Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [83]
“Every man of power,” the President said carefully, “by the very fact of that power, is capable of doing damage to his neighbors; but we cannot afford to discourage the development of such men merely because it is possible they may use their power for wrong ends.… Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own hearts.”
His audience began to show signs of restlessness. “There is other harm,” he quickly added. It was time for him to shout the words Harriman had objected to. He did so with passion:
The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever need of such control is shown.… (Applause) The immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, control of some sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts shall owe allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign’s orders may be enforced. (Applause) In my opinion, this sovereign must be the National Government.
By now, he was punching his left palm so hard the blows echoed like ricochets. Once, he surprised the people behind him by spinning on his heel and pointing directly at them. Nobody laughed; the President’s face was hard and stern. Time and again, his imperious hand rejected applause. A reporter sensed his “almost desperate determination” to be understood.
Yet Roosevelt’s equal compulsion to follow every strong statement with a qualifier caused the speech to degenerate into a series of contradictions on the pros and cons of regulatory law. By the time he sat down, much of his audience had wandered off.
THERE WAS SOME EXASPERATED comment in the press on the President’s equivocations. “He spent more time in trying to pacify those who criticize the trusts than in pointing out a remedy,” William Jennings Bryan wrote in The Commoner. Even normally supportive Republican editorials were unenthusiastic. These, however, were but inner-page qualms. Front pages everywhere bore the headlines Roosevelt wanted:
PRESIDENT WOULD REGULATE TRUSTS
In Speech at Providence Says Government Should Control Capital
MIGHT AMEND CONSTITUTION
If Step Were Necessary to Give Controlling Power
Evidently, the use of rhetoric was to make positive points that would cause typesetters to reach for their display faces. Negative dissemblings rated body copy (which he could always cite, when necessary, in self-defense). A few thousand myopic scrutineers of the body text mattered little, if millions of larger vision registered the banner words above.
THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL, a train of rare beauty, puffed north along the Atlantic seaboard. Its press complement, originally set at six, swelled to fifty as reporters realized that Roosevelt was out to make news. Navy Secretary William H. Moody came aboard at Boston to keep him company. Every stop brought a crescendo of church bells, band music, and calls for “Teddy.” On 26 August alone he addressed a quarter of a million people, leaning over the back rail of his Pullman and rasping out little homilies about “the simple life.”
At Bangor, Maine, an old loyalty reawakened. “If anyone sees or knows where Bill Sewall of Island Falls, Aroostook, is,” Roosevelt yelled from the balcony of Bangor House, “I wish he would tell him that I want him to come in and lunch with me right now.” The bewhiskered woodsman who had toughened him as a teenager pressed dazedly through the crowd, and went inside to roars of applause.
As the tour entered its second week, publicity surrounding it grew. So did a general admiration of Roosevelt’s courage in making trust control a campaign issue. “Not since the nation hearkened to the words of the Great Emancipator,” declared the New York Press, “has a Chief Magistrate of the United States delivered to the American people a message of greater