Ye see, th’ fact iv th’ matter is th’ Sinit don’t know what th’ people iv th’ Far West want, an’ th’ Prisidint does.
CROWNED HEADS AND columnists around the world hastened to praise Theodore Roosevelt in September 1905. “Accept my congratulations and warmest thanks,” Nicholas II cabled, adding, “My country will gratefully recognize the great part you have played in the Portsmouth peace conference.” An overjoyed Wilhelm II declared, “The whole of mankind must unite and will do so in thanking you for the great boon you have given it.” Emperor Mutsuhito wrote in the careful language of the Japanese court, “To your disinterested and unremitting efforts in the interests of peace and humanity, I attach the high value which is their due.”
Roosevelt was pleased enough with these pro forma expressions to copy them into a posterity letter to Henry Cabot Lodge. He did not notice, or bother to notice, the subtler signals they sent forth: the Tsar’s unconscious separation of himself from his subjects, the Kaiser’s readiness to speak for every person on the planet, the Mikado’s enigmatic formality. But neither did he let the praise go to his head. As he wrote to Alice (still touring the Far East with Nick):
It is enough to give anyone a sense of sardonic amusement to see the way in which the people generally, not only in my own country but elsewhere gauge the work purely by the fact that it succeeded. If I had not brought about peace I should have been laughed at and condemned. Now I am over-praised. I am credited with being extremely longheaded, etc. As a matter of fact I took the position I finally did not of my own volition but because events so shaped themselves that I would have felt as if I was flinching from a plain duty if I had acted otherwise.… Neither Government would consent to meet where the other wished and the Japanese would not consent to meet at The Hague, which was the place I desired. The result was that they had to meet in this country, and this necessarily threw me into a position of prominence which I had not sought, and indeed which I had sought to avoid—though I feel now that unless they had met here they never would have made peace.
Alice had returned to Japan after visiting China and the Philippines and had been taken aback by the sudden coolness of the Japanese people toward her. Evidently, Komura’s agreement with Witte was seen as a humiliating retreat after one and a half years of military triumph. She heard that there had been riots in Tokyo when news of the treaty signing came in.
This did not mean that high officials in the Katsura government were not secretly satisfied with the treaty. It gave Japan peace at just the moment she would have had to stop fighting anyway, through sheer exhaustion of resources. Nor was Roosevelt under any illusion as to what Portsmouth meant in terms of future Pacific strategy. After Tsu Shima, he had seen the war as “the triumph of Asia over Europe,” and mused, almost with complacency, on America’s geopolitical position between the belligerents. Now, as he studied a report he had commissioned on the immigration scare in California, he again began to worry about what agitators there called “the Yellow Peril.” He admired the Japanese too much to use such language himself, but saw that for the rest of his presidency he was going to have to monitor with extreme caution the ambitions of these “wonderful people.” While he did so, Secretary of State Root (even now immersed in a major re-examination of Canadian and Latin American policy) would have to be relied on to maintain the security of the Western Hemisphere.
“SHE HEARD THAT THERE HAD BEEN RIOTS IN TOKYO.”
Alice in the Far East, late summer 1905
So could a new recruit to the Administration, whom Roosevelt had long wanted to woo away from the House of Morgan: his old Harvard classmate Robert Bacon. As First Assistant Secretary of State, replacing Francis B. Loomis, the handsome and athletic Bacon also rated inclusion in the presidential “tennis crowd”—more and more jealously dubbed “Teddy’s Tennis Cabinet” by unsuccessful aspirants to it.
FOR ALL THE CONSENSUS that Roosevelt had proved himself a master diplomat, he could not boast, or even agree, that the world was demonstrably safer as a result of his efforts. Socialism was spreading like dry rot in Russia, even through the ranks of the army, with consequent weakening of authority and strengthening of authoritarianism. Morocco remained a potential flash point of war among the European powers. At least the commitments that Wilhelm II had managed to coax from Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and a reluctant United States to address the problem in conference had tamped down on the fuse for a few more months: talks were scheduled to begin in Algeciras, Spain, early in the new year. Roosevelt took further comfort in the fact that Nicholas II, no longer troubled by Japanese ambitions, could now look west again, and help curb those of the Kaiser.
