THE "MUCK-RAKERS"
Before Roosevelt was inaugurated for his second term, the national
"revival," in which he and Bryan and other preachers of civic virtue had
played the speaking parts, was sweeping over the country. The menace of
the trusts was seen and exaggerated as railways, corporations, and labor
availed themselves of the means of cooperation. The connection between
the great financial interests and politics was believed to be dangerous
to public welfare. All the mechanical reforms for the recovery of
government by the people, that had been originated between 1889 and
1897, were revived once more, and there was added to confidence in them
a widespread belief in the existence of a malevolent, plundering class.
It was not enough that the trust movement should be explained as an
unavoidable development from modern communication. It was believed to
constitute more than an economic evolution. The public was prone to
place an ethical responsibility upon an individual or groups of
individuals, and there came a series of revelations or exposures that
appeared, in part, to fix the blame. All the old uprisings against
boss-rule were revivified, and capitalistic control was placed upon the
Index.
Miss Ida M. Tarbell, an historical student who had gained an audience
through popular and discriminating lives of Napoleon and Lincoln,
published a history of the Standard Oil Company in _McClure's Magazine_
during 1903. She showed conclusively the connection between
transportation and monopoly in the oil industry, revealing the mastery
of the tools of transportation, by rebates, by control of tank cars, or
by pipe lines, that had enabled John D. Rockefeller to establish his
great trust. She showed also the unlovely methods of competition, long
common to all business, but magnified by their use in the hands of a
monopoly to establish itself. "What we are witnessing," wrote Washington
Gladden a little later, "is a new apocalypse, an uncovering of the
iniquity of the land.... We have found that no society can march
hellward faster than a democracy under the banner of unbridled
individualism."
Three years before Miss Tarbell displayed the tendency of the trusts,
President Hadley, of Yale, had suggested that social ostracism, or
social stigma, might be made an efficient tool for reform. Other writers
used the tool. Lincoln Steffens, in a series of articles on "The Shame
of the Cities," exposed the connection between graft and politics.
Thomas Lawson, with spectacular exaggeration, laid the troubles of
society at the feet of "Frenzied Finance." _Collier's Weekly_ undertook
to reveal the worthlessness and fraud in the trade in patent medicines.
Many of the exposers encroached upon the fields of fiction in their
work, while books of avowed fiction exploited the conditions they
portrayed. _Coniston_, by Winston Churchill, was based upon the control
of a State by a railroad boss. Upton Sinclair wrote _The Jungle_ to
expose the meat-packers.
A new journalism aided and was aided by the zeal to expose and the greed
of the public for literature of exposure. In the later nineties city
journalism was reorganized under the influence of the "yellow" papers,
and sensational news was made a profitable commodity as never before.
The range of the daily paper was, however, limited by a few hundred
miles, and its influence could not become national. A new periodical
literature, resembling the old literary monthlies, but using many timely
and journalistic articles, sprang into life and gained national
circulation and influence. S.S. McClure was one of its pioneers.
_Everybody's_, the _Cosmopolitan_, _Munsey's_, the _American_, and
weeklies like _Collier's_, the _Outlook_, and the _Independent_ were
among the journals that helped to spread the conclusions and advocate
reforms. Besides these a horde of imitators fattened for a time upon
exposure.
Journalism had a large part in directing the American revival, and
private investigators furnished many of the facts. Public suits marked
an attempt to act upon the facts and remedy them. In Missouri Joseph W.
Folk conducted a series of prosecutions against grafters in St. Louis
that elevated him in a few months to the head of his party and the
governorship of his State. The Bureau of Corporations, attached to the
new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, made a series of reports
the most notable of which showed that the charges against the Standard
Oil Company for extorting rebates, and against the meat-packers for
unsanitary conditions, were founded upon fact.
The most notable public exposure of indiscretion and wrongdoing in high
finance occurred in New York. Here, during 1905, a quarrel over the
management of the Equitable Life Insurance Company led to a legislative
investigation by a so-called Armstrong Committee. One of the attorneys
employed by the committee, Charles E. Hughes, soon became the spirit of
the examination. One by one he called insurance officers to the witness
stand, and drew from their reluctant lips the story of their relation to
banking, to speculative finance, and to politics. He revealed the
existence of a group among the bankers not unlike a money trust. He
proved that for at least three national campaigns the insurance
companies, like other corporations, had given heavy subsidies to the
campaign funds, sometimes of both but always of the Republican party.
Whenever an investigator rose above the level and established his
reputation for honesty and competence, the aroused public seized upon
him for use in politics. In September, 1906, the Democrats of New York
nominated the most successful of the sensational journalists, Hearst,
for governor. On the same day the Republican Convention, in which no
delegate had been instructed for him, nominated Hughes as governor of
New York, because public opinion in the party would take no other
candidate. Hughes was elected in 1906 and again in 1908, in spite of the
hostility of Republican party leaders. His administrations were
prophetic of the new spirit that was entering politics.
