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CHAPTER THREE

Of Theodore Roosevelt And his Time Volume 2

 THE PANIC OF 1907: 

duRing no other portion of his Presidential service was Roosevelt more fiercely assailed with hostile criticism than he- was in 1907. Early in that year signs were visible of serious financial disturbances, not only in the United States but in Europe. A formidable and concerted effort was made by the opponents of the President's policy in regard to railway and other corporations suspected of violations of law, to use those disturbances as an inducement for him to moderate that policy and to abandon temporarily legal proceedings that had been instituted under his direction. In his message to Congress in December, 1906, he had adhered steadfastly to his policy and had declared that while the powers conferred upon the Interstate Commerce Commission had been productive of excellent results, still there would ultimately be need of enlarging those powers along several different lines so as to give the Commission larger and more efficient control over the railroads. In November, 1906, the Government had brought suit against the Standard Oil Company as a combination in restraint of trade, and about the same time had begun an investigation of the Union Pacific or Harriman lines. Appeals for modification or temporary suspension or compromise poured in upon him from many sources, including persons who had hitherto upheld his course. Lifelong friends turned against him and joined the chorus of those who had been his most venomous assailants. The assaults upon him increased in ferocity when he refused to swerve a particle from his course. His letters at this time show that he was entirely unmoved by the appeals either of friends or of foes, because he was convinced absolutely of the justice and wisdom of his policy. From a large number of these letters, among the most earnest and convincing that he ever wrote, I select a few which are typical of all, beginning with one written on January 24, 1907, to Paul Morton, a former member of his Cabinet, and at the time President of the Equitable Life Insurance Company of New York:
"I suppose that your letter was really based upon this Harriman investigation. It would in my judgment be most undesirable for the ultimate good of the railways to interfere in any way with a full and fair investigation. However, I am certain that we have got to make up our minds that the railroads must not in the future do things that cannot bear the light. If trouble comes from having the light turned on, remember it is not really due to the light but the misconduct which it exposed.
"I quite agree with you that there is danger in ill-directed agitation, and especially in agitation in the States; but the only way to meet it is by having the fullest and most thorough investigation by the national government, and in conferring upon the national government full power to act. The federal authorities, including the President, must state as clearly as possible that railroads which do well are to be encouraged and when they make a good showing it is to be emphasized; and that the people who invest will be given a chance of profit which alone will make them willing to invest, and which alone will make big men willing to undertake the job.
"Do you ever see Judge Gary? He has assured us that the publicity given by the investigation of the national government to the steel corporation is welcome and will do good and not harm."
An appeal from an attorney in the employ of Harriman, on January 31, 1907, called forth a reply which is an admirable specimen of Roosevelt's thorough and direct method of dealing with charges of misconduct against his associates in the Government:
   
"Last winter you came to me on several occasions, some times with and sometimes without Mr. Harriman, assuring me that very grave errors and shortcomings existed in the work of the Interstate Commerce Commission, these being due primarily to the work of the statistician, Mr. Adams. The allegations made were so grave that I had both of you meet certain members of the Commission, on which occasion you stated that you would be able to get the Commission in possession of information, which would practically revolutionize much of the work they were doing, if you were given the chance to have access to their books. The Commission, at my request, gave you such access. You were engaged in the research last spring. When I returned to Washington last fall I heard from both Mr. Harriman and you on different occasions that you had found errors of the gravest and grossest character in the work of the statistician—errors which completely nullified and rendered valueless the work of the whole Commission.
'' The charges you had made and were then making were of so grave a character that I did not feel justified in failing to give you every opportunity to substantiate them; for of course there was nothing more important than to find out whether or not the work of the Interstate Commerce Commission was accurate and trustworthy. I endeavored to have Mr. Harriman state to me definitely what the charges were. You admitted that your only knowledge of the matter was from him. I found it almost impossible to pin him down to any definite statement; and finally, in view of the repeated statements of both you and himself that only experts could go into the matter, I appointed Mr. O. P. Austin to look into the charges. He reported to me that after careful examination of the charges as presented in the paper of Mr. Harriman, and of the reply of Professor Adams, he believed the charges were without foundation.