Freed from global responsibility himself, for the first time in eight months, he was able to start preparing for what promised to be the biggest legislative season of his presidency. Indeed—sobering thought—it would effectively be his last. The “odd year” and “even year” disequilibrium of congressional sessions meant that only the first and third of any presidential term were long enough for the passage of major bills. And, inevitably, the third tended to be wary of anything radical, because it preceded another general election. So Roosevelt had until early December to write the defining Message of his second term.
One issue above all others that he was determined to fight for “as a matter of principle” was that of railroad rate regulation. Ever since his election, he had sensed a rising, almost populist rage against the power of trusts (uninhibited, apparently, by the Elkins Anti-Rebate Law of 1903) to fix interstate shipping charges. The rage was not entirely populist, in that it rose above white collars rather than blue, and expressed itself, articulately and persuasively, in the pages of middle-class magazines such asMcClure’sandEverybody’s. And it had persisted since the articles by Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker that had caught Roosevelt’s eye in January 1903—articles that had made McClure’s the most influential magazine in the country.
Roosevelt had been warned during the summer, by S. S. McClure himself, that the fall of 1905 would be a time of renewed journalistic calls for—what? McClure could only write, rather clumsily, “law-abidingness and uprightness in political matters.” Doubtless somebody with less money and more style would find a compact term for the new movement, inchoate as yet but definitely gathering force: a social current that sooner or later must politicize itself—if it had not done so already in the “Iowa Idea” and Roosevelt’s own huge electoral mandate.
What particularly characterized the movement, McClure reported, was the evangelical fervor of its practitioners. As yet, they lacked a leader, even a liturgy. But their fervor, patent wherever the publisher traveled in the United States, “almost correspond[ed] to the passion that one finds in a country when it is on the eve of a righteous war.”
Now here, in the President’s hand, were page proofs of a new article by Baker, “Railroad Rebates.” It was scheduled for publication in McClure’s in December, coincident with the opening of the Fifty-ninth Congress. Second of a five-part series, it assailed the “secret, underhand” dealings and “piggish” greed of “the oil-barons, beef-monopolists, the steel-trust millionaires, the sugar magnates, the banana kings and their like.” Baker, who was apparently paid by the word, decried rebates as “wrong, wrong morally, wrong economically, wrong legally.”
This was carrying fervor too far, but Roosevelt saw no harm in encouraging political rhetoric more extreme than any he would use on Congress himself. Let Baker, Steffens, et al. do what advance guards had always done in battle: draw enemy fire from both sides while Caesar advanced down the middle. He responded to the page proofs, therefore, with the utmost delicacy:
I haven’t a criticism to suggest about the article. You have given me two or three thoughts for my own message. It seems to me that one of the lessons you teach is that these railroad men are not to be treated as exceptional villains but merely as ordinary Americans, who under given conditions are by the mere force of events forced into doing much of which we complain. I want so far as I can to free the movement for their control from all rancor and hatred.
Just how “far” he would, in fact, go to keep the public temper sweet remained to be seen. For the moment, he was still exulting in the afterglow of Portsmouth. On 30 September, Oyster Bay collected at the depot to cheer him back to Washington. The little sheet of water beyond the rails lolled in its bowl, careless of the cannon fire (and submarine plunges) that had shaken it so thrillingly during the summer. Roosevelt’s fellow villagers, however, seemed determined not to forget the glory he had visited upon them eight weeks before. A large shield, starred and striped, hung over the station entrance, framed to right and left by the flags of Russia and Japan, and surmounted by a banner image of a white dove with olive leaves in its beak.
The President approached this portal between two cordons of young women in white dresses. To general surprise—since he was famous for self-control—he had tears in his eyes when he turned to say good-bye.
RAY STANNARD BAKER’S proofs were not the only ones Roosevelt had to check that fall. Two articles of his own, “Wolf-Coursing” and “A Colorado Bear Hunt,” were due out in consecutive issues of Scribner’s Magazine, followed by a collection of wildlife pieces in book form at the end of October. Somewhat redundantly entitled Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, this volume was the fourth in a series begun with Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885) and continued with Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888) andThe Wilderness Hunter (1893). It supplemented an already bewildering variety of different editions of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, which had begun to come out in 1900 and bulked as large as fifteen-volume sets of history, natural history, biography, criticism, memoir, and political philosophy.
