Charging Into Fame
Theodore Roosevelt wanted to fight. By the mid-1890s, inflamed by press reports of
Spanish atrocities against Cubans fighting for independence, he strongly favored
forcing Spain to give up Cuba or face war. On Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship
Maine exploded under mysterious circumstances in Havana harbor, killing 266
sailors. Congress declared war against Spain in April and called for volunteers.
Among the first was Roosevelt, who said a man "should pay with his body" for his
beliefs.He helped raise a cavalry regiment largely from the Southwest and became its
lieutenant colonel. The press dubbed them the Rough Riders. Roosevelt got his fight
and stormed into politics upon his return.
THE BATTLE OF SAN JUAN
HEIGHTS The Spanish defenses
on the low hills were the key to
controlling Santiago de Cuba.
Once the Spanish lost the high
ground, they could not defend the
city. They surrendered on July 17
Santiago de Cuba The Spanish
kept thousands of soldiers in
reserve near the city, but they
never joined the battle Spanish
positions The Spanish were
outnumbered more than 10 to 1,
but they held the high ground and inflicted heavy damage during the disorganized
American approach San Juan Hill U.S. troops were pinned down at first, but
withering fire from their three Gatling guns sent the Spanish troops scrambling in
less than 10 minutes
Kettle Hill Under fire, Roosevelt led the charge, killing one soldier just below the
summit. He then led a second charge, joining the fight for San Juan Hill
U.S. positions Units became hopelessly entangled on the narrow road through the
jungle. Casualties were heaviest at the exposed river crossing
Trail Sharpshooter skirmish lines El Pozo Hill Aguadores River San Juan River To
El Caney Gatling guns Trail Road Observation balloon Factory Blockhouse Barbed
wire U.S. artillery Cavalry units Spanish retreat
AFTERMATH: A U.S. EMPIRE In one of his last acts as Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, Roosevelt dispatched Commodore George Dewey and the U.S. Pacific Fleet
to the Philippines. On May 1, 1898, Dewey destroyed the Spanish squadron at
Manila Bay without a single U.S. casualty. A peace agreement was signed on Aug.
12, and with a formal treaty in December, Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam, sold
the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million and granted independence to Cuba
PHILIPPINES Manila Guam
Birth Of A Superpower
By Paul Kennedy
The facts were blindingly obvious, claimed the precocious Harvard graduate in his
book The Naval War of 1812, or the History of the United States Navy, during the
Last War with Great Britain. First, in the eternal Darwinian struggle that took place
between calculating, egoistic nation-states, it was essential for one country--in this
case, the U.S. at the close of the 19th century--to avoid "a miserly economy in
preparation for war." And for a state as dependent on sea power as America, it was
unthinkable that the nation "rely for defence [sic] upon a navy composed partly of
antiquated hulks, and partly of new vessels rather more worthless than the old." The
U.S. was rising to world-power status, but it could do so only on the back of a
powerful and efficient Navy.
Phew! Who was saying this? The writer in question was none other than Theodore
Roosevelt, then a mere 24 years old. He was just a short time out of college when his
book was first published, in 1882, but already making waves. Here is one of the few
examples in recent history--Churchill is another--of a young, highly ambitious man
who could foresee his own impact on the future international order. From early on,
Churchill seemed to have possessed a premonition that he would lead his nation and
empire in an age of great peril. In much the same way, T.R. appeared destined--and
felt destined--to preside over, and manage, the U.S.'s emergence as one of the global
great powers. He believed also that his leadership would be decisive because he had
understood, before many of his contemporary political rivals and friends, the
importance of naval power in buttressing the international position of the U.S.
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Roosevelt was, for an American, unusually familiar with naval history. Two of his
uncles, brothers of his Southern-born mother, had been involved in the Confederate
navy in the Civil War. (One of them, James D. Bulloch, was a Confederate naval
agent who commissioned the C.S.S. Alabama, the famous commerce raider on which
his younger brother Irvine served.) The young Theodore had grown up with stories
about earlier naval battles and eagerly read works on the history of war. Yet it would
be fair to say that his notions about sea power--build
bigger warships, concentrate the fleet--were primitive
until the late 1880s, when he was introduced to one of the
greatest luminaries of naval thought, Captain Alfred
Thayer Mahan. At the time of their first meeting, Mahan,
then in his late 40s, was giving lectures at the Naval War
College in Newport, R.I., lectures that would culminate in
the 1890 publication of his international best seller, The
Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1783.