"You and Mr. Harriman insisted that Mr. Austin had erred, and you yourself suggested that I should have Mr. Neill and one or more bank examiners examine your charges. I summoned Mr. Harriman to meet me with Mr. Neill, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Adams. I spent an entire evening endeavoring to get Mr. Harriman to make specific charges, telling him that he had been many months at work and that it was out of the question for me any longer to accept general allegations or sweeping accusations without specific statements to back them up. It proved exceedingly difficult to pin him down to anything specific; but I finally did pin him down to three definite charges. I explained to him repeatedly that he must then and there make any charges he had to make; that it was impossible to take up the time of officers of the administration any longer with loose declarations and that I would consider nothing whatever save what charges he then and there presented; that I would have them tested by a commission consisting of Mr. Garfield, Mr. Neill, and a Mr. Starek, one of the best bank examiners in the Government service. The examination has been made and the charges of Mr. Harriman are found to be without any foundation whatever. Under the circumstances it would be simply folly for me to pay any further heed to any allegations whatever made in regard to the work of the Interstate Commerce Commission by either Mr. Harriman or you. The incident is closed and I shall forward a copy of this letter to the Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission."
A rather persistent appellant was Colonel Henry L. Higginson of Boston, to whom these two replies were sent:
February 11, 1907.
"The present unsatisfactory condition in railroad affairs is due ninety-five per cent to the misconduct, the short-sightedness, and the folly of the railroad men themselves. Unquestionably there is loose demagogic attack upon them in some of the States, but not one particle of harm has come to them by Federal action; on the contrary, merely good. I wish very much that our laws could be strengthened, and I think that the worst thing that could be done for the railroads would be an announcement that for two or three years the Federal Government would keep its hands off of them. It would result in a tidal wave of violent State action against them throughout three-fourths of this country. I am astonished at the curious shortsightedness of the railroad people—a short-sightedness which, thanks to their own action, extends to would-be investors. Legislation such as I have proposed, or whatever legislation in the future I shall propose, will be in the interest of honest investors and to protect the public and the investors against dishonest action.
"I may incidentally say that I think that no possible action on railroads would have as disturbing an effect upon business as action on the tariff at this time. I earnestly and cordially agree with you on the need of currency legislation, and have been doing all I can for it; but the big financial men of the country, instead of trying to get sound currency legislation, seem to pass their time in lamenting, as Wall Street laments, our action about the railroads."
March 28, 1907.
"... You say that the fear of investors in railway securities must be dispelled; and you say that the people now have the impression that the greatest business interests (those of railroads) are imperiled. I am inclined to think that this is the case. If so, the responsibility lies primarily and overwhelmingly upon the railway and corporation people—that is, the manipulators of railroad and other corporation stocks—who have been guilty of such scandalous irregularities during the last few years. Secondarily it lies, of course, with the agitators and visionaries to whom the misdeeds of the conscienceless speculators I have named gave the chance to impress the people as a whole. Not one word of mine; not one act, administrative or legislative, of the National Government, is responsible, directly or indirectly, in any degree whatsoever for the present situation. I trust I have stated this with sufficient emphasis, for it would be quite impossible to overemphasize it. Two years ago the railroads were all clamoring against the passage of the rate law—an act of folly on their part and on the part of their friends and abettors which can not be too harshly stigmatized. The one hope for the honest railroad man, for the honest investor, is in the extension and perfection of the system inaugurated by that law; in the absolute carrying out of the law at present and in its strengthening, if possible, at the next session of Congress so as to make it even more effective.
"I will not deviate one hand's breadth from the course I have marked out, and anything I may say will contain this explicit statement. Moreover, it is an act of sheer folly and short-sightedness on the part of the railway men not to realize that I am best serving their interests in following out precisely this course. I have never seen more foolish and hysterical speeches and acts than those of the so-called industrial leaders during the past few months. At one moment they yell that I am usurping the rights of the States. The next they turn around in literally a panic frenzy and beseech me to make some public utterances forbidding the States to do the very things they have just asserted the States alone had the power to do."
