Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [261]
Although speculation arose that the Senator was working secretly to defeat the bill later in the House, Roosevelt could congratulate himself on another legislative victory. “The tone of the Republican Senators is not so defiant as it was a few weeks ago,” Sir Mortimer Durand reported to London, “and one hears on all sides predictions that Mr. Roosevelt will carry all the various measures upon which he was to have been overthrown.” The British Ambassador thought that fear of Depew’s fate might be the reason Old Guard solidarity had begun to erode. Roosevelt, whose contempt for “business in politics” was well known, looked more and more like a tribune of morality as the exposure journalists went about their work.
If so, the tribune had his sword shattered two days later. Aldrich’s negotiatory cunning revealed itself when the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce deadlocked over amendments to the Hepburn Bill. Senator Dolliver had managed to override the nay votes of Elkins and four other Republicans, and got an agreement to report the bill as written. But after seeming to accept defeat, Aldrich enlisted Democratic support to empower all non-Committee members of the Senate to amend the bill freely later. Violent arguments broke out as to which “friend of the measure” would report it. Aldrich bided his time, then proposed Benjamin R. Tillman—a name so unexpected that the committee voted in favor almost out of shock.
Senator Tillman was neither a Republican nor, notoriously, a “friend” of anything to do with Theodore Roosevelt. His only qualification as sponsor of a federal regulatory measure was his near-paranoid obsession with states’ rights. This, plus the Hepburn Bill’s popularity outside Congress, meant that reform was still a possibility. But Aldrich had at one stroke rendered Dolliver impotent, made the bill look regional rather than national, and severely embarrassed the President of the United States. Debate opened on the Senate floor on 28 February.
Now began a series of blows which Roosevelt could not at first parry. His oldest political ally, Senator Lodge, spoke out against regulation. So did Senator Knox, apparently forgetful of the days when he and the President had prosecuted illegal railroad combinations across state lines. So did Senator Spooner, author of the language that had facilitated the Panama Canal. So did every Republican of any legislative weight in the upper chamber. Joseph B. Foraker, emerging as the most aggressive of the “railroad senators,” made no fewer than eighty-seven speeches in defense of free enterprise.
The issue of court power, again forced by Aldrich, became the main threat to the railroad bill. Roosevelt, Hepburn, and Dolliver had imagined that debate would focus on administrative power—the rate-fixing authority of the ICC. They wanted, at worst, a “narrow review” amendment, which would permit the courts to rule only on procedural questions.
So, amid dry clouds of legalistic dust, the battle dragged on.
WAS ONE TO believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was precious, to whom these hog-squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice?
As prose, The Jungle left something to be desired, and Upton Sinclair’s ear for dialogue (“Eik! Eik! Uzdaryk-duris!”) was perhaps best appreciated in Lithuania, but Roosevelt was both fascinated and repulsed by the book Senator Beveridge had sent him. Although disguised as fiction, it had the tang—in this case the reek—of fact. He drew it to the attention of his Secretary of Agriculture, James Wilson, along with a letter Sinclair had written him, calling for