Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [264]
One of the weakest men in the Republican Party, influentially speaking, visited Roosevelt late at night to urge him to demand rates that were reasonable as well as nondiscriminatory. Robert LaFollette had been studying railroad finance for thirty years, and thought that the President might listen to him on the subject.
“But you can’t get any such bill as that through Congress.”
“That is not the first consideration, Mr. President.”
A fault line instantly ran between the idealist and the practical politician. LaFollette did not see—or, seeing, did not understand that it was already unbridgeable, and must one day become a chasm.
“But I want to get something through,” Roosevelt said.
To do so, he needed forty-six of the Senate’s ninety votes. Assuming he got none of the Old Guard block of twenty-four, he would have to build a majority out of sixty-six votes, thirty-three of which belonged to the opposing party. Senator Tillman undertook to deliver only twenty-six Democrats, since not all his colleagues liked the idea of rate regulation, and very few liked Roosevelt. Washington insiders delighted in the paradox that “Teddy” now depended on the parliamentary tactics of “Pitchfork Ben.”
A small group of proregulatory senators from the Plains states came to the President’s rescue on 31 March. There was something symbolic about their solidarity: they represented the old agrarian values of grain and grassland, eternally resisting the spread of smoke and steel. But they saw that Roosevelt, unless he compromised on the issue of court review, would never get the Hepburn Bill through the Senate. Some language had to be included to check and balance the ICC’s proposed rate-making power. This would persuade more Republicans to vote for the measure. Senator Chester I. Long of Kansas suggested adding an amendment that was “broad” enough to please more Republicans, yet still “narrow” in the sense that the ICC would retain plenty of regulatory power. Courts should be allowed to rule on whether any disputed order was “beyond the authority of the Commission,” or in violation of the constitutional rights of railroad operators.
The President was agreeable to this idea, which he thought might yield fifteen or even twenty votes on top of Tillman’s twenty-six. But he was embarrassed by the fact that he could not discuss it with his legislative lieutenant. Tillman and he were not on speaking terms. In 1902, the Senator had been banned from the White House for punching out a colleague, mid-debate. That disinvitation was now canceled, but Tillman showed no inclination to drop by. He had never forgiven Roosevelt for some prepresidential wisecracks about Populists. (“A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion.… Senator Tillman’s brother has been frequently elected to Congress upon the issue that he wore neither an overcoat nor an undershirt.”)
Somebody suggested that the President enlist the aid of a distinguished former Senator, William Eaton Chandler, who was close to Tillman and presumably proregulatory, having been lobbied out of office by a railroad company some years before. Chandler was summoned to the White House that evening, massaged into complicity, and sent on to Tillman with secret expressions of Roosevelt’s wrath against the “lawyers” impeding reform in the Senate.
Tillman knew he was being manipulated, but agreed to help build a bipartisan majority in favor of what he genuinely felt was “a great legislative bill.” For the next two weeks, he and Senator Bailey labored over the amendment with Attorney General Moody, while Roosevelt polished prose of his own. It was a restatement of the “Muckrake” speech, scheduled for delivery at the most public ceremony on his upcoming schedule, the dedication of the House Office Building on 14 April.
BUNYAN’S NOISOME FIGURE, more interested in piling up dirt than stargazing, duly made every major newspaper in