Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

He sat alone on the passenger seat, shrouded against splashes of mud in a borrowed raincoat several sizes too big.

Aging and increasingly hypochondriachal, Hay had once worked for Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, and seen them both assassinated. This third assassination, compounded by the recent death of his own son, was enough to extinguish all desire to go on living in an alien century.

Although his physical courage was by now legendary, it was not a natural endowment. He had been a timid child in New York City, cut off from schoolboy society by illness, wealth, and private tutors. Inspired by a leonine father, he had labored with weights to build up his strength. Simultaneously, he had built up his courage “by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” With every ounce of new muscle, with every point scored over pugilistic, romantic, and political rivals, his personal impetus (likened by many observers to that of a steam train) had accelerated.

THE PRESIDENT DIED AT TWO-FIFTEEN THIS MORNING Looking suddenly worn and weary, he pocketed the paper and strode across the wet platform. A private car was ready for him. He darted up the steps, turned, and waved once.

Three years of experience had taught him that his boss was always in a hurry.

Theodore Roosevelt, was the youngest man ever called upon to preside over the United States—itself the youngest of the world powers. The double symbolism was pleasing.

No Vice President succeeding to the presidency through death had yet won another term in his own right.

predicted that John Hay would resign as Secretary of State, followed by Treasury Secretary Lyman J. Gage. Roosevelt did not like this forecast.

Roosevelt knew little about money—it was one of the few subjects that bored him—but even he could see that one false move this weekend might bring about a real panic on Monday.

Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character.

reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own;

Roosevelt was to receive worldwide praise for his few words.

He struggled to reconcile his love of strong language with the need for dignified expression. It had always been thus with him: conflict between belligerence and civilized restraint, between animal brutality and human decency, between pessimism and optimism, or, as his perceptive friend Owen Wister put it, “between

He managed to look solemn on the way to Milburn House, but his mind was seething with politics.

Roosevelt had long since perfected the art of manipulating newspapermen.

Neither man could then quit without appearing disloyal to Roosevelt, and to the unfinished agenda of William McKinley. Roosevelt’s move was well-timed.

The United States was already so rich in goods and services that she was more self-sustaining than any industrial power in history. Indeed, it could consume only a fraction of what it produced.

More than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil flowed from the American cornucopia, and at least one third of all steel, iron, silver, and gold. Even if the United States were not so blessed with raw materials, the excellence of her manufactured products guaranteed her dominance of world markets.

As a result of this billowing surge in productivity, Wall Street was awash with foreign capital.

New York City seemed destined to replace London as the world’s financial center. It was hard to believe that the United States had struggled out of a depression only five years before. Prosperity was everywhere for Roosevelt to see—if not through drawn blinds at the moment, then memorably on his recent trip to Minnesota.

EMPTY LAKESIDE LAND BEGAN to roll by. Roosevelt relaxed with the morning newspapers. Almost every editor in the country, it seemed, approved of his promise to continue “unbroken” the policies of President McKinley.

listening to the sound of a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Much as Roosevelt coveted the respect of Grand Army veterans, he knew they would never love him as they had loved his predecessor. McKinley had marched with them at Antietam,

The old soldiers remained fiercely opposed to expansionism. They asked how a nation that had won its own independence in a colonial war could force dependence upon others. They rejected McKinley’s assurance, “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind.”

As yet this anti-imperialist lobby remained a minority, but its numbers

were growing, and its propaganda was powerful. Roosevelt could see the day when it might p...

Those simple words introduced a new concept—un-American to some—of privilege in commerce, bestowing rewards upon the large at the expense of the small.

But it was followed, over the years, by sophisticated arrangements to the same effect. Standard Oil had engulfed its smaller rivals, while the Pennsylvania Railroad made similar deals with other industries,

Presidents Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley paid little attention to the phenomenon of Combination. To them, it seemed a natural economic trend. If industries produced vital supplies, if railroads functioned as semipublic utilities, why restrict their profitable development? Only slowly, and locally, had ordinary Americans—workers, consumers, and small businessmen—begun to feel the “dark power” growing. For Combination’s irresistible tendency was toward Monopoly; and whatever corporate executives might say about increased efficiency and reduced waste, the historic inclination of Monopoly was to raise prices and lower wages.

It reorganized its component corporations into a “trust,” whereby all stocks were delivered to an independent board, which then operated the entire combination in unison. Congress had no power to quash this move. Within nine years, John D. Rockefeller had “entrusted” himself with 90 percent of the oil-refining business of the United States.

The proliferation evoked an image,

in many minds, of a constrictive organism stretching out to every extremity of American civilization. Hence the title of Frank Norris’s new antitrust novel: The Octopus.

