Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [302]
Essentially an independent, he mistrusted the tendency of the wealthy to form tight, self-protective social cliques or (when they went into business) combinations in restraint of trade. The tighter each formation, the more obsessed it became with its own cohesion, and the more resentful of outside monitoring. He had noticed a definite increase in this resentment since the panic, especially along Wall Street, where the rumors that he was an alcoholic had strengthened into reports that he was insane. At the annual banquet of the New York Chamber of Commerce, a toast to the health of the President of the United States had been met with almost total silence.
To Ambassador James Bryce, a scholarly septuagenarian who had followed Roosevelt’s career from afar for almost twenty years, there was something medieval about the current politico-economic struggle. (“Combinations in restraint of trade,” Bryce reminded his government, “are contrary to common law since Henry II.”) The castles of wealth had been owned by “the great trust barons,” who in theory owed allegiance to the state, but in truth were beholden only to Money. The only nationally empowered defender of the rights of “their villein consumers” had been Roosevelt, intervening “partly from benevolent disinterestedness, partly from statecraft, much as did the medieval Church.” In the process, he had won the devotion of an enormous plebeian following. By March 1907, the struggle had seemed “to be going à outrance,” leading to the collapse of the stock market in October, and looking more and more like an episode from a knightly chronicle:
The oppression of the weak, the perversion of justice to private ends, the petty warfare, such as that of Heinze with Amalgamated [sic] Copper, fought out from underground forts in Montana mines, excommunications such as those pronounced by the Attorney-General against “bad Trusts”: the temporary ascendancy of a strong personality with great authority, without direct means of control, but with the support of public faith in the constitution and sanction of that authority, all find political parallels in the Middle Ages.
Bryce left vague whom he meant by “strong personality with great authority,” although he did note that J. Pierpont Morgan had “for a time quite outshone Theodore Roosevelt as a saviour of society.” He was definite, though, in saying that 1907 had marked the end of the “individualistic” era of checking combinations—as exemplified by Roosevelt’s willingness to make discreet arrangements with the likes of Judge Gary and Cyrus H. McCormick. In the new year of 1908, “the guiding principle has been changed to the socialistic ambition to control and convert them.”
ALL THAT WAS NEEDED to precipitate a final, all-out battle was a direct challenge. It came on 6 January, and from an unexpected quarter: the Supreme Court of the United States. One of Roosevelt’s proudest legislative achievements, the Employers’ Liability Act of 1906, was struck down on the grounds that it applied to intrastate corporations as well as interstate ones—thus unconstitutionally infringing upon states’ rights.
The President’s initial reaction was to send Justice William R. Day a book on the need for a federal liability law protecting workers, begging him to read what it had to say about two higher-court rulings inimical to bakers and tenement-house cigar makers in New York. “If the spirit which lies behind these two decisions obtained in all the actions of the Federal and State courts, we should not only have a revolution,