On th’ wan hand I wud stamp them undher fut; on th’ other hand, not so fast.
SHORTLY BEFORE NOON on Tuesday, 3 December 1901, a committee of senators and representatives called upon the President. They announced that the Fifty-seventh Congress was in session, and “ready to receive any communication” he might want to make. The delegation bowed out, and returned to Capitol Hill by official carriage. After a polite interval, one of Roosevelt’s own monogrammed vehicles followed. It drew up outside the House of Representatives, and a White House secretary jumped out with an enormous manila envelope.
Octavius L. Pruden had carried thirty presidential messages up the Capitol steps, but this was the heaviest yet. It consisted of two duplicate eighty-page volumes—one for the House, one for the Senate. Each was silk-lined, leather-bound, gold-stamped, and sealed with the presidential wafer. A Secret Service man, marching beside Pruden, kept guard over the precious cargo.
Actually, the content of Roosevelt’s Message was the worst-kept secret since the Declaration of Independence. For at least six weeks, White House guests had been treated to stentorian readings of the author’s favorite passages. Newspaper presses across the country held every word in cold type, and in Britain and Europe the Message was already being published and commented on.
Even so, Congress was tense with anticipation when Pruden appeared at the door of the House and announced, “A message from the President of the United States.” Speaker David B. Henderson took delivery of the first volume and broke its seal. He was surprised to see printed text, instead of the traditional formal copperplate. A reading clerk took it from him, and flicked through to the end. “Yes, sir, it is signed.” Henderson shrugged. The clerk in-toned Roosevelt’s opening sentence: “The Congress assembles this year in the shadow of a great calamity.”
There was an immediate reaction. Presidential messages were supposed to begin blandly, with hackneyed phrases about the United States being at peace with mankind. But as the clerk continued to read, it was clear that Roosevelt was all business.
William McKinley, he said, was the victim of a chillingly modern breed of assassin. Lincoln and Garfield had been martyrs for the kind of government they stood for; today’s political killer wanted to destroy government itself. Roosevelt began to eulogize his predecessor, but rage against Czolgosz diverted him into a magnificent six-minute tirade against anarchism, and those who abused the First Amendment by inciting it. The reading clerk could not help but perform histrionically: “The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped.… If ever anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for but one red moment, to be succeeded for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.”
The House sat rapt as Roosevelt demanded federal jurisdiction over attacks on the presidential line of succession, and a ban on all politically violent immigrants. “They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came; and far-reaching provision should be made for the punishment of those who stay.… The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is kindled it burns like a consuming flame.”
At this, the spell over the listening representatives broke. The sound of their applause rolled after Pruden as he hurried down the corridor to make his second delivery.
THE SENATE, in contrast to the brilliantly lit House, was not yet illuminated for business. Dull winter sunshine seeped through the glass roof, too faint to reach the floor. Pruden hesitated in the doorway while senators settled like shadows into their chairs. A page relieved the messenger of his burden. Not until it was placed on the chief clerk’s lectern did somebody throw a switch; Roosevelt’s first words were heralded by a flood of incandescent light.
For a quarter of an hour, the seated company listened silently. Paperbound offprints of the Message—another novelty—were distributed, and senators began following the text like dutiful pupils.
“During the last five years business confidence has been restored, and the nation is to be congratulated because of its present abounding prosperity.”
Mark Hanna sat nodding solemnly at his own revisions. Henry Cabot Lodge, the President’s best friend, lounged nearby, looking, as usual, as if he was about to go to sleep. But every now and again he unscrewed his fountain pen and endorsed a passage that appealed to him.
“The captains of industry who have driven the railway systems across this continent, who have built up our commerce, who have developed our manufactures, have on the whole done great good to our people.”
As Roosevelt swung into his much-edited subsection on trusts, Senator John Coit Spooner (R., Wisconsin) got up and walked across the room. Spectators in the press gallery watched the small, pigeon-toed figure, guessing that it would stop at one of three desks. These, and Spooner’s own, were the four corners of Republican power on Capitol Hill.
SPOONER, AT FIFTY-EIGHT, had the fastest mind, best constitutional knowledge, and most lethal wit in Congress. No senator could match him in debate; he was a scholar of classical rhetoric, and when short of a riposte—which was seldom—he could quote from Cicero or John Wilkes. He was equally dangerous as a listener, specializing in gadfly questions that stung ponderous orators. His very appearance stamped him as unique. In a chamber luxuriant with beards and mustaches, Spooner’s clean, chiseled features glowed pale as stone. It was an arresting, almost shocking face, with an imperious twitch to the nostrils. Great waves of hair, polished pince-nez, and oversize cravats softened the cold sculpture. They suggested a frustrated actor. If so, the part Spooner most longed to play was that of President of the United States. But he had always been too spontaneous, and too impatient, for campaign teamwork. Solo improvisation suited him better.