His sudden return to authorship after four years of self-imposed silence, coupled with his current celebrity as peacemaker, prompted the first serious attempt by a foreign intellectual—for that matter, any intellectual—to make political and literary sense of the President of the United States. Léon Bazalgette, France’s ranking authority on Whitman and Thoreau, published a livre broché entitled simply Théodore Roosevelt. Although it was based only on close study of the Roosevelt canon, its thirty-five pages packed more perceptions into the President’s character than any current full-length biography of him.
Bazalgette admitted that, as a nonpolitical person, he preferred Roosevelt’s nature writings to the histories and social commentaries. They were more beguiling and more self-revealing. A paradoxical sweetness and love of life, in no way mitigating the author’s blood lust, emanated from such books as The Wilderness Hunter (whose title, in French, hauntingly became Le Chasseur des solitudes). Despite many dogged pages, and a deliberate avoidance of fine prose, these works charmed “with their simplicity and acute sense of realism.” They were imbued with a poignant nostalgia for the free western way of life, which had passed away even as Roosevelt had participated in it. The plainness of his style enabled him to achieve special effects “more intense than those of professional writers.” (Bazalgette seemed to be unaware that the President had once earned a living with his pen.) Perhaps the most remarkable of these effects derived from his uncanny ear for sounds, which, combined with scientifically precise observation, often enabled him to achieve “a communion with all that breathes in Nature.”
Roosevelt the modern statesman clearly owed much to his youthful cultivation of, and acceptance by, frontiersmen of the hardest and most violent sort. A man who could earn the respect of such “desperadoes,” and write about them with such unsentimental empathy, was unlikely to be fazed by eruptions of the primitive in the behavior of senators, or, for that matter, of plenipotentiaries. His youth in the Badlands had been an education in essentials:
He was able to observe there, in its absolute nakedness, the perpetual phenomenon of existence on this planet: human life consisting of the rhythm and friction of two parallel dynamics, inextricably interlaced, twin instincts eternally directing its course, the struggle for existence and the acceptance of existence. Both of them are positive forces, fertilizing and appropriate, the complete and final fusion of which will probably coincide with the ruin of humanity and the reign of silence around the world.
Out of his lessons in man and nature, Roosevelt had evolved a Darwinian philosophy that was harsh, yet wholly altruistic. No one reading his volumes of political and social essays, Administration—Civil Service, American Ideals, and The Strenuous Life (La Vie intense), could have doubted what sort of President he would be. An anarchist had ironically elevated to power “the supreme political personality of our time, of all contemporary statesmen the one surest of his mission, and most capable of achieving it.”
What these didactic works lacked in charm, they made up for in exhortatory effect. Old World sensibilities might recoil, at first, from the extraordinary aggression of Roosevelt’s attacks on “that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class,” as well as on all who put private gain, or cloistered security, or machine loyalty before their larger social obligations.
The tone is resolute, affirmative, maybe even brutal. He is pitiless toward hypocrites and rogues, whom he always identifies by name. Rare, in a man of his station, is the audacity, vehemence, and hasty decisiveness with which he exposes and denounces the corruption of the political world around him.… To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one’s strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.
“OF ALL CONTEMPORARY STATESMEN, THE ONE SUREST OF HIS MISSION.”
Roosevelt in his Sagamore Hill study, September 1905
There was, nevertheless, “a contagious force” to Roosevelt’s moral energy, which no foreign sophisticate could resist. “One feels braced by the presence of a reformer, in the full sense of the word.… He shakes our delicacies, repeats to us the healthy, grand lesson that no refinement can compensate for rugged virtues.”
Braced thus, one was pleasantly shocked when Theodore Roosevelt stopped preaching and started affirming. At such times, Bazalgette wrote, Roosevelt was possessed of an almost evangelical urgency, campaigning for political and social reform with the “ineradicable conviction” of a John Knox or a Martin Luther:
Such is the magnetism of his utterance, so forceful is his advocacy, that he persuades us to understand him and love him, even though we—I speak of such [Europeans] as myself—flinch and protest, and refuse to suit our instincts to his. When, for example, the excess which is part of his nature moves him to the point of “spread-eaglism,” formidably increasing the vibration of patriotic and warlike strings, I am not with him, and turn instead to his noble dream that “justice will rule, not only between man and man, but also between nation and nation.” It is the dream, more than any others I might cite, he has done the most to bring about.
