Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [156]
After a two-hour lunch, officially described as “social,” Cannon left Sagamore Hill smiling, hinting that he might consider some currency reform in a future session. But when he stopped off in New York, en route to his home in Illinois, he showed no inclination to reassure Wall Street further on that score. “I could not get him to visit a single banker,” Congressman Lucius Littauer wrote Roosevelt. “His constant reiteration was that a time of financial panic was not one in which to discuss the necessity of financial legislation.”
No sooner had Cannon left town on 23 July than a serious collapse in share values began on Wall Street. Banks canceled credit, and syndicates unloaded their reserve investments of high-grade securities. U.S. Steel common dropped by more than 50 percent. Frantic for more funds, the syndicates put up their newer, underwritten offerings, and got almost nothing for them. J. P. Morgan’s United States Shipbuilding Company went bankrupt, as did the hundred-million-dollar Consolidated Lake Superior. Four major brokers went out of business.
Like ripples round a dropped stone, waves of desperation ringed outward, but shallowly, failing to shake the calm depths of general investment. Cannon had gotten—perhaps even brought on—the “rich man’s panic” he wanted. Secretary Shaw wrote to reassure Roosevelt, as did James Clarkson: “The country is prosperous every place else except Wall Street, and perhaps the Street is all the better for this experience.”
So while stockbrokers raged, blaming the Administration’s antitrust policies—“This is a market on which John D. Rockefeller could not borrow on Standard Oil”—Roosevelt kept cool in white flannels. He had discovered a new sport, cricket, and spent many hours with a British professional, learning the difference between topspins, long-hops, and silly mid-ons.
A THOUSAND MILES SOUTH, the white Democrats of Mississippi prepared to cast their primary votes for Governor and Senator. James K. Vardaman’s vicious rhetoric had somehow turned the contest into one between “Rooseveltism” and racism. On 9 August, the President decided to issue his long-delayed “utterance,” in the form of a public letter to Winfield T. Durbin of Indiana.
“My dear Governor Durbin,” he wrote, “permit me to thank you as an American citizen for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty of the law by your recent action in reference to lynching.” (Durbin had not only dispelled rioters with troops, but proclaimed the right of a black murderer to a fair trial.) “All thoughtful men,” Roosevelt continued, “must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims—on which occasions the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal.”
In a minority of cases—fewer than one in four—lynch victims were guilty of rape, “a crime horrible beyond description.” Yet rape’s very bestiality required that society respond to it in a civilized fashion. Roosevelt was at his most impassioned when he commented on the sadistic quality of lynchings:
There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation.… Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.
Rollo Ogden congratulated him after the