His perambulation ended at the desk of William Boyd Allison (R., Iowa). Stooping, he began to whisper in the old man’s ear. Rooseveltian rhetoric continued to echo over their heads:
“Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations … known as ‘trusts,’ appeal especially to hatred and fear.… The whole history of the world shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless undertaken after calm enquiry and with sober self-restraint.”
Here were cautious words to appeal to Senator Allison—if Spooner’s whispering allowed him to hear them. Throughout his political career, “the Old Fox” had counseled due process in lawmaking. His genius was the resolution of discord; his vanity was to affect humility. Not once in his seventy-two years had he expressed a public point of view. Colleagues joked that if the road from Des Moines to Washington was a piano keyboard, “Allison could run all the way without ever striking a note.”
This legerdepied kept him from being beholden to anybody, while gratifying everybody. When legislation arose to favor the urban East, Senator Allison modified it so as not to alienate the rural West. If Southern Democrats forced bills upon him to benefit their poorer constituents, he attached innocent-looking amendments and profited Wall Street as well. But his moderating did not make him moderate. Like Spooner, Allison was a Hamiltonian fiscal conservative.
Poised in his equilibrium, he was upset by any shock, and could lash out with the sudden bitchiness of old age. Friends forgave him these outbursts. They knew he was tormented by a swelling prostate. Allison’s weary shuffle, his dark-brown, nicotinous smell—the very breath of the antebellum—guaranteed deference in a chamber worshipful of seniority.
“All this is true, and yet it is also true that there are real and grave evils.”
In the front row of the chamber, beneath the reading clerk, sat a senator even hoarier than Allison. At seventy-four, Orville H. Platt (R., Connecticut) was the éminence grise of the Republican leadership. No relation to Thomas C. Platt of New York (Roosevelt’s ancient enemy, senescent now in a forgotten corner), he served as the Senate’s spiritual mentor, its legislative and ethical conscience.
There was something Lincolnesque about Platt’s grooved, bearded face, and the awkwardness of his six-foot-four-inch frame. Scholarly, mild, logical, and reclusive, Platt was almost a caricature of New England bookishness; his idea of an amusing evening was to read Greek to his wife. But the mildness was deceptive. Few senators worked more aggressively on behalf of big business.
“There is a widespread conviction,” the clerk declaimed, “ … that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right.”
Spooner returned to his seat. The outburst that none of Roosevelt’s advisers had been able to suppress was coming. “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form … they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations.… Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.”
If Nelson W. Aldrich (R., Rhode Island) deduced that Roosevelt was sounding the keynote of his presidency, he showed no sign. The sixty-year-old “Manager of the United States” looked as he always did: big, handsome, placid, nonchalantly powerful. His brow was calm, his silvery mustache stiff, his black eyes steady on the page before him.
“The first essential in determining how to deal with the great industrial corporations is knowledge of the facts—publicity.”
Aldrich’s was a classic poker face. Indeed, he was champion of a private poker game at which he, Spooner, Allison, and Platt formulated policy. So elite was this little circle, so doubly dedicated to cards and politics, that its interests tended to fuse; the house would deal tariff schedules, pension bills, and aces of clubs interchangeably. Most evenings, Aldrich collected.
His power derived in part from natural authority, in part from pure memory. Spooner was quicker, and the two senior members were perhaps wiser, but none could match Aldrich’s command of information. No matter how raw the data—ore piles of statistics, a rubble of currency regulations—he processed them with the silent efficiency of a kiln. Consequently, he was the Senate’s ranking expert on such subjects as paper-money circulation, railroad bonds, and free wool. His actions on these issues did not usually make headlines, but Aldrich never cared for publicity.
Roosevelt, in contrast, seemed to equate it with democracy. “In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations.”
As far as Aldrich was concerned, news was noise, an intrusive bedlam that disturbed the quiet condominium of government and economy. The more attention public servants enjoyed, the more they would want to be seen to be doing, at the expense of free entrepreneurs.
“The nation should, without interfering with the power of the States in the matter itself, also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business.”
