Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
their damage.
Every time that rape or criminal assault on a woman is pardoned, and
anything less than the full penalty of the law exacted, a premium is
put on the practice of lynching such offenders. Every time a big moneyed
offender, who naturally excites interest and sympathy, and who has
many friends, is excused from serving a sentence which a man of less
prominence and fewer friends would have to serve, justice is discredited
in the eyes of plain people--and to undermine faith in justice is to
strike at the foundation of the Republic. As for ill health, it must
be remembered that few people are as healthy in prison as they would be
outside; and there should be no discrimination among criminals on this
score; either all criminals who grow unhealthy should be let out, or
none. Pardons must sometimes be given in order that the cause of justice
may be served; but in cases such as these I am considering, while I know
that many amiable people differ from me, I am obliged to say that in my
judgment the pardons work far-reaching harm to the cause of justice.
Among the big corporations themselves, even where they did wrong, there
was a wide difference in the moral obliquity indicated by the wrongdoer.
There was a wide distinction between the offenses committed in the case
of the Northern Securities Company, and the offenses because of which
the Sugar Trust, the Tobacco Trust, and the Standard Oil Trust were
successfully prosecuted under my Administration. It was vital to destroy
the Northern Securities Company; but the men creating it had done so in
open and above-board fashion, acting under what they, and most of the
members of the bar, thought to be the law established by the Supreme
Court in the Knight sugar case. But the Supreme Court in its decree
dissolving the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, condemned them in the
severest language for moral turpitude; and an even severer need of
condemnation should be visited on the Sugar Trust.
However, all the trusts and big corporations against which we
proceeded--which included in their directorates practically all the
biggest financiers in the country--joined in making the bitterest
assaults on me and on my Administration. Of their actions I wrote as
follows to Attorney-General Bonaparte, who had been a peculiarly close
friend and adviser through the period covered by my public life in high
office and who, together with Attorney-General Moody, possessed the same
understanding sympathy with my social and industrial program that
was possessed by such officials as Straus, Garfield, H. K. Smith, and
Pinchot. The letter runs:
January 2, 1908.
My dear Bonaparte:
I must congratulate you on your admirable speech at Chicago. You said
the very things it was good to say at this time. What you said bore
especial weight because it represented what you had done. You have shown
by what you have actually accomplished that the law is enforced against
the wealthiest corporation, and the richest and most powerful manager
or manipulator of that corporation, just as resolutely and fearlessly as
against the humblest citizen. The Department of Justice is now in very
fact the Department of Justice, and justice is meted out with an even
hand to great and small, rich and poor, weak and strong. Those who have
denounced you and the action of the Department of Justice are either
misled, or else are the very wrongdoers, and the agents of the very
wrongdoers, who have for so many years gone scot-free and flouted the
laws with impunity. Above all, you are to be congratulated upon the
bitterness felt and expressed towards you by the representatives and
agents of the great law-defying corporations of immense wealth, who,
until within the last half-dozen years, have treated themselves and have
expected others to treat them as being beyond and above all possible
check from law.
It was time to say something, for the representatives of predatory
wealth, of wealth accumulated on a giant scale by iniquity,
by wrongdoing in many forms, by plain swindling, by oppressing
wage-workers, by manipulating securities, by unfair and unwholesome
competition and by stock-jobbing,--in short, by conduct abhorrent to
every man of ordinarily decent conscience, have during the last few
months made it evident that they are banded together to work for a
reaction, to endeavor to overthrow and discredit all who honestly
administer the law, and to secure a return to the days when every
unscrupulous wrongdoer could do what he wished unchecked, provided he
had enough money. They attack you because they know your honesty and
fearlessness, and dread them. The enormous sums of money these men have
at their control enable them to carry on an effective campaign. They
find their tools in a portion of the public press, including especially
certain of the great New York newspapers. They find their agents in
some men in public life,--now and then occupying, or having occupied,
positions as high as Senator or Governor,--in some men in the pulpit,
and most melancholy of all, in a few men on the bench. By gifts to
colleges and universities they are occasionally able to subsidize in
their own interest some head of an educational body, who, save only a
judge, should of all men be most careful to keep his skirts clear from
the taint of such corruption. There are ample material rewards for those
who serve with fidelity the Mammon of unrighteousness, but they are
dearly paid for by that institution of learning whose head, by example
and precept, teaches the scholars who sit under him that there is one
law for the rich and another for the poor. The amount of money the
representatives of the great moneyed interests are willing to spend can
be gauged by their recent publication broadcast throughout the papers
of this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific of huge advertisements,
