Theodore Rex (2010)
“Ivrything has gone wrong. Th’ wurruld is little better thin a convict’s camp.
“YOU AND I, of course, can never believe in the benevolent despot.” George F. Baer, president of the anthracite-carrying Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, had as much reason as his addressee, Senator Stephen B. Elkins, to view Theodore Roosevelt’s current ascendancy with misgivings. As an industrialist privately engaged in interstate commerce, he saw any governmental intrusion upon his right to set his own shipping rates, such as the President was now proposing, in the light of flames licking around the last copy of the Constitution.
Elkins—affable, unreliable, energetic, a chronic schemer personifying the West Virginian notion that all scenes and situations could be profitably mined—had been happy to sponsor Roosevelt’s Anti-Rebate Bill in 1903, if only because men like Baer wanted it. The railroads were weary of handing out special favors to a widening roster of not-so-special customers.
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