Aldrich believed that, on the contrary, the nation could do with a little “supervision and regulation” by businessmen. He was himself a successful railroad executive. “I would undertake to run this government for three hundred million a year less than it is now run for,” he said. Since this was not constitutionally possible, he could at least control the United States Senate to a greater degree than it had ever known. With a majority of 55 to 31, and a supplementary majority of 187 to 151 in the House, he might even manage to control Theodore Roosevelt as well.
“I believe that a law can be framed …”
THE SENATE WAS popularly and inaccurately known as “The Millionaires’ Club.” Aldrich protested that he, for one, had begun life as a wholesale grocer. Ordinary Americans saw magazine pictures of his palatial house on Narragansett Bay, noted that his daughter had just married John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and doubted that the Senator would recognize a grocery now if he saw one.
Aldrich was indeed extremely rich, but he told the truth about his origins. There were a few other self-made millionaires in the Senate; aristocratic millionaires, like Lodge, formed an even smaller minority. Only sixteen members could be described as wealthy or well-born. Orville Platt was not ashamed to admit that he had never seen more than a hundred spare dollars in his life. The remaining seventy-four senators were divided evenly between the middle and working classes. Far from representing an “alliance between business and politics”—another popular fallacy—fewer than one in four represented commerce or industry. Most were lawyers of ordinary accomplishment.
What held them together was their collective dedication to politics as a profession. Conscience, not corruption, kept the average senator in office. He worked seven days a week, assisted by one secretary and one typist, for five thousand dollars a year—one tenth of what Roosevelt earned. Venality was a constant temptation, but only the most unscrupulous senators, men such as Matthew Quay and Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania, fattened at the public trough.
Under Aldrich’s management, the Senate was disciplined and hierarchical in structure. Younger members rose by patience and labor. Not even such a brilliant upstart as Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana (ardent, golden-haired, Botticellian) could hope for early privilege. Committee seats were rewards for loyalty and efficiency, and Allison dispensed them with a fine eye for political balance. Positions of power were rotated by the Republican leadership. Aldrich chaired Finance, with Spooner, Allison, and Platt sitting to his left and right. The same quartet, but with Allison in the chair, controlled the Republican steering committee, which in turn controlled all legislative business. Aldrich dominated Interstate Commerce and Cuba Relations; Allison, Appropriations; Spooner and Platt, Judiciary. A few other GOP senators—Hanna, Lodge, George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts, Eugene Hale of Maine—helped swell the ranks of this conservative elite.
ROOSEVELT BROUGHT HIS trust remarks to an indecisive end, suggesting that if Congress felt debarred from passing a law regulating interstate commerce, it should consider a Constitutional amendment to that effect. He called for a new department to regulate commerce and industry, and new laws to improve conditions for American workers. He granted labor’s right to combine for self-advancement, as corporations did, on condition neither threatened the larger rights of society.
By now it was past one o’clock. Bottles of bourbon stood tall and cool in the Senate saloon, and white bean soup bubbled in the restaurant. Members began paging through their copies to see how much Message was left. The survey was discouraging—almost twice as much again. But some of the upcoming issues were too important to walk out on. Roosevelt had shrewdly intermixed them with others of less consequence.
He demanded reform of immigration laws, including a threefold ban on persons of low intellect, low morals, and low wage requirements. He analyzed tariff protectionism and trade reciprocity at length, if not in depth. Clearly, neither subject interested him; he was happy to leave them to Senator Aldrich, their virtual proprietor. He launched an attack on railroad rebates and rate-fixing. “The railway is a public servant. Its rates should be just to, and open to, all shippers alike.”
Then, striking a note altogether new in presidential utterances, Roosevelt began to preach the conservation of natural resources. He showed an impressive mastery of the subject as he explained the need for federal protection of native flora and fauna. Urgently, he asked that the Bureau of Forestry be given total control over forest reserves, currently parceled among several agencies, and demanded more presidential power to hand further reserves over to the Department of Agriculture.
The theme of “water-storing” infused his rhetoric as he appealed for the reclamation of arid public lands. He said that the interstate irrigation program he had in mind was so ambitious that only the national government could undertake it. It must not risk the fate of the countless private schemes that Western water speculators had tried, and failed, to get rich on in recent years. Nor should the reclaimed lands benefit anyone other than the settlers willing to farm them. “The doctrine of private ownership of water apart from land cannot prevail without causing enduring wrong.”
Action on all fronts must begin immediately. Yet—a typical Rooseveltian hedge—it must proceed cautiously: “We are dealing with a new and momentous question, in the pregnant years while institutions are forming, and what we do will affect not only the present but future generations.”