In political prose as in political speech, the President’s most characteristic weapon was the rhythmically beating fist. Every beat punched home an idea or part of an idea, and he never stopped punching.
He has only one limiting and devouring ambition, which is to move and convince. He has too much to say not to dispense altogether with artifices of style, too much faith and force to need anything else. He is a workman who puts the best of his energy into driving rivets. He hammers out understandings.
THE LEGISLATIVE CONSENSUS that Roosevelt wanted to forge during the winter of 1905–1906 was going to require more than huge amounts of energy. He would also have to exercise his gift for delicate negotiation—an attribute Bazalgette did not know about, since it was incommunicable in writing and by its nature discreet. The same landslide that had swept him back into power had elected a Congress with big Republican majorities, so whatever reforms he intended would have to be accomplished within the bounds of party orthodoxy. And prosperity was booming in both farms and factories. With a largely contented populace and a paralyzed political opposition (Parker had been the worst-beaten candidate in the history of the popular vote), he must whip up a moral fervor for his program, rather than the usual economic and social arguments that got difficult bills through.
Having found, during the last session of the Fifty-eighth Congress, that tariff revision was too divisive an issue to wreck his presidency on, he was happy to trade it for legislation addressing the fact that most American business was now conducted across state lines—a phenomenon the framers of the Constitution could not possibly have foreseen. That meant that “the government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce.” The Sherman Act was no longer enough, nor the Anti-Rebate Law. The Bureau of Corporations could only monitor business malfeasance, not control it. What was needed was a larger, stronger Interstate Commerce Commission.
Here Roosevelt parted company with radicals demanding that the ICC be empowered to fix rates. As his letter to Baker showed, he believed that railroad executives justifiably took advantage of the free-enterprise system, and that a President’s job was to keep the system fair. The most he was prepared to ask Congress for was a maximum rate, to be imposed by the ICC only in cases of dispute.
Another law he was looking for was in the area of employer’s liability. This was not a new cause for him. As Governor of New York, he had signed a bill mandating it, and as President he had called for the protection of federal employees in the District of Columbia. Immediately after the last election, he had called for a comprehensive Congressional study of the subject, “with a view of extending the provisions of a great and constitutional law to all employments within the scope of Federal power.” That call had been mainly propaganda, since the lame-duck Fifty-eighth Congress had soon after quacked its last; but this time around, his intent was sincere. So was his desire for an investigation into child-labor abuses, legislation to maintain sanitary standards in the food industry, and governmental supervision of insurance corporations.
ONE OF THE FIRST things Roosevelt did after returning to Washington was to dedicate his forthcoming book to John Burroughs. He was greatly amused when Scribner’s mistakenly advertised the title as Outdoor Pastimes of an American Homer. “I am hurt and grieved at your evident jealousy of my poetic reputation,” he wrote Professor James Brander Matthews, who had sent him a note of mock inquiry from Columbia University. “If you saw my review of Mr. Robinson’s poems you may have noticed that I refrained from calling him ‘our American Homer.’ This was simply due to the fact that I hoped some discerning friend would see where the epithet ought to go.”
The allusion was to Edwin Arlington Robinson, the reclusive and poverty-stricken northeastern balladeer, whose collection The Children of the Night had come his way earlier in the year. Kermit Roosevelt had studied some of the poems at Groton and been transfixed by their chilly beauty. The President had read them too, at his son’s urging, and agreed that Robinson had “the real spirit of poetry in him.”
Kermit had found out that Robinson was living in New York City, drinking heavily, and so desperate for money he was working ten hours a day as a time-checker in the Manhattan subway system. Clearly, such an existence was not conducive to the production of more verse. The President, in strict secrecy waiving all civil-service rules, had offered Robinson jobs in the immigration service or the New York Customs House, which latter the poet accepted. A tacit condition of employment was that, in exchange for his desk and two thousand dollars a year, he should work “with a view to helping American letters,” rather than the receipts of the United States Treasury.
In further generosity, Roosevelt had written a review of The Children of the Night, comparing Robinson’s prosody to “the coloring of Turner,” and published it in Outlook during the Portsmouth peace conference. Léon Bazalgette might have had this enlightened kind of patronage in mind when he approvingly quoted a Roosevelt dictum, “A poet can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.”
