Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [303]
Justice Day, who had concurred with the majority opinion of Justice White, was not able to do much more than note the title of the little volume Roosevelt found so alarming: Moral Overstrain.
In the three weeks that followed, the President gave evidence of suffering from that condition himself. He became incensed by Congress’s obvious reluctance to act on his last Message, which included demands for inheritance and income taxes, national incorporation of interstate businesses, greater federal power over railroad rates, compulsory investigation of major labor disputes, wider application of the eight-hour day, and no fewer than four new battleships.
Not unconnectedly, he also viewed with concern two looming threats to the presidential candidacy of William Howard Taft. First, Senator Foraker had made his own candidacy official, and had called upon the Ohio GOP to choose between its two sons well in advance of the national convention, set for Chicago on 16 June. And in New York, the successful and popular Governor Charles Evans Hughes was showing strength as a national candidate as well.
Roosevelt had tried to help Taft by repeating, forcefully and unequivocally, that he himself would not run for a third term. This had at least allayed lingering doubts about his determination to retire. But how to eliminate Hughes, whom he had backed strongly only fourteen months before? He was quite willing to act, if he could do so without seeming treacherous. The Governor was intelligent but humorless, and exuded such an aura of scraggy-bearded self-righteousness that Roosevelt had taken to calling him “Charles the Baptist.”
An announcement that Hughes was to speak on national issues at the New York Republican Club on 31 January, in a clear bid for party attention, enabled the American people to observe, yet again, that Theodore Roosevelt was the most adroit tactician in American politics. Working at top speed, he wrote a Special Message to Congress, radical enough to excite the admiration of Upton Sinclair, and released it on the day of Hughes’s speech. Its first words deceptively suggested that it was a response to the Supreme Court’s antilabor ruling, but its later paragraphs, filling twelve and a half columns of dense print in Congressional Record, amounted to a rewrite, in much harsher language, of his neglected Message of two months before. As a result, he simultaneously wrested from Hughes all the lead headlines (HOTTEST MESSAGE EVER SENT TO CONGRESS), put both Court and Congress on the defensive, dulled Morgan’s “saviour of society” shine, and by the sheer audacity of his proposals made the progressive/conservative split in the Republican Party permanent, with himself—ambiguous no longer—aligned firmly on the left.
He demanded that the employers’ liability law be re-enacted in a form that would satisfy the Supreme Court, yet apply even more strongly to interstate commerce. He declared that congressional unwillingness to write any remedial entitlements for job injuries into the so-called federal worker’s compensation law was an “outrage” and “humiliation” to the United States. “In no other prominent industrial country in the world could such gross injustice occur.… Exactly as the working man is entitled to his wages, so he should be entitled to indemnity for the injuries sustained in the natural course of his labor.” Ultimately, private employers should be compelled to apply federal principles of liability and compensation across the entire industrial landscape.
Roosevelt proudly cited the Anthracite Coal Commission’s 1903 strike report as “a chart” for action against the abuse of court injunctions in strikes and walkouts. “Ultra-conservatives who object to cutting out the abuses will do well to remember that if the popular feeling does become strong, many of those upon whom they rely to defend them will be the first to turn against them.” The Interstate Commerce Commission’s powers should be extended to