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He hurled forth antitrust suit after antitrust suit after antitrust suit that led to indictments, including a heavy blow at John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s mammoth Standard Oil Co. "Darkest Abyssinia never saw anything like the course of treatment we received," cried Standard Oil's John D. Archbold. The President maneuvered through Congressional bear trapes to get the U.S.'s first Pure Food bill. He got the U.S.'s first law providing for federal inspection of slaughterhouses. After a power play in Congress with the G.O.P. right wing, after ^a masterful display of coalition-juggling and issue-juggling, T.R. also got for the Interstate Commerce Commission the right to fix railroad rates. T.R. was thus the great working pioneer of the 20th century's whole new trend toward federal commissions to watch over key sectors of public welfare.
Balance of Power. The miracle of T.R.'s second-term domestic struggles is that he won them while actually concentrating on foreign policy, while putting in the most definitive display of world peacekeeping by power politics that the U.S. had ever known. In T.R.'s second term the world stage was vaster than the Caribbean. World powers were in the mood for adventures. Secret treaties were being signed. The adolescent machine gun would cause untold loss of life. So T.R. began to move his ships and his diplomats in consort to try to head off history's first world war. Said T.R.: "I never take a step in foreign policy unless I am assured that I shall be able eventually to carry out my will by force."
Across the Atlantic Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was already brewing a world war that then seemed destined to start over Morocco. At the Algeciras Conference in 1906, T.R.—far from claiming neutrality —unexpectedly threw U.S. support against Germany, and the Kaiser backed down.
Across the Pacific, the Russo-Japanese War exploded in 1904. T.R. later wrote an old friend that he had notified France and Germany "in the most polite and discreet fashion" not to combine against Japan, or the U.S. would "proceed to whatever length necessary." Later Japan began to thrash Russia. T.R., determined to balance the power of Japan, moved in secrecy and with great skill through intermediaries in Europe to signify a U.S. desire to mediate, and to douse the world powder keg altogether.
In August 1905, aboard the U.S.S. Mayflower on Long Island Sound off the Roosevelt summer place, Sagamore Hill, T.R. met the plenipotentiaries of Russia and Japan. These talks led to 1) the Treaty of Portsmouth, N.H.; 2) restoration of balance of power; 3) the Nobel Peace Prize for T.R. T.R.'s thought about the Treaty of Portsmouth: "Sometime soon I shall have to spank some little international brigand, and then all the well-meaning idiots will turn and shriek that this is inconsistent with what I did at the peace conference, whereas in