Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [296]
When someone asked how many battleships would make the trip, Roosevelt said that depended on how many there were in service at the time. If fourteen, he would send fourteen; if sixteen, then sixteen. He wanted them “all to go.”
Metcalf was authorized to announce the dispatch of the “Great White Fleet”—as it soon became known—appropriately on the Fourth of July. But the news was too big to hold, in view of the tense state of American-Japanese relations. By the time the Secretary issued his statement, Ambassador Aoki had already moved defensively to say that Japan did not regard Roosevelt’s gesture as “an unfriendly act.”
His Excellency thus avoided sounding overjoyed at the prospect of an enormous alteration in the balance of naval power in the Pacific. And Roosevelt, by intimating that San Francisco would be the fleet’s farthest port of call, encouraged Californian alarmists to think it was being dispatched for their protection. They would have been less comforted if they had known that he was privately talking to Henry Cabot Lodge about sending it on “a practice cruise around the world.”
THE CONNECTION JACOB Schiff had tried to draw for Roosevelt earlier in the year, between persecution of men of property and loss of investor confidence, was dramatically demonstrated at the beginning of August, when Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis of the United States District Court fined the Standard Oil Company of Indiana more than twenty-nine million dollars in an antirebate case. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., said that the judge would be dead before he ever saw a dime of his fine. Within a week, the stock market slumped again.
Conservatives blamed Roosevelt and his “fool Attorney General” for jamming regulatory levers into the American economic machine. The New York Times declared that Landis’s ruling exemplified “that spirit of vindictive savagery toward corporations that, until recently, possessed the minds of … persons in authority.” A sheaf of concerned-citizens’ letters was delivered to Sagamore Hill, variously accusing the President of orphanicide, old age abuse, cruelty to women, and “Rough Rider methods” sure to bring on hard times. An anonymous postcard asked if he was aware that he had ruined every single industry in the forty-six states.
Roosevelt, who had been enjoying himself with plans for the fleet cruise (“go thru the Straits of Magellan; have thirty days’ target practice in the Pacific”), was forced to reply to some of the more important missives. “You say that the verdict against the Standard Oil Company has done great damage,” he wrote to Henry Lee Higginson, the Boston banker, “and you advise me to let the public know that the prosecutions will not be pushed.… I cannot grant illegal immunity.”
He chose to call the economic contraction of 10 August a “flurry,” rather than a “panic,” and used sensible logic against his accusers, asking why, if Wall Street’s disarray was his fault, markets in France, Britain, Germany, and Canada were failing in exactly the same way. “The present trouble is worldwide.”
This was true enough, but behind his show of unconcern lay a sense that the money men might be right in predicting a real crash to come. He addressed a letter to his “fool Attorney General,” who was preparing to prosecute International Harvester under the Sherman Act. Bonaparte seemed to have forgotten about last January’s agreement between the trust and the Bureau of Corporations on a cooperative “investigation,” which was even now under way. One such probe by one government agency was surely enough. “Please do not file the suit until I hear from you,” Roosevelt instructed.
With that, he resumed his interrupted vacation and a reading of Guglielmo Ferrero’s five-volume The Greatness and Decline of Rome. He was struck by the similarity of many conditions endemic to ancient imperial and modern