FOR ANOTHER HOUR, the Message droned on, while clerk after clerk read himself hoarse, and somnolence gathered in the air like fog. Roosevelt was impassioned on the Navy’s need for more battleships and heavy armored cruisers, firm in his defense of the Monroe Doctrine, galvanic in his call for a canal across Central America. He praised the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress as national treasures—something no previous President had thought to do. He was silent on Negro disfranchisement and lynchings, optimistic for the future of free Cuba, and pessimistic about early independence for the Philippines. He was dogged to the point of dullness on rural free mail delivery, national expositions, merchant-marine subsidies, and the need for a permanent census bureau.
By two o’clock, many senators could stand it no longer, and left the chamber to fortify themselves. Even Henry Cabot Lodge showed impatience as he and sixty-six other holdouts waited for the President’s peroration.
Roosevelt returned at last to the subject of death, with which he had begun two and a half hours before. He noted that William McKinley had been preceded to the grave by Queen Victoria of England and the Dowager Empress Frederick of Germany. He seemed to be reminding his older auditors that nineteenth-century cobwebs were blowing away all over the world. The twentieth century looked bright for all Americans, yet they would not abandon traditional values.
“In the midst of our affliction we reverently thank the Almighty that we are at peace with the nations of mankind; and we firmly intend that our policy shall be such as to continue unbroken these international relations of mutual respect and good will.”
ALDRICH, ALLISON, SPOONER, and Platt emerged from the chamber smiling like Wagnerites after a slow performance of Siegfried. Each had an approving adjective for the President’s Message. It was “able,” “excellent,” “admirable,” and “intrepid.” Their satisfaction was not surprising, since its caveats and circumlocutions had been dictated by themselves.
Democratic leaders, too, were mostly complimentary, although Senator James K. Jones of Arkansas pointed out that the President’s trust control proposals were so nonspecific as to be legislatively worthless. “The Message is in every respect disappointing.”
Members of the House reacted with general approbation, as did the nation’s press. The adjective conservative was used often, as if in relief that the young President had matured so quickly. Only 12 percent of editorial comments were critical of him; a mere half of one percent condemnatory.
That night, Roosevelt entertained the Republican leadership to dinner. He had reason to celebrate. Not since the time of Lincoln had a President’s first thoughts received such public attention; congratulatory telegrams were pouring in, and the stock market was surging. Even as he feasted, eighteen of his proposals were being drafted into bills.
Aldrich and Allison saw no immediate threat to the legislative status quo. Yet they sipped Roosevelt’s sauterne with a vague sense of unease. Walter Wellman, White House correspondent of the Chicago Record-Herald, caught their mood:
It is not so much what he has done as what he may do that fills [them] with anxiety.… They have been accustomed to a certain way of playing the game. They know all the rules.… Naturally the question arises in many minds: What of the future? What will it all come to? The significance of this great Message, this remarkable piece of writing, is that it has raised up a new intellectual force, a new sort of leader, against whom the older politicians are afraid to break a lance, lest he appeal to the country … and take the country with him.
THE WINTER DAYS shortened toward solstice. Roosevelt returned home from his afternoon rides in ever-thickening darkness. Whether he came from Rock Creek or the Potomac flats, sooner or later L’Enfant’s perspectives disclosed the Capitol ahead of him, high and remote on its wooded hill, twinkling with lights as Congress worked late.
On 7 December, he received his first piece of legislation from the Senate. It was a minor customs waiver, and he signed it impatiently. A bill authorizing construction of the Isthmian Canal would have been more to his taste, but the Senate had yet to ratify the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. When it eventually did, on 16 December, congressmen were already turning their thoughts toward Christmas. Roosevelt gave up hope of a canal bill before the new year, and turned his energies to building up political strength.
The quickest way to do this was through patronage, so he began to bombard the Hill with as many as thirty appointments a day. A surprise choice was fifty-three-year-old Governor Leslie Mortier Shaw of Iowa to replace Lyman Gage as Secretary of the Treasury. Gage resigned with understandable chagrin, having stayed on—at Roosevelt’s request—to give Wall Street a sense of continuity. Now, with stocks rising, he found himself dispensable. Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith also felt a presidential chill, and stepped aside for Henry C. Payne of Wisconsin.
It did not escape notice that the new Cabinet recruits were protégés, respectively, of Senators Allison and Spooner. Those two Republican stalwarts were plagued by party insurgencies back home; Iowa and Wisconsin were notoriously fickle states, receptive to new ideas. Roosevelt’s nominations seemed to align him with the Old Guard against reform.
