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Philander Chase Knox: McKinley

The roots of Mr. Knox's superciliousness dip down deep into the relationships begun a score of years ago. To understand him as he is it is necessary to understand him as he was when his career was before him. William McKinley asked him to become Attorney General in his Cabinet. He was then forty-two years old, a political nobody. What reputation he had was confined to Pittsburg and a selected few of the steel millionaires in Wall Street, but among the selected few were names to be conjured with, such as Andrew Carnegie and Henry C. Frick. Whether President McKinley's interest in Knox was spontaneous or prompted by Mr. Frick I do not know. Mr. Knox likes to believe that Mr. Frick did not enter into the equation. Mr. Knox declined, saying that he could not sacrifice his lucrative practice but that in four years he would accept the invitation if the President cared to renew it. It was renewed. At the age of forty-six, Mr. Knox quit the bar for politics, or, as he would say, statecraft. His appointment evoked a storm of protest from such immaculate journals as the New York World. They dubbed him, "Frick's man," and predicted that the Department of Justice would be turned into a Wall Street anteroom for the convenience of the capitalistic combinations then flouting the Sherman anti-trust law. The charges, of course, were as wide of the mark as most of the ebullitions of the yellow journals. Mr. Knox began his public career by attacking the Northern Securities merger, against the judgment of some of the highest-paid lawyers of the country. The Supreme Court sustained him. It was the greatest victory the government ever won under the Sherman law. Thereafter Mr. Knox, who had been labeled a corporation lawyer, was proclaimed a trust buster. By the time he was fifty he had become the greatest Attorney General in a half century. Certainly the mark he set has never been reached by any of his successors. When Mr. Roosevelt came into the White House Mr. Knox was at the pinnacle of his career and was as much admired by his new chief as by his martyred predecessor. In ability Mr. Roosevelt considered him next to Elihu Root,--for which Mr. Root was never quite forgiven. It is generally known that President Roosevelt believed that Mr. Root was the best qualified man in the country to succeed him, but at the same time, being an astute politician, he knew that he could not be elected. His attitude to his Secretary of State was the same as Senator Lodge's toward himself, when he said in 1920: "I know that I would make an excellent President, but I realize that I would make a poor candidate."