Roosevelt as President

ROOSEVELT AS PRESIDENT President McKinley was shot in Buffalo on Sept. 6, 190i, and died Sept. 14. On the same day Theodore Roosevelt took the oath as president of the United States. His sudden accession to power caused a flutter of apprehension in the ranks of what was known as "Big Business." The new president was, as a matter of fact, by nature a conservative, but he wore his conserva tism with a difference, standing as far removed from the re actionary position of men like Platt and Hanna, as he was from the radicalism of Bryan. He recognized what many of the spokes men of capital refused to recognize, that true conservatism demanded a just re-appraisal of industrial and economic condi tions and prompt, far-reaching remedial action. On Feb. 18, 1902, he threw what was in effect a bomb into the financial world, when he announced through his attorney general, Philander C. Knox, that he had brought suit in behalf of the United States for the dissolution of a holding corporation known as the Northern Securities Company. The announcement caused con sternation among such financiers as J. P. Morgan, Edward H. Har riman and James J. Hill. The holding company was a device designed by shrewd legal minds to evade the restrictions of the Sherman anti-Trust act of 1890, and was generally regarded as impregnable. In the Knight case (1895) involving the American Sugar Refining Company, the Supreme Court had, in fact, held that Congress was without constitutional power to forbid it.

Campaign Against Financial Interests.

When Roosevelt came to the presidency, the average American was moving rapidly toward the cynical conclusion that there was one law for the corporations and another for the individual; one law for the rich, another for the poor. The corporations carried on their existence in a kind of "twilight zone" between State and Federal authority, where neither seemed able to reach them; and when finally a body so revered and so obviously incorruptible as the Supreme Court admitted that Congress was powerless to check the growth and extension of the power of organized wealth, the common man began to wonder whether he would have to seek a corrective which other peoples had found effective. "The

United States," said the New York World years later, "was never closer to a social revolution than at the time Roosevelt became president." Roosevelt, made aware of the danger first by the campaign of 1896, recognized that the fundamental principles of democratic government—equal justice and national solidarity— were being undermined and that on the outcome of the struggle between the financial powers and the government depended the future vitality of American Government. His vision and courage were vindicated by the courts which he had invoked. On April 9, 1903, the U.S. circuit court, sitting at St. Louis, ordered the dissolution of the Northern Securities Company; and on March 14, 1904, the Supreme Court affirmed the decree.

The anthracite coal strike in 1902 brought the menace of popu lar unrest to the surface. The miners, under the leadership of John Mitchell, were insistent in their demands ; the operators led by J. P. Morgan and George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway, were obdurate. Roosevelt for the first time asserted the right of the President to act as representative of the public in an industrial dispute. The miners agreed to arbitrate, but the operators were indignant at the President's "interference" in what they regarded as their private concern Roosevelt saw clearly what the operators failed to see, that the labour problem had entered upon a new phase ; that the growth of industry necessitated a new approach to the questions affecting it; that the public was in no mood to suffer for the inability of the opera tors to recognize the parity of human rights with the rights of property, and that in a winter of coal famine lay the possible beginnings of irreparable discontent. After a long-drawn struggle he succeeded in impressing these views upon the operators.