Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [256]
In consequence of all these factors, Roosevelt now commanded a bipartisan, proregulatory majority in the House of Representatives. Senator Elkins’s committee looked like an increasingly lonely redoubt as it braced to do battle with “progressives” both within and without the Capitol.
ONE OF THE earliest aspirants to the new label loomed shock-headed among the President’s hand-shakers at a White House reception on 4 January 1906. Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin, just elevated from Governor to Senator, was an insurgent even as to hairstyle. Dense and irrepressible, a pompadour did what it could to add to LaFollette’s height. He was fifty years old and five feet five inches tall, opaque except for his facial flush: inside, he was all dark, dour aggression.
Roosevelt recognized him at once, and held up the reception line to recall their first meeting, seventeen years before in Washington. It had also been a formal occasion; Civil Service Commissioner Roosevelt had accidentally spilled some coffee on Mrs. LaFollette’s white satin gown.
“When I wake up in the dark, and think about that, I blush!” Roosevelt said.
Such naïve naturalness of expression was hard to resist. “Mr. Roosevelt is one of the most likable men that I am acquainted with,” Mark Twain remarked a few days later, dictating his autobiography. The President was “the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States,” by virtue of his “joyous ebullitions of excited sincerity.” Twain was nevertheless moved to express the misgivings of not a few thoughtful observers who wondered if a Roosevelt unrestrained might not become a Roosevelt moving too fast for his own good. “He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch.… each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion.”
In private correspondence and conversation, the President gave quite the opposite impression. He was deliberate about his intent to use railroad rate reform as a switch between two different stages on the American economic journey. It was not he, but the outdated system of laissez-faire, that was accelerating out of control. Elihu Root, a conservative for life (and a favored member of the Aldrich poker circle), saw that “the central fact” for Theodore was that the last decades of the nineteenth century had been a period of risk for capital—risk demanding great courage from entrepreneurs, and rightly rewarding them with enormous wealth if their new modes of production paid off. When those modes became established modes, however, and risk declined in consequence, there would have to be “a surrender by capital … of its high percentage of profit.” Unfortunately, today’s conservatives—self-made men like Elkins and Aldrich, both of them railroad board members—believed with complete sincerity in the stand-pat values embodied by President McKinley and Mark Hanna. Roosevelt understood that a “profound reconstitution [had] taken place in modern industrial society,” and that change was in the direction of economic redress.
He also believed something else with complete sincerity, too: that unless capital consented to some redistribution of profits, piling up beyond reason now that times were stable and competition was often turning to complicity, “the radical elements in society” would resort to violence.
In a rare admission of this fear, Roosevelt confided to Sir Mortimer Durand that he was “dreadfully worried” about the fate of the Dolliver bill. Durand repeated his words to Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary of the new Liberal government in Great Britain:
He told