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Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography
Chapter XV. Roosevelt and Congress
by Thayer, William Roscoe
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In a previous chapter I glanced at three or four of the principal
measures in internal policy which Roosevelt took up and fought
through, until he finally saw them passed by Congress. No other
President, as has been often remarked, kept Congress so busy;
and, we may add, none of his predecessors (unless it were Lincoln
with the legislation required by the Civil War) put so many new
laws on the national statute book. Mr. Charles G. Washburn
enumerates these acts credited to Roosevelt's seven and a half
years' administration: "The Elkins Anti-Rebate Law applying to
railroads; the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor
and the Bureau of Corporations; the law authorizing the building
of the Panama Canal; the Hepburn Bill amending and vitalizing the
Interstate Commerce Act; the Pure Food and Meat Inspection laws;
the law creating the Bureau of Immigration; the Employers'
Liability and Safety Appliance Laws, that limited the working
hours of employees; the law making the Government liable for
injuries to its employees; the law forbidding child labor in the
District of Columbia; the reformation of the Consular Service;
prohibition of campaign contributions from corporations; the
Emergency Currency Law, which also provided for the creation of
the Monetary Commission." *
[ C. G. Washburn, 128, 129.]
Although the list is by no means complete, it shows that
Roosevelt's receptive and sleepless mind fastened on the full
circle of questions which interested American life, so far as
that is controlled or directed by national legislation. Some of
the laws passed were simply readjustments--new statutes on old
matters. Other laws were new, embodying the first attempt to
define the attitude which the courts should hold towards new
questions which had grown suddenly into great importance. The
decade which had favored the springing-up and amazing expansion
of the Big Interests, had to be followed by the decade which
framed legislation for regulating and curbing these interests.
Quite naturally, the monopolists affected did not like to be
harnessed or controlled, and, to put it mildly, they resented the
interference of the formidable young President whom they could
neither frighten, inveigle, nor cajole.
And yet it is as evident to all Americans now, as it was to some
Americans at the time, that that legislation had to be passed;
because if the monopolists had been allowed to go on
unrestrained, they would either have perverted this Republic into
an open Plutocracy, in which individual liberty and equality
before the law would have disappeared, or they would have hurried
on the Social Revolution, the Armageddon of Labor and Capital,
the merciless conflict of class with class, which many persons
already vaguely dreaded, or thought they saw looming like an
ominous cloud on the horizon. It seems astounding that any one
should have questioned the necessity of setting up regulations.
And will not posterity wonder, when it learns that only in the
first decade of the twentieth century did we provide laws against
the cruel and killing labor of little children, and against
impure foods and drugs?
Year after year, the railroads furnished unending causes for
legislative control. There were the old laws which the railroad
men tried to evade and which the President, as was his duty,
insisted on enforcing; and still more insistent and spectacular
were the new problems. Just as three or four hundred years ago
the most active and vigorous Frenchmen and English men tried to
get possession of large tracts of land, or even of provinces, and
became counts and dukes, so the Americans of our generation, who
aspired to lead the pushing financier class, worked day and night
to own a railroad. Naturally one railroad did not satisfy a man
who was bitten by this ambition; he reached out for several, or
even for a transcontinental system. The war for railroad
ownership or monopoly was waged intensely, and in 1901 it nearly
plunged the country into a disastrous financial panic. Edward H.
Harriman, who had only recently been regarded as a great power in
the struggle for railroad supremacy, clashed with James J. Hill,
of Minnesota, and J. P. Morgan, a New York banker, over the
Northern Pacific Railroad. Their battle was nominally a draw,
because Wall Street rushed in and, to avert a nation-wide
calamity, demanded a truce. But Harriman remained, until his
death in 1909, the railroad czar of the United States, and when
he died, he was master of twenty-five thousand miles of road,
chief influencer of fifty thousand more miles, besides steamboat
companies, banks, and other financial institutions. He controlled
more money than any other American. I summarize these statistics,
in order to show the reader what sort of a Colossus the President
of the United States had to do battle with when he undertook to
secure new laws adequate to the control of the enormously
expanded railway problems. And he did succeed, in large measure,
in bringing the giant corporations to recognize the authority of
the Nation. The decision of the Supreme Court in the Northern
Securities case, by which the merger of two or more competing
roads was declared illegal, put a stop to the practice of
consolidation, which might have resulted in the ownership of all
the railroads in the United States by a single person. Then
followed the process of "unscrambling the omelet," to use J. P.
Morgan's phrase, in order to bring the companies already
illegally merged within the letter of the law. Probably a
lynx-eyed investigator might discover that in some of the efforts
to legalize operations in the future, "the voice was Jacob's, but
the hands were the hands of Esau."
The laws aimed at regulating transportation, rates, and rebates,
certainly made for justice, and helped to enlighten great
corporations as to their place in the community and their duties
towards it. Roosevelt showed that his fearlessness had apparently
no bounds, when in 1907 he caused suit to be brought against the
Standard Oil Company in Indiana--a branch of a monopoly which was
popularly supposed to be above the law--for receiving a rebate
from a railroad on the petroleum shipped by the Company. The
judge who tried the case gave a verdict in favor of the
Government, but another judge, to whom appeal was made, reversed
the decision, and finally at a re-trial, a third judge dismissed
the indictment. "Thus," says Mr. Ogg, "a good case was lost
through judicial blundering." *
[ Ogg, 50.]