On March 12, J. Pierpont Morgan visited the White House and had a long interview with the President, giving out for publication afterwards a statement in which he said he "had suggested to the President that it would be greatly to the public interest if he would see the railway presidents and confer with them as to what steps might be taken to allay the public anxiety now threatening to obstruct railway investment and combination, and especially to allay public anxiety as to the relations between the railways and the Government. The President had said that he would be glad to see them with this end in view."
When this suggestion was communicated to the presidents of the great railway systems they said they would go to see the President if he would invite them to do so. This he declined to do. Finally, one of them, President Mellen of the New Haven system, alone went. Writing to Jacob Schiff of New York, March 28, 1907, the President explained his attitude on the subject:
"It is difficult for me to understand why there should be this belief in Wall Street that I am a wild-eyed revolutionist. I can not condone wrong, but I certainly do not intend to do aught save what is beneficial to the man of means who acts squarely and fairly. When I see you I will explain at length why I do not think it advantageous from any standpoint for me to ask any railroad man to call upon me. I can only say to you, as I have said to Mr. Morgan when he suggested that he would like to have certain of them call upon me (a suggestion which they refused to adopt, by the way), that it would be a pleasure to me to see any of them at any time. Sooner or later I think they will realize that in their opposition to me for the last few years they have been utterly mistaken, even from the standpoint of their own interests; and that nothing better for them could be devised than the laws I have striven and am striving to have enacted. I wish to do everything in my power to aid every honest business man, and the dishonest business man I wish to punish simply as I would punish the dishonest man of any type. Moreover, I am not desirous of avenging what has been done wrong in the past, especially when the punishment would be apt to fall upon innocent third parties. My prime object is to prevent injustice and work equity for the future.''
A leading figure in the assaults upon the President was E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific lines. On April 2, 1907, a discharged employee in the Harriman service published a letter written by Harriman in which Harriman asserted that the President in the campaign of 1904 had sought his aid in raising a $250,000 campaign fund to aid in Roosevelt's election to the Presidency. When this was published the President gave out to the press a letter that he had written on October 8, 1906, to the Hon. J. S. Sherman, who was then chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee, in which he had denied Harriman's assertion about the $250,000 campaign fund as "a deliberate and wilful untruth," and had stated in detail his relations with Harriman, giving the text of various letters that had passed between them. These showed conclusively that his communications with Harriman related solely to the State campaign in New York in 1904, and not at all to the Presidential campaign of that year. A phrase in one of the President's letters to Harriman—"You and I are practical men"—was seized upon by the President's regular opponents in and out of the press as evidence of guilty partisan complicity with Harriman and it was in quite constant use for many months, and spasmodically for years afterwards, though the context of the letter showed clearly that such an interpretation was distortion of the President's meaning.
Other letters revealing the calm he maintained under the fierce storm which raged about him are appended.
April 8, 1907. To Hon. T. M. Patterson, Denver, Colorado:
"The real trouble with Harriman and his associates is that they have found themselves absolutely powerless to control any action by the National Government. There is no form of mendacity or bribery or corruption that they will not resort to in the effort to take vengeance. The Harriman-Standard Oil combination and the other owners of predatory wealth hate me far more than they do those who make a profession of denouncing them, because they have learned that while I do not attack them in words as reckless as those often used against them, I do try to make my words bear fruit in deeds. They have never before been obliged really to reckon with the Federal Government. They have never before seen practical legislation such as the rate bill, the beef inspection bill and the like become laws. They have never before had to face the probability of adverse action by the courts and the possibility of being put in stripes. Such being the case, and inasmuch as they have no moral scruple of any kind whatsoever, it is not to be wondered at that they should be willing to go to any length in the effort to reverse the movement against them."
oysteR bay, August 16, 1907.

