Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [39]
The New York Journal saw it as yet another step toward universal monopoly. Ordinary citizens had lost their capacity to feel “rage and terror” at such news; all they wanted to know was “whether the concentration shall be in the public interests or against them.” With heavy irony, the Journal complimented “the best business brains in America” for advancing socialism’s concept of a nationalized industrial state:
They are smoothing out all the difficulties, consolidating staffs, and creating one vast, smoothly running machine. When they have finished, all the Government will have to do will be to assume the debts of the system, exchange national bonds for stock, and give the general manager a commission from the President of the United States.
The irony was lost on George Perkins, who excitedly clipped the column and sent it to Roosevelt. “To me there is a great deal of significance in an editorial of this kind from a paper like the Journal.”
In due course, both Perkins and Robert Bacon were reported to have joined the board of Northern Securities, balancing the power of Hill and Harriman. Other board members came from the Rockefeller empire, and the Vanderbilt and Gould systems. The complete directorate read like a miniature Who’s Who of finance capitalism.
The more Roosevelt and Knox looked at Northern Securities, the more they saw it as a symbol of the arrogant beauty of Combination. Unlike U.S. Steel—a smoky picture, to most minds, of ovens and boilerplate—the new trust was imaginable in detail, length, and breadth. Here was a shining necklace of rails, bejeweled with real estate, spread across America’s bosom. What it adorned, it monopolized.
Speculators rushed to buy. One of the first was Senator Hanna. “Can I get some of the new ‘Holding’ Co. stock as an investment,” he begged Perkins. “I asked Mr. Hill to give me some and he said he would but I would like more.… I wish you would look ‘a little out’ for me.”
Lesser citizens to whom one share, at $110, represented ten weeks’ wages wondered how a company purporting to operate in Hoboken, N.J., could do legitimate business halfway around the globe. The popular journalist Ray Stannard Baker, writing for Collier’s Weekly, noted with what “humdrum monotony” five or six plutocratic names appeared on the rosters of giant corporations. “You can ride from England to China on regular lines of steamships and railroads without once passing from the protecting hollow of Mr. Morgan’s hand.”
What would happen when these owners of owners began owning one another? Morgan already owned Perkins. Who would be the ultimate ruler of the American economy? “Is it possible,” Baker asked, “that the time will come when an imperial ‘M’ will repose within the wreath of power?”
As if in answer to his question, the Roman initials T.R. were emblazoned on the sides of White House carriages.
IN MID-NOVEMBER, the leaders of the Senate began to return to town, many on complimentary railroad passes signed by Hill or Harriman, and paid courtesy calls on the President. Mark Hanna took a look at his Message typescript, and reacted even more negatively than Perkins. “I see dynamite in it.”
He objected in particular to the heated tone of Roosevelt’s language against overcapitalization. Phrases such as baleful evils, despotism, and storm centers of financial disturbance would not go down well on Wall Street, while inevitable depression, reduced wages, and mismanagement and manipulation might imperil the current détente between capital and labor.
Other senators proposed other changes. None seemed to notice that for every word the President had written in criticism of “bad” trusts, there were five in praise of good. Gradually, reluctantly, he erased adjectives, then sentences, then whole paragraphs. He suppressed his condemnation of price-fixing and preferential rebates. He withdrew a proposal to make corporate records subject to government scrutiny. He even