Theodore Roosevelt (9 page)

TR agreed to do this, after inducing the French to make a final offer of minimum terms. They revised their position slightly by bringing the Sultan of Morocco into more direct relation with the French and Spanish police officers and associating Italy (a sop to Germany) in the police control. Germany continued to stand pat until TR, citing the Kaiser's letter to him of the previous June in which the German emperor had flatly stated: “I will in every case be willing to back up the decision which you consider to be the most fair and most practicable,” insisting that the time had come for this promise to be fulfilled. The Kaiser gave in.

The Algeciras conference averted a war that would have come at a time when the French army was far less prepared for it than it would be in 1914. As Allan Nevins put it: “It allowed the powers a few more years in which to avert the great conflagration—years and opportunities which they threw away.”

TR was entirely frank with Lodge about the individual and vital role he had played in the conference. “I became the intermediary between Germany and France,” he wrote him. “This is a deep secret.… With Jusserand [French ambassador to the United States] I was able to go over the whole matter, and we finally worked out a conclusion which I think was entirely satisfactory. Do not let anyone except, of course, Nanny [Mrs. Lodge] know of this. Even Whitelaw Reid [ambassador to Britain] does not know it. I have told Taft but not Hay. I shall tell Root.”

Eight years of peace was something, anyway, and the world owed them at least in part to TR. His relations with the Kaiser, contrary to what many thought, were always productive of concord. One can add the Venezuela crisis to Algeciras. Yet TR never made a secret of his admiration for virile nations, and the bristling, glittering, armored empire of William II was not unsympathetic to him until the brutal invasion of Belgium in 1914. He had even once gone so far as to express his understanding of Germany's ambition to become an imperial power. Writing how he would feel as a German about such a course of action, he stated: “I should adopt it without the least feeling that the Germans who advocated German colonial expansion were doing anything save what was right and proper from the standpoint of their own people. Nations may, and often must, have conflicting interests, and in the present age patriotism stands a good deal ahead of cosmopolitanism.”

And in TR's rather condescending description of the politically liberal German-born Carl Schurz, he seems to betray a muffled respect for the Prussian aspects of Germany that Schurz repudiated:

He is not an American, and he is not a present-day German. He is a leftover German of 1848, of the amiable, visionary, impractical, revolutionary type, now soured by his own constant wrong behavior for many years. He knows nothing whatever of modern Germany.… Modern Germany is alert, aggressive, military and industrial. It thinks it is a match for England and France combined in war, and would probably be less reluctant to fight both those powers together than they would be together to fight it.

TR was friendly and congenial with Baron H. S. von Sternberg and asked his legate in Berlin to urge his appointment as ambassador to the United States. There was considerable delay in this, perhaps in respect to former chancellor Bismarck's dictum: “I do not regard it as a virtue in my ambassadors to be popular in the nation to which they are accredited,” but at last the appointment was made, and it facilitated relations between the two governments. In one of the last letters that TR wrote at the end of his second term he confided in the Kaiser: “It is very unlikely that I shall hold office again. But if—what I most earnestly hope may never occur—there should be a big war in which the United States was engaged, while I am still in bodily vigor, I should endeavor to get permission to raise a division of mounted rifles—cavalry in our use of the word, that is, nine regiments such as I commanded in the war with Spain.”

Of course, there was such a war, but with his correspondent as the hated enemy, and he did indeed seek permission to raise such a regiment, only to be refused by President Wilson. There had always been a basic distrust behind TR's occasional admiration of the Kaiser. He had been flattered in 1910 by the latter's taking him on military maneuvers in Germany, a privilege not usually accorded to aliens, but from the beginning of their relationship he had deplored the Kaiser's rashness and excitability, so different from the cool reflectiveness behind his own seeming bluster. Henry Adams saw this, and when Lodge told him the British thought that Roosevelt was under the Kaiser's spell, he exclaimed: “For heaven's sake let them think so! The President's influence with the Kaiser is one of the strongest weapons we have in a really perilous condition. We know he understands the Kaiser, and that is enough.”

