Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [430]
44 By noon, the The following account is based on a detailed story (with group portrait) in the New York Herald, 15 Mar. 1904, and another in the Philadelphia Press, same date. The decision is published in U.S. Reports, vol. 193, 197ff. The best analysis of the proceedings remains that of Meyer, “Northern Securities Case,” chap. 8.
45 his clear, sharp voice Fuller described Holmes’s voice as “incisive as the edge of a knife” (Novick, Honorable Justice, 271). The Library of Congress preserves a sound recording of Holmes broadcasting to the American people, in tones unblunted by time, on his ninetieth birthday.
46 “No scheme or” U.S. Reports, vol. 193, 320–22, 327; New York Herald, 15 Mar. 1904.
47 It was five Philander Knox scrapbook (PCK); New York Sun, 15 Mar. 1904. TR’s other lunch guests were James Cardinal Gibbons, Austrian Ambassador Baron von Hengervár Hengelmüller, and the writer William Roscoe Thayer. Thayer, John Hay, vol. 2, 351.
48 The dimensions of Lamoreaux, Great Merger Movement, 169.
49 “Great cases,” The following quotations are from U.S. Reports, vol. 193, 400–411. Other details from New York Sun and Philadelphia Press, 15 Mar. 1904.
50 “I am happy” This was the first of the great High Court dissents for which Holmes was to become famous. “The trouble with Wendell,” an exasperated Bostonian friend complained, “is that he likes to play with his mind” (M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1841–1882 [Cambridge, Mass., 1957–1963], vol. 1, 255). As John Blum points out, TR miscalculated in thinking Holmes a reformer. The justice was “a profound skeptic” who “deeply distrusted popular passion.” In this case, Holmes felt that most of his brethren had been carried away by the temporary, and unreasoning, antitrust mood of the times. His decision not to go along was therefore “entirely in character.” Blum, Progressive Presidents, 35.
51 So by a margin Knox, after leaving the Justice Department later that year, reacted dismissively to a question about the historical significance of his Northern Securities suit. The case was regarded as “of surpassing importance” by the press, he said, but had proved “of less real value to the government than many others that attracted no general attention.” It had been, “in a sense, a test case” (Philadelphia Ledger, 12 June 1904). Knox’s use of the phrase real value reflects his essentially pragmatic nature. What mattered to TR was its symbolic value, reaffirming the right of a federal democracy to regulate big business. Modern historical assessments, however, tend to agree with Knox. See the cynical words of Albro Martin in James J. Hill, 520, or the more balanced assessments in Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 473–74 and 562–63. Chandler, Visible Hand, 499, argues that Northern Securities led, paradoxically, to more, not less, corporate consolidation.
52 “I could carve” John Hay diary, 15 Mar. 1904 (JH); Harbaugh, Life and Times, 161–62; Lodge, Selections, 518. See also Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 564.
53 “I have such” Novick, Honorable Justice, 272. TR was writing affectionately to Holmes again by the fall of 1904 (TR, Letters, vol. 4, 989). Many years later, the Justice claimed that TR “looked on my dissent as a political departure (or, I suspect, more truly, couldn’t forgive anyone who stood in his way).” When these words were written, TR was dead, and Holmes’s tone conveys a certain octogenarian crotchetiness. Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874–1932 (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), vol. 2, 61–62.
54 Knox and Taft John Hay diary, 15 Mar. 1904 (JH); A. B. Farquhar to TR, 8 Mar. 1904 (TRP); New York World (front page, lead article), 15 Mar. 1904; New York Evening Post, 15 and 16 Mar. 1904. See the vast selection of clips in Philander Knox scrapbook (PCK); also Literary Digest, 26 Mar. 1904. For a sample of critical opinion, see The New York Times, 15 Mar. 1904.
55 The New York World New York World, 15 and 20 Mar. 1904.
56 The three men New York World, 15