572 Chapter 21 The Age of Reform
He had greater success when he proposed still
another increase in the power of the Interstate
Commerce Commission. Rebating remained a serious
problem. With progressive state governors demand-
ing federal action and farmers and manufacturers,
especially in the Midwest, clamoring for relief against
discriminatory rates, Roosevelt was ready by 1905 to
make railroad legislation his major objective. The
ICC should be empowered to fix rates, not merely to
challenge unreasonable ones. It should have the right
to inspect the private records of the railroads since fair
rates could not be determined unless the true finan-
cial condition of the roads were known.
Because these proposals struck at rights that busi-
nessmen considered sacrosanct, many congressmen
balked. But Roosevelt applied presidential pressure,
and in June 1906 the Hepburn bill became law. It gave
the commission the power to inspect the books of rail-
road companies, to set maximum rates (once a com-
plaint had been filed by a shipper), and to control
sleeping car companies, owners of oil pipelines, and
other firms engaged in transportation. Railroads could
no longer issue passes freely—an important check on
their political influence. In all, theHepburn Actmade
the ICC a more powerful and more active body.
Although it did not outlaw judicial review of ICC deci-
sions, thereafter those decisions were seldom over-
turned by the courts.
Congress also passed meat inspection and pure
food and drug legislation. In 1906 Upton Sinclair
publishedThe Jungle, a devastating exposé of the filthy
conditions in the Chicago slaughterhouses. Sinclair
was more interested in writing a socialist tract than he
was in meat inspection, but his book, a best seller,
raised a storm against the packers. After Roosevelt
readThe Junglehe sent two officials to Chicago to
investigate. Their report was so shocking, he said, that
its publication would “be well-nigh ruinous to our
export trade in meat.” He threatened to release the
report unless Congress acted. After a hot fight, the
meat inspection bill passed. The Pure Food and Drug
Act, forbidding the manufacture and sale of adulter-
ated and fraudulently labeled products, rode through
Congress on the coattails of this measure.
Roosevelt has probably received more credit
than he deserves for these laws. He had never been
deeply interested in pure food legislation, and he
considered Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist of the
Department of Agriculture and the leader of the fight
for this reform, something of a crank. He compro-
mised with opponents of meat inspection cheerfully,
despite his loud denunciations of the evils under
attack. Nevertheless, the end results were positive and
in line with his conception of the public good.
To advanced liberals Roosevelt’s achievements
seemed limited when placed beside his professed
objectives and his smug evaluations of what he had
done. How could he be a reformer and a defender of
established interests at the same time? Roosevelt
found no difficulty in holding such a position. As one
historian has said, “He stood close to the center and
bared his teeth at the conservatives of the right and
the liberals of the extreme left.”
“Inside the Packinghouse” from Upton
Sinclair’sThe Jungleatwww.myhistorylab.comRoosevelt Tilts Left
As the progressive movement advanced, Roosevelt
advanced with it. He never accepted all the ideas of
what he called its “lunatic fringe,” but he took
steadily more liberal positions. He always insisted that
he was not hostile to business interests, but when
those interests sought to exploit the national domain,
they had no more implacable foe.Conservationof
natural resources was dear to his heart and probably
his most significant achievement as president. He
placed some 150 million acres of forest lands in fed-
eral reserves, and he strictly enforced the laws govern-
ing grazing, mining, and lumbering.
As Roosevelt became more liberal, conservative
Republicans began to balk at following his lead. The
sudden panic that struck the financial world in
October 1907 speeded the trend. Government poli-
cies had no direct bearing on the panic, which began
with a run on several important New York trust com-
panies and spread to the Stock Exchange when specu-
lators found themselves unable to borrow money to
meet their obligations. In the emergency Roosevelt
authorized the deposit of large amounts of govern-
ment cash in New York banks. He informally agreed
to the acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron
Company by U.S. Steel when the bankers told him
that the purchase was necessary to end the panic. In
spite of his efforts, conservatives insisted on referring
to the financial collapse as “Roosevelt’s panic,” and
they blamed the president for the depression that fol-
lowed on its heels.
Roosevelt, however, turned left rather than right.
In 1908 he came out in favor of federal income and
inheritance taxes, stricter regulation of interstate cor-
porations, and reforms designed to help industrial
workers. He denounced “the speculative folly and the
flagrant dishonesty” of “malefactors of great wealth,”
further alienating conservative, or Old Guard,
Republicans, who resented the attacks on their
integrity implicit in Roosevelt’s statements. When the
president began criticizing the courts, the last bastionReadtheDocument