Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [182]
Roosevelt, congenitally unable to question the rightness of his own decisions, did not understand what Hoar and other moralists meant when they talked of “conscience” in foreign-policy making. If conscience was something more lasting than emotion, more flexible than intellect, he could do without it. He did not regret what he had done, because it was done. Second thoughts were like grief; they inhibited the vital onrush of life, of the world’s work. He only knew that opportunity—Senator Ingalls’s “master of human destinies”—had knocked unbidden at his gate:
It is the hour of fate,
And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe,
Save death …
“In this Panama business,” Roosevelt exploded to his son Ted, “the Evening Post and the entire fool mugwump crowd have fairly suffered from hysterics, and a goodly number of Senators, even of my own party, have shown about as much backbone as so many angleworms.” Quick to emasculate his critics, he dismissed the liberals of New York and Massachusetts as “a small body of shrill eunuchs.”
He kept such expressions private, yet the violence of his language betrayed fear that the eunuchs would revive his old reputation for impulsiveness. Since the Northern Securities suit, he had worked hard to persuade party professionals that he was both conservative and cautious. His impartiality in the coal strike, his quiet management of the Venezuela crisis, his voluntary abandonment of antitrust activities, his insistence on the open shop in government—these were hardly the policies of a radical. Yet here was Villard still berating him as “a rash young man,” and a Wall Street consortium pledging one million dollars to make Mark Hanna President of the United States.
The Republican National Committee was about to meet in Washington to make its first plans for 1904; then Philander Knox and attorneys representing the Northern Securities Corporation were to present their final arguments before the Supreme Court. Should either of these confrontations embarrass the Administration, Roosevelt’s hopes of another term could crash.
ON 9 DECEMBER, Walter Wellman was admitted to the Executive Office and given a major scoop. He reported it the next day, in front-page articles in the Philadelphia Press and Chicago Record-Herald:
Washington, Dec. 9—President Roosevelt has refused to make peace with the trust and railway corporation leaders of New York. They approached the President with an offer to withdraw their opposition to him if he would give them certain assurances as to his future course. The President declined point-blank. Angered by this rejection … the big financiers started a last desperate movement designed to bring Senator Hanna forward as a candidate for the Republican nomination for President. This, too has failed. Mr. Hanna is not willing to become a candidate with the backing of Wall Street and the support of the Lily Whites of the South. These important disclosures, which I am able to make on the highest authority, explain much that has been going on above and beneath the surface during the past month.
Wellman said that the President’s importuners had represented J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, James J. Hill, and “the Rockefeller-Gould combination.” They were afraid he was a warmonger as well as a trustbuster: “He might wreck the country any morning before breakfast.” Hanna, fortunately, was no alarmist. As for Roosevelt and Administration leaders, “they do not believe the judgment and level-headed common sense of the American people can be upset by such methods.”
The article, reprinted widely, was the talk of Washington on 11 December, when fifty-two Republican bosses convened at the Arlington Hotel. Hanna escorted them to the Green Room of the White House after lunch. “Mr. President, I have the honor