Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [190]
The New York World agreed, but worried about placing such control in the hands of Theodore Roosevelt. He had already broadened the use of executive power in labor mediation, in foreign policy, and in federal patronage. Now he had dissolved the world’s second-largest trust. “Imagine the Demagogue as President, armed with all the legitimate power of an office grown greater than man had dreamed was possible …! He is Everything. He is Power. He is Patronage. He is Privilege.”
The three men most affected by the decision reacted with surprising equanimity. J. P. Morgan puffed serenely on a cigar, smiled, and waggled his great head at reporters. E. H. Harriman turned defeat into victory by suing for his old Northern Pacific stock, at a huge profit. James J. Hill put on a brave public face, saying, “The three railroads are still there, earning good money.” Only in private was he critical of the President as an aspirant king, surrounded by “gilded flunkies.”
Roosevelt persuaded himself that the case had ended happily, in spite of Justice Holmes’s dissent. If he had not achieved the historic review he dreamed of, he had won a temporal accord that redressed the balance between government and free enterprise. Washington resounded with praise, and predictions of four more Rooseveltian years. “As far as I can see,” Joseph Bucklin Bishop wrote in the Commercial Advertiser, “there is no need of an election.”
BY 1 APRIL, Washington was efflorescent with cherry blossom. A million and a quarter new bulbs splotched parks and roadsides. To Roosevelt, who since Groundhog Day had been hopefully snapping twigs for signs of sap, the warming sunshine felt especially pleasant. Mrs. J. Borden Harriman, remembering him as a boy, found him boylike still, “the embodiment of spring … bubbling with life and hope.” An Administration bill to set up American government in the Panama Canal Zone was set for passage, and the nation’s economy was improving. So were his jujitsu skills. Indeed, he had just shown how the latter could be adapted to politics, by grabbing a pension measure right out of the hands of Congress and flipping it into an executive order of his own. Veterans now found that they were eligible for benefits at the early age of sixty-two, and their gratitude was sure to translate into a huge number of votes in November.
As always when the President was happy, his happiness touched those around him. “He is a very sweet and natural man and a very trusting man,” William Howard Taft wrote. “… I am growing to be very fond of him.”
Even so, Roosevelt’s bright spring was not entirely cloudless. William Randolph Hearst seemed intent on a populist campaign for the presidency. Meanwhile, Old Guard Republicans were insisting that lanky, awful Charles W. (“Icicle”) Fairbanks be nominated for Vice President. He was the senior Senator from Indiana, a tireless speaker, and Wall Street’s darling. “Who in the name of Heaven else is there?” Roosevelt asked, not expecting any answer.
A long-simmering foreign-policy crisis also threatened to embarrass him, at a time when he did not want any more accusations of “gunboat diplomacy.” It was virtually a repeat of the Venezuelan affair of 1902–1903, transposed to the Dominican Republic. Again, an impoverished Caribbean nation could not pay its debts; again, Germany was an impatient creditor; again, the United States Navy had conducted “exercises” off Isla de Culebra, in a choreographed evocation of the Monroe Doctrine. So far, Wilhelm II had sent in no warships—only a fulsome