To President David Scull, Bryn Mawr College, Overbrook, Penn.:
"You have written frankly to me and you are entitled to frankness in return. You say that you have been a supporter of my course until within the last few days; but that you have now changed and are an opponent. You seem to think that your change is due to some change on my part; but as my attitude now is practically what it has been for the last six years it is perfectly obvious that the change is in you. You do not surprise me in the least when you tell me that many men have experienced such a change. The very word 'panic' denotes a fear so great as to make those who experience it to become for the time being crazy; and when crazy with fear men both say and do foolish things, and, moreover, always seek for some one to hold responsible for their sufferings—usually without any regard as to whether he is or is not responsible. At the time of the flurry in stocks last March I received hundreds of letters exactly like yours. I am receiving plenty of letters like it to-day. These good people are ignorant, as you evidently are, that the trouble we have had here has been paralleled by similar troubles on the bourses in Berlin and Paris; they are ignorant, as you evidently are, that British consols are now selling lower than ever before in their history, and that the railway securities in England and Canada have also fallen, altho not to the same degree as ours. Surely, you can hardly believe that all this is due to my action in enforcing the law against wealthy wrongdoers.
"That some trouble has been caused by the action I have taken against great and powerful malefactors, I have no doubt; and in any such case there are always people of little faith who at once scream in favor of a continuance of corruption and dishonesty rather than see any unsettlement of values because of the enforcement of the principles of honesty. I shall pay no heed whatever to these people, whose attitude I regard as profoundly foolish and profoundly immoral. In other words, their attitude is precisely like that of a man who, having a cancer which can be cured by the use of the knife, nevertheless screams and refuses to submit to an operation because he knows that there will be temporary pain and discomfort.
"You say that there should be 'severe proceedings against' and 'punishment of a few prominent financiers. You describe exactly the action I have been taking. Do you suppose that Mr. Rockefeller is giving out interviews denouncing me because of his altruistic devotion to small outsiders? Certainly not; he has been attacking me because he has been hurt; and because he believes that by working on your fears he can count upon the support of you and men like you. You protest against my policy of 'prosecuting the railroads where evidences of criminal action on their part is obtained,' on the ground that, as you say, I have made no effort to show the 'limitations' of my 'intended course.' You might just as well ask a district attorney to make a statement as to the 'limitations' of his 'intended prosecutions' against liquor sellers who are guilty of illegal conduct. If people will obey the law they can count on my doing all I can to further their interests, but I will no more countenance crimes of greed and cunning by men of property than crimes of brutality and violence against property.
"Let me in closing point out that when you advocate, as you do in your letter to me, a policy of connivance at or condonation of law-breaking by men of wealth on my part, you advocate precisely the principles which have made certain corrupt political organizations in our cities by-words among the people, and you put yourself upon the level of politicians who have controlled them. How you can reconcile such an attitude with that of teaching young Americans respect for law and for proper ideals of justice, I am wholly unable to understand. But, this being your attitude, you are quite right in assailing me; for during the closing year and a half of my term I shall follow precisely the course I have followed during the last six years. I shall enforce the laws; I shall enforce them against men of vast wealth just exactly as I enforce them against ordinary criminals; and I shall not flinch from this course, come weal come woe."
December 1, 1907. To Dr, Alexander Lambert, New York:
"... Perhaps you remember the incident of a delegation of extreme antislavery people calling on Lincoln to get him to take some action which he could not take and which they said would bring the war to a successful conclusion. They warned him that the war would be a failure if he did not take this action, and that he would be responsible for the failure. He answered that whether he was or was not responsible for the failure, he knew that he would be held responsible. Of course the same thing is true now. Whether I am or am not in any degree responsible for the panic, I shall certainly be held responsible. At present most of those who hold me responsible are people who are bitterly against me anyhow; but of course the feeling will spread to those who have been my friends, because when the average man loses his money he is simply like a wounded snake and strikes right and left at anything, innocent or the reverse, that presents itself as conspicuous in his mind.
