Ohio History Journal

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JOSEPH B

JOSEPH B. FORAKER AND THE STANDARD OIL

CHARGES1

 

by EARL R. BECK

Instructor in History, Ohio State University

 

In 1908 Joseph Benson Foraker, then serving his second

term in the United States Senate, was one of the outstanding

figures in politics in the nation. Foraker had won national notice

for his aggressive, uncompromising fight against the Hepburn

Rate Bill of 1906 and for his strident attacks upon the executive

action of President Theodore. Roosevelt which led to the discharge

without honor of a battalion of Negro soldiers involved in a shoot-

ing affray at Brownsville, Texas. The latter issue aroused the

personal ire of the President and he and Foraker had met in a

heated discussion at the Gridiron Dinner of 1907. To these diffi-

culties between the two men was shortly to be added a further

cause for rancor, the opposition of Roosevelt to Foraker's presi-

dential aspirations.

During Foraker's long career in politics his pathway to a

presidential nomination by the Republican Party was constantly

blocked by superior claims for recognition upon the part of some

other Ohio statesman. Thus in 1884 and 1888 it was John Sher-

man who demanded the solid vote of the Ohio delegation at the

Republican National Convention as a guerdon for thirty years of

faithful service. In 1892, 1896, and 1900 William McKinley, Jr.,

came to the fore, receiving Ohio's vote in 1892 in an effort to avert

the renomination of Benjamin Harrison and in the two succeeding

campaigns as the result of a political compromise with the Foraker

forces. In 1903 Mark Hanna was considered the great man of

politics in the Buckeye State and Foraker averted his possible

nomination for the 1904 campaign only by springing to the staunch

 

1 This article is based largely upon the author's unpublished doctoral dissertation,

written at the Ohio State University, 1942.

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