Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [53]
THE PRESIDENT CLIMBED carefully up the beanstalk, an ax in his belt. He clenched his teeth as he tried to separate a tangle of branches above him. High in the sky, on a spreading crest of leaves, sat a giant, gorging and grinning. The giant’s knife was sharp and eager over an array of heaped platters. Roosevelt, peering through thick lenses, sensed rather than saw what the dishes contained: helpless, trussed human beings.
From outer space, a pen flew in, loaded with ink. It scratched across the giant’s belly, THE TRUSTS, and wrote over Roosevelt’s head, WILL JACK REACH THE OGRE?
A FEW DAYS AFTER Edward Kemble’s cartoon appeared in Life, Roosevelt told a friend, “The time has come when my course has to be definitely shaped.”
It was 5 February 1902. He had been in office nearly five months, listening to advice and experimenting with power, not always successfully. His gesture toward Booker T. Washington looked, in retrospect, more courageous than wise; his reform appointments would show only long-term effects; veterans were upset with him over General Miles; and as for the fine phrases of his First Message to Congress, he heard no chinks from masons immortalizing them in marble. Signs of creeping disillusionment were evident in the press, and on Capitol Hill.
Any fool could tell what the public expected of him. Jack must reach, and grapple with, the ogre of Combination. Mail poured daily into the White House, urging him to prosecute various trusts under the Sherman Act. He had referred possible suits to the Attorney General, but in all cases save one, Knox saw no grounds for legal action. This exceptional case looked strong enough to go all the way to the Supreme Court, yet it was fraught with political risk. Roosevelt and Knox were careful not to identify “it” in their communications. “Am giving it constant attention,” the latter had telegraphed from Florida, “to the end that your wishes, with which I am in full sympathy, can be creditably executed.”
Now, eight weeks later, Knox was back in town, but still hedging over his opinion. Roosevelt decided to insist upon it. The Attorney General begged one more week. He canceled all his social engagements from 5 February on, citing “a public duty that will admit of no postponement,” and plunged, with renewed energy, into research. As far back as A.D. 483, he found, the Emperor Zeno had directed the Praetorian Prefect of Constantinople, No one may presume to exercise a monopoly of any kind … and if anyone shall presume to practice a monopoly, let his property be forfeited and himself condemned to perpetual exile.
Plunging deep into sociological theory, Knox postulated the “underlying laws” that linked all social and industrial movements, and the common-law “sanctions” that prompted them. Was it rash of the President to seek sanctions of his own? Knox found enlightenment—as Roosevelt himself had done, years earlier—in Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution. The British philosopher argued that laissez-faire economics might suit one stage in a nation’s development, but not necessarily the next. Some governmental tamping-down should follow a period of explosive growth. Nor was discipline incompatible with democracy. As Knox himself put it, “Uncontrolled competition, like unregulated liberty, is not really free.”
What, then, of the Constitution? Knox brooded over Supreme Court rulings on the Sherman Act. U.S. v. Trans-Missouri Freight Association (1897) had concluded that combination in restraint of interstate trade was unlawful “whether reasonable or not.” Yet U.S. v. E. C. Knight (1895) had condoned some monopolistic practices, and made them difficult to prosecute at the federal level. Knox felt