Eleven

Roosevelt started his second term with resoundingly approving majorities in the nation and in Congress. There had also been enough scandals and public disclosures about the malefactions of wealth to engender considerable support for his “Square Deal.” The age of muckraking had been initiated with the publication of Ida Tarbell's
History of the Standard Oil Company.
And furthermore the Standard Oil Company of Indiana had been exposed for cheating on rebates, as had the Sugar Trust for underpaying the U.S. customs by underweighing its imports at the docks.

Roosevelt wrote this to a friend about one of his campaign manager's unsuccessful efforts to raise money from E. H. Harriman:

To this Harriman answered that … whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of senators and congressmen or state legislators to protect his interests, and when necessary he could buy the judiciary. These were his exact words. He did not say this under any injunction of secrecy to Sherman and showed a perfectly cynical spirit of defiance throughout, his tone being that he greatly preferred to have in demagogues rather than honest men who treated them fairly, because when he needed he could purchase favors from the former.

In 1907 many were not surprised to hear the president in his annual message to Congress call for the imposition of income and inheritance taxes, the fixing of railroad rates based on the valuation of railroad property, currency reform, limitation of injunctions in labor disputes, extension of the eight-hour day, and control of campaign contributions.

Yet Roosevelt always kept a wary and suspicious eye on the radical left. “A government like ours,” he wrote, “must equally dread the Scylla of mob rule and the reign of mere plutocracy,” and even such a basic conservative as Elihu Root described him as “the great conservator of property and rights.”

One of the signal accomplishments of the second term was the passage of the Hepburn Bill, which increased the regulating power of the Interstate Commerce Commission over railroads, giving it jurisdiction to inspect railroad records, to restrict rebates, and, to some degree, to establish rates charged. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich had tried to cripple these powers by giving the railroads ample opportunity to delay the commission's rulings indefinitely through appeals to the courts, but the bill provided for more summary legal action. It gave the federal courts the power to set aside any order of the commission, but provided for direct appeal to the Supreme Court and calendar priority in antitrust cases. TR eased off in his effort to obtain tariff reductions in order to reach a compromise in Congress on the Hepburn Bill.

In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed to remedy the abuses of the meatpacking industry as exposed by Upton Sinclair's novel
The Jungle.
Finley Peter Dunne, “Mr. Dooley,” described TR's reaction to the book: “Tiddy was toying with a light breakfast and idly turnin' over the pages iv the new book with both hands. Suddenly he rose fr'm the table, an cryin': ‘I'm pizened,' began throwin' sausages out iv the window.”

The Panic of 1907 was initiated by the failure of the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York, which set off a run on banks and threatened a major financial disaster. The leading financiers of the day met in J. P. Morgan's library to discuss ways and means to avert the crash. The great banker sat in their midst, among his art treasures, silently playing solitaire while they suggested, one after another, possible steps to take, only to receive an abrupt negative shake of the head. At last a plan was evolved whereby a major brokerage house, Moore and Schley, whose imminent bankruptcy dangerously loomed, could be saved. It held substantial stock in the Tennessee Coal & Iron Company as collateral for loans, though the price had plummeted. If U.S. Steel exchanged some of its stock for the Tennessee stock, the solidly valuable steel shares would satisfy the Moore and Schley creditors, the brokerage house would be saved, and the financial crisis averted. And so in the end it turned out. But U.S. Steel insisted on an assurance from the federal government that the control of Tennessee, which the transaction would provide, would not subject it to an antitrust suit. TR was consulted and gave the requested assurance. Following the adage that no good deed goes unpunished, he would later find himself bitterly criticized for assisting U.S. Steel to increase its monopoly by this (as it turned out) highly advantageous acquisition of Tennessee.