There was further significance in his appointment of Payne, a “Roosevelt Republican” with no love for Mark Hanna. Payne was one of the GOP’s top political managers. Life had been lean for him during the McKinley years. At fifty-eight, he hungered for a salaried office with spoils. Roosevelt gave him both, in good measure: the Postal Service was the richest source of patronage in Washington. Mark Hanna’s effulgence as party boss began to dwindle with the December light.
Almost simultaneously, Senator Joseph Benson Foraker of Ohio proclaimed himself a Roosevelt Republican, too. Foraker resented his colleague’s domination of the Ohio party, and gave notice that he would endorse the President in 1904. Yet another anti-Hanna recruit was Senator Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania. Roosevelt turned a blind eye to Quay’s semicriminal record, gave a consulship to one of his cronies, and flattered his intellectual pretensions: “So you’re fond of De Quincey, Senator?”
Night after night, he gazed more cheerfully at the Capitol, knowing that some of its lights, at least, twinkled for him.
ONE UNSEEMLY INCIDENT marred the week before Christmas: the President’s public scolding of Nelson A. Miles, Commanding General of the United States Army. His treatment of the old soldier was by most accounts brutal. “It is a horrible thing,” wrote a former aide to Benjamin Harrison, “to realize that we have a bully in the White House.”
Roosevelt had developed an antipathy for the Commanding General during the Spanish-American War, dismissing him as nothing more than “a brave peacock.” Miles still loved to parade before admiring eyes. At sixty-one, he was a splendid specimen of bristling military masculinity. If he wore more gold braid, silver stars, and polished leather than seemed necessary for national security, few begrudged him his glitter. He was, after all, a hero of the Indian Campaigns.
What angered Roosevelt now was not so much the preening and strutting as signs that the Commanding General wished to become Commander-in-Chief. He was not particular as to which party should nominate him, but the latest signs were that he was courting the anti-imperialist vote, with a view to running as a Democrat in 1904.
As Commanding General, Miles had access to all classified dispatches sent to the Secretary of War. Secrets embarrassing to Elihu Root’s management of the war in the Philippines were being leaked to senators in the opposition. Roosevelt and Root were sure that he was responsible.
Miles played into their hands on 17 December by telling an interviewer that he disagreed with a naval court investigating a dispute between two admirals. Root informed him, on behalf of the President, that the senior officer of one service had “no business” criticizing legal proceedings in another. Miles hurried to the White House to explain that his remark had been merely “personal.” Roosevelt was in the middle of an open reception, and jumped at the chance to humiliate him. His voice rose to a shout, accompanied by jabs of the presidential forefinger: “I will have no criticism of my Administration from you, or any other officer in the Army. Your conduct is worthy of censure, sir.”
“You have the advantage of me, Mr. President,” Miles said, controlling himself. “You are my host and superior officer.” He bowed and left the room. On 22 December, his reprimand was made official. There was much sympathy for him, and criticism of the President for going beyond normal disciplinary decencies. “Mr. Roosevelt,” commented The Army and Navy Register, “approached General Miles in a manner which, without exaggeration, may be described as savage.”
PURGED, PERHAPS, by his outburst, Roosevelt radiated contentment at pre-Christmas appearances. The approach of the festive season always delighted him. Now that he inhabited the house of his highest desire, his excitement was childlike. “The President,” a visitor remarked, “seems to get whole heaps of fun out of the Presidency.”
Yet there was something about Roosevelt that gave close observers pause. Was he as naïvely impulsive as he seemed? Why was he so cheerfully equivocal on every possible issue? Why had he sent Philander Knox down to Florida for a month’s “rest,” and why was the Attorney General carrying such a suspiciously fat briefcase?
“I should say,” the last reporter to interview the President in 1901 wrote, “that he has something up his sleeve.”
HOWLS OF MIRTH, mixed with music and hand-claps, were heard in the East Room after dinner on 25 December, as the President led his family and friends in a Virginia reel. The tempo quickened until even Senator Lodge shed his solemnity and joined in. Roosevelt, beaming like a boy, performed a variety of buck-and-wing steps to loud applause. Edith collapsed in tears of laughter, while his children exhorted him to further display. “Go to it, Pop!”
The band swung into the tune the Rough Riders had adopted at training camp in San Antonio. Seizing another partner, Roosevelt stomped out a joyous cakewalk, and the sound of singing voices rolled out into Lafayette Square:
When you hear dem-a bells go ding, ling, ling,
All join round, and sweetly you must sing,
And when the verse am through,
In the chorus all join in,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!