Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [81]
The feeling went both ways, as Attorney General Knox discovered on 8 August, when he stopped at Atlantic City en route to Oyster Bay. That evening in the Garden Café, Knox entertained a small mixed party. The restaurant’s lights were dim, so he was not recognized by three Pennsylvanian trust lords who lurched in for a bottle of wine—evidently not their first of the evening. Millionaires all, they were Charles T. Schoen, of the Pittsburgh Pressed Steel Car Company; Theodore Cramp, of Cramp & Sons, shipbuilders; and Arthur H. Stephenson, of Stephenson Yarns. A boozy male conversation ensued. Schoen’s voice was particularly loud. (Some years before, Knox’s law firm had been involved in a suit to oust Schoen from his job.) After a few minutes, the headwaiter brought him a message: “Attorney-General Knox objects to your noise and vulgar language.”
“The hell he does,” said Schoen, enraged. “I’d like to know what right he has to interfere with us,” the drunken executive blustered, and began a tirade against government antitrust policy. Knox stood up, small and bristling in his dinner suit. He said crisply that he would not tolerate any more “objectionable remarks.” Cramp and Stephenson at once offered some of their own. Amid jeers and imprecations, Knox escorted his party out.
As he lightly put it to reporters afterward, “I had such a pressing invitation to go back that I couldn’t resist.” But what ensued had not been funny. According to eyewitnesses, the Attorney General had re-entered the restaurant alone and shaken his finger in Schoen’s face. “You are a blackguard, sir!”
Schoen, too sluggish to rise, had roared back, “You are a cur!” Cramp and Stephenson had jumped up, fists flying, but waiters and bystanders pulled them off, and Knox was escorted out, shaken, bruised, and minus several waistcoat buttons.
He tried to make light of the incident at Sagamore Hill, joking that Schoen probably felt worse than he did. But the incident emphasized the passions with which Roosevelt had to contend. A cartoon on the front page of the Philadelphia North American showed the President standing thoughtfully beside the battered, bandaged form of his Attorney General, while three retreating toughs jeered, “Hooray for the trusts!”
AS ALWAYS IN SITUATIONS involving extremes, Roosevelt’s instinct was to seek out the center. He drafted a major speech on trust policy for delivery in Providence, Rhode Island, balancing it to appeal equally to paupers and plutocrats. Just to make sure about the latter, he forwarded a copy to E. H. Harriman. “Will you send it back to me with any comments you choose to make?”
The financier, facing years of legal harassment in the Northern Securities suit, complied. But he let Roosevelt know what priority a presidential document enjoyed in his office. “My day has been so much occupied I have not had an opportunity until after five o’clock to read it.”
Some paragraphs on trust control, Harriman wrote, sounded “a little broad,” and might bring on a sudden recession, even depression. A President should work for “understanding and confidence” between Wall Street and the public, not mutual mistrust. Testily, he asked Roosevelt “to have a little patience” and allow the economy to benefit from the recent boom in consolidations, before making “any radical change” in regulatory law.
If Roosevelt needed any further evidence of the arrogance of capital, he got it on 21 August, when newspapers published George Baer’s reply to a correspondent urging compromise in the coal strike:
The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of