But the greatest of Roosevelt's works as a legislator were those
which he carried through in the fields of conservation and
reclamation. He did not invent these issues; he was only one of
many persons who understood their vast importance. He gives full
credit to Mr. Gifford Pinchot and Mr. F. H. Newell, who first
laid these subjects before him as matters which he as President
ought to consider. He had himself during his days in the West
seen the need of irrigating the waste tracts. He was a quick and
willing learner, and in his first message to Congress (December
1, 1901) he remarked: "The forest and water problems are perhaps
the most vital internal problems of the United States." Years
later, in referring to this part of his work, he said:
'The idea that our natural resources were inexhaustible still
obtained, and there was as yet no real knowledge of their extent
and condition. The relation of the conservation of national
resources to the problems of national welfare and national
efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation
of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private
enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its
superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the
National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series
of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their
effect on the reelection or defeat of a Congressman here and
there--a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.'*
[ Autobiography, p. 430.]
The public lands saved mounted to millions of acres. The
long-standing practice of stealing these lands was checked and
put a stop to as rapidly as possible. Individuals and private
companies had bought for a song great tracts of national
property, getting thereby, it might be, the title to mineral
deposits worth fabulous sums; and these persons were naturally
angry at being deprived of the immense fortunes which they had
counted on for themselves. A company would buy up an entire
watershed, and control, for its private profit, the water-supply
of a region. Roosevelt insisted with indisputable logic that the
States and Counties ought them selves to own such natural
resources and derive an income from them. So, too, were the areas
restored to man's habitation, and to agriculture, by irrigation,
and by reforesting. A company, having no object but its own
enrichment, would ruthlessly cut down a thousand square miles of
timber in order to convert it into wood pulp for paper, or into
lumber for building; and the region thus devastated, as if a
German army had been over it, would be left without regard to the
effect on the climate and the water supply of the surrounding
country. Surely this was wrong.
It seems to me as needless now to argue in behalf of Roosevelt's
legislation for the conservation of national resources as to
argue against cannibalism as a practice fit for civilized men.
That lawyers of repute and Congressmen of reputation should have
done their utmost, as late as 1906, to obstruct and defeat the
passage of the Meat Inspection Bill must seem incredible to
persons of average sanity and conscience. If any of those
obstructionists still live, they do not boast of their
performance, nor is it likely that their children will exult over
this part of the paternal record.
In order not to exaggerate Roosevelt's importance in these
fundamental reforms, I would repeat that he did not originate the
idea of many of them. He gladly took his cue for conservation
from Gifford Pinchot, and for reclamation from F. H. Newell, as I
have said; the need of inspecting the packing-houses which
exported meat, from Senator A. J. Beveridge, and so on. The vital
fact is that these projects got form and vigor and publicity, and
were pushed through Congress, only after Roosevelt took them up.
His opponents, the packers, the land-robbers, the mine-grabbers,
the wood-pulp pirates, fought him at every point. They appealed
to the old law to discredit and damn the new. They gave him no
quarter, and he asked for none because he was bent on securing
justice, irrespective of persons or private interests. It
followed, of course, that they watched eagerly for any slip which
might wreck him, and they thought they had found their chance in
1907.
That was a year of financial upheaval, almost of panic, the blame
for which the Big Interests tried to fasten on the President. It
resulted, they said, from his attack on Capital and the
Corporations. A special incident gave plausibility to some of
their bitter criticism. Messrs. Gary and Frick, of the United
States Steel Corporation, called on the President, and told him
that the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company was on the verge of
bankruptcy, and that, if it went under, a general panic would
probably ensue. To prevent this financial disaster, their
Corporation was willing to buy up enough of the Tennessee Company
to save it, but they wished to know whether the President would
allow the purchase. He told them that he could not officially
advise them to take the action proposed, but that he did not
regard it as a public duty of his to raise any objection. They
made the purchase, and the total amount of their holdings in the
Tennessee Company did not equal in value what they had originally
held, for the stock had greatly shrunk. The Attorney-General
subsequently informed the President that he saw no reason to
prosecute the United States Steel Corporation. But the
President's enemies did not spare their criticism. They
circulated grave suspicions; they hinted that, if the whole truth
were known, Roosevelt would be embarrassed, to say the least.
What had become of his pretended impartiality when he allowed one
of the great Trusts to do, with impunity, that which others were
prosecuted for? The public, which seldom has the knowledge, or
the information, necessary for understanding business or
financial complexities, usually remarks, with the archaic
sapience of a Greek chorus, "There must be some fire where there
is so much smoke." But the public interest was never seriously
roused over the Tennessee Coal and Iron affair, and, six years
later, when a United States District Court handed down a verdict
in which this matter was referred to, the public had almost
forgotten what it was all about.
The great result from Roosevelt's battle for conservation, which
I believe will glorify him, in the future, to heroic proportions
as a statesman, is that where he found wide stretches of desert
he left fertile States, that he saved from destruction, that he
seized from the hands of the spoilers rivers and valleys which
belonged to the people, and that he kept for the people mineral
lands of untold value. Nor did he work for material and sanitary
prosperity alone; but he worked also for Beauty. He reserved as
National Parks for the use and delight of men and women forever
some of the most beautiful regions in the United States, and the
support he gave to these causes urged them forward after he
ceased to be President.
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