Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [262]
Roosevelt’s was a mind in which literary images and political priorities floated interchangeably. Whether or not Sinclair’s description of immigrant workers bending over stinking masses of blood and offal and bits of bone under lights “like far-off twinkling stars” reminded him of Bunyan, he chose to cite a parallel passage in Pilgrim’s Progress when he addressed a white-tie dinner of the Gridiron Club on 17 March. It represented his current opinion of investigative journalists, and was fortunately articulated after the squab stuffed with chestnuts sur canapé.
… the Man with the Muckrake, the man who could look no way but downward with muckrake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muckrake but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.
Roosevelt’s subsequent remarks about “a certain magazine” that he had just read “with great indignation” could not be reported, due to the Gridiron’s tradition of confidentiality. He spoke for nearly three quarters of an hour over a white, twelve-foot model of the Capitol, glowing with internal lights. According to one member of the audience, he “sizzled” with moral disdain. Since his listeners represented all of official Washington, and since The Cosmopolitan had just published another installment of “The Treason of the Senate,” it was not long before the Man with the Muckrake was identified as David Graham Phillips.
Nor was it long before the Man became plural—denoting all writers of Phillips’s type—and the noun a verb, as in muckrakers, muckraking, to muckrake. A new buzzword was born. Ray Stannard Baker reacted to it as if stung. Opprobrium cast on all investigative journalists, he wrote Roosevelt, might discourage the honest ones, leaving the field to “outright ranters and inciters.” Roosevelt’s reply indicated a determination to give the Gridiron speech again, in some more public forum. “People so persistently misunderstand what I said that I want to have it reported in full.”
THE LAST THING Roosevelt needed, as he prepared for the final stages of debate on the Hepburn Bill, was escalation of the Algeciras Conference into another full-scale diplomatic crisis. But any proceedings involving the Kaiser seemed to slide toward war at some point, and this one was no exception. After six weeks of talk and translation, the conferring powers (most actively, Germany, France, Austria-Hungary, and Great Britain) had deadlocked in a dangerous squabble about how Morocco was to be policed. France wanted gendarmes in control of all port cities. Wilhelm II objected, because German traders might then be denied access to the interior. His negotiants suggested that a multinational force, equally representing all parties to the conference, might keep order more peaceably.
Roosevelt felt the first, distinct tuggings of a foreign entanglement absolutely contrary to his inclinations. With some asperity, he told an informal emissary from the Kaiser that Germany had “perhaps fourteen times less interests” in Morocco than France.
“We do not admit that anyone except ourselves be the judge of our interests,” the German replied.
“Then I do not understand this insistence upon having a conference. Why take the opinion of others if only your own counts for you?”
Roosevelt repeated this exchange to Jusserand afterward, along with the alarming information that Germany’s ruling trinity—the Kaiser, Count von Bülow, and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz—apparently all believed that the Reich was now omnipotent in Europe.
“Never have