Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [38]
Knox was the quintessential attorney, ready to argue any brief for a fee. The larger the fee, the better he argued. Happily for him, corporations in his home state of Pennsylvania could afford very large fees indeed. By the time he joined the second McKinley Administration, Knox had argued himself into the highest income bracket of the law, and his client list boasted such names as Carnegie, Mellon, and Frick.
The Attorney General spent his money well, in nouveau-riche style. His first gesture on coming to Washington had been to beat the Count of Monte Cristo’s price for a pair of high-stepping horses. He established himself in a lavishly redecorated mansion on K Street, wore pearls at cuffs and collar, and entertained all comers to magnums of Moët & Chandon Impérial. Although he affected to be bored by his own splendor, Knox worked behind the biggest desk in town, and was lobbying for a new, palatial Department of Justice building. “I think I shall need a large appropriation.… It should be built entirely of marble.”
His languid, laissez-faire law enforcement so far had earned him the nickname “Sleepy Phil.” Cynics noted that Knox had helped organize U.S. Steel. Henry Adams dismissed him as a Wall Street stooge, “sodden with corporate briefs,” not realizing that Knox needed instructions in order to function. President McKinley had never supplied them. A friend remarked, “There must be a client—Knox would not know himself without one.”
Roosevelt was quick to remedy this deficiency. He had asked Knox to help him draft the trust-control paragraphs of his Message to Congress, with encouraging results. “I am being advised by the best Attorney General this Government has ever had.” In just eight weeks the two men had become fast friends. They could often be seen riding together in Rock Creek Park.
Knox, Roosevelt discovered, was a distinguished equestrian. Those high-stepping horses were not just for show. Neither were the thousands of leather volumes in his library; the Attorney General was a perpetual, if monotonous, quoter of verse and historical facts. He was polite without being humble, and could be startlingly outspoken. This further endeared him to his “client.” When a visitor asked the Roosevelt children who their father’s favorites were, they drummed their spoons and piped in chorus, “Mr. Root and Mr. Knox.”
NEITHER THE PRESIDENT nor the Attorney General would reveal what they discussed over lunch on 13 November 1901, but since the Hill-Harriman “settlement” was the day’s big news, they probably devoted little time to the weather. Such a truce could portend only one thing: further monopolization of the railroad industry. Roosevelt knew both Hill and Harriman slightly, and Morgan rather better. But he was more concerned with the Sun’s revelation that George W. Perkins had been an auxiliary party to the settlement.
Perkins was the brightest of J. P. Morgan’s “golden boys”—clever, charming, successful in both insurance and finance, a self-made millionaire at thirty-nine. To Roosevelt, he was a close friend, “one of the men I most respect.” Perkins had come to the White House recently to advise him on the corporate section of his Message—along with another Morgan partner, Robert Bacon. (Handsome, godlike “Bob,” who so overshadowed pale “Teddy” in the Harvard class of ’80!) It was plain now why they had reacted negatively to his antitrust paragraphs, “arguing like attorneys for a bad case.”
“THE BEST ATTORNEY GENERAL THIS GOVERNMENT HAS EVER HAD.”
Philander Chase Knox, ca. 1901 (photo credit 3.1)
Whatever doubts the President may have had about trust control, he had none now. “Perkins may just as well make up his mind that I will not make my Message one hair’s breadth milder.”
MORGAN, HILL, AND HARRIMAN announced the Northern Securities Company late that afternoon. A few evening newspapers carried the story, but its full impact did not register across the country until Thursday, 14 November. By then, a majority of directors named to the board had approved the conversion and