Mahan's book, which Roosevelt devoured in one reading,
is at first sight a detailed account of the many battles
fought by the British Royal Navy as it rose to become
sovereign of the seas. But it is much more than that, for
Mahan claimed to have detected the principles that
underlay the workings of sea power, and had determined
the rise and fall of nations. With great skill, the author
showed the intimate relationships among productive
industry, flourishing seaborne commerce, strong national
finances and enlightened national purpose. Great navies
did not arise out of thin air; they had to be built up over
time with the most modern warships, well-trained crews
and decisive admirals. Ultimately, though, it was the man
or the men at the top--those steering the nation through
war and peace--who had to understand the great influence
that navies could exert on international politics. Sea power, if properly applied by
such leaders, was the vital tool for any country aspiring to play on the world stage.
Here was a road map for the rest of T.R.'s life, or at least the part of it that would be
focused on foreign affairs. In Roosevelt's future naval policies we see the
embodiment of Mahan's larger principles. Moreover, this conjuncture of Mahan the
theoretician and Roosevelt the man of action arrived at just the right time in the
history of the U.S. Its industries were booming, its commerce thriving and its
merchants fighting to gain markets overseas in the face of tough foreign competition.
All of that pointed to the need for a strong Navy. And, to be sure, the nation was
getting one. The fleet was no longer the dilapidated collection of small warships it
had been when Roosevelt wrote his book about the War of 1812. By the late 1890s,
it could be reckoned among the top four or five in the world.
But it was Roosevelt, more than anyone else, who turned U.S.
sea power into the manifestation of the nation's outward
thrust. His first demonstration of that counts among his most
famous decisions. By 1897 he was Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, a position in which he could act out his ambitions,
especially since the Secretary, John D. Long, was a rather sick
man and President William McKinley had no great interest in
naval matters. On Feb. 15, 1898, when news arrived of the
sinking in Havana harbor of the U.S.S. Maine--the event that
effectively set off the Spanish-American War--Roosevelt had
his opportunity.
Roosevelt had previously confided in Mahan his belief that the
U.S. should push Spain out of not only Cuba but also the
Philippines, though at the time acquiring the Philippines was
by no means a goal of the McKinley Administration. Ten days
after the Maine went down, on a late Friday afternoon when
Long was temporarily out of the office, his dynamic assistant
cabled instructions to Admiral William T. Sampson in the
Caribbean and Commodore George Dewey in Hong Kong to
prepare for decisive action. Long, though by his own account
somewhat bemused, did nothing later to counter those orders.
So when Congress declared war on Spain on April 25, the
U.S. squadrons in both theaters had been heavily reinforced.
The results--the destruction of the Spanish fleets in Manila Bay and, two months
later, off Santiago, Cuba--were decisive. Spain had been reduced to the rank of a
minor power, and the deeply troubled lands of Cuba and the Philippines came under
U.S. sway.
The naval war of 1898 provided the nation with a complete justification of Mahan's
theories. The firepower of the American battleships had clearly been overwhelming--
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a great relief to Roosevelt, who had feared voices in Congress calling instead for lots
of small, coastal-defense vessels. Most impressive of all was the performance of the
new battleship U.S.S. Oregon, which had steamed from San Francisco to Cuba to
partake in the final battle. In fact, so enthusiastic was Congress about the importance
of the Navy that it authorized the construction of many more battleships and heavy
cruisers.
was U.S. sea power that compelled the Germans to back down, is open to some
doubt. But with a compromise debt settlement reached at the Hague, it was becoming
clear that the era of European interventions in the western hemisphere had come to
an end. Long an empty declaration, the Monroe Doctrine, which had warned
Europeans not to interfere in the Americas, was now a reality as a result of American
sea power.
But the lesson that most impressed itself on Roosevelt was that it had taken the
Oregon, steaming at high speed, a full 67 days to complete the 14,700-mile journey
around Cape Horn. American navalists and expansionists--and Roosevelt was both-began clamoring for the construction of a canal across Central America, one that,
given the turbulent nature of international politics, must be completely under U.S.
control. Facing large potential threats in the Atlantic and the Pacific, the U.S. had no
choice but to shorten the route between the East and West coasts.
But so, too, as the Latin American states discovered to their dismay, was the
Roosevelt Corollary to that doctrine, which the President proclaimed in 1904. If we
do not want third powers to take action against wrongdoing regimes in our
hemisphere, the President stated, "then sooner or later we must keep order
ourselves." What that meant was that the U.S. was claiming for itself the right to
intervene in the affairs of hemispheric nations when those nations aroused the
displeasure of Washington.
