Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [254]
Roosevelt could not have wanted a louder fanfare of trumpets to proclaim the importance of his Fifth Message to Congress. But Baker, never one for restraint, gave him an extra trombone blast all to himself: “Out of hopelessness of justice has arisen the present widespread demand, voiced by President Roosevelt, for some tribunal which is at once impartial and powerful enough to do justice as between the Railroad and the Citizen.”
THE MESSAGE ITSELF, published on 5 December, was quieter and more rationally argued than readers of McClure’s might have expected. Indeed, its opening section, subheaded “Control of Corporations,” was written in a lucid, unemotional style that belied what Bazalgette had said about the President’s tendency toward rhetorical “roughness.”
In our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases a straight-dealing man who by his efficiency, by his ingenuity and industry, benefits himself must also benefit others. Normally the man of great productive capacity who becomes rich by guiding the labor of many other men does so by enabling them to produce more than they could produce without his guidance; and both he and they share in the benefit, which comes also to the public at large. The superficial fact that the sharing may be unequal must never blind us to the underlying fact that there is this sharing, and that the benefit comes in some degree to each man concerned.
Roosevelt was clearly addressing himself to Speaker Cannon and the conservative Senate leadership still managed by Nelson Aldrich—Republicans whose votes, and control of votes, he would need in the months ahead. He had to persuade them, without melodramatics, that unless they began to respond to the demands of the progressives (some of whom were now members of Congress), the Grand Old Party was likely to become two parties, and sooner rather than later.
The Department of Justice, he wrote, was devoting too much of its time to prosecuting antitrust cases on an individual basis. And experience had shown that individual states lacked the power, in an age of combination, to stop the abusive practices of trusts operating across their borders. What was needed was a regulatory and supervisory law enacted by the only body as big as the biggest trust—“that is, by the National Government.” The need was so great that if Congress would not move, the Constitution would have to be amended.
He emphasized that the law should be positive rather than prohibitory, monitoring growth rather than slowing it, and imposing discipline only when the growth became destructive of competition. Its prime focus must be on railroad rates, and in particular on rebate rates, which were discriminatory and should be forbidden “in every shape and form.” A commission should be created (or the ICC empowered) to establish a maximum reasonable rate whenever a rate was shown to be unfair—and unfairness meant “minimum” rates for big shippers as well as excessive ones for small. In the former instance, “the commission would have the right to declare this already established minimum rate as the maximum; and it would need only one or two such decisions by the commission to cure the railroad companies of the practice of giving improper minimum rates.”
The President kept reiterating that he was asking for an administrative agency, not an enforced partnership between government and private business. His Message proceeded to spin itself out, as usual, to prodigious length, and contained no fewer than seventy-three requests for moderately progressive new laws. But already he had issued the war call most sure to bring him into direct conflict with Senator Aldrich: he had challenged free enterprise’s right to set its own prices in the competitive marketplace. To Aldrich, Depew, Hale, Foraker, even to Senator Elkins, this was a blasphemy, however quietly