Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [125]
The result was another batch of positive headlines. They helped counteract negative editorials, such as one in the Philadelphia Ledger mocking the Roosevelt plan as “a lame and impotent conclusion to so much ferocious talk.” Few Republican papers went as far as the Philadelphia Press in claiming that “no such revolution in the operations of trusts and railroads has been worked since the Interstate Commerce Act was passed.”
Nevertheless, Roosevelt had brought about the first strengthening of federal regulatory authority in more than a decade, and unlike any Chief Executive before him, identified himself with antitrust policy. In the words of the Washington Evening Star, “The President of the United States is the original ‘trust-buster,’ the great and only one for this occasion.”
Whether this would redound to his future glory was uncertain. There were signs that yesterday’s great wave of combination was slowing, even as competition thrived, and the nation’s wealth swelled. Memories of hard times were growing dim. The American people were bored with antitrust, as they were tired of winter. Like their President, they looked forward to a summer of new issues. For now, “trust-busting” could safely be left to Knox, Cortelyou, and the courts.
GEORGE BRUCE CORTELYOU had a habit of carefully straightening his spectacles whenever anything was laid in front of him, whether a memorandum on his desk or sheet music on his piano. Each new challenge had to be focused twenty-twenty, in center lens, as he dealt with it. This self-protective gesture was the legacy of boyhood years when demands and deprivations came from unexpected directions, leaving him a young stenographer of impeccable ancestry but common education. Yet there had been, even then, a slithering efficiency about Cortelyou (associates used such words as oiled, smooth, eel-like to describe him) that sped him to high position, if not wealth, under Presidents Cleveland and McKinley. Now, still poor, he was raised to Cabinet rank under President Roosevelt.
Exulting, he straightened his spectacles and contemplated the future. “I am not going into this new department with the idea of staying indefinitely,” he wrote a friend. “I have refused many advantageous business offers.… If I am successful, and I think I shall be, the returns will be immediate and liberal within a very short time after I retire.” Just at the moment, however, he needed five thousand dollars to repay a debt of honor. A check for six thousand came by return mail. At forty, Cortelyou felt for the first time the luxurious correlation of money and power.
Political gossips doubted that the thirty-seven-year-old Commissioner of Corporations would accept much of Cortelyou’s authority. James Rudolph Garfield was the son of President Garfield, and Roosevelt’s former protégé at the Civil Service Commission. Although he was foppish enough to care passionately about silk hats, his lean good looks were those of a privately educated sportsman. As such he qualified for the elite company of exercise companions whom Roosevelt delighted to abuse with cliff-crawls and frigid swims.
Cortelyou, despite seventeen months of almost daily proximity to the President, had never been so privileged.
ON 18 FEBRUARY, Roosevelt invited Speck von Sternburg to join him for a horseback trot in Rock Creek Park. Snow had fallen and frozen the night before; wedges of white lay in the trees, and the stream growled between ice-roughened banks. The skinny German bobbed along looking correct but cold in afternoon dress, while Roosevelt relaxed warmly in fur coat and cap.
Now that Germany’s battleships were at last clear of the Caribbean, a soothing signal to Wilhelm II seemed called for. Roosevelt discounted the seriousness of the naval threat Admiral Dewey had posed, and said that His Majesty’s representatives had made “the best impression imaginable” during the recent negotiations.
The President’s words again showed a respect for diplomatic face. As “a gentleman,” he was in honor bound not to