"Whether I can do anything to allay the panic I do not know. All the reactionaries wish to take advantage of the moment by having me announce that I will abandon my policies, at least in effect. Inasmuch as I believe that these policies are absolutely necessary, I shall not abandon them no matter what may be the stress for the time being. The big financial men, moreover, seize the occasion to try to escape from all governmental control, and believe they can now thus escape. My judgment is more firmly than ever that they must be brought under control, and that the only way to free them from the undesirable control of the States is to secure a more adequate control on the part of the nation. The situation is unpleasant and perplexing. I shall do my best to meet the needs of the hour, but I shall not do it in a way that will work harm in the future; and if I must choose between a temporary good and the ultimate good, my choice must necessarily be the latter."
November 8, 1907. To Mr. Ansley Wilcox, Buffalo, N. T.:
"You say that many of your friends 'are feeling keenly that there is much truth in what Shepard said in his recent Brooklyn speech.' This gives me a very vivid idea of the mischief that can be done by deliberate mendacity such as Edward M. Shepard has been guilty of in misleading men as good as yourself. You probably know Mr. Shepard, and you are quite welcome to show him this letter. In the speech in question he was guilty of wilful misrepresentation. I do not mean that he was merely guilty of untruth; I mean that he was guilty of deliberate and wilful untruth, either intentionally, or with a reckless disregard of facts which he could easily have found out, which puts his conduct in no better light. I am not speaking of what were merely matters of opinion on the part of Mr. Shepard. I am speaking of him where he said:
" 'But when a man is charged with enormous responsibilities, whose duty it is not to speak until he knows that he can make good, when such a man goes over the country, with every ear open to his words, and charges men of wealth and standing with crimes, saying that almost every captain of industry should be behind the bars, his words have a much greater effect than if he were a mere private citizen.
" 'And when he, from the White House, says that he will send from ten to fifty capitalists to jail, he attacks the very center of our confidence in our institutions.'
"Now, I call your attention to the fact that in this utterance he first of all says that it is my duty, the duty of the President, not to speak until I know, and not to make charges until I can make them good. In this Mr. Shepard is quite right; and the duty is as obligatory upon him, a lawyer, who ought to know something of evidence, something about criminal libel. Yet in this very same sentence where he says this as to my duty, he goes on to speak about what he does not know, or else what he knows to be untrue, and to make charges which he either knows or ought to know that he can not make good. He says in this sentence that I have been saying 'that almost every captain of industry should be behind the bars.' I have never said any such thing, and he either knows it or ought to know it. In the next sentence he says that I have said that I 'would send from ten to fifty capitalists to jail.' I have never said such a thing, and he either knows it or ought to know it. When Mr. Shepard makes such statements as these he is guilty of deliberate and wilful untruth.
"The trouble has come, my dear Mr. Wilcox, primarily, because of what certain big financiers did in the speculative spirit; secondarily, because the movement which I started has resulted in the uncovering of this rascality a year or two sooner than it would otherwise have been discovered; and in the third place, because papers like the Sun, Times, and Harper's Weekly, read by the financial classes and I believe financed by them also, the individuals like Shepard, in the effort to attack me, continually and habitually not merely misquote what I say, but deliberately invent statements which I have never uttered, and attribute to me an attitude which I have never held. They may have hurt me a little by this; but the people they have really damaged are the members of the business community whom they have persuaded to believe that I am attacking all wealth, preaching hostility against all rich men, and failing to discriminate between rich men who are honest and rich men who are dishonest.
"I am well aware how difficult it is to get people to understand what is said or to read what is said, but remember that it is not the 'yellow press' which is responsible in this matter. The yellow press has endeavored to misrepresent me by stating that I have not gone far enough in attacking the dishonest rich. It is the so-called conservative press, the capitalist press, that has misrepresented me by stating that I have gone too far."