The matter was urgent because Roosevelt and his circle were not the only people
who had discovered the influence of sea power on world affairs. Mahan's lessons
from history had had an almost universal resonance. Under Kaiser Wilhelm II and
Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany was building a battle fleet as large as the U.S.
one and equally fast. France and Russia, now in alliance, were also pouring resources
into new construction, as were Italy and Austria-Hungary in the Mediterranean. The
most amazing growth, from virtually nowhere, was that of the Japanese navy in the
Far East. And all these growing fleets caused the British to spend unprecedented
amounts on the Royal Navy in an effort to maintain its centuries-old naval
supremacy. The U.S. could not afford to slacken its pace.
It was not just the misbehavior of Central and South American governments that
concerned Roosevelt in this volatile region. He was also eager to prevent any
foreigners from gaining a concession to build the canal that he wanted the U.S. to
build. When the Colombian government turned down a proposed deal for a 100-year
lease of territory in its province of Panama, the President threw his weight--and the
weight of a naval landing party--in favor of one of the perennial Panamanian
uprisings aimed at gaining independence from Colombia. Twelve days after
Washington recognized the new nation of Panama, in November 1903, it signed with
deep satisfaction a canal treaty with Panama that was identical to the one rejected by
Colombia.
The U.S. navalists need not have worried. Within a short while, in March 1901,
Roosevelt was elected Vice President under McKinley; six months later, following
McKinley's assassination, he was catapulted into the highest office. As early as 1902
he demonstrated the growing clout of the U.S. Navy during the so-called Venezuelan
crisis. Venezuela's feckless financial policies and its refusal to pay international
debts had led to a blockade of its coastline by various European navies, notably
Germany's. Urged on by the nationalist wing of the U.S. press, Roosevelt had
instructed Dewey, now an admiral, to patrol with a large force in waters nearby,
ostensibly on seasonal fleet maneuvers but with an intent that was clear to all.
While the U.S. was secure now in its Atlantic realms, it was being forced to increase
its attention to China and the Pacific. The U.S. had long possessed trading and
missionary interests in East Asia and now of course occupied the Philippines, so it
naturally had cruisers and gunboats in those waters. But it was not the biggest player
in the region. Russia, France and Britain had significant battleship squadrons in the
Far East. The fastest-growing naval force of all belonged to Japan, which was
increasingly suspicious of Russia's creeping territorial controls in Manchuria. In
February 1904, Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet anchored at
Port Arthur on the coast of China. The 20th century struggle for dominance of East
Asia had begun in earnest.
It was a tactic that seemed to fit perfectly with the President's motto, "Speak softly,
but carry a big stick." Whether it was fully true, as Roosevelt later claimed, that it
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The Russo-Japanese War was another gift from the gods to Roosevelt. He had long
worried about czarist ambitions in Asia, as he worried about German ambitions in
the Atlantic. He was full of admiration for the Japanese armed services as they
steadily vanquished the larger Russian armies on land and smashed the Russian fleet
in the epic battle of Tsushima in May 1905. But the President did not want complete
Japanese domination of the Far East either, and so he actively lobbied both sides to
turn to the peace table. Since Britain was diplomatically allied to Japan, and France
to Russia, neither was an acceptable arbitrator. And the Kaiser's Germany was
trusted by no one. By default the U.S. became the natural mediator. Roosevelt
persuaded the two nations to send representatives to the U.S. for negotiations to be
conducted in Portsmouth, N.H., where he took the deepest interest in cajoling, often
bullying, the two belligerents into ending the war. For his role, T.R. was awarded the
1906 Nobel Peace Prize.
All the same, the world remained a dangerous place. There were the German threat
to France, the Anglo-German rivalry in the North Sea, the Balkan tinderbox and the
unanswered question of Japan's ultimate ambitions. Roosevelt decided a bold move
was required to send a message that the U.S. was a global player. In December 1907
he dispatched from Hampton Roads, Va., the "Great White Fleet," consisting of all
16 of the U.S. Navy's modern battleships. They were embarked on what would be a
46,000-mile, 14-month cruise around the world. Here was showing the flag, indeed.
Almost a century later, that voyage is still regarded as the apotheosis of Roosevelt's
belief in naval power as an instrument of national policy. The stately procession
across the Pacific and then through the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal and Mediterranean
before returning to the Atlantic seaboard was an impressive logistical feat, even if it
confirmed to the U.S. Navy the limited endurance of the older battleships and
produced a remarkable number of desertions in Australian ports. But the world
public was not to know of that. A million people had assembled in San Francisco
harbor to watch the fleet depart; half a million Australians greeted it in Sydney. Even
the anxiously prepared visit to Tokyo Bay had gone well.
