Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [85]
The family doctor found no concussion, and she slowly recovered. But the accident, following so soon after her fiftieth birthday and the advent of baby Grace, served as a notice to Roosevelt that they had both reached the years of physical decline. His mustache was going from gray to white, and chronic rheumatism assured him that he would never again stride out as freely as he had in Africa. He comforted her with a copy of Edith Wharton’s new novel Ethan Frome—not that she found much to enjoy in the climactic crash scene—and in his only speaking engagement of the season, called passionately for a social policy more considerate toward the frailties of women and children. “I am not talking to you tonight about abstract things,” he told a packed audience at Carnegie Hall, “but about flesh and blood and the ills of flesh and blood.”
Worried as he was about his wife, he was only distractedly aware that the Agadir crisis had eased, with Germany being “compensated” for French supremacy in Morocco with a large slice of the Middle Congo and several billion tsetse flies. It sounded like the kind of arbitral accord that the President favored. Meanwhile Taft, still traveling, was trying to publicize himself as a trust-buster. He launched an attack on monopolistic combinations in Boise, Idaho, and warned that his attorney general, George W. Wickersham, would prosecute violations of the Sherman Act, “whether we be damned or not.” Coming from a self-proclaimed conservative, this language sounded like a parody of Roosevelt’s own radical rhetoric, or at best, an attempt to win back Westerners lost to reciprocity. The first national convention of Republican progressives responded on 16 October by endorsing Robert La Follette for the presidency in 1912.
Eleven days later, on Theodore Roosevelt’s fifty-third birthday, Taft handed him an unwelcome present.
THE HEADLINES THAT MORNING on the front page of the New York Tribune could not have been more enraging:
GOVERNMENT SUES TO DISSOLVE STEEL TRUST AS ILLEGAL COMBINATION IN RESTRAINT OF TRADE
Mentions 36 Companies as Defendants and Names J. P. Morgan, J. D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie
SAYS ROOSEVELT WAS DECEIVED
RECITES PURCHASE OF TENNESSEE COAL AND IRON COMPANY AND DECLARES THAT E. H. GARY AND H. C. FRICK MISLED THE PRESIDENT AS TO THEIR REAL PURPOSE AT TIME OF PANIC
Other newspapers treated the story similarly, with the words deceived and misled recurring like drumbeats. Roosevelt was stunned into temporary wordlessness. It was as if everything he had told the Stanley Committee, and subsequently published, word for word, in The Outlook, was disbelieved by the Justice Department. With friends like Taft and Wickersham, he did not need enemies in Congress.
For two and a half years, he had tried to keep quiet about Taft. In the process he had disappointed and even lost many of his progressive colleagues, who were now, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, supporting La Follette. He debated what to do about his credibility and the fragmentation of the GOP, cracking like a salt lick under the President’s elephantine missteps. Labor despised Taft; the insurgents always had; free-traders and protectionists alike blamed him for the reciprocity debacle; Democrats could not wait for 1912. Even the Republican Old Guard deplored this prosecution, which could be justified only on the most legalistic grounds.
As James Bryce noted, U.S. Steel was not technically a monopoly: it often lost out on large orders to smaller competitors. Wickersham had therefore focused on the Tennessee Coal & Iron deal as monopolistic in intent, enabled by Theodore Roosevelt. His petition granted that the former president had acted honestly in 1907. But to readers of newspaper headlines four years later, Roosevelt’s innocence looked like naïveté—if not complicity in what the financial expert John Moody called “the best bargain [any] concern or individual ever made in the