Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [116]
“HE FOUND HIMSELF ENTRUSTED WITH A MISSION
OF MAJOR IMPORTANCE.”
Jules Jusserand, anonymous sketch (photo credit 14.1)
Might he be, against original expectations, a man of peace?
THE JANUARY ISSUE of McClure’s disagreeably reminded Roosevelt that he had problems to confront at home, regardless of foreign powermongering. Never before had an American magazine publisher put out so shocking a number. Absent were the pallid love stories and escapist travelogues that most readers looked for. In their place were three long articles on trust abuse, political corruption, and union violence. Each one, Samuel S. McClure noted in his introductory editorial, could be entitled “The American Contempt of Law.”
The frontispiece photograph showed John D. Rockefeller seated, exuding the security of two hundred million dollars. But his trouser leg, hitched too high, revealed a hint of flabby calf, a vulnerable length of sock. This documentary note permeated the subsequent articles, which were remarkable for depth of research, toughness of language, and something fresh to journalism: a sort of tacit moral disdain.
“The Oil War of 1872,” by Ida Tarbell, described the panic that hit Titusville, Pennsylvania, when the Standard Oil Company announced new freight rates crippling to independent producers. Only one supplier, under a hitherto unknown name, was entitled to enjoy special rates: it turned out to be an alias for Standard Oil. A contemporary blacklist of “conspirators,” reproduced in facsimile, prominently featured Rockefeller’s name. The man with the flabby calf had gone on to other, more subtle schemes, inexorably locking an entire industry in his corporate grip. Tarbell was as meticulous in documenting Rockefeller’s acts of philanthropy as she was in analyzing the fine print of his contracts. But she noted that “religious emotion and sentiments of charity … seem to have taken the place in him of notions of justice and regard for the rights of others.”
Elsewhere in McClure’s, Lincoln Steffens contributed “The Shame of Minneapolis: Rescue and Redemption of a City That Was Sold Out.” The article, plentifully illustrated with bribery lists and police-file photographs, recounted the slide to corruption of a once-honest mayor. Thanks to the efforts of a courageous grand juror, Minneapolis was now purged, but Steffens allowed a cynical question to shadow his last paragraph: “Can a city be governed without any alliance with crime?”
The third story, by Ray Stannard Baker, was an equally harsh and factual survey of conditions in Pennsylvania during the coal strike. Entitled “The Right to Work,” it consisted of interviews with nonunion miners who had braved bullets and beatings to continue working. One was quoted as saying, “I believe that a man should have a right, no matter what his reasons are, to work when and where he pleases.” Baker reported that this miner had been set upon by union vigilantes, and blinded with a rock.
All in all, the January McClure’s made for ugly reading. But palpably, beneath its flotsam of fact, a new kind of reportage—“torrential journalism,” Roosevelt called it—was surging from wellsprings of popular discontent.
THE FIFTY-SEVENTH Congress reconvened for the last time on 5 January, and Roosevelt moved swiftly to push through the legislative program he had been talking about for so long. “From now until the 4th of March my hands will be full,” he wrote Kermit. The American economy had expanded at such a rate in 1902 (oil production alone was up 27 percent) that he knew there was no hope of controlling trust growth by occasional slow prosecutions under the Sherman Act. What was needed was an overall regulatory system calling for the cooperation, rather than the coercion, of businesses engaged in interstate trade.
He wanted three antitrust weapons: a Department of Commerce with an investigatory