A short while after the Great White Fleet's return, Roosevelt relinquished the
presidency. To his successor, William Howard Taft, he had one message: Do not
divide the fleet. The Mahanian principle of concentrating the main battle fleet in one
theater remained in place. It would still be there in 1914 when the Panama Canal,
instigated by T.R., finally opened. Only during the Second World War, when the
U.S. Navy became the largest in the world, would the U.S. possess a two-ocean fleet.
But the foundations of its maritime supremacy had been laid, and firmly, by this
most energetic of U.S. Presidents. It is true that after 1909, the U.S. took a bit of a
breather in world affairs, retreating to the side of the stage as the European crisis
unfolded. But it never stopped building warships. And the country would be
summoned back to the center of international politics in 1917. Despite the
isolationist pressures of the interwar years, the U.S. would never be able, or willing,
to abandon its pivotal role. The country's later trajectory would have made T.R. feel
justified, and proud. He had always been convinced that it was impossible for the
U.S. to avoid becoming the greatest world power of the 20th century; the only choice
was whether it would do so well or poorly. And the trick was to turn the theory of
Mahan's principles about sea power into effective practice, for the furtherance of
American interests and values. No U.S. President did that better.
How To Shrink The World
1 - CREATE A COUNTRY
Panama was a province of
Colombia when Theodore
Roosevelt took up the idea of
building a canal after a failed
attempt by France. When the
Colombian government rejected
a new treaty allowing the U.S. to
build a canal, Roosevelt became
enraged. Soon after, a group of
Panamanian separatist leaders
declared a revolution. That same
day, U.S. gunboats appeared off
the coast to keep Colombia from
reclaiming its territory. Roosevelt vigorously denied that the U.S. had fomented the
revolution but defended his actions in characteristic terms: "To have acted otherwise
... would have been betrayal of the interests of the United States."
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2 - GET THE BUGS OUT
6 - LOCK AND LOAD
The rain forests and squalid towns of Panama were rife with diseases like malaria
and yellow fever. As many as 20,000 people died during the French effort to build a
canal in the late 1800s. But as a result of his work in Cuba after the SpanishAmerican War, a tireless American doctor named William Gorgas came to believe
strongly in the new discovery that a specific mosquito spread yellow fever.
Overcoming doubters, he began a widespread campaign of mosquito eradication and
sanitation improvements. The death rate among canal workers plummeted
At 1,000 ft. long and 110 ft. wide, the locks were built to handle the largest ships
then planned. Even though many modern ships are too big (the Titanic would have
fit; today's Queen Mary 2 doesn't), the canal handled more than 14,000 transits in
2005, accounting for about 5% of world trade.
3 - CONSOLIDATE POWER
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.
Initially, Congress created a seven-person commission to oversee construction. After
the first chief engineer broke down under the stress of the job, Roosevelt sidestepped
the panel and gave total power to one man, Army Colonel George Goethals. As
absolute ruler of the Canal Zone, Goethals oversaw every detail, from digging and
building to resolving personal disputes among workers.
Fighting the Fat Cats
By Richard Lacayo
4 - MAKE THE DIRT FLY
At first, the Americans pursued the failed French dream: a sea-level passage through
the mountains and jungles. In 1906 that plan was overruled in favor of damming the
Chagres River to create a vast inland lake that could be entered through flights of
locks at either end. That still meant cutting an eight-mile trench through the
mountains. Every rainy season, mudslides wiped out months of work in a single
moment.
5 - RALLY THE TROOPS
In 1906 Roosevelt wanted to see the colossal project for himself. His trip marked the
first time a U.S. President left the country while in office. To see conditions at their
worst, he went at the height of the rainy season. While touring, he delighted workers
by leaping aboard a 95-ton Bucyrus steam shovel and grilling the operator about how
it worked. The operator seized the moment to ask for overtime pay.
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
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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.
All of that was fine to men like Rockefeller. "The day of
combination is here to stay," he once said. "Individualism is
gone. Never to return." He hadn't reckoned on Roosevelt.
Five months into his presidency, T.R. took Wall Street by
surprise. He launched an antitrust suit that demanded the
breakup of Northern Securities, a holding company
organized to consolidate three railroads in the Pacific
Northwest. By targeting that company, Roosevelt had also
chosen to move against the man who epitomized the empire of money, New York
financier J. Pierpont Morgan.
