Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [180]
Morgan, no less perceptive than the President, talked throughout Thanksgiving dinner of Hanna’s “duty to the country.” He spoke not only for himself, but for all the Wall Street moneymen still recovering from the summer panic. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s yards were crowded with empty cars. Morgan’s pride, U.S. Steel, had reduced wages sharply. As a result, millworkers and boilermen from Rhode Island to California faced an impoverished winter. Miners were rioting in Colorado. Theodore Roosevelt—seeking with one hand to constrict capital and with the other to throttle organized labor—was to blame. Financiers mistrusted what Oswald Garrison Villard called Roosevelt’s “terrifying habit of ‘suddenness,’ ” demonstrated so recently in Panama. They looked to Hanna—a businessman as well as a Senator, an employer well respected by workingmen—to save the Republican Party from schism.
When the Senator remained silent, Morgan appealed to Mrs. Hanna. It would be “easy” to nominate her husband, he said, “if he would only give the word.” She replied with feminine forthrightness: nothing would induce Mark to run.
This did not stop Hanna from joshing reporters afterward. “You can say what you damn please,” he told them, grinning and thumping his cane.
THE SENATOR’S CONTINUING conservative appeal exasperated Roosevelt, who thought it had been disposed of at Walla Walla. He saw trouble with Hanna in the months ahead, particularly with regard to party patronage. There was the vexed question of Dr. Crum, and a much newer one concerning Leonard Wood. Roosevelt wished to make his old Rough Rider commander a Major General at forty-three. Unfortunately, Wood had once jailed one of Hanna’s political cronies for postal fraud in Cuba. The Senator was now bent on revenge. Nothing would better demonstate his renewed legislative clout than blocking an obvious piece of presidential favoritism.
In a last-minute effort to negotiate a truce, Roosevelt summoned Hanna to the White House on the evening of 4 December. They sat up till nearly midnight. Hanna won the right to say what he liked about Wood on the floor of the Senate, in exchange for permitting the appointment. Roosevelt also promised not to force the Senator to serve another term as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. In theory, this cleared Hanna to run for the presidency. But Roosevelt could see at close quarters that he was an exhausted man.
Another party elder who had to be wooed before the regular session began was the priestly George F. Hoar. Roosevelt needed him to bless the Administration’s Panama policy as a sign to anti-imperialists (a dwindling but still powerful faction in Congress) that God had not been mocked on the Isthmus. He invited the Senator to take an advance look at his Third Annual Message. Hoar began to read the Panama section, then stood up in disgust. “I hope I may never live to see the day when the interests of my country are placed above its honor,” he said, and walked out of the White House.
Roosevelt turned to his two closest aides for counsel, and got only wisecracks. “I think,” Philander Knox teased, “it would be better to keep your action free from any taint of legality.” Elihu Root was even more sarcastic. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction, and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”
Both men rallied behind him, however. Knox provided a written opinion, “Sovereignty over the Isthmus, as Affecting the Canal,” which showed that the United States had legal grounds for her recognition of Panama. And Root came up with an ingenious argument to protect recess appointments from Speaker Cannon’s forelengthening of Congress. Since the special session