Uncle Sam sits in a chair smoking a pipe as a man labeled “California” and “States Rights” pleads with him. On a map of the United States in the background, an explosion appears over California; and newspapers in the foreground display headlines like “President’s Message Stirs Up Storm in San Francisco” and “California Dissatisfied.”
Comments and Context
The year 1906 was possibly the busiest of President Roosevelt’s presidency. It was the high-water mark of the Muckrakers, the journalists, authors, and reformers who explosively attacked corruption in American business and finance. Congress passed many reform laws, and the administration promulgated many regulations, in many areas of American life from conservation to corporate affairs. The president engaged himself in battles with trust moguls like Edward Henry Harriman (whom the president called an unfit citizen); and other magnates like John D. Rockefeller had to defend themselves in lawsuits. Roosevelt’s own affairs included the Simplified Spelling and “Nature Fakir” crusades; and the controversy over dismissed Black soldiers in Brownsville, Texas, occupied his attention.
Another matter seems minor in retrospect, at least as a part of the president’s agenda, and indeed other presidents might have let it run its own course: anti-Japanese agitation on the West Coast.
