Penguin History of the United States of America (85 page)

No such bold claims for the Presidency had been heard since the days of Andrew Jackson; yet they did but lay bare the significance of Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership, unveiling the role which all ambitious twentieth-century Presidents would seek to play, and the scope which existed for playing it. Wilson’s words were indeed prophetic, and some of the prophet’s friends began to feel that he ought to be given his turn at the job he described. The analysis was clearer about Roosevelt than he had so far been about himself. But it contained a trap, for it outlined a programme for modern Presidents which was tempting yet, as many of them have found out (including Wilson himself), extraordinarily difficult to realize. And in 1908 the vision was perhaps premature, for Congress was still there, and still, apparently, as much in command of the government as ever. Like the President, its members sensed that rewards were now to be won by gratifying the taste for reform, and they did not mean to let Roosevelt monopolize them.

The railroad problem, for example, had become intolerable to almost
everyone, and Congress at last began to tackle it seriously, passing the ineffective Elkins Act against rebates in 1903 and the Hepburn Act of 1906, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission broad powers to fix maximum and minimum railroad rates, extended its jurisdiction to cover the Pullman and other sleeping-car companies, empowered it to inspect the accounts of railroad companies and made its orders binding until a court had reviewed them (and afterwards, if the court sustained the commission). This act was a characteristic triumph of the Progressive Era. Travellers were tired of paying high fares for places on unsafe trains (railroad accidents were not so frequent or so spectacular as steamboat explosions in the old days, but there were far too many of them). Western farmers felt as bitter as ever about their innumerable grievances. Other shippers, such as oil and coal companies, disliked the chaos of rates brought about by totally free competition. The railroads themselves disliked the system under which they operated. They did not want to give rebates to extortionate giants like Standard Oil (which Theodore Roosevelt liked to denounce, thereby helping to make Rockefeller’s trust the universal whipping boy of the age). They disliked having to undercut each other in the quest for traffic, for even if undercutting ruined a rival, it often came near to ruining the undercutter too. They did not even much appreciate their unpopularity, which was, they felt, undeserved. The late William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s son, had got into fearful trouble in 1883 for saying ‘the public be damned!’ (he was forced to sell all his railroad shares to Morgan), but had he not been right? Why should the railroads provide unprofitable lines and trains which the public would not pay for? No doubt their safety record was appalling (and railroad men disliked getting killed or maimed as much as anyone else) but how, given the competitive world, could the lines earn enough money to service their debts, pay their shareholders, maintain their equipment, pay their workers’ wages
and
improve safety? They felt they were being ruined by undercutting, rebates and free passes.

In short, there was pressure from all sides to reform the conditions in which the railroads operated, and the Hepburn Act was Congress’s response. After a long and bitter debate in the Senate the Act was passed by a majority of seventy-one to three. It had sailed through the House easily, and finally been approved there by a vote of 346 to seven.

This law and the manner of its passage was characteristic of all the important legislation of the Progressive Era. As its lopsided majorities should suggest, it was generally acceptable, a compilation of compromises, rather than radical. It had only needed months of struggle for passage because the reformers initially wanted more than they could get; because the irreconcilable conservatives, though few, were good fighters; and, above all, because the railroads, though in principle in favour of reform, disliked in practice the concessions that reform required of them, especially the degree to which they lost independence to the ICC. The Act, as passed, was full of loopholes, some of which would be closed by later laws. It was a useful and important
beginning, that was all. But the ballyhoo which surrounded it convinced everyone that something wonderful had occurred. Had not the President stumped the country in support of the bill for months? He had, and whipped up a storm of public concern. He had worked hard to persuade Congress in other ways, cultivating Democrats and Republicans with fine impartiality, using the patronage freely, and knowing just when to stand firm, just when to offer a compromise. Those Congressional majorities suggest that his labours were somewhat unnecessary and that he did not altogether deserve the credit for the measure which he greedily appropriated. Some sort of bill was due. But the episode served to bolster the growing myth of Presidential power, and thereby to strengthen real Presidential influence. Soon Roosevelt would be gruffly defending himself against charges of executive usurpation, just like Andrew Jackson before him.