Beefy, saturnine and phenomenally wealthy, with a plump red nose caused by the
skin disease rhinophyma, Morgan held immense power over the U.S. economy. In a
day when there was no Federal Reserve to control the money supply or tweak
interest rates, he operated at times as the nation's one-man central bank. By
withdrawing his approval from a shaky deal, he could cause a panic. By pouring
millions into tottering banks, he could end one. He did more than assemble capital
for new ventures. He took over mismanaged companies, installed his own men and
supervised operations. As he exercised his godly powers, he could not abide
interference. Jean Strouse, one of his most thorough biographers, has cast doubt on
whether he actually spoke the words that have been endlessly attributed to him: "I
owe the public nothing." But if he didn't say them, he should have. As a summary of
his lifelong outlook, they could hardly be bettered.
Like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Morgan believed in free enterprise but had
seen enough of unbridled competition. For much of his career, he had assembled
financing for the railways whose stupendous growth had
revolutionized the U.S. after the Civil War. Boom and
bust, duplicated routes, desperate price cutting and
collapsed enterprises--the bumpy realities of the railroad
business left Morgan with a horror of economic disorder.
Profits required stability. Stability required concentration.
Concentration meant trusts.
As it happens, Roosevelt's outlook was not entirely
different. He didn't dispute the benefits of large-scale
capitalism, and he thought of huge enterprises as an
inevitable development of the industrial age. He
understood the idea of economies of scale. Wisconsin
Senator Robert La Follette and William Jennings Bryan,
the perennial standard bearer for the common man, might
have wanted to dismantle everything bigger than a
hardware store. What Roosevelt wanted was simply to
regulate the big outfits. For starters, he wanted to compel
them to open their books. Quarterly reporting in the
corporate world was still a novelty and always voluntary.
He wanted the government to see into companies' workings so it could judge which
combinations were tolerable and which were illegal restraints of trade. "We draw the
line against misconduct," he said. "Not against wealth."
In his business affairs, Morgan was a man accustomed to handling things personally.
One of his biggest objections to the way Roosevelt had sprung the Northern
Securities suit was that the President had not quietly tipped him in advance. Large
sums of borrowed money were at stake, and the abrupt attack by the Justice
Department had rattled the markets. In Morgan style, he went personally to
Washington to meet with Roosevelt and Attorney General Philander Knox.
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Roosevelt left a recollection of the meeting, which remains a classic moment in the
history of dealings between business and government. In that account, Morgan asks
Roosevelt why he had not quietly allowed Morgan to take care of the problem
without resorting to the courts.
Morgan: "If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can
fix it up."
Roosevelt: "That can't be done."
Knox: "We don't want to fix it up, we want to stop it."
any favor in his second term that Henry C. Frick, one of Rockefeller's lieutenants,
was left to grumble, "We bought the son of a bitch, but he wouldn't stay bought."
The suit against Northern Securities eventually landed at the Supreme Court, and
Roosevelt won a narrow but crucial victory that opened the way for more aggressive
use of the Sherman Antitrust Act in other cases. He also established a Department of
Commerce and Labor, which included a Bureau of Corporations to monitor the
budding monopolies. Roosevelt endlessly reassured Big Business that he intended
merely to keep an eye on its conduct. But he let it be known that he meant business
too. Only "the corporation that shrinks from the light" would have anything to fear
from government, he once said. Then he added, "About the welfare of such
corporations we need not be oversensitive."
There in brief was the divide between the new President who had a whip in his hand
and the veteran financier who could barely imagine that whips could be wielded by
anyone in Washington. After Morgan departed, Roosevelt confided to Knox his
bemusement at the financier's manner. Morgan, T.R. said, had acted as though the
President of the U.S. was just "a big rival operator."
Roosevelt directed Knox to continue to pursue his suit. All the same, Roosevelt
remained open to more cooperative dealings with Morgan. For all his tough talk,
Roosevelt really was willing to cut deals. But he wanted the business world on notice
that the days of freewheeling combination were over. And Morgan had reason to
play ball with Roosevelt. Northern Securities was only one of the many trusts he had
assembled. General Electric, Western Union, International Harvester, Aetna
Insurance--he controlled them all. Just a year earlier, he had put together what was
then the world's largest corporation, U.S. Steel, whose $1.4 billion in assets was
equal to 7% of the nation's gross national product. Roosevelt recorded that in their
meeting Morgan had asked him bluntly, "Are you going to attack my other interests,
the Steel Trust and others?" Roosevelt's answer couldn't have been entirely
reassuring: "Certainly not--unless we find out that in any case they have done
something wrong."
Though Roosevelt's Justice Department went on to bring 44 more antitrust suits in
the course of his presidency, he never attacked any other of Morgan's interests. He
even used Morgan as a mediator to help settle a Pennsylvania miners' strike that
threatened to create a winter scarcity of coal for heating. And when he ran for
President in 1904, Roosevelt was not above accepting campaign contributions from
the very businesses he was pressuring, though he was so careful not to show them
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