Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [86]
Taft professed not to have known that his attorney general was going to name the Colonel. But the plan’s political intent was plain. Wickersham wanted voters to know that he and the President had launched almost as many antitrust prosecutions in two years as “Teddy the trust-buster” had in seven and a half. The fact that they were both pro-business did not betray their mutual commitment to the letter of the law.
“I know you will agree with me that the only wise course for me to pursue is that of absolute silence,” Roosevelt wrote the president of the Reform Club, in reply to a sympathetic letter. By that he meant only oral speech: he would have plenty to say in print. If he spoke out too forcefully to reporters, he would start hearing from Roosevelt Republicans again, and find himself pitted against both Taft and La Follette in 1912.
He told two progressive friends, William Allen White and Governor Hiram Johnson of California, that an emergency could conceivably arise which would require him to make the “sacrifice” of a presidential run. Otherwise, it was best that he remained a private citizen. “I very sincerely believe that if I should be nominated, you would find that it was a grave misfortune not only for me but for the progressive cause.… I ask with all the strength that is in my power … to do everything possible to prevent not merely my nomination, but any movement looking toward my nomination.”
JOHNSON, BEING A POLITICIAN, took note of the condition and ignored the disclaimer. It was useless for Roosevelt to try to persuade such men that he meant what he said: that his fears were for progressivism rather than for himself. But if he was one day to be nominated against his will, he had to do something about his present low esteem on Wall Street. At Carnegie Hall he had spoken, he thought, “with guarded moderation” about court rulings that favored property rights over the public interest, “but every single New York newspaper was bitterly against me, and for the most part suppressed my speech, merely playing it up in the headlines as an attack on the judiciary.”
He therefore worked with extreme care on an article responding to the steel suit. How he expressed himself did not really matter. What he was saying, in so many words, was that he no longer supported William Howard Taft as President of the United States.
The article, headlined “The Trusts, the People, and the Square Deal,” appeared in The Outlook on 16 November. It proved to be not so much a cry of outrage as a sober, detailed statement of his regulatory philosophy, adapted to new conditions, and accepting that combination was a fact of American life. For all its lack of sensationalism, it quickly sold out its press run, and tens of thousands of offprint copies had to be issued to satisfy public demand. Newspapers reprinted it nationwide.
Roosevelt tersely reaffirmed his self-defense in the Tennessee Coal & Iron matter, as testimony confirmed by all the principals involved. He devoted the rest of his space to a repudiation of Taft’s “chaotic” and overly judicial antitrust program. Admitting that he had invoked the Sherman Act himself against such trusts as Northern Securities, American Tobacco, and Standard Oil (and succeeded all the way to the Supreme Court), he said he had done so only when convinced of corporate mischief. Throughout his presidency he had exhorted Congress to create an independent agency that would constantly regulate, rather than sporadically punish, the doings of trusts—most of which were law-abiding, and all of which were entitled to be as big as they liked, as long as they did not monopolize their sector of the economy. “Size in itself does not signify wrong-doing.”
The time had come, he wrote, for an administrative policy of “close and jealous” monitoring of business combinations. Whatever body was created to exercise this authority—perhaps a strengthened version of his own Bureau of Corporations—must have power to override states’ rights and restrain unbridled competition. He acknowledged that