Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [87]
Roosevelt sent a wry message back to Senator Quay that he had received some “almost diametrically opposed” information. The truth, as usual, must lie somewhere in between.
HIS LEFT LEG WAS hurting badly next day at the Music Hall in Cincinnati. But he showed no sign of discomfort, beyond asking a capacity audience not to interrupt him with applause. “I intend … to make an argument as the Chief Executive of a nation who is the President of all the people.”
It was the first time Roosevelt had invoked the majesty of office, and the crowd listened with appropriate respect. For a while he expounded his familiar formula for trust control: tolerance, mild regulation, and public accountability. All the proposed alternatives, he said, were “ineffective or mischievous.” Chief among these was the Iowa Idea, “a policy … which would defeat its own professed object.” Governor Cummins imagined that tariff penalties would cause trusts to end monopolistic practices. Yet most trusts controlled far less than half of their respective markets. The rare trust with majority control had an advantage of only one or two percentage points. “Surely in rearranging the schedules affecting such a corporation, it would be necessary to consider the interests of its smaller competitors who control the remaining part, and which, being weaker, would suffer most?”
Speaking lucidly and calmly, the President reminded his audience that some trusts might react to tariff penalties by laying off “very many tens of thousands of workmen.” Other trusts would escape discipline because their products were tariff-free. “The Standard Oil Company offers a case in point—and the corporations which control the anthracite coal.”
By choosing two particularly unpopular trusts to illustrate the inequities of the Iowa Idea, Roosevelt managed to sound both reform-minded and conservative. He mentioned his own “present legislative and constitutional limitations,” and ended with a vague promise that in spite of them, he would deal “exact and even-handed justice … to all men, without regard to persons.”
At last the audience could applaud freely. He listened with an air of abstraction to the roars that followed him into the street. “It’s rather peculiar,” he remarked, “that everywhere they call for ‘Roosevelt’ or ‘Teddy,’ but never say ‘Theodore.’ ”
A REPORTER COVERING Roosevelt’s arrival at Detroit on Sunday, 21 September, was impressed with the change in him since his last visit, two years before. No longer was he a young, ruddy-faced Governor, grinning and squinting and pumping hands. He appeared to have aged considerably; his features were sterner. The close-cropped auburn hair glinted with gray, and there was “an indefinable something about his appearance, call it dignity, call it responsibility—that showed he felt the weight resting on his shoulders.”
Actually, the main weight Roosevelt felt was on his left leg. He complained of pain, and was unresponsive to press-pool questions about the coal strike. As soon as he reached the Hotel Cadillac, he went to bed.
Early the next morning, the inevitable crowd of gogglers gathered on the sidewalk outside. “Just keep your eye on that little window,” a porter said helpfully. “That’s his bathroom, and when you see a light in there you’ll know that the President is in his tub.” The light remained off, to general mystification. Roosevelt’s major appearance of the day was at a convention of Spanish-American War veterans. Normally he delighted in such events, but he arrived late and delivered a perfunctory address, grimacing and sweating heavily. During the subsequent parade, he had to stand for four hours. At the end, he looked drained.
Speculation that something was wrong with his health began early on Tuesday, at an outdoor event in Logansport, Indiana. Despite steady rain, he launched into the big speech he had been expected to deliver that afternoon at Indianapolis. He declined applause as he extolled the glories of private enterprise. Beneficiaries of the new