Similar observations might be made, in all respects, of the other big laws of the Roosevelt years. All of them did something to increase the regulatory powers of the federal government; most of them were of more help to the consumer and the industrialist than to the industrial worker; none of them was very radical, and all of them passed Congress by huge majorities. Next to the Hepburn Act, and passed in the same year, came the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Both benefited from the enormous uproar created by the publication of
The Jungle
, a novel by Upton Sinclair, the most famous of the muckrakers, who exposed the miserable condition of the workers in the Chicago stockyards and the grossly insanitary conditions in which meat was slaughtered and canned for sale there. Sinclair was more interested in the workers than in poisoned meat, but as he said, ‘I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’ Americans did not appreciate being sold poisoned food, and let their Congressmen know; Theodore Roosevelt himself was appalled, especially as official reports came in to confirm Sinclair’s findings; the largest firms of meat-packers, whose chief interest was in the export of meat to Europe, where strict sanitary regulations were enforced, were delighted at the prospect of disciplining the multitude of their smaller competitors – something they had been trying to do for decades. So the Meat Inspection Act went easily through Congress. It laid down rules for the sanitary operation of slaughterhouses and canning factories, and set up a federal inspectorate to enforce them – another accretion of power to Washington. The Pure Food and Drug Act, the pet project of Dr Harvey Wiley of the Department of Agriculture, forbade the sale of adulterated products in inter-state commerce, and gave Wiley, as head of a new bureau of food and drug inspection, power to make sure the law was obeyed (but when it seemed that the bureau was going to ban saccharine, which Roosevelt took in his coffee, the obstreperous chemist was soon cut down to size). This Act, too, was supported by the big boys of American commerce, and opposed, naturally on high grounds of principle, by their smaller, weaker rivals, who made a good living out of selling worthless or even dangerous patent medicines
(such as Lydia Pinkham’s famous all-purpose cure) and tainted whisky. It too got a large Congressional majority.

The year 1906 was the
annus mirabilis
of Republican progressivism. The President was well satisfied with Congress, and he himself towered over the national scene. Not only had he sponsored much useful legislation; not only did he conduct the day-to-day business of government, its administration, with businesslike skill; not only did he, very occasionally and very warily, initiate a prosecution under the Sherman Act; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in helping Russia and Japan to end their war with each other by the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905. It was an optimistic time: everywhere serious reformers began to pluck up their hopes. Perhaps their moment was come at last.

If so, it seemed that they would have to find a fresh leader. By the end of his second term Roosevelt had shot dozens of bears; he had called a conservation conference at the White House in 1908 to publicize the need to husband America’s physical resources; he had shown off America’s fine new navy by sending it off to sail round the world; and he had co-operated with Morgan to overcome the panic of 1907 that had momentarily threatened progressive prosperity. These and his other achievements did not satisfy him, but he had given his word, all too flatly and publicly, on the night of his election in 1905: he would not seek a third term, dearly though he would have liked to keep his job, for he was only just fifty and felt as energetic as ever. At least he could, like Andrew Jackson again, choose his successor: William Howard Taft, who, thanks to Roosevelt’s warm backing, easily defeated Bryan’s last bid for the Presidency in 1908. His patron tactfully took himself off to Africa to slaughter animals, confident that he had left the country and the Republican party in good hands. He did not return for more than a year, and by the time he did so a great political storm was brewing.