Many of the problems raised by the investigations were old and presented
only a need for an honest enforcement of the law against law-breakers.
Others were simple and prescribed their own methods of treatment. The
evil of corporation contributions to campaign funds was met in 1907 by a
law forbidding national banks to contribute to any election, or any
corporations to contribute to a presidential or congressional election.
In 1906 the gift of free railroad passes upon interstate railroads was
prohibited by law. The presidential candidates in 1908 pledged
themselves to publicity in the matter of contributions, while the
complaints of poverty-stricken campaign managers in 1908 and 1912
indicated that the laws were generally obeyed. Still other problems
raised large questions of scientific investigation and legislation.
The reaction from the carelessness revealed by the investigation of the
meat-packers stimulated a pure-food movement that had had its advocates
for many years. With the concentration of food manufacture and the
increase in the consumption of "package products," the consumer had
given up the preparation of his own food and thrown himself upon the
dealer. The numerous domestic industries typical of the American family
in 1880 had been sorted out. The sewing had gone to the sweat shop and
the factory, the baking had gone to the public baker, the laundry was
going, the killing and preservation of meat and the preparation of
canned vegetables and fruits were nearly gone. Population followed the
industries to work in the factories. Country life lost much of its
variety and interest, while the congested masses in the cities were made
dependent for their health and strength upon private initiative.
Rigorous bills for the inspection of meats at the slaughter houses, and
for the proper labeling of manufactured foods and medicines, were
carried through Congress in 1906 on the strength of the popular
revulsion against the manufacturers. Hereafter the Department of
Agriculture stood between the people and their food. James Wilson, of
Iowa, had been Secretary since 1897 and remained in the office until
1913. He and his subordinates, notably Dr. Harvey Wiley, in charge of
the pure-food work, administered the law amid the proddings of consumers
and the protests of manufacturers. With much complaint, but with little
difficulty because of the consolidation of control, business adjusted
itself to the new requirements and labels in the next few years.
The anti-railroad movement reminded the public that the Interstate
Commerce Law of 1887 was an imperfect statute. It had always done less
than its framers had intended. Judicial interpretation had limited its
scope. The commission did not have power to fix a rate or to compel in
the railroads the uniformity of bookkeeping without which no scientific
rates could be established. After Roosevelt had directed his speeches of
1903 and 1904 to the subject, Congress responded to the public interest
thus aroused with a flood of projected railroad bills. One of these
passed the House of Representatives in 1905, but was held up in the
Senate while a new investigation of interstate commerce, the most
exhaustive since the Cullom investigation of 1885, was undertaken. In
1906 the Hepburn Railway Bill was passed. In its chief provisions it
gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power to fix rates and to
prescribe uniform bookkeeping, and it forbade railways to issue free
passes or to own the freight they carried. The long railroad debate was
made notable by the speeches of a new Senator, Robert M. LaFollette, of
Wisconsin, who had fought his way to the governorship on this issue and
gone through a prolonged fight with the railroads of his own State. He
insisted that public rate-making could not succeed without a preliminary
physical valuation of the roads that would show the extent of their real
capitalization. He talked, often, to empty chairs in the Senate, but he
prophesied that the people had a new interest in their affairs, and that
many of the seats, vacant because of the indifference of their owners,
would soon be filled with Senators of a new type. In vacations he spoke
to public audiences on the same subject, reading his "roll-call," and
telling the people how their representatives voted for or against
commercial privilege. With its enlarged powers the Interstate Commerce
Commission made rapid headway against rebates and discrimination.
The popular revival was well advanced by 1905, but was becoming more
sensational every month. Led on by an expectant public, the magazines
manufactured exposures to supply the market, and hysteria often took the
place of investigation. The real needs of reform were in danger of
being lost in a flood of denunciation. In the spring of 1906 President
Roosevelt spoke out to check the indiscriminate abuse. He drew his topic
from Bunyan's "Man with the Muck-Rake," pointed out that blame and
exposure had run its course, and demanded that enforcement of the law be
taken up, and that efforts be turned from destruction to construction.
He had done much himself to "arouse the slumbering conscience of the
nation," and turned now to direct it toward a permanent advantage.
The trend of criticism injured the party under whose administration
corporate abuse had grown up. The personal popularity of Roosevelt, and
his associates, Root, Taft, Knox, and Hughes, saved the party from
defeat. In 1906 the congressional campaign was fought on the basis of
holding on to prosperity, enforcing the law against all violators, and
strengthening the hands of government. Roosevelt wrote the substance of
the platform, and his party gained control of its sixth consecutive
Congress since 1896. The canvass over, Roosevelt departed from an old
precedent, left the territory of the United States, and visited the
Isthmus of Panama to inspect the work on the canal.
