The crisis was watched from Washington, DC, by a new president. In September 1901, speaking in Buffalo, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist. Vice-President Roosevelt, holidaying in Vermont, visited the recovering McKinley in hospital, then returned to the Adirondacks. Then suddenly McKinley deteriorated. Roosevelt was president.
DU BOIS, WASHINGTON AND ROOSEVELT
This bumptious show-off was a new sort of president, revelling in the plenitude and spectacle of growing American power, presenting the presidency as a guide to the nation, lecturing from his ‘bully pulpit’ with the moral confidence possessed only by those of inherited grandeur.
He ruled through his intimates, known as the Tennis Cabinet. Meanwhile, the family became celebrities, widely photographed. Teddy insisted on family games and hikes, on which they chanted, ‘Over, under, through but never around!’ His bear hunting even spawned a toy: the Teddy Bear. But he struggled to control his wild, vivacious eldest daughter Alice, who danced late, smoked, flirted and wore a snake around her neck. He tried to channel her exuberance by sending her on a trip to China and Japan, during which she met Empress Cixi but caused further scandal by flirting with a congressman, Nicholas Longworth. Even though she later married Longworth, Roosevelt was exasperated.
Alice grumbled that her father ‘wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening’, while he exclaimed, ‘I can do one of two things: I can be president … or I can control Alice. I can’t possibly do both.’
Roosevelt turned on the overmighty trusts, the first president to believe that the state had to limit the power of monopolies. ‘Of all forms of tyranny,’ said Teddy, ‘the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.’ He rightly believed that it was the state’s duty to limit the plutocracy. ‘Like all Americans I like big things,’ he said, ‘big prairies … wheatfields, railways, factories, steamboats. But … no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their morals.’ The president, assisted by his attorney-general Charlie Bonaparte,* struck at Rockefeller, forcing the break-up of Standard Oil, along with banks, railways and tobacco trusts.
Yet Roosevelt’s most enduring achievement was a giant step forward in public health that saved millions of lives not just in America. Pharmacies still sold a selection of semi-poisonous snake-oil potions as medicines, many of them containing generous portions of arsenic, cocaine, heroin. In 1906, encouraged by socialist activists and doctors, Roosevelt created a national agency to enforce standards of medicine and food, work which demonstrated that scientific discoveries were essential in the saving of lives, yet useless without the leaders, organizers and activists who could actually deliver the improvements to the people. In 1863, a French scientist, Louis Pasteur, experimenting in his Lille laboratory, had discovered the bacterium that caused wine to spoil. When he expanded his experiments to milk, he found it could be made safe by heating – a revolutionary discovery. Yet it took forty years for pasteurization to save lives.
For decades, thousands of children had died after being poisoned by ‘swill milk’, produced by cows which had been fed the waste created by distilling grain to make whisky. Poisonous milk went on killing until Nathan Straus, Jewish owner of Macy’s department stores, started to pasteurize milk and sell it cheaply to the poor. Roosevelt backed Straus and ordered an investigation that led to the endorsement of pasteurization. It was a similar story with other life-saving discoveries.* But he was less bold in taking on racism.
Soon after becoming president, Roosevelt invited the black leader Booker T. Washington to dinner with his family in the White House – the first such occasion. Washington, born a slave, head of Tuskegee College in Alabama, backed by white millionaires, was a revered moderate who had proposed the Atlanta Compromise that southern black people should leave politics to whites in return for education and legal equality, acquiescing in Jim Crow. He supported a cohort of black businessmen, led by Ottawa W. Gurley, son of Alabama slaves, who moved to Greenwood, a section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, to build what Washington called ‘Negro Wall Street’. Gurley built the Gurley Hotel, developed property and became the first black millionaire. But he was an exception: the Jim Crow laws still imposed segregation and removed the black right to vote across the south.
The invitation to Washington outraged southerners. The White House, fulminated James Vardaman, soon to be Mississippi governor, was now ‘so saturated with the odor of the n***** that the rats have taken refuge in the stable’. Roosevelt trod timidly. ‘The very fact,’ he admitted, ‘I felt a moment’s qualm on inviting him made me ashamed of myself,’ but he did not repeat it.
