Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [257]
The trouble with the Senate in 1906 was that it was not a representative institution, except insofar as state legislatures elected its members—often at the command of party machines, or at the behest of corporate contributors. Aldrich and most of his colleagues were so sure of continued incumbency that Roosevelt doubted he would be able to get “coherent—that is, effective—action from them” by invoking voter displeasure.
As if on cue, The Cosmopolitan magazine proclaimed on 15 January that it would publish a major new “exposure” series by David Graham Phillips, entitled “The Treason of the Senate.” The first article would focus on Chauncey M. Depew and Thomas Collier Platt as “New York’s Misrepresentatives.”
Roosevelt was not charmed by this announcement, nor by heavy hints, in the current Arena, that Senators Depew and Platt took orders from Standard Oil, along with Aldrich, Bailey, Elkins, Gorman, Lodge, Penrose, and Spooner. He needed the votes of such men. Ray Stannard Baker’s less vindictive railroad series, still running in McClure’s, might yet persuade them to accept his bill. But vulgar abuse could only stiffen their resistance to reform—the instinct of stand-patters under attack, after all, is to stand even more pat.
IN ALGECIRAS, ON 16 January, Wilhelm II’s longed-for conference on the status of Morocco got under way. This time around, Roosevelt, with no direct interest in the south Mediterranean theater, was happy to leave American peacemaking efforts to others—specifically, to a delegation of professional diplomats headed by Henry White, now United States Ambassador to Italy. “I want to keep out of it if I possibly can.” The stakes at the conference table were much less fraught than they had been six months before, since the Kaiser had been unable to secure an alliance against France with his war-weary cousin, Nicholas II. In a sense, Wilhelm had already won what he had blustered for in 1905: the humiliation of France and the resignation of Théophile Delcassé.
White was under instructions to press for nothing more controversial than stability and security in Morocco, with occasional vague references to an “open door” there. The bulk of the negotiating could be left to more interested parties. Their wranglings would no doubt be interminable. If the situation ever got ugly, Roosevelt could always be consulted by cable.
SENATOR ELKINS TOOK no immediate umbrage at the President’s apparent cooperation with the progressive press. He even worked up a regulation bill of his own, to see if it would satisfy him. Inevitably, however, it called for private rather than public rate control. Roosevelt remained committed to Senator Dolliver’s bill.
On 27 January, Dolliver sent that measure to the House. It was quickly and favorably reported by that body’s Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, and it received the sponsorship of Elkins’s counterpart chairman, Congressman William P. Hepburn (R., Iowa). Although all the world knew who had demanded the legislation and who had drafted its language, it forthwith became “the Hepburn Bill,” and thereby gained prestige. Tall and stately at seventy-two, Hepburn was the House’s best debater, admired for his strength of character and legal acumen. Roosevelt, who affectionately called him “Colonel Pete,” could wish for no more effective sponsor. Nor could Hepburn himself wish for a bigger piece of legislation to crown his long career. Railroad