Six months after the signing of the Panama Treaty in 1903 the United
States took possession of the Canal Zone and began to dig. It had to
learn lessons of both management and tropical engineering. One by one
its chief engineers deserted the enterprise. The choice between a
sea-level and a lock canal divided the experts. The legislation by
Congress was inadequate. In the spring of 1906 Roosevelt, with the
approval of Taft, who had been recalled from the Philippines to be
Secretary of War, determined to build a lock canal. The President
tramped over the workings in November, 1906, and sent an illustrated
message about them to Congress on his return. In 1907 Major George W.
Goethals was detailed from the army to be benevolent despot and engineer
of the Canal Zone. Inspired and encouraged by repeated visits from Taft,
the work now made rapid progress toward completion. Sir Frederick
Treves, the great English surgeon, visited the canal in 1908, and found
there not only gigantic engineering works, but a triumph for the
preventive medicine of Colonel William C. Gorgas, chief of the sanitary
officers.
The attention of the world, directed toward the United States since
1898, was held by the canal and by a continuation of a vigorous and open
diplomacy. In February, 1904, Russia and Japan, unable to agree upon the
conduct of the former in Manchuria, had gone to war. Hostilities had
continued until Russian prestige was shattered and Japanese finance was
wavering. In June, 1905, the United States directed identical notes to
the belligerents, offering a friendly mediation. The invitation was
accepted, and during the summer of 1905 the envoys of Russia and Japan
met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to conclude a treaty of peace. In 1906
the Nobel Committee awarded to Roosevelt the annual prize for services
to peace.
Relations with all the world were friendly between 1905 and 1909. Great
Britain contributed to the cordiality by sending to the United States
as her ambassador the best-fitted of her subjects, James Bryce. Under
his tactful management the next five years were a period of
unprecedented friendship. The South American republics, always sensitive
about the headship of the United States, were brought to kindlier
feelings. There had been two congresses of all the Americas, one in
1889, at the instigation of Blaine, the next in Mexico in 1901. In 1906
the American republics convened at Rio de Janeiro in July. Secretary of
State Elihu Root made a plea for friendship before this congress. From
Rio he went to other capitals of South America, achieving notable
triumphs in his public speeches.
The Pan-American Conference at Rio was an American preliminary to a
larger meeting in which the United States played an important part in
1907. During 1904 Roosevelt had agreed to start a movement for a second
conference at The Hague. He took up the negotiation during the
Russo-Japanese War, deferred it at the instance of the Czar, and then
stood aside to let the latter issue the formal invitation. The American
delegation at the Second Hague Conference was led by Joseph H. Choate,
leader of the American Bar and former ambassador to Great Britain. It
forced the discussion throughout the session, tried in vain to produce
an agreement to abolish the right of capture of enemy property on the
high seas in time of war, and helped to strengthen the permanent court
of arbitration. In January, 1906, the United States had sat in
conference at Algeciras, over the affairs of Morocco. It had mediated
in the Oriental war. It had strengthened its position at home. It was no
longer true that the United States was entirely disinterested in the
affairs of Europe, for it had become a world power.
A visible emblem of power was afforded to the world in 1907. Since the
Treaty of Portsmouth there had been friction with Japan over the
treatment of Japanese subjects on the Pacific Coast, and alarmists had
drawn pictures of a possible war. Late in 1907 the President announced a
practice voyage for the whole effective navy that would carry it around
South America and into the Pacific. In December he reviewed the fleet,
and saw it off from Hampton Roads. From the Pacific it was ordered round
the world, visited Japan and China, and was received with keen interest
everywhere. It came home early in 1909, having made a record for holding
together without breakdown or accident.
While the fleet was going round the world and business was adjusting
itself to the new constructive laws, an old problem was formally ended.
The tribal sovereignty, which had made the Indians a problem, was
terminated. The Dawes Act of 1887 had substituted severalty for tribal
landholdings among the Indians. Out of the first cessions which followed
the act Oklahoma Territory had been made in 1890. This had developed
more rapidly than any previous Territory because of the railroads that
crossed it in every direction. By 1900 it demanded statehood. In 1906 it
was enabled, and during 1907 it was admitted, with the longest and most
radical of state constitutions. Fear of the activities of corporate
wealth and distrust of the agents of government were written into nearly
every article.
