Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [304]
Referring to himself not infrequently in the royal plural, Roosevelt admitted that he was engaged in a “campaign against privilege” that was “fundamentally an ethical movement.” His targets were stock gamblers “making large sales of what men do not possess,” writers who “act as the representatives of predatory wealth” (among them, probably, the entire editorial staff of the New York Sun), and “men of wealth, who find in the purchased politician the most efficient instrument of corruption.” He reserved his strongest language for these multimillionaires, not identifying them directly but taking care to repeat, with incantatory frequency, the names of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company and E. H. Harriman’s Santa Fe Railroad. Such men were “the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.”
Americans upon whom such men preyed had three choices: to let them flourish without supervision, to control them at the state level, or to regulate them by federal action. He did not doubt that the last option was the only way, as common law no longer had power to deal with uncommon wealth.
These new conditions make it necessary to shackle cunning as in the past we have shackled force. The vast individual and corporate fortunes, the vast combinations of capital, which have marked the development of our industrial system, create new conditions, and necessitate a change from the old attitude of the State and the Nation toward the rules regulating the acquisition and untrammeled business use of property.
SUBSCRIBERS TO THE theory that Roosevelt was crazy found in his Special Message all the evidence they wanted. Chancellor James Roscoe Day of Syracuse University remarked that “much of it reads like the ravings of a disordered mind.” The New York Times and New York Evening Mail both spoke of the President’s tendency toward “delusion,” especially with regard to imaginary conspiracies against him, and the New York Sun said that his “portentous diatribe” might be referred better to psychologists than to the archivists of Congress. “It is an even more disturbing reflection that the hand which penned this message is the same hand which directs the American Navy, now on its mission toward unknown possibilities. God send our ships and all of us good luck!”
Charles Lanier, of Winslow Lanier & Co., added drugs to the derangement theory. He claimed, in a rumor that tickled Roosevelt enormously, that “the President is crazy, and furthermore … indulging immoderately in drink and is an opium fiend.” Current Literature, in one of its regular roundups of public opinion, noted the curious fact that almost all the questions about Roosevelt’s mental health were being asked, loudly and querulously, in his home state. Calmer voices there were few, and none so salutary as that of a progressive judge, William J. Gaynor of Brooklyn: “Every purseproud individual, as well as reactionary dullard, always considers a great character insane. In their littleness of heart, of soul, he seems so to them; but the people know that Frederick the Great was not insane, although he was called so all over Europe, just as well as they know and understand Theodore Roosevelt.”
Gaynor’s words were borne out by the echolike promptness and fidelity of the response of “Roosevelt Republicans” west of the Hudson. The Philadelphia North American placed the Special Message “in the forefront among the really memorable state papers in the history of the nation,” and the Chicago Evening Post found it “a profoundly conservative document” in its