Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [85]
At the time, all Roosevelt could think of was vengeance. The engineer became truculent. “You don’t suppose I tried to do it, do you?” For a moment he and the President were at the point of blows. Then Roosevelt remembered his dignity and turned back to the wreckage. “Well, I had the right of way anyway,” the engineer shouted, as deputies led him off.
Roosevelt did not seem to hear. He knelt beside the reddened wheels. “Too bad, too bad,” he murmured. “Poor Craig. How my children will feel.”
QUENTIN WAS INDEED a bereft little boy when Roosevelt got back to Sagamore Hill that evening. But the President, whose face was blue-black and grotesquely swollen, attracted more immediate sympathy. He was also limping slightly from a bruise on his left shin.
In the days that followed, varying explanations of the accident came from Pittsfield. Charges of manslaughter were filed against Euclid Madden, the engineer. One story was that passengers on the trolley car had bribed him to pursue the President; another claimed he had been coming down the slope on schedule, and could not brake fast enough when the barouche got in his way. Madden pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to a heavy fine, plus six months in jail for failing to control his car.
Memories of “poor Craig” faded slowly, like the leaves around Sagamore Hill. The anniversary of William McKinley’s death came and went without incident. Next day, 15 September, Roosevelt hosted a garden reception to celebrate his first year in office. Several thousand Nassau County neighbors came to shake the President’s hand and sip raspberry shrub from specially engraved glasses. Long Island Sound shimmered through the trees; the air was sweet with the smell of popcorn and banana fritters. Although Roosevelt was still bruised about the face, he seemed healthy and vigorous as he welcomed his guests. “Dee-lighted!” He shook fifty-two hands a minute for three hours.
“It takes more than a trolley accident to knock me out,” he boasted, “and more than a crowd to tire me.”
Only Edith knew that beneath the neatly pressed flannel trousers, the pain in his shin was beginning to bother him.
CHAPTER 10
The Catastrophe Now Impending
It was different when I was a young man,
Hinnissy. In thim days, Capital an’ Labor
were friendly, or Labor was.
THE PRESIDENTIAL EAGLE fluttered bravely at masthead, its golden wings beating the drizzle. Roosevelt and his aides huddled below in raincoats and wraps, waiting for Manhattan to show across the East River. Fall was still three days off, but for party politicians the summer had already ended. A “grave and delicate” question demanded Roosevelt’s attention out west, where he was headed on another campaign trip.
The question was one of basic Republican policy. Some ambitious insurgents in Iowa, led by Governor Albert B. Cummins, had forced a revolutionary idea into the state platform for 1902:
We favor such amendments of the Interstate Commerce Act as will more fully carry out its prohibition of discrimination in ratemaking, and [such] modification of the tariff schedules [as] may be required to prevent their affording a shelter to monopoly.
In other words, monopolistic corporations should be controlled by special, punitive taxation. Price-fixing would give way to an equitable redistribution of Wall Street’s wealth. Railroad rate regulation would control the tendency of agricultural prices to decline in inverse proportion to manufacturing costs. And fair-trade agreements would reopen overseas markets shut by the impossible cost of doing business with the United States.
This “Iowa Idea” made little sense to Roosevelt (what, for instance, about trusts whose products were already on the free list?), but he could see its appeal to ignorant voters. Before leaving Oyster Bay, he had summoned six Republican leaders to advise him on what to say about the tariff while on tour. The meeting had been so divided as to confirm his suspicions that the Iowa Idea was a party-splitter.