Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [46]
He demanded reform of immigration laws, including a threefold ban on persons of low intellect, low morals, and low wage requirements. He analyzed tariff protectionism and trade reciprocity at length, if not in depth. Clearly, neither subject interested him; he was happy to leave them to Senator Aldrich, their virtual proprietor. He launched an attack on railroad rebates and rate-fixing. “The railway is a public servant. Its rates should be just to, and open to, all shippers alike.”
Then, striking a note altogether new in presidential utterances, Roosevelt began to preach the conservation of natural resources. He showed an impressive mastery of the subject as he explained the need for federal protection of native flora and fauna. Urgently, he asked that the Bureau of Forestry be given total control over forest reserves, currently parceled among several agencies, and demanded more presidential power to hand further reserves over to the Department of Agriculture.
The theme of “water-storing” infused his rhetoric as he appealed for the reclamation of arid public lands. He said that the interstate irrigation program he had in mind was so ambitious that only the national government could undertake it. It must not risk the fate of the countless private schemes that Western water speculators had tried, and failed, to get rich on in recent years. Nor should the reclaimed lands benefit anyone other than the settlers willing to farm them. “The doctrine of private ownership of water apart from land cannot prevail without causing enduring wrong.”
Action on all fronts must begin immediately. Yet—a typical Rooseveltian hedge—it must proceed cautiously: “We are dealing with a new and momentous question, in the pregnant years while institutions are forming, and what we do will affect not only the present but future generations.”
FOR ANOTHER HOUR, the Message droned on, while clerk after clerk read himself hoarse, and somnolence gathered in the air like fog. Roosevelt was impassioned on the Navy’s need for more battleships and heavy armored cruisers, firm in his defense of the Monroe Doctrine, galvanic in his call for a canal across Central America. He praised the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress as national treasures—something no previous President had thought to do. He was silent on Negro disfranchisement and lynchings, optimistic for the future of free Cuba, and pessimistic about early independence for the Philippines. He was dogged to the point of dullness on rural free mail delivery, national expositions, merchant-marine subsidies, and the need for a permanent census bureau.
By two o’clock, many senators could stand it no longer, and left the chamber to fortify themselves. Even Henry Cabot Lodge showed impatience as he and sixty-six other holdouts waited for the President’s peroration.
Roosevelt returned at last to the subject of death, with which he had begun two and a half hours before. He noted that William McKinley had been preceded to the grave by Queen Victoria of England and the Dowager Empress Frederick of Germany. He seemed to be reminding his older auditors that nineteenth-century cobwebs were blowing away all over the world. The twentieth century looked bright for all Americans, yet they would not abandon traditional values.
“In the midst of our affliction we reverently thank the Almighty that we are at peace with the nations of mankind; and we firmly intend that our policy shall be such as to continue unbroken these international relations of mutual respect and good will.”
ALDRICH, ALLISON, SPOONER, and Platt emerged from the chamber smiling like Wagnerites after a slow performance of Siegfried. Each had an approving adjective for the President’s Message. It was “able,” “excellent,” “admirable,” and “intrepid.” Their satisfaction was not surprising, since its caveats and circumlocutions had been dictated by themselves.
Democratic leaders, too,