American Nationalism, Teddy-Roosevelt Style!
A reading from August 20, 1907: the high tide of American Right-Progressive nationalism under the stewardship of Teddy Roosevelt...
A reading from August 20, 1907: the high tide of American Right-Progressive nationalism under the stewardship of Teddy Roosevelt...
Teddy Roosevelt wanted to accomplish four things in his August 1907 speech at the dedication of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument in Provincetown, Massachusetts:
Insist that all of us Americans are legitimate heirs of the Pilgrims and the Puritans—a relatively small number of us by descent, and the rest of us by adoption.
Insist that we must constructively build on what the Pilgrims and the Puritans built for us, and emulate their good qualities that enabled them to be master builders.
Insist equally that we know much better than the Pilgrims and the Puritans—that “we have traveled far” since his day.
Insist that his task and the task of America in his day is to fight plutocracy and constrain the evil wrought by the “malefactors of great wealth”.
Insist that we all scorn as contemptible “the life of a man who accumulates a vast fortune in ways… repugnant to… generosity and of fair dealing… [and] the vapidly useless and self-indulgent life of the inheritor of that fortune…”
I think the speech was rather successful.
Theodore Roosevelt <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68052/pg68052-images.html>:
We can not as a nation be too profoundly grateful for the fact that the Puritan has stamped his influence so deeply on our national life…. [With] strong natures… their failings, like their virtues… stand out in bold relief; but there is nothing easier than to belittle the great men of the past by dwelling only on the points where they come short of the universally recognized standards of the present. Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell, and the work they have to do.
The Puritan’s task was to conquer a continent; not merely to overrun it, but to settle it, to till it, to build upon it a high industrial and social life; and… lay deep the immovable foundations of our whole American system of civil, political, and religious liberty achieved through the orderly process of law. This was the work allotted him to do; this is the work he did; and only a master spirit among men could have done it.
We have traveled far since his day. That liberty of conscience which he demanded for himself, we now realize must be as freely accorded to others as it is resolutely insisted upon for ourselves. The splendid qualities which he left to his children, we other Americans who are not of Puritan blood also claim as our heritage. You, sons of the Puritans, and we, who are descended from races whom the Puritans would have deemed alien—we are all Americans together. We all feel the same pride in the genesis, in the history, of our people; and therefore this shrine of Puritanism is one at which we all gather to pay homage, no matter from what country our ancestors sprang.
We have gained some things that the Puritan had not—we of this generation, we of the twentieth century, here in this great Republic; but we are also in danger of losing certain things which the Puritan had and which we can by no manner of means afford to lose. We have gained a joy of living which he had not, and which it is a good thing for every people to have and to develop. Let us see to it that we do not lose what is more important still; that we do not lose the Puritan’s iron sense of duty, his unbending, unflinching will to do the right as it was given him to see the right….
The Puritan owed his extraordinary success… to the fact that he combined… both the power of individual initiative… and the power of acting in combination with his fellows; and that furthermore he joined to a high heart that shrewd common sense which saves a man from the besetting sins of the visionary and the doctrinaire… lofty purposes, but… practical good sense, too. He could hold his own… without clamorous insistence upon being helped by others, and yet he could combine with others… to do a job which could not be as well done by any one man individually.
These were the qualities which enabled him to do his work, and they are the very qualities which we must show in doing our work to-day. There is no use in our coming here to pay homage to the men who founded this nation unless we first of all come in the spirit of trying to do our work to-day as they did their work in the yesterdays that have vanished….
The Puritan was no Laodicean, no laissez-faire theorist. When he saw conduct which was in violation of his rights—of the rights of man, the rights of God, as he understood them—he attempted to regulate such conduct with instant, unquestioning promptness and effectiveness… if such regulation was necessary for the public weal; and this is the spirit which we must show to-day whenever it is necessary.
The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods…. National sovereignty is to be upheld in so far as it means the sovereignty of the people used for the real and ultimate good of the people; and state’s rights are to be upheld in so far as they mean the people’s rights. Especially is this true in dealing with the relations of the people as a whole to the great corporations which are the distinguishing feature of modern business conditions.
Experience has shown that it is necessary to exercise a far more efficient control than at present over the business use of those vast fortunes, chiefly corporate…. When the Constitution was created none of the conditions of modern business existed. They are wholly new and we must create new agencies to deal effectively with them. There is no objection in the minds of this people to any man’s earning any amount of money if he does it honestly and fairly, if he gets it as the result of special skill and enterprise, as a reward of ample service actually rendered. But there is a growing determination that no man shall amass a great fortune by special privilege, by chicanery and wrongdoing, so far as it is in the power of legislation to prevent; and that a fortune, however amassed, shall not have a business use that is antisocial….
In dealing with any totally new set of conditions there must at the outset be hesitation and experiment. Such has been our experience in dealing with the enormous concentration of capital employed in interstate business. Not only the legislatures but the courts and the people need gradually to be educated so that they may see what the real wrongs are and what the real remedies….
In the last six years we have shown that there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows; and we are strengthening the hands of those who propose fearlessly to defend property against all unjust attacks. No individual, no corporation, obeying the law has anything to fear from this Administration.
During the present trouble with the stock market I have, of course, received countless requests and suggestions, public and private, that I should say or do something to ease the situation. There is a world-wide financial disturbance; it is felt in the bourses of Paris and Berlin; and British consols are lower than for a generation, while British railway securities have also depreciated. On the New York Stock Exchange the disturbance has been peculiarly severe.
Most of it I believe to be due to matters not peculiar to the United States, and most of the remainder to matters wholly unconnected with any governmental action; but it may well be that the determination of the Government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver), to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to[48] bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the Government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. That they have misled many good people into believing that there should be such reversal of policy is possible. If so I am sorry; but it will not alter my attitude….
The rich man who with hard arrogance declines to consider the rights and the needs of those who are less well off, and the poor man who excites or indulges in envy and hatred of those who are better off, are alike alien to the spirit of our national life…. There exists no more sordid and unlovely type of social development than a plutocracy, for there is a peculiar unwholesomeness in a social and governmental ideal where wealth by and of itself is held up as the greatest good…. The life of a man who accumulates a vast fortune in ways that are repugnant to every instinct of generosity and of fair dealing… [and] the vapidly useless and self-indulgent life of the inheritor of that fortune… [are] contemptible in the eyes of all….
Where the power of the law can be wisely used to prevent or to minimize the acquisition or business employment of such wealth and to make it pay by income or inheritance tax its proper share of the burden of government, I would invoke that power without a moment’s hesitation….
We should all of us work heart and soul for the real and permanent betterment which will lift our democratic civilization to a higher level of safety and usefulness. Such betterment can come only by the slow, steady growth of the spirit which metes a generous, but not a sentimental, justice to each man on his merits as a man, and which recognizes the fact that the highest and deepest happiness for the individual lies not in selfishness but in service.
Reference:
Roosevelt, Theodore. 1907. Address of President Roosevelt on the Occasion of the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Pilgrim Memorial Monument, Provincetown, Massachusetts, August 20. <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68052/pg68052-images.html>
A century later we see that these understandings have been lost as wealth has corrupted politics yet again. Added to that, religion is being pushed to the fore despite the Constitution.
Please send this as an amicus brief to our SCOTUS, especially on the issue of the Chevron Deference. And as an item of general knowledge, knowledge that the modern corporation as we know it today didn't exist, say, circa 1800.