November 12, 1907. To the Hon. Thomas E. Watson, Thomson, Georgia:
"In the first place, my dear sir, I trust I need hardly assure you that I shall not 'surrender' to the bankers, or to any one else, and there will be no 'secret midnight conferences' with any big financier, or any one else. I have not seen Mr. Morgan, but I intend to see him soon, and he will  call at the White House just as openly as Mr. Gompers did the other day, just as openly as he has called in the past, and just as openly as Mr. Gompers and his associates have more often called in the past. I know I have your hearty support in the proposition that the doors of the White House swing open with equal readiness to capitalist and wage-worker, to the head of a great corporation or a union, to the man who is neither—all shall have a fair hearing from me, and none shall exert any influence save that their case, openly stated and openly repeated, warrants.''
November 16, 1907. To Douglas Robinson, New York City:
"Of course I am gravely harassed and concerned over the situation. Every kind of suggestion is made to me, almost always impractically. I am doing everything I have power to do; but the fundamental fact is that the public is suffering from a spasm of lack of confidence. Most of this lack of confidence is absolutely unreasonable, and therefore we can do nothing with it. There is a part for which there is substantial basis, however. There has been so much trickery and dishonesty in high places; the exposures about Harriman, Rockefeller, Heinze, Barney, Morse, Ryan, the insurance man, and others, have caused such a genuine shock to people that they have begun to be afraid that every bank really has something rotten in it. In other words, they have passed thru the period of unreasoning trust and optimism into unreasoning distrust and pessimism.
'' I shall do everything I can up to the very verge of my power to restore confidence, to give the banks a chance to get currency into circulation. Whether I can accomplish what I seek to do I can not say. Of course if I do not I shall be held responsible for the conditions. As a matter of fact, the growth of the speculative spirit and the scandalous dishonesty among some high financiers combined, made it absolutely certain that we would come a cropper. I am inclined to think that the exposures which were largely the result of the policies I inaugurated brought this cropper sooner than we otherwise should have had it, but I am also very certain that it was bound to come in a year or two, and that it would have been far more severe if it had been held off. But if it comes we may as well make up our minds to the fact that for the time being at any rate, and perhaps permanently, I will be blamed and that the administration will be held to have gone out under a cloud. Yet there is nothing that I have done that I would not do over again, and I am absolutely positive that the principles which I have sought to enforce are those that must obtain if this Government is to endure. But, as you say, the very people whom I have been seeking to protect by exposing what is rotten in trusts and railroads, when the dinner pail becomes empty will feel they would rather have full dinner pails, and watered stocks and other things against which they used to declaim, rather than to go thru the period of discomfort when readjustment takes place. Poor fellows! I do not blame them."
November 23, 1907. To Hamlin Garland, New York City:
"When hard times come it is inevitable that the President under whom they come should be blamed. There are foolish people who supported me because we had heavy crops; and there are now foolish people who oppose me because extravagant speculations, complicated here and there with dishonesty, have produced the inevitable reaction. It is just the kind of incident upon which one must count. It may produce a temporary setback for my policies in either one of two ways; that is in securing the election as my successor of a reactionary or of some good man who will be the tool of reactionaries; or else thru having the pendulum swing with violence the other way, so that my successor as a wild radical will bring utter discredit on the reforms by attempting to do too much, and especially by doing a number of things that ought not to be done, thereby ensuring a real reaction.
"But I am perfectly certain that in the end the Nation will have to come to my policies, or substantially to my policies, simply because the Republic can not endure unless the governmental actions are founded on these policies, for they represent nothing whatever but aggressive honesty and fair treatment for all—not make-believe fair treatment, but genuine fair treatment. I do not think that my policies had anything to do with producing the conditions which brought on the panic; but I do think that very possibly the assaults and exposures which I made, and which were more or less successfully imitated in the several States, have brought on the panic a year or two sooner than would otherwise have been the case. The panic would have been infinitely worse, however, had it been deferred.
