Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [265]
He noted that the United States was passing through a period of “social, political, and industrial unrest.” So far as the unrest took the form of a struggle between the “haves” and “have-nots,” those essential counterbalances of a capitalist economy, it was to be condemned. But where it was moral, and sought to punish evildoers of any stamp, it was a “sign of healthy life” that government should welcome.
It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business.… No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them. As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we should ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount, either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon the death of any individual—a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual.
If conservatives in the audience could believe their ears, the President was proposing that government should profit from, and even confiscate, the rewards of private enterprise. His subsequent warning that railroad rate regulation was but “a first step” toward greater federal control of the economy sounded a declaration of ideological war.
Was it, though? Roosevelt’s by now compulsive habit of following every statement with a counterstatement (positives neutralizing negatives and on the other hand used as a kind of conjunction) muted the overall effect of his speech. Those who had heard him off the record at the Gridiron were disappointed. He sounded progressive one minute and reactionary the next, as he alternately scowled and smiled at muckraking and moneymaking, allowing that there were good and bad varieties of each.
Reporters got plenty of quotes, but their editors were not too sure which way, ideologically, the President was headed. If in the direction of restraint of free speech, he would sooner or later collide with Justice Holmes. If he wanted more and more centralized government, then Senator LaFollette would be quick to march behind him, as would Upton Sinclair and a lengthening line of socialists and communists.
Men with muckrakes continued their work—some, such as Baker, decently and doggedly, others, like David Graham Phillips, with waning fervor. Good investigative reporting was simply too expensive for most editors, and too slow for journalists paid by the piece. Baker felt betrayed by Roosevelt, who had seemed so encouraging of his work, yet had now twice trivialized it by association. He still admired the President’s “remarkable versatility of mind,” if not the seeming versatility of his principles.
SENATORS TILLMAN AND Bailey learned a similar lesson on 4 May, the day after they introduced their Roosevelt-backed “narrow review” amendment to the Hepburn Bill. After five weeks of secret negotiations conducted through William E. Chandler, Tillman felt in honor bound to let the White House know that he was, as yet, one vote short of the twenty-six he had promised.
At 3:00 that afternoon, Roosevelt called a press conference and announced, as if the Tillman-Bailey Amendment had suddenly ceased to exist, that he had decided to support a “broad review” amendment crafted by Senator Allison. Rambling for almost a half hour, he imputed his own switch to the Republican leadership, which had accepted the will of the American people.
A disillusioned progressive reporter interrupted him. “But Mr. President, what we want to know is why you surrendered.”
Tillman and Bailey wanted to know, more basically, how any self-respecting politician