THE PRESIDENT STAYED in Washington just eighteen days, intently plotting railroad-legislation strategy, before embarking on a nine-day tour of the South. His ostensible purpose was to generate favorable publicity for the GOP, in advance of the November elections. But he also wanted to try out some of the centralized-government rhetoric of his upcoming Message in an area of the country that cherished the notion of states’ rights. If his ideas won favor there, it would be much more difficult for Congressional conservatives to challenge them in December.
Tensions were high when he arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 19 October to make an announced address on railroad rate legislation. Lieutenant Governor Francis D. Winston did not appreciate being frisked by agents before being allowed to shake the President’s hand, and the “peanuts ’n pickle” lunch laid on at the state fairground came close to a denial of hospitality. Hunger, or anger, made Roosevelt orate with persuasive effect. (“The new highway, the railway, is in the hands of private owners, whereas the old highway … was in the hands of the state.”) He was rewarded with considerable applause.
The following day he made a pilgrimage, poignant to him, to Bulloch Hall, the white-columned mansion in Roswell, Georgia, where his mother had grown up and married his father. The floors were no longer polished by corn shucks tied to the feet of a mulatto slave boy, as they had been then, and only the Union flag flew in the little park down the avenue. But he knew the place so vividly in his imagination, from listening to his mother and aunt talk about it, that he felt he was revisiting it.
“It is my very good fortune,” Roosevelt told the villagers of Roswell, “to have the right to claim that my blood is half southern and half northern.”
The farther south he went, the more heartening it was for him to see that white Southerners seemed disposed to forgive him for his “Negrophilist” behavior in 1902 and 1903. Some of his welcomes were almost royal in their triumphalism. He avoided the question of black disfranchisement in his speeches, and made only one unscripted reference to lynching, when Governor Jeff Davis of Arkansas suggested to his face that the “only good Negro is a dead Negro.” This Roosevelt could not tolerate. “Above all other men, Governor, you and I [as] exponents and representatives of the law, owe it to our people, owe it to the cause of civilization and humanity, to do everything in our power, officially and unofficially, directly and indirectly, to free the United States from the menace and reproach of lynch law.”
ROOSEVELT WAS SO pleased with his Southern trip that he invited the historian James Ford Rhodes to the White House to hear about it. Rhodes arrived on 16 November and found Root and Taft among his fellow guests. The President recounted his put-down of Governor Davis with the meticulousness of an actor analyzing a coup de théâtre. He said he had controlled his displeasure at first, and proceeded with his own speech until he felt the crowd was “in sympathy” with him. Then he had marched up to Davis, looked him in the eye, and issued his reprimand, gesticulating in such a way that both Governor and audience thought he was going to throw a punch. The cheering had been “enthusiastic and genuine.”
It was clear to Rhodes that the President’s brave stand had been made not out of compassion, but out of concern for due process. Roosevelt, encouraged by Root and Taft, proceeded to give robust evidence that he and Davis were not far apart on phylogenetic matters. The Fifteenth Amendment had been “very unjust and bad policy.” Lincoln’s dream of a graduated extension of suffrage, as more and more black men qualified for it, was all very well, but the Yazoo Delta offered proof that a people could regress. Negroes, Roosevelt said, were “two hundred thousand years behind.”
Rhodes suggested “a million,” and the President agreed. He cheerfully went on to castigate the Irish, who struck him as a good argument for Anglophilia. Not that there were many other justifications. The English were by nature undemocratic, and were not even good at governing themselves anymore: Prime Minister Balfour and his Cabinet were “a set of split carrot-heads” who might “answer perfectly well for a pink tea.” He did not believe in sending American boys to Oxford, and would “dislike exceedingly” to have one of his daughters marry a foreigner. (At least Alice, just back from her marathon junket to the Far East, would spare him that pain: she and Nick were now unofficially engaged.) English girls, on the other hand …
Léon Bazalgette could only dream of listening to Roosevelt talk, as Rhodes was now. But the Frenchman understood that these floods of apparent aggression, half fierce, half humorous, were more indicative of energy than of serious thought. They were part ofl’outrance qui est dans sa nature, the excess that was part of Roosevelt’s nature. The weir had constantly to spill, to keep the deep water behind clear and calm.
