Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [248]
“SHE HEARD THAT THERE HAD BEEN RIOTS IN TOKYO.”
Alice in the Far East, late summer 1905 (photo credit 25.1)
So could a new recruit to the Administration, whom Roosevelt had long wanted to woo away from the House of Morgan: his old Harvard classmate Robert Bacon. As First Assistant Secretary of State, replacing Francis B. Loomis, the handsome and athletic Bacon also rated inclusion in the presidential “tennis crowd”—more and more jealously dubbed “Teddy’s Tennis Cabinet” by unsuccessful aspirants to it.
FOR ALL THE CONSENSUS that Roosevelt had proved himself a master diplomat, he could not boast, or even agree, that the world was demonstrably safer as a result of his efforts. Socialism was spreading like dry rot in Russia, even through the ranks of the army, with consequent weakening of authority and strengthening of authoritarianism. Morocco remained a potential flash point of war among the European powers. At least the commitments that Wilhelm II had managed to coax from Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and a reluctant United States to address the problem in conference had tamped down on the fuse for a few more months: talks were scheduled to begin in Algeciras, Spain, early in the new year. Roosevelt took further comfort in the fact that Nicholas II, no longer troubled by Japanese ambitions, could now look west again, and help curb those of the Kaiser.
Freed from global responsibility himself, for the first time in eight months, he was able to start preparing for what promised to be the biggest legislative season of his presidency. Indeed—sobering thought—it would effectively be his last. The “odd year” and “even year” disequilibrium of congressional sessions meant that only the first and third of any presidential term were long enough for the passage of major bills. And, inevitably, the third tended to be wary of anything radical, because it preceded another general election. So Roosevelt had until early December to write the defining Message of his second term.
One issue above all others that he was determined to fight for “as a matter of principle” was that of railroad rate regulation. Ever since his election, he had sensed a rising, almost populist rage against the power of trusts (uninhibited, apparently, by the Elkins Anti-Rebate Law of 1903) to fix interstate shipping charges. The rage was not entirely populist, in that it rose above white collars rather than blue, and expressed itself, articulately and persuasively, in the pages of middle-class magazines such as McClure’s and Everybody’s. And it had persisted since the articles by Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker that had caught Roosevelt’s eye in January 1903—articles that had made McClure’s the most influential magazine in the country.
Roosevelt had been warned during the summer, by S. S. McClure himself, that the fall of 1905 would be a time of renewed journalistic calls for—what? McClure could only write, rather clumsily, “law-abidingness and uprightness in political matters.” Doubtless somebody with less money and more style would find a compact term for the new movement, inchoate as yet but definitely gathering force: a social current that sooner or later must politicize itself—if it had not done so already in the “Iowa Idea” and Roosevelt’s own huge electoral mandate.
What particularly characterized the movement, McClure reported, was the evangelical fervor of its practitioners. As yet, they lacked a leader, even a liturgy. But their fervor, patent wherever the publisher traveled in the United States, “almost correspond[ed] to the passion that one finds in a country when it is on the eve of a righteous war.”
Now here, in the President’s hand, were page proofs of a new article by Baker, “Railroad Rebates.” It was scheduled for publication in McClure’s in December, coincident with the opening of the Fifty-ninth Congress. Second of a five-part series, it assailed the “secret, underhand” dealings