All the Way to Mobile

Our recalling Theodore Roosevelt as President usually brings to mind his drive to break up the industrial trusts and to increase marketplace competition.  We can picture his standing above the crowd, and as the photographer is facing the sun, the picture is almost a silhouette.  Riding a long-held popular sentiment, bent forward from the hips, with his mouth open and his finger raised, Teddy worked his audience.

Since the discussion about business consolidation versus competition proved salient for the large merchant class in New York City, Roosevelt, from a family long in the plate glass business, would have been familiar with this continuing debate.  He had entered the state Assembly in 1882 and almost immediately had an opportunity to act on the matter.  He probably knew of the work of a leading proponent of competition, Joseph Nimmo, an engineer by training, who in the 1870s had a hand in helping Senator William Windom prepare his report on transportation. When that report finally emerged it contained not simply suggestions for technical improvements such as double tracks but also a national concept of north-south transportation using the Mississippi River and east-west transportation using the lakes and the Erie Canal.   Nimmo soon became Chief of the Bureau of Statistics in the Treasury Department.  A century later scholars continue to praise him for the steady quality of his reports.  Albro Martin, the author of the recently published Railroads Triumphant, writes that Nimmo produced “a series of reports that are a priceless source of information on the rapidly evolving American transportation system in its most critical and formative years.”

In a passage about competition, probably known to Roosevelt, Nimmo in his first report on internal commerce wrote,

The beneficent law of supply and demand where it operates most freely may not secure systematic justice, and yet the whole world concedes that, as far as it is operative, it secures substantial justice.  This is all that can be expected in the present condition of human affairs.  Competition may not make all things even, but it affords a nearer approach to equitable dealing among men than any substitute which has yet been proposed for the natural laws of trade.  The very instability of competition is the surest safeguard of the public interest.

Competition given the railroads by the Erie Canal was an issue facing the public at the moment Roosevelt stood for election to the Assembly.  The legislature had passed the free canal amendment for the first time in July 1881 and in the subsequent legislature would have to pass it again if it was to go to the public.  While at Albany the Democrats won both houses in November of 1881, New York City Republican Theodore Roosevelt won his first election to the state Assembly.  The legislature then proceeded in March of 1882 to pass the resolution a second time.  The Assembly carried the resolution 74 to 53.  The Democrats voted 55 for and 19 against and the Republicans voted 19 for and 34 against, with Roosevelt in the Republican minority.  In the state Senate the Republican support proved negligible.  In favor were 18 Democrats and four Republicans with ten Republicans opposed.  With this second legislative approval, the free canal amendment went to the public in November of 1882 in the election most notable for the election of Grover Cleveland as Governor.