Taft was an enormously fat man and had proved invaluable to Roosevelt in the various administrative posts he had occupied, such as Secretary of War. Apart from that he was noted for his legal learning, an attribute which would eventually carry him to the Chief Justiceship of the United States (1921-30) – the only ex-President ever to sit in the Supreme Court. At first he found it difficult to realize he was President, so much had Roosevelt dominated the office; and he does not seem to have expected to achieve very much: ‘this is a very humdrum administration’ he once remarked, not without satisfaction. But he was not yet an iron-bound reactionary, though he became one in his old age; in a sense he too was a progressive; he had a lawyer’s sense of duty and initiated far more anti-trust prosecutions than Roosevelt had done: it was he who broke up the Standard Oil Company, forcing it to dissolve into thirty-four separate organizations (John D. Rockefeller kept his large stake in all of them). But he was not a creative politician; not the man to take the lead and master events, or even his party; and it soon became clear that this ability to lead was just what was essential.

For the Republican party had been too successful. Its steady run of electoral victories had attracted to it a most heterogeneous range of supporters, and even before Roosevelt’s retirement they had begun to quarrel among themselves. There was the tariff, a subject which Roosevelt had prudently left alone. The hard core of the Republicans in Congress were as stoutly protectionist as ever; but many Senators and Congressmen, perhaps especially those from the Mid-West, felt that since the United States was now so prosperous and so clearly stronger than all its competitors, the time had come to lower the tariff somewhat and give American consumers the blessing of a lower cost of living. Andrew Carnegie said the same. The Democrats had always reasoned in this way. There was an almighty row in Congress, which Taft was unable to mediate successfully. Instead he took sides with the high-tariff men of the East, led by Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island and the Speaker, Joe Cannon of Illinois, who in this matter went against his own section. For the tariff of 1909 raised the rates on imported manufactured goods while lowering those on the raw materials produced in the Mid-West. This ‘eastern-made bill to protect eastern products’ was described by Taft in a speech in Minnesota as ‘the best bill that the Republican party ever passed’. Mid-Western Republicans felt betrayed.

Their indignation was strengthened by two other quarrels. Congress was now receiving recruits who had succeeded in politics by taking the liberal route in state and city affairs, often in the teeth of their local Republican machines. Men such as Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and Congressmen George Norris of Nebraska and Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa, brought with them to Congress the habits of insurgents (as they were soon to be named) and chafed against the rigid rule of the regular party leadership, which they saw as the mere tool of big business. They hoped, by overthrowing Speaker Cannon, to help clear the way for reforms, especially of the tariff, which they favoured; and at first it seemed that they would have Taft’s assistance. But the President eventually decided that Cannon was more of a help to him than a hindrance: a calculation that was soon exposed as faulty, for the Speaker did little to accommodate Taft’s views on legislation, while the insurgents, with Democratic help, succeeded in stripping him of many of the powers which Speakers had enjoyed over the House of Representatives ever since the days of Henry Clay. In the long run this weakening of the Speaker greatly helped Congressional conservatives, since his power fell into the hands of the chairmen of the various committees who, being chosen by seniority, tended to be old and stick-in-the-mud, when not downright reactionary; but it seemed a victory for progressivism at the time; and Taft had been on the wrong side of the fight.

Still more damaging was a breach that opened between Taft and Roosevelt. This was occasioned by Gifford Pinchot, the head of the US Forest Service, who in Roosevelt’s day had earned great applause by introducing strict measures of conservation (a word he claimed to have invented) in the
national domain. Pinchot was one of the first to perceive that America’s resources of timber and minerals would not last for ever, and he led a very successful campaign to curb the traditional energy with which Western entrepreneurs had exploited the new country. Almost 150 million acres were added to the government reserves of forty-five million acres, which did not make the Roosevelt administration particularly popular in the land-greedy Far West. Taft appointed a Western man, Richard A. Ballinger, formerly mayor of Seattle, to be Secretary of the Interior: he and Pinchot soon fell out. Pinchot behaved badly, and Taft supported the secretary against him, eventually dismissing the forester in January 1910. Pinchot rushed over to Europe to seek the aid of Theodore Roosevelt, who returned to America in June; Taft stuck to Ballinger; and before long ‘the Colonel’ (as he was universally known), who never got used to being an ex-President, had persuaded himself that in 1912 it would be his duty to the cause of progress to try to take the Republican nomination and the Presidency away from the man to whom he had given them.