Ideologically, Roosevelt was committed to a conservative view of the trusts. Personally, he felt a certain ambivalence. He saw “grave dangers” in unrestricted combination, yet he could not deny that the economy functioned better now that the trusts were, in effect, running it.

According to a recent survey, at least 65 percent of the national wealth was attributable to the trusts. That statistic did not even include the newest and most gigantic combination of all, Andrew Carnegie’s merger of his steel company with nine others.

train moved on, but the singing did not. Thousands

But the President was not looking for sympathy. “I need your advice and counsel,” he said. He also needed their resignations, but for legal reasons only. Every man must accept reappointment. “I cannot accept a declination.” This assertion of authority went unchallenged.

He interrupted them often with questions, and they were astonished by the rapidity with which he embraced and sorted information. His curiosity and apparent lack of guile charmed them. The President’s hunger for intelligence did not diminish as the day wore on.

By Monday morning, Roosevelt had calmed down enough to perform his duties with dignity and dispatch. “Here is the task,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. “I have got to do it to the best of my ability; and that is all there is about it. I believe,”

Official Washington smiled as more children and more animals joined the Roosevelt menagerie. The White House police were particularly disarmed,

WHEN SENATORS RECONVENED on 5 June, they were surprised to find the chamber festooned with maps and diagrams. One twenty-foot projection, hanging from the visitors’ gallery, showed red and black dots splotching Central America. The dots represented volcanoes, active and extinct. Those in red were lined up mainly with Nicaragua. Panama was dot-free.

The chamber settled down to being informed rather than entertained. Not for Hanna the old-fashioned eloquence of Senator

Data, not dramatics, would get him the ten further votes he needed. “I was once,” he admitted, “in favor of the Nicaragua Canal.” But after two years of reflection, “I have been forced by stubborn facts and conditions to change my mind.” For the next one and a half hours, Hanna funneled his “stubborn facts” like wheat into the Senate granary. Every dry grain had its kernel of persuasion. “The Panama route is forty-nine miles long, as against one hundred eighty-three miles of the Nicaragua.… Trade winds blow every day in the year from sixteen to twenty knots across the Nicaragua route.… The annual cost of operating the Nicaragua Canal is one million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or, say one million, three hundred—” “Oh, do make him sit down,” came a woman’s voice from the gallery. It was a cry of concern more than boredom: Hanna’s arthritis was visibly tormenting him. He said that he would conclude his speech the next day.

HANNA RESUMED HIS speech as soon as the Senate reopened for business on Friday, 6 June. Pointing to the splotched volcanic map, he said he wished to discuss “the burning question” of igneous activity in the Caribbean region. Just the previous month, Mont Pelée in Martinique had erupted, killing forty thousand people. Panama was “exempt” from this kind of danger. Not so Nicaragua, which lay along an almost continuously volcanic tract extending northwest from Costa Rica. Senator Morgan’s canal would cut straight across that tract—“probably the most violently eruptive of any in the Western Hemisphere.” Mount Momotombo, a hundred miles from the proposed route, had blown up only two months prior to Pelée. Had it done so

with equal force, it would have precipitated “enough cinders and lava … to fill up the basin of Lake Managua.” For another hour, Hanna cited alarming seismological, social, and navigational evidence against Nicaragua. Even as he spoke, Mont Pelée was erupting again. Reports of his speech in the evening newspapers jostled news of sky-darkening clouds and six-foot fluctuations of sea level.

Had they been able to look over his shoulder, they would have seen that he was merely doodling the names of his children, over and over again.

For a quarter of a century, environmental pioneers had urged the construction of vast irrigation systems to collect and distribute Western floodwaters. John Wesley Powell and WJ McGee noted that the arid lands thus reclaimed—one third of the total area of the United States—could be sold to farmers and ranchers, and the profits recycled for further reclamation. But Congress had responded with unenforceable public land laws, allowing a “water monopoly” to grow up in the West. This combination levied extortionate rates where supply was meager, and dried out established communities in order to irrigate speculative tracts elsewhere.

Cannon ignored Roosevelt’s letter, but a majority of the House, responding to strong White House pressure, voted in favor of the bill. The Senate followed suit. On 17 June 1902, Roosevelt delightedly signed the National Reclamation Act into law.

Mark Hanna praised the act as Theodore Roosevelt’s first major legislative achievement, and said that its importance would grow with the years. “People have not paid much attention to this business.… It’s a damn big thing.”

By a margin of 44 to 34, the Senate also approved the Spooner Amendment. Theodore Roosevelt, nine months President of the United States, was handed power to join the world’s largest oceans.

Exultant, he forecast that the Panama Canal would be “the great bit of work of my administration, and from the material and constructive standpoint one of the greatest bits of work that the twentieth century will see.”