A SURPRISE RESULT of the elections that month was that machine candidates of either party were punished in what Outlook called “the Rout of the Bosses.” Even Henry Cabot Lodge, who was not machine-made but seemed to personify orthodox Republicanism in Massachusetts, nearly lost his senatorial seat. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana favored “Reform” or “New Idea” tickets over ones labeled “Stalwart” or “Old Guard.” Evidently, there was a schism developing in the GOP, and the force driving it apart was the same fervor S. S. McClure had tried to describe earlier in the summer. Only now it was less vague, more political, easier to define—as Ray Stannard Baker did, in the first article of his railroad series:
We are at this moment facing a new conflict in this country, the importance of which we are only just beginning to perceive. It lies between two great parties, one a progressive party seeking to give the government more power in business affairs, the other a conservative party striving to retain all the power possible in private hands. One looks toward socialism, the other obstinately defends individualism. It is industrialism forcing itself into politics. And the crux of the new conflict in this case, recognized by both sides, is the Railroad Rate.
Baker might have used a less distracting word than party, with its inevitable overtones of registration and organization. But progressive, an adjective hitherto only generally indicative of forward social movement, had been transformed into a label, and might in time (depending on how effectively conservatism resisted it) rate the ultimate dignity of a capital P.
Roosevelt could not have wanted a louder fanfare of trumpets to proclaim the importance of his Fifth Message to Congress. But Baker, never one for restraint, gave him an extra trombone blast all to himself: “Out of hopelessness of justice has arisen the present widespread demand, voiced by President Roosevelt, for some tribunal which is at once impartial and powerful enough to do justice as between the Railroad and the Citizen.”
THE MESSAGE ITSELF, published on 5 December, was quieter and more rationally argued than readers of McClure’s might have expected. Indeed, its opening section, subheaded “Control of Corporations,” was written in a lucid, unemotional style that belied what Bazalgette had said about the President’s tendency toward rhetorical “roughness.”
In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others. Normally the man of great productive capacity who becomes rich by guiding the labor of many other men does so by enabling them to produce more than they could produce without his guidance; and both he and they share in the benefit, which comes also to the public at large. The superficial fact that the sharing may be unequal must never blind us to the underlying fact that there is this sharing, and that the benefit comes in some degree to each man concerned.
Roosevelt was clearly addressing himself to Speaker Cannon and the conservative Senate leadership still managed by Nelson Aldrich—Republicans whose votes, and control of votes, he would need in the months ahead. He had to persuade them, without melodramatics, that unless they began to respond to the demands of the progressives (some of whom were now members of Congress), the Grand Old Party was likely to become two parties, and sooner rather than later.
The Department of Justice, he wrote, was devoting too much of its time to prosecuting antitrust cases on an individual basis. And experience had shown that individual states lacked the power, in an age of combination, to stop the abusive practices of trusts operating across their borders. What was needed was a regulatory and supervisory law enacted by the only body as big as the biggest trust—“that is, by the National Government.” The need was so great that if Congress would not move, the Constitution would have to be amended.
He emphasized that the law should be positive rather than prohibitory, monitoring growth rather than slowing it, and imposing discipline only when the growth became destructive of competition. Its prime focus must be on railroad rates, and in particular on rebate rates, which were discriminatory and should be forbidden “in every shape and form.” A commission should be created (or the ICC empowered) to establish a maximum reasonable rate whenever a rate was shown to be unfair—and unfairness meant “minimum” rates for big shippers as well as excessive ones for small. In the former instance, “the commission would have the right to declare this already established minimum rate as the maximum; and it would need only one or two such decisions by the commission to cure the railroad companies of the practice of giving improper minimum rates.”
The President kept reiterating that he was asking for an administrative agency, not an enforced partnership between government and private business. His Message proceeded to spin itself out, as usual, to prodigious length, and contained no fewer than seventy-three requests for moderately progressive new laws. But already he had issued the war call most sure to bring him into direct conflict with Senator Aldrich: he had challenged free enterprise’s right to set its own prices in the competitive marketplace. To Aldrich, Depew, Hale, Foraker, even to Senator Elkins, this was a blasphemy, however quietly uttered, against one of the fundamental tenets of the Constitution.
Roosevelt had until Christmas to work with a reform-minded legislator—probably that jovial Methodist bison Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa—on the language of his railroad bill, and concentrate all the political momentum he had built up as President. Then in the new year, force must meet with force.