TR had earlier, at the bringing of the Northern Securities suit, accused Morgan of presuming to deal on equal terms with the U.S. government. To many observers in 1907 it looked as if that was exactly what Morgan was successfully doing.

Roosevelt marred the end of his term with one foolish act. When Joseph Pulitzer's paper
The World
accused him of “deliberate misstatements of fact” in defending his Panamanian policy, he insisted that his attorney general institute a suit for criminal libel. Of course, the suit was lost, and TR had to content himself with one of his angriest denunciations: “Pulitzer is one of these creatures of the gutter of such unspeakable degradation that to him even eminence on a dunghill seems enviable.”

McKinley had appointed William Howard Taft as governor of the Philippine Islands, a post that TR had wanted for himself at the time he had been offered the vice presidential nomination. TR kept a sharp eye on Taft, therefore, after TR became president, and ultimately promoted him to be secretary of war, where he was extremely helpful in the construction of the Panama Canal, carried out under the aegis of the army. Searching the political field for a successor, Roosevelt, who had barred a third term for himself, decided that his two likeliest candidates were Taft and Root.

Taft was fifty-one in 1908, the last full year of TR's second term. A native of Ohio, he had been in public life for twenty-one years, as a prosecuting attorney and then judge in his home state and thereafter in the federal offices above stated. Because of his obesity and genial personality he appeared to the public mind as a kind of Santa Claus figure, smiling, easygoing, tolerant, beaming the rays of his benevolent heart on people whom he could not imagine to be any less benevolent than himself. If there was a political gain in this—something comparable to the popularity that Ronald Reagan in our time achieved—there was also a political liability. Was such a man really capable of leading the nation in a grave crisis? Might he not be too weak or easily misled or careless of significant detail?

Taft in fact was a shrewd and conscientious worker, fully capable of command. He had been the effective governor of Pacific islands teeming with revolt and the efficient and respected head of our army. His real political liability lay in his deep distaste for the smoke-filled back rooms of practical politics and in his yearning for the intellectual isolation of the judicial bench. Roosevelt saw this, but tried to entice him toward the presidency by pointing out how effective a chief of state he might prove if he would only make his affability the partner of his willpower:

Let the audience see you smile,
always,
because I feel that your nature shines out so transparently when you do smile—you big, generous, high-minded fellow. Moreover, let them realize the truth, which is that for all your gentleness and kindliness and generous good nature, there never existed a man who was a better fighter when the need arose.

It is a tribute to Taft's good nature that in later years, after the acerbic animosity aroused by the Bull Moose campaign, Roosevelt forgave him, as he never forgave the colder, more calculating but preeminently just Elihu Root. The three men had been close friends and allies in the years when one of them had been in the White House and two in his cabinet. They had even called themselves the three musketeers and sometimes signed themselves accordingly: D'Artagnan, of course, for Roosevelt, Athos for the sober and cynical Root, and Porthos for stout Taft. Yet all must have known that Aramis and not D'Artagnan was the third musketeer. Making D'Artagnan one may have prefigured the breakup.

Root, though he backed Taft, may have toyed with the idea of seeking the successorship to Roosevelt for himself, but he knew—and TR knew—that a man whose public image was that of a corporate lawyer for big business could never be elected. Taft, who might genuinely have preferred the choice to fall on Root, also had to acknowledge this, as he recalled a conversation with Roosevelt: “The President was particular to say to Root, so the President told me, that he was committed to me for the presidency so far as his influence might properly go, and I infer that Root had no definite intention of running for that office, though you never can tell.”

But what Taft really wanted was something quite different:

My ambition … is to become a justice of the Supreme Court. I presume, however, there are very few men who would refuse to accept the nomination of the Republican Party for the presidency, and I am not an exception. If it were to come to me with the full understanding of the party of the weaknesses that I should have as a candidate, I should not feel that I had any right to decline, and should make the best fight possible to secure my election.