The 1900s: Government and Politics: People in the News

THE 1900s: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: PEOPLE IN THE NEWS

Albert J. Beveridge, a freshman senator from Indiana, made his first speech as a U.S. senator on 9 January 1900. Having just returned from a visit to the front lines in the Philippine Islands, where American troops were fighting Filipino insurrectionists, he chastised the Democrats for wanting to give up the islands and praised the Republican effort to establish and maintain control over them.

On 5 December 1904 it was announced that Sen. Francis Marion Cockrell of Missouri would retire after twenty-nine years of service and would take with him the last pair of cowhide boots worn in the Senate. After Cockrell's retirement, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Secret Service agent William Craig was killed and President Roosevelt suffered an injured leg when the carriage in which they were riding was struck by a trolley car near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on 3 September 1902.

Minutes after San Francisco was hit by a devastating earthquake early on 18 April 1906, Gen. Frederick Funston, one of the heroes of the Filipino Insurrection and commander at the Presidio in San Francisco, acting without orders from Washington, marched his troops into the city and quickly established martial law to combat looting and general anarchy. His quick thinking was subsequently praised by city leaders and citizens.

Democrat William Goebel, governor-elect of Kentucky, was shot and mortally wounded in an ambush on 30 January 1900. The oath of office was administered to him as he lay in bed the next day, and he died on 3 February. Several leading state Republicans were ar-rested, tried, and convicted of complicity in Goebel's murder.

Congressman J. Thomas Heflin (D-Ala.) was indicted for assault on 11 May 1908 by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., for shooting Lewis Lundy, an Af-rican American, and accidentally wounding another man during a streetcar fight several weeks earlier. Heflin claimed the shooting was in self-defense and the indictment was quashed a few months later.

In November 1907 government prosecutor Frank B. Kellogg filed papers under the Sherman Antitrust Act, which led to the 1911 government-ordered dissolution of Standard Oil of New Jersey, an action that broke up the oil monopoly.

Roy Knabenshue's dirigible balloon flight around the dome of the U.S. Capitol on 15 June 1906 caused so many representatives and senators to leave their desks to watch the spectacle that for an hour both houses lacked a quorum.

On 3 August 1907 U.S. District Court Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis levied the largest fine to date—in excess of $29 million—against the Standard Oil Company of Indiana for accepting rebates in violation of the Elkins Act of 1903. The decision and fine were overturned on appeal. The publicity generated by the ruling was an important factor in the selection of Landis as the first baseball commissioner in 1920.

Nicholas Longworth, a young congressman from Cincinnati, Ohio, married Alice Lee Roosevelt, the president's eldest daughter, on 17 February 1906 in a White House ceremony. Many of the female guests wore dresses and overcoats of "Alice blue," named for the second most popular member of the first family.

On 19 November 1903 Kansas prohibitionist Carry Nation called at the White House and was refused an opportunity to see President Theodore Roosevelt. She then went to the Senate gallery, where she sold miniature hatchets, began a tirade, was arrested, and was fined twenty-five dollars.

On 25 January 1900 the House of Representatives refused to allow congressman-elect Brigham H. Roberts of Utah to occupy the seat to which he had been elected because he was a Mormon who practiced polygamy.

On 15 November 1906 Mayor Eugene Schmitz of San Francisco and political boss Abe Ruef were indicted on five counts of extortion. Hiram Johnson, who took over as the lead prosecutor after the first one was injured in an attack, was elected governor of California on a progressive platform in 1910.

On 21 April 1902 Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith was put on trial in Manila on charges that he had instructed a subordinate to "kill and burn and make Samar a howling wilderness." The courtmartial recommended that the general be "admonished." Both Secretary of War

Elihu Root and President Roosevelt were sympathetic to the conditions of war that provoked the orders, but Smith was ordered to retire from active service.

Oscar S. Straus was appointed secretary of commerce and labor on 12 December 1906, becoming the first Jew to hold a cabinet post.