Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [266]
“I love a brave man,” Bailey said, “I love a fighter, and the President of the United States is both—on occasions; but he can yield with as much alacrity as any man who ever went into battle.”
ROOSEVELT TRANQUILLY RECEIVED the British writer H. G. Wells at the White House on 6 May. They lunched and strolled the grounds together. Wells, who was on assignment for the London Tribune, noted that the President had none of the usual stiffness of politicians afraid of being quoted. He talked in the manner of Arthur Balfour, another intellectual who had risen to supreme eminence. But unlike that unhappy statesman, recently deposed, Roosevelt had the “power of overriding doubts in a sort of mystical exaltation.” He seemed more representative than patrician:
He is the seeking mind of America displayed.… His range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the thought of his time, he has receptivity to the point of genius. And he does not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks.… He assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes it and reverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself.
“A COMPLEX MINGLING OF WILL
AND CRITICAL PERPLEXITY.”
Theodore Roosevelt in mid-sentence. (photo credit 26.1)
Having read extensively in Roosevelt’s earlier writings, Wells had expected “Teddy” the Rough Rider, all slouch hat and swordsmanship. Instead, he found himself dealing with a friendly, gray-clad statesman, whose voice was more confidential than strenuous, and whose clenched fist waved almost absentmindedly. The President’s screwed-up, bespectacled face conveyed “a complex mingling of will and critical perplexity.” There again, Roosevelt was representative. “Never did a President so reflect the quality of his time.”
IF BY “QUALITY of his time” Wells was alluding to the progressive impulse behind Roosevelt’s current regulatory proposals, its force burgeoned in the days immediately following. Tillman railed against the President for treachery and manipulation of muckrakers, but his language was oddly muted, as if he had to acknowledge that the Hepburn Bill deserved bipartisan support.
On 18 May, the Senate approved the bill with only three dissenting votes—two by gentlemen from Alabama, and one from the lone Republican who still hoarsely declaimed the right of railroads to regulate themselves: Joseph B. Foraker of Ohio. Even though the original Roosevelt-Dolliver measure’s simplicity was now complicated by the Allison Amendment, its sheer accumulation of legislative weight, from a motion few supported to a majority measure only extreme conservatives opposed, was evidence that the President had started something very big.
Railroad rate regulation was not yet a reality, since the bill now had to be reported to a joint committee of the House and Senate. This did not stop early words of praise from flowing Roosevelt’s way. The most moving were uttered by the man most disposed to choke on them. “But for the work of Theodore Roosevelt in bringing this matter to the attention of the country, we would not have had any bill at all,” Benjamin R. Tillman said. “Whatever success may come from it will largely be due to him.”
AS THE WEATHER WARMED, so did the attitude of both Houses toward other items of progressive legislation. Joseph Cannon grudgingly relaxed his opposition to the Pure Food Bill. Senator Beveridge