Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [20]
The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the State and the nation toward property.… More and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary the nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures.
He now stood committed to those words, uttered only two weeks ago at the Minnesota State Fair. Morgan’s philosophy was also on record: “I owe the public nothing.”
If they were indeed set on a collision course, Roosevelt was determined not to be the one derailed. Morgan may be master of United States Steel, but he was master of the United States Government—surely the greatest combination of all. National stability required that he maintain eminent right-of-way.
ELSEWHERE IN THE TRAIN, Senator Hanna was slumped, cursing the day that William McKinley accepted Theodore Roosevelt as his running mate. “Now look—that damned cowboy is President of the United States!”
Herman Kohlsaat came back to tell Roosevelt about Hanna’s despair. He suggested that the Senator be treated with utmost delicacy, for he had the power to block all White House initiatives during the coming session of Congress.
Roosevelt reacted blankly. “What can I do?” Kohlsaat suggested a flattering supper à deux in the presidential car.
AT FOUR MINUTES past eleven, the funeral train drew into Port Allegany, Pennsylvania, and stopped for a while to allow platform mourners to look at the dead President’s bier. Souvenir collectors laid nickels and pennies and flowers on the rails. When the wheels started to roll again, there was a crunching of coins, and the perfume of pressed roses filled the air. In future years, misshapen metal discs and bits of dried petal would remind the citizens of Port Allegany of McKinley’s last earthly journey.
THE STEEP CLIMB up Keating Ridge began. At times the locomotive seemed about to stall. Shortly before noon, it dragged its payload over the crest and with loud puffs of relief entered a winding valley. Hills crowded in on both sides. Then one cut gave way to the shaft of a coal mine, and for a few seconds Roosevelt and his fellow passengers could exchange stares with four hundred filthy coal miners.
Boys, youths, and old men (were they really old, or just toothless?) stood bareheaded, leaning on picks and shovels. Their small, smudged eyes (only the creases showing white), squat bodies, and tape-wrapped shins proclaimed them to be Slavs. It was impossible to tell from their swarthy expressions whether the sight of a presidential cortege moved them or not. Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor’s historic threat of violence against capital.
Roosevelt knew that nowhere in America was the threat more real than in the Pennsylvania coalfields—the bituminous region he had just entered, and the anthracite region to east and south. Valley after valley, as the train snaked through, disclosed communities as squalid as any these people could have fled in Europe. Thousands of sooty shacks on stilts, with pigs tied below; gutters buzzing with garbage; mules clopping to the mineheads, hock-deep in fine gray dust. Beneath that dust, men were scrabbling in wet, gassy gloom, earning a dollar and change for every ton of coal they hacked. If 1901 turned out to be a good year, they might get five hundred dollars apiece—about what Roosevelt had already earned as President