attacking with envenomed bitterness the Administration's policy of
warring against successful dishonesty, advertisements that must have
cost enormous sums of money. This advertisement, as also a pamphlet
called "The Roosevelt Panic," and one or two similar books and
pamphlets, are written especially in the interest of the Standard Oil
and Harriman combinations, but also defend all the individuals and
corporations of great wealth that have been guilty of wrongdoing. From
the railroad rate law to the pure food law, every measure for honesty
in business that has been pressed during the last six years, has been
opposed by these men, on its passage and in its administration, with
every resource that bitter and unscrupulous craft could suggest, and the
command of almost unlimited money secure. These men do not themselves
speak or write; they hire others to do their bidding. Their spirit and
purpose are made clear alike by the editorials of the papers owned in,
or whose policy is dictated by, Wall Street, and by the speeches of
public men who, as Senators, Governors, or Mayors, have served these
their masters to the cost of the plain people. At one time one of their
writers or speakers attacks the rate law as the cause of the panic; he
is, whether in public life or not, usually a clever corporation lawyer,
and he is not so foolish a being as to believe in the truth of what he
says; he has too closely represented the railroads not to know well that
the Hepburn Rate Bill has helped every honest railroad, and has hurt
only the railroads that regarded themselves as above the law. At another
time, one of them assails the Administration for not imprisoning people
under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law; for declining to make what he well
knows, in view of the actual attitude of juries (as shown in the Tobacco
Trust cases and in San Francisco in one or two of the cases brought
against corrupt business men) would have been the futile endeavor to
imprison defendants whom we are actually able to fine. He raises the
usual clamor, raised by all who object to the enforcement of the law,
that we are fining corporations instead of putting the heads of the
corporations in jail; and he states that this does not really harm the
chief offenders. Were this statement true, he himself would not be found
attacking us. The extraordinary violence of the assault upon our policy
contained in speeches like these, in the articles in the subsidized
press, in such huge advertisements and pamphlets as those above referred
to, and the enormous sums of money spent in these various ways, give a
fairly accurate measure of the anger and terror which our actions have
caused the corrupt men of vast wealth to feel in the very marrow of
their being.
The man thus attacking us is usually, like so many of his fellows,
either a great lawyer, or a paid editor who takes his commands from the
financiers and his arguments from their attorneys. If the former, he has
defended many malefactors, and he knows well that, thanks to the advice
of lawyers like himself, a certain kind of modern corporation has been
turned into an admirable instrument by which to render it well nigh
impossible to get at the really guilty man, so that in most cases the
only way of punishing the wrong is by fining the corporation or by
proceeding personally against some of the minor agents. These lawyers
and their employers are the men mainly responsible for this state of
things, and their responsibility is shared with the legislators who
ingeniously oppose the passing of just and effective laws, and with
those judges whose one aim seems to be to construe such laws so that
they cannot be executed. Nothing is sillier than this outcry on behalf
of the "innocent stockholders" in the corporations. We are besought to
pity the Standard Oil Company for a fine relatively far less great than
the fines every day inflicted in the police courts upon multitudes of
push cart peddlers and other petty offenders, whose woes never extort
one word from the men whose withers are wrung by the woes of the mighty.
The stockholders have the control of the corporation in their own hands.
The corporation officials are elected by those holding the majority of
the stock and can keep office only by having behind them the good-will
of these majority stockholders. They are not entitled to the slightest
pity if they deliberately choose to resign into the hands of great
wrongdoers the control of the corporations in which they own the stock.
Of course innocent people have become involved in these big corporations
and suffer because of the misdeeds of their criminal associates. Let
these innocent people be careful not to invest in corporations where
those in control are not men of probity, men who respect the laws; above
all let them avoid the men who make it their one effort to evade or defy
the laws. But if these honest innocent people are in the majority in
any corporation they can immediately resume control and throw out of
the directory the men who misrepresent them. Does any man for a moment
suppose that the majority stockholders of the Standard Oil are others
than Mr. Rockefeller and his associates themselves and the beneficiaries
of their wrongdoing? When the stock is watered so that the innocent
investors suffer, a grave wrong is indeed done to these innocent
investors as well as to the public; but the public men, lawyers and
editors, to whom I refer, do not under these circumstances express
sympathy for the innocent; on the contrary they are the first to protest
with frantic vehemence against our efforts by law to put a stop to
over-capitalization and stock-watering. The apologists of successful
dishonesty always declaim against any effort to punish or prevent it on
the ground that such effort will "unsettle business." It is they who by
their acts have unsettled business; and the very men raising this