Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [19]
Ideologically, Roosevelt was committed to a conservative view of the trusts. Personally, he felt a certain ambivalence. He saw “grave dangers” in unrestricted combination, yet he could not deny that the economy functioned better now that the trusts were, in effect, running it. The price of kerosene, for example, had been declining for thirty years, courtesy of Standard Oil. America was no longer a patchwork of small self-sufficient communities. It was a great grid of monopolistic cities doing concentrated business with one another: steel cities and rubber cities, cities of salt and cloth and corn and copper. Just beyond these hills was a place that actually called itself Oil City! American exporters did not need a book of vouchers to dispatch one consignment across a rickety grid of independent railroads, each with its own timetable, rates, and reliability quotient. Now one ticket sped a million tons to either coast on flawlessly synchronized trains. At every port, trust-operated ships were ready to ferry the consignment on. If freight charges were higher than they used to be, so was turnover, and so were profits.
According to a recent survey, at least 65 percent of the national wealth was attributable to the trusts. That statistic did not even include the newest and most gigantic combination of all, Andrew Carnegie’s merger of his steel company with nine others. United States Steel, capitalized at almost one and a half billion dollars and feeding more than one million people, was virtually a nation in itself. Its income and expenditures approximated those of the Second Reich. It, too, had a Kaiser, an emperor of finance, and if today’s newspapers were to be believed, Wilhelm II might soon cede him a portion of his realm: “Mr. John Pierpont Morgan is trying to get control of the German steamship lines.”
ROOSEVELT LIKED MORGAN. The solitary, bottle-nosed banker had been a friend of his father, and on that score alone merited affection. Even so, he did not know him well. Few did. Only Morgan’s immediate family, and the half-dozen handsome young aides who stood between him and the world (as if to screen his legendary ugliness) claimed that privilege. Governor Roosevelt had once denied Morgan tax exemptions on two railroads. He had tried to make amends with a testimonial dinner (“an effort on my part to become a conservative man, in touch with the influential classes”), but the financier remained unmollified. Roosevelt’s last letter to Morgan had been answered by a secretary.
So far, 1901 had been Morgan’s annus mirabilis. Along with his new billion-dollar trust, he controlled several banks, including the international House of Morgan, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Pullman Car Company, Aetna Life Insurance, General Electric, Britain’s Leyland Steamship Lines, and twenty-one railroads. Control, indeed, was his passion—not the constant, clashing competition of the free market. As chairman of J. P. Morgan and Company, he handled more wealth than any other man on earth, and was capable of plunging the United States into a depression overnight—or rescuing it from one. Yet his greatest power derived from his integrity of character. One nod of the massive head was security for fifty million; one snort of the carbuncled nose was enough to sweep all opposition from his path. Review of Reviews saluted him as “the most masterful personality in the country, perhaps in the world.”
But now there was a challenger to that title, riding to Washington on one of the few Northeastern railroads Morgan did not control. Sooner