Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [82]
This pious protestation touched off a firestorm of ridicule. Baer was accused of blasphemy and hypocrisy. “A good many people think they superintend the earth,” The New York Times remarked, “but not many have the egregious vanity to describe themselves as its managing directors.” The New York Tribune gave mock thanks that God would be able to manage the strike “through the kindness of the coal operators.”
Roosevelt, about to leave for New England, wistfully asked his Attorney General, “What is the reason we cannot proceed against the coal operators as being engaged in a trust?” Knox replied that until the Supreme Court ruled on Northern Securities v. U.S. the Sherman Act was too narrowly drawn to support such a move. As President, he had “no power or duty in the matter.”
THE SYLPH STEAMED across Long Island Sound in glittering sunshine. Roosevelt lounged in a deck chair astern, enjoying the breeze. He sat staring at the green retreating bulk of Sagamore Hill, while Connecticut grew proportionately. The yacht’s wake took with it his last moments of vacation. Thirteen days of campaign duty beckoned, all the way north to Maine: he wanted to get as many Republican congressman as possible elected or re-elected in the fall.
Three traveling aides—George Cortelyou, Assistant Secretary Benjamin F. Barnes, and Captain George A. Lung of the Navy Medical Corps—left the President alone, as did a pool of five reporters, four typists, and two telephonists. But his ubiquitous bodyguard hovered.
Roosevelt had grown fond of William Craig. Time was when Big Bill, an immigrant from Britain, had protected Queen Victoria. Now forty-eight years old, he stood six foot three and was still quick and muscular as a bull. Perhaps his best friend in the world was four-year-old Quentin Roosevelt. They liked to read comics together.
AT NOON THE FOLLOWING day, Saturday, 23 August, Theodore Roosevelt stood on a high platform in front of Providence’s City Hall. Twenty thousand people filled the square below, and another thousand sat behind him. Wherever he looked, miniature flags flashed red, white, and blue. Squinting against the scintillations of brass-band instruments and binocular lenses, he began his speech.
We are passing through a period of great commercial prosperity, and such a period is as sure as adversity itself to bring mutterings of discontent. At a time when most men prosper somewhat some men always prosper greatly; and it is as true now as when the tower of Siloam fell upon all alike, that good fortune does not come solely to the just, nor bad fortune solely to the unjust. When the weather is good for crops it is also good for weeds. (Applause)
It was a classic Rooseveltian opening in its complementary positives and negatives, its appeal to every social order, its biblical reference and earthy proverb. Honest industrialists, the churchgoing middle class, the rural poor—all were reassured that the President had their particular interests at heart.
Human law, he went on, encouraged moneymaking, but natural law prevented equal gain. If wealthy men abused their good fortune, or the needy sought to penalize them, both groups would be buried “in the crash of the common disaster.” General progress depended on benevolence at every level of society, and “above all things stability, fixity of economic policy.”
Roosevelt noticed that the square was becoming too crowded in front of him, and cautioned against the danger of crushing. Then he swung gracefully into his main theme:
Where men are gathered together in great masses it inevitably results that they must work far more largely through combinations than where they live scattered and remote from one another.… Under present-day conditions it is as necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have organizations, unions, among wage workers.
E. H. Harriman could scarcely find fault with these measured phrases—nor, for that matter, could Rhode Island’s most prominent exemplar