"As for the New York financiers, their hangers-on, the innocent men whom they have deceived, or who follow them and the newspapers that they own or inspire, why, I have to expect that these people will attack me. Their hostility toward me is fundamental. I neither respect nor admire the huge moneyed men to whom money is the be-all and the end-all of existence; to whom the acquisition of untold millions is the supreme goal of life, and who are too often utterly indifferent as to how these millions are obtained. I thoroughly believe that the first duty of every man is to earn his own living, to pull his own weight, to support his own wife and family; but after this has been done, and he is able to keep his family according to his station and according to the tastes that have become a necessity to him, then I despise him if he does not treat other things as of more importance in his scheme of life than mere money getting; if he does not care for art, or literature, or science, or statecraft, or warcraft, or philanthropy—in short for some form of service to his fellows, for some form of the kind of life which is alone worth living."
November 26, 1907.
To  Mr.  W.  A.   White, Editor,  The  Gazette,  Emporia, Kansas:
"... It is to be expected as a matter of course that the corporation judge, the corporation senator and ex-senator, the big corporation attorney, the newspaper owned in or controlled from Wall Street will attack me. I should be very foolish if I expected anything else; I should be still more foolish if I were greatly disturbed over the attacks. If there is much depression, if we meet hard times, then a great number of honest and well-meaning people will gradually come to believe in the truth of these attacks, and I shall probably end my term of service as President under a more or less dark cloud of obloquy. If so, I shall be sorry, of course; but I shall neither regret what I have done nor alter my line of conduct in the least degree, nor yet be unduly cast down.
"As far as I am personally concerned, I am well ahead of the game, whatever happens. I have had an exceedingly good time; I have been exceedingly well treated by the American people; and I have enjoyed the respect of those for whose respect I care most. If for a moment I have to go under a cloud, why, it is all in the game. I am as sure as man can be of anything that I have been following the course which the best interests of this country demand; and tinder such circumstances, if I had known that the obloquy were to be permanent I should still not have altered this course. But I do not believe that it will be permanent, because I do not believe that there can be a permanent deviation from the lines of policy along which I have worked —that is, if the Republic is to endure at all. If there is such permanent deviation I shall esteem the calamity so great that any thought of my own reputation in the matter will be entirely swallowed up."
November 27, 1907.
To Lawrence F. Abbott, The Outlook, New York.
"I have been much amused by the decision of the State Court of Appeals in the recount bill. This was purely a personal measure of Governor Hughes'. While I did not think it the wise way to get at what he sought, and while both Root and I had advised against it, still I sympathized so thoroughly with his purpose that I hoped the bill would be declared constitutional. Root had said all along that it could not be so declared. Think of the yell that would have gone up from the capitalist press of New York City if any similar measure of mine had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the Nation!
"As you say, it is rather curious to realize that there are good men who actually do believe that I have been violating the law and the Constitution. They are usually somewhat puzzle-headed, as I found in talking to one of the most eminent bankers in New York the other day, who spoke of my 'illegal actions' not exactly with severity but with sorrow. I questioned him as to the illegal action in question, and found that what he meant was that I had been carrying on suits against Harriman and the Standard Oil Company ! Mind you, this man was not an exception. When the Sun, the Times, the Evening Post, Harper's Weekly, the New York Herald, the New York World, and company, denounce me as doing something unconstitutional, they mean that I have succeeded in getting through laws which have been declared by the Supreme Court to be constitutional, and when they denounce my 'illegal actions' they usually refer to a lawsuit which has been begun by the Department of Justice.
"I enclose you a most striking decision which has just been rendered by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. You will see that this decision takes exactly the view which I have taken about the power of the Government under the interstate commerce act, and it even goes a little further than what I have said went, although not further than I implied. This again makes rather ridiculous the attitude of the worthy people who have spoken of me as trying to usurp powers on behalf of the Federal Government. The great measure of my administration as Governor was the franchise tax. It was far more bitterly fought than the public utilities bill; and, mind you, it broke ground for the first time in New York in dealing with these big corporations, and it has been declared constitutional by the highest court in the land. So it is with the measures I have succeeded in getting through Congress while I have been President."