In the spring of 1908 nearly all of the forty-six governors met with
President Roosevelt in the White House and registered another problem
upon which agitation and revelation had led to public reflection. The
coal strikes of 1900 and 1902 had drawn attention to the possible
relation of government to the coal supply of the people. The beginnings
of reclamation in 1902 had revealed the fact that public reclamation was
impeded by large private and corporate water rights. The natural
resources of the country were seen to be following the course of all
business and settling into the control of great corporations. The waste
of coal and timber and water and land itself was unreasonable. The
denudation of the hills led to terrible floods along the rivers. The
future was being darkened by the organized selfishness of the present. A
movement for conservation grew out of the conference of governors, but
Congress for the present would not encourage it.
In popular education, in initiation of new administrative policies, and
in the passage of constructive laws efforts were being made to adjust
government to the needs of modern industry and to safeguard society. The
business interests affected by the changes obstructed the process when
they could, and were intensified in their opposition by the series of
prosecutions brought by Attorney-General Knox, and his successor Charles
J. Bonaparte, under the Sherman Law. At no time in the earlier history
of this law had there been a strong disposition to test its merit, and
no one of the notorious trusts had been attacked before the Northern
Securities case. In later years it was turned against the Standard Oil
Company, the beef-packers, the Tobacco Trust, the Sugar Trust, and the
United States Steel Corporation, while railways and smaller
corporations, in great number, were prosecuted. The enforcement of the
law aroused blind opposition among many of the victims, and stimulated
queries as to whether or not any attempt to limit the size of business
was sound public policy. The debate upon regulation, as against
prohibition of trusts and monopolies, ran on with no sign of victory for
either side of the argument. Personal hostility against the
Administration for applying the law gave color to the last two years of
Roosevelt's Administration.
By 1907 there had been ten years of the prosperity that had begun with
the election of McKinley. Finance had developed with industry and trade.
The needs of corporations dealing in millions and hundreds of millions
of capital had induced the consolidation of banks and the concentration
of financial power in the hands of a small group of men. The holding
companies were great aids in the furtherance of this concentration. J.
Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller were best known as
representative of the inner circle. Their speculations and investments
were embarrassed by the weakening of public confidence. It was certain
there would come a time when the whole surplus capital of the United
States would be invested in permanent improvements. Such periods had
followed eras of boom in 1837, 1857, and 1873. It was too probable that
some accident occurring in the period of liquidation would create a
panic. Suspicion had been directed against the controlling agents of
business by the revelations of 1902-07. It was exaggerated by
sensational journalism. It reached a climax in the fall of 1907 when a
group of banks, reputed strong, failed through dishonesty and
speculative management. The failure of the Mercantile National Bank and
the suspension of the Knickerbocker Trust Company in New York brought
the crisis on October 22, 1907. The loss to the public was lessened by
resolute and sympathetic cooperation among the clearing-houses, Morgan,
Rockefeller, and the United States Treasury, but a period of enforced
economy was begun for all.
The managers of big business attributed the panic to "Theodore the
Meddler." They claimed that business was sound and honest, and the
upheaval was caused by the agitation of demagogues. The President, they
asserted, had destroyed confidence by his attack on the commercial
class. Federal prosecutions, new laws, and the enforcement of
inquisitorial pure-food regulations had made it impossible for business
to live. "Let us alone," they cried.
They convinced only themselves, a small minority of the people of the
United States. Since 1902 the people as a body, regardless of the great
parties, had opened their eyes to the trend of business and had decided
that public authority must be summoned to the defense of democracy. The
independent vote broke away from each party in increasingly numerous
cases. The old American view that democracy meant unrestrained
individualism had given way to the newer view that democratic
opportunity was dependent upon the restriction of monopoly. The
ostensible leaders, from the President down, were only the mouths that
spoke the new language. Without them the same condition would have
existed in large degree. The attack of the financial interests and Wall
Street upon the President only convinced the people that the Roosevelt
policies were, on the whole, their policies, and that individual
interest and party machinery must give way to their attainment.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The periodicals and special articles alluded to in this chapter
constitute the best sources as yet available for the period. There were
numerous investigations by committees of Congress that furnished facts
in their reports. Certain of the departments of government, notably the
Bureau of Corporations and the Department of Agriculture, were active in
the publication of facts. Thoughtful surveys of society in the United
States may be found in E.A. Ross, _Changing America_ (1912); H. Croly,
_The Promise of American Life_ (1909); A.B. Hart, _National Ideals
Historically Traced_ (in _The American Nation_, vol. 26, 1907). The
autobiography of R.M. LaFollette is of considerable value. A great
number of books upon America by foreign visitors bring out special
viewpoints. Among these are F. Klein, _In the Land of the Strenuous
Life_ (1905); A. Bennett, _Your United States_ (1912); W. Archer,
_America To-Day_ (1899); Anon., _As a Chinaman Saw Us_ (1904); and James
Bryce has revised and brought down to date his _American Commonwealth_.