Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [328]
So far, the second session of the Sixtieth Congress had been, in Alice’s words, “one long lovely crackling row between the White House and Capitol Hill.” Her father’s Eighth Annual Message had been, for Joseph Cannon, the last of a haystack of straws heaped on the camelback of the Constitution. The Conservation Conference and the Commission on Country Life had been bad enough, he felt; but if any of the significant centralizations of power Roosevelt called for—over the railroads, over telecommunications, over the environment—were made law, states could say good-bye to their individual rights. Progressivism would have finally replaced conservatism, with outright socialism sure to follow.
Cannon sat now, gavel in hand, as yet another Special Message was announced. It elicited such a bedlam of mocking laughter that the Speaker had to pound for order for several minutes. The Message, when read, amounted to a semi-apologetic withdrawal of Roosevelt’s perceived insult to Congress. But he persisted in objecting to a House move to confine the Secret Service’s activities strictly to presidential protection and the investigation of counterfeiting. Again, he said, such limitation would benefit “the criminal class.”
He might also have added, but wisely did not, that the House’s sudden prejudice against a venerable federal agency was due to rumors that he had been using the Secret Service for his own purposes over the years, harassing Senators Foraker and Tillman and other political opponents, gathering espionage for political campaigns, even getting his bodyguards to fetch and carry for him.
There was some substance to these rumors, although evidence of abuse of power was lacking. As The Atlanta Constitution pointed out, the Secret Service had been involved in most of Roosevelt’s major initiatives, from antitrust probes and peonage prosecutions to pure-food sleuthing and the grilling of Brownsville discharges. Its chief, John E. Wilkie, was a known favorite of the President. The force was tiny—only ten full-time agents—but Wilkie had funds to hire an unlimited number of private detectives for whatever purposes he deemed fit. It was these funds, and these purposes, that anti-Rooseveltians in Congress sought to restrict, conveniently focusing years of resentment against the President for his steady transfer of power away from Capitol Hill.
The Secret Service’s necessarily covert nature only fueled the suspicions of conspiracists in politics and the press. Seeking, as conspiracists always do, a central intelligence behind diverse activities, these rumormongers ignored the fact that many other government departments used confidential agents not under Wilkie’s or Roosevelt’s direct control. The irony was that the President himself wanted to concentrate all such activities in one federal bureau of investigation, answerable to the Attorney General, if not to the general public. So, conspiracism clashed with coordination, and seven years of cumulative frustration exploded in jeers and catcalls.
The chorus unhappily coincided with a debate on the very subjects Roosevelt had raised. After seven hours of mounting rancor, the House handed him a rebuke unprecedented since the days of Andrew Jackson, voting to table his new Message as so much white paper. Thus, little more than eight weeks before the end of his Presidency, Roosevelt reached the nadir of his relations with Congress. But—to his great personal glee—the House’s very action made it seem as if it was indeed afraid of an empowered Secret Service, because certain representatives might have things to hide. Effectively if not legislatively, he came out looking like a political winner.
“Nobody likes him now but the people,” Ambassador Bryce remarked.
ARCHIE BUTT WAS amazed at the President’s good-humored