Fighting the Fat Cats

We know Theodore Roosevelt well from photographs--that round, fully fleshed face, that swelling neck, those teeth. How many people know that we have a record of his voice as well? During his 1912 presidential campaign, Roosevelt was recorded several times on Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder technology. His voice, it turns out, is not quite what you would expect from his pugnacious appearance. The tone is patrician, cultivated, almost professorial. It has accents not so different from the ones you hear in the voice of that other Roosevelt, Franklin. Old money courses through every syllable.

Roosevelt's voice is a reminder that he was a descendant of a wealthy old New York family. In an age of robber barons and their heaped-up millions, Roosevelt's net worth was modest compared with theirs, and as a young man, he lost considerable money in his disastrous attempt to become a cattle rancher in the Dakota Badlands. But all his life he moved easily in a world that dressed for dinner. When he led the Rough Riders, it was in a uniform from Brooks Brothers.

All the same--and with good reason--America's business élite was wary of Roosevelt from the start. He turned out to be the first President to aggressively use the powers of government to set rules for the headlong U.S. economy and the men he called "malefactors of great wealth." When President William McKinley chose T.R. as his running mate in 1900, Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, the business-friendly G.O.P. power broker who had engineered McKinley's rise, was horrified. "Don't any of you realize," Hanna raged at fellow Republicans, "there's only one life between this madman and the presidency?" As Governor of New York, the job he occupied before joining McKinley's ticket, Roosevelt had pushed legislation to clean up sweatshops, strengthen state inspection of factories and cap the workday at eight hours. He was by no means a radical, as every radical would tell you, but he was convinced that if the legitimate grievances of laborers and the poor were not addressed, they would rise up to take matters into their own hands.

By comparison, McKinley had been everything a robber baron could hope for in a President. He consulted with Wall Street on economic policy, kept tariffs high--they protected American industry but meant higher prices for consumers--and never moved to curb the growth of trusts, the huge enterprises that gathered together smaller companies to form near monopolies. Oil, steel, rubber, copper--one after another, the major sectors of the U.S. economy were becoming dominated by behemoths like John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which marketed 84% of all the petroleum products in the U.S. As large companies gobbled up smaller ones, McKinley did nothing to spoil the feeding frenzy, though it often meant higher prices and lower wages. The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, was a feeble weapon to begin with--the Supreme Court had restricted how it could be used--but McKinley didn't even take the trouble to use it.