Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [255]
Roosevelt had until Christmas to work with a reform-minded legislator—probably that jovial Methodist bison Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa—on the language of his railroad bill, and concentrate all the political momentum he had built up as President. Then in the new year, force must meet with force.
CHAPTER 26
The Treason of the Senate
But now whin I pick me fav-rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivrything has gone wrong. Th’ wurruld is little better thin a convict’s camp.
“YOU AND I, of course, can never believe in the benevolent despot.”
George F. Baer, president of the anthracite-carrying Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, had as much reason as his addressee, Senator Stephen B. Elkins, to view Theodore Roosevelt’s current ascendancy with misgivings. As an industrialist privately engaged in interstate commerce, he saw any governmental intrusion upon his right to set his own shipping rates, such as the President was now proposing, in the light of flames licking around the last copy of the Constitution.
Elkins—affable, unreliable, energetic, a chronic schemer personifying the West Virginian notion that all scenes and situations could be profitably mined—had been happy to sponsor Roosevelt’s Anti-Rebate Bill in 1903, if only because men like Baer wanted it. The railroads were weary of handing out special favors to a widening roster of not-so-special customers. But the chairman of the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce was considerably less willing to endorse the idea of railroad rate regulation. Apart from opposing it on principle, he resented the way the President had chosen a junior Senator, Dolliver of Iowa, to draft the legislation.
Roosevelt did not see how Elkins could expect to be consulted on a bill that, in effect, proclaimed the failure of the Elkins Law. Three years before, the “accidental” President had to take what weak measures he could coax from the Senate; now he had power enough to get almost anything he wanted. That did not mean getting it would be easy, or quick. For the sake of future harmonious relations with the Upper House, he could only hope that Elkins and Aldrich and other stalwarts would accept the fact that he represented the will of the people.
The truth of the situation was that most Americans supported him unconditionally. Even “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman was forced to acknowledge that Theodore Roosevelt was “the most popular President the country has ever had.” Speaking on the floor of the Senate, Tillman berated his colleagues for their subservience to Roosevelt’s public relations:
The newspapers are the men who have made him what he is, as far as the public knows, because he has never had the opportunity in all his journeyings and speeches to meet more than one in a thousand of his fellow-citizens, and it is through the great instrumentality represented in that press gallery that he has become puffed to such a degree that he “strides the world like a colossus, and we smaller men”—you, thank God, not I—“crawl around between his legs hunting for yourselves dishonorable graves or a piece of pork.”
It was not the most fortunate literary allusion from a senator who generally displayed a public appetite for pork such as the Armour Brothers meatpacking company might fail to satisfy. But Tillman made a valid point: the President had Washington correspondents working on his behalf as if they were in his employ, and he had the added support of the new investigatory journalists. More than any other previous occupant of the White House, Roosevelt understood that the way to manipulate reporters was to let them imagine they were helping shape policy. A “consultation” here, a confidence shared there, and the scribe was transformed into a pen for hire.
Another weapon in Roosevelt’s negotiatory arsenal was the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, revitalized by (now Senator) Philander Knox. Within days of the Message, Attorney General Moody had ordered wholesale prosecutions of shippers and conveyors