Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [86]
Roosevelt inclined to the Western point of view. But Governor Cummins’s suggestion that the tariff was “the mother of trusts” was irresponsible. No wonder Hanna, an arch-protectionist, was so disturbed. Already, the Iowa Idea was on the lips of other prairie insurgents: Governors Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin and Samuel Van Sant of Minnesota were barking it with the fervor of patent-medicine salesmen. Protection must give way to Reciprocity—had not William McKinley said as much, the day before he was shot?
McKinley’s successor remembered being a free-trade man himself once, in hot youth. But he had found it wise to recant that heresy upon entering Republican politics. His failure eighteen years later to win even a minor bill of reciprocity for Cuba proved that protectionism was still the holiest tenet of party faith. Indeed, Speaker David B. Henderson, an Iowan, had announced he would not run for re-election, rather than submit to tariff blasphemies on the stump.
Roosevelt, thinking ahead to 1904, hesitated between risk-taking and caution. He had always been willing to embrace a worthy cause—civil-service reform, for example—if it could be proved legal and representative of vox populi. Tariff reform was beginning to look like just such a mass movement. But the mass, as yet, was still a minority. He did not want to alienate a key constituency—those millions of small businessmen and farmers who traded exclusively within the United States, and relied on tariffs as a bulwark against foreign competition. To them, protection was a right honored by twelve successive Republican administrations, and the Iowa Idea was both an insult and a threat.
During the next eighteen days, Roosevelt intended to drum into Midwestern and Western skulls the basic incompatibility of trust control and tariff reform. He planned major addresses on each issue, at Cincinnati and Indianapolis, before taking his message of strenuous moderation across the heartland of insurgency, from Milwaukee and St. Paul to Sioux Falls and Des Moines. He was setting out, he acknowledged, on an expedition fraught with risk. Every step must be measured carefully, and not just because of the nagging pain in his left shin. “There are a good many worse things than the possibility of trolley-car accidents in these trips!”
DISEMBARKING ON THE East Side, the presidential party proceeded across Manhattan by cavalcade. Secret Service men rode one hundred feet ahead, making sure, this time, that all local traffic was stationary. A Hudson River ferry took Roosevelt on to Jersey City. At 2:14 P.M., his special pulled out of the depot and chugged west through the rain.
When the train crossed the Pennsylvania border, a small, saturnine, droop-eyed man got on. Matthew S. Quay was accustomed to free rides, as senior Senator from the Keystone State, on both public and private transport. Alone with Roosevelt for the next twenty-five miles, he reported on the coal strike. Happily, the miners were about to capitulate. They had abandoned their demand for union recognition. The determination of operators had defeated John Mitchell; management was not mocked.
No sooner had Quay detrained in Philadelphia than another hitch rider got on. This was Frank B. Sargent, Commissioner of Immigration, a former union leader and the Administration’s secret observer in anthracite country. Alone with Roosevelt for the next forty miles, he too reported on the coal strike. Happily, the miners were in good moral and financial shape. Recognition mattered less to them than fair wages. The determination of the rank