America's Money Machine

The First Shock Wave 11
McKinley had been elected President to his first term on a platform
upholding the gold standard, high protective tariff, and a vigorous foreign
policy; his Party manager was the Cleveland industrialist Marcus
Hanna. McKinley';s second election, in which Roosevelt was substituted
for Garret A. Hobart on the ticket, was on a substantially similar program:
the Republicans were regarded particularly as the party ofthe "moneyed
East" in opposition to the agrarian South and West, and the campaign
was between creditors on the one side and debtors on the o,ther.
McKinley's assassination oCCUlTed ,at a moment when the public itself
was becoming disturbed over the trend toward industrial combinations.
In particular, anxiety arose over formation ofthe U. S. Steel Corporation
under the influence ofJ. P. Morgan, by merging several independent
companies into an integrated steel producing enterprise. The new company
did not monopolize but it did dominate the important steelproducing
industry. The organization ofthe Northern Securities Company, also
under Morgan influence, as a means ofresolving the struggle between the
James S. Hill and the E. H. Harriman railroad empires for control of the
Northern Pacific railroad system, also bred public suspicions. (When it
became apparent that neither of tbes,e rivals-one of whom controlled
the Union Pacific, the other the Great Northern-had been able to capture
enough stock to control the Northern Pacific, a compromise had
been worked out by which the railroad would be controlled jointly
through a securities holding company.) Roosevelt, who was nothing ifnot
an opportunist,seized 'upon ,these in his first message to Congress, in
December ofthat year, and recommended legislation to curb such combinations.
Congress declined to act, whereupon Roosevelt ordered his
Attorney General to file suit for dissolution of the Northern Securities
Company, and three years later the Supreme Court sustained his action. 1
,MeantimeR:oo'sevelt took his case to the people in a speaking tour in
which he gave his campaign the slogan of a "square deal for all."
Roosevelt's attack on the corporations ("We do not wish to destroy the
corporations, but we do wish to make them subserve the public good")
was assisted by.a public opinion aroused by a number ofwritings· exposing
corruption in politics and busines:s 'practices. One ofthe first of these
is Ida M. Tarbell's classic History ofthe Standard Oil Company, ,which began
as a serial in McClure's in 1903. This work startled and aroused the public
not only by its disclosures of business malpractices but by the ohstacles,
approaching violence, by which the author's efforts to collect her data
were met. Lincoln Steffens'The Shame ofCities (1904), Thomas W. Law-