These early diplomatic settlements in Roosevelt's Administration
showed the world that the United States now had a President who
did not seek quarrels, but who was not afraid of them, who never
bluffed, because--unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney
with their Venezuela Message in 1895--he never made a threat
which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a
bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United
States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending
thorns.
These particular achievements in foreign affairs, and others
which I shall mention later, gave Roosevelt and his country great
prestige abroad and the admiration of a large part of his
countrymen. But his truly significant work related to home
affairs. Now at last, he, the young David of the New Ideals, was
to go forth, if he dared, and do battle with the Goliath of
Conservatism. With him there was no question of daring. He had
been waiting for twenty years for this opportunity. Such a
conflict or duel has rarely been witnessed, because it rarely
happens that an individual who consciously embodies the aims of
an epoch is accepted by that epoch as its champion. Looking
backward, we see that Abraham Lincoln typified the ideals of
Freedom and Union which were the supreme issues of his time; but
this recognition has come chiefly since his death. In like
fashion I believe that Roosevelt's significance as a champion of
Liberty, little suspected by his contemporaries and hardly
surmised even now, will require the lapse of another generation
before it is universally understood.
Many obvious reasons account for this. Most of the internal
reforms which Roosevelt struggled for lacked the dramatic quality
or the picturesqueness which appeals to average, dull,
unimaginative men and women. The heroism of the medical
experimenter who voluntarily contracts yellow fever and dies--and
thereby saves myriads of lives--makes little impression on the
ordinary person, who can be roused only by stories of battle
heroism, of soldiers and torpedoes. And yet the attacks which
Roosevelt made, while they did not involve death, called for the
highest kind of civic courage and fortitude.
Then again a political combat with tongues and arguments seldom
conveys the impression that through it irrevocable Fate gives its
decision to the same extent that a contest by swords and volleys
does. Political campaigns are a competition of parties and only
the immediate partisans who direct and carry on the fight, grow
very hot. The great majority of a party is not fanatical, and a
citizen who has witnessed many elections, some for and some
against him, comes instinctively to feel that whoever wins the
country is safe. He discounts the cries of alarm and the abuse by
opponents. And only in his most expansive moments does he flatter
himself that his party really represents the State. The
Republican Party, through which President Roosevelt had to work,
was by no means an ideal instrument. He believed in
Republicanism, with a faith only less devoted than that with
which he embraced the fundamental duties and spiritual facts of
life. But the Republicanism which he revered must be interpreted
by himself; and the party which bore the name Republican was
split into several sections, mutually discordant if not actually
hostile. It seems no exaggeration to say that the underlying
motive of the majority of the Republican Party during Roosevelt's
Presidency was to uphold Privilege, just as much as the
underlying purpose of the great Whig Party in England in the
eighteenth century was to uphold Aristocracy. Roosevelt's
purpose, on the contrary, was to clip the arrogance of Privilege
based on Plutocracy. To achieve this he must, in some measure,
compel the party of Plutocracy to help him. I speak, so far as
possible, as a historian,--and not as a partisan,--who recognizes
that the rise of a Plutocracy was the inevitable result of the
amassing, during a generation, of unprecedented wealth, and that,
in a Republic governed by parties, the all-dominant Plutocracy
would naturally see to it that the all dominant party which
governed the country and made its laws should be plutocratic. If
the spheres in which Plutocracy made most of its money had been
Democratic, then the Democratic Party would have served the
Plutocracy. As it was, in the practical relation between the
parties, the Democrats got their share of the spoils, and the
methods of a Democratic Boss, like Senator Gorman, did not differ
from those of a Republican Boss, like Senator Aldrich. Roosevelt
relied implicitly on justice and common sense. He held, as firmly
as Lincoln had held, to the inherent rightmindedness of the
"plain people." And however fierce and formidable the opposition
to his policies might be in Congress, he trusted that, if he
could make clear to the average voters of the country what he was
aiming at, they would support him. And they did support him. Time
after time, when the Interests appeared to be on the point of
crushing his reform, the people rose and coerced Congress into
adopting it. I would not imply that Roosevelt assumed an
autocratic manner in this warfare. He left no doubt of his
intention, still less could he disguise the fact of his
tremendous personal vigor; but rather than threaten he tried to
persuade; he was good-natured to everybody, he explained the
reasonableness of his measures; and only when the satraps of
Plutocracy so far lost their discretion as to threaten him, did
he bluntly challenge them to do their worst.
The Interests had undeniably reached such proportions that unless
they were chastened and controlled, the freedom of the Republic
could not survive. And yet, in justice, we must recall that when
they grew up in the day of small things, they were beneficial;
their founders had no idea of their becoming a menace to the
Nation. The man who built the first cotton-mill in his section,
or started the first iron-furnace, or laid the first stretch of
railroad, was rightly hailed as a benefactor; and he could not
foresee that the time would come when his mill, entering into a
business combination with a hundred other mills in different
parts of the country, would be merged. in a monopoly to strangle
competition in cotton manufacture. Likewise, the first stretch of
railroad joined another, and this a third, and so on, until there
had arisen a vast railway system under a single management from
New York to San Francisco. Now, while these colossal monopolies
had grown up so naturally, responding to the wonderful expansion
of the population they served, the laws and regulations which
applied to them, having been framed in the days when they were
young and small and harmless, still obtained. The clothes made
for the little boy would not do for the giant man. I have heard a
lawyer complain that statutes, which barely sufficed when travel
and transportation went by stage-coach, were stretched to fit the
needs of the public in its relation with transcontinental
railroads. This is an exaggeration, no doubt, but it points
towards truth. The Big Interests were so swollen that they went
ahead on their own affairs and paid little attention to the
community on which they were battening. They saw to it that if
any laws concerning them had to be made by the State Legislatures
or by Congress, their agents in those bodies should make them. A
certain Mr. Vanderbilt, the president of one of the largest
railroad systems in America, a person whose other gems of wit and
wisdom have not been recorded, achieved such immortality, as it
is, by remarking, "The public be damned." Probably the president
and directors of a score of other monopolies would have heartily
echoed that impolitic and petulant display of arrogance.
Impolitic the exclamation was, because the American public had
already begun to feel that the Big Interests were putting its
freedom in jeopardy, and it was beginning to call for laws which
should reduce the power of those interests.
As early as 1887 the Interstate Commerce Act was passed, the
earliest considerable attempt to regulate rates and traffic. Then
followed anti-trust laws which aimed at the suppression of
"pools," in which many large producers or manufacturers combined
to sell their staples at a uniform price, a practice which
inevitably set up monopolies. The "Trusts" were to these what the
elephant is to a colt. When the United States Steel Corporation
was formed by uniting eleven large steel plants, with an
aggregate capital of $11100,000,000, the American people had an
inkling of the magnitude to which Trusts might swell. In like
fashion when the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern
Railroads found a legal impediment to their being run by one
management, they got round the law by organizing the Northern
Securities Company, which was to hold the stocks and bonds of
both railroads. And so of many other important industrial and
transportation mergers. The most powerful financial promoters of
the country, led by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan, were busy setting up
these combinations on a large scale and the keenest corporation
lawyers spent their energy and wits in framing charters which
obeyed the letter of the laws, but wholly denied their spirit.
President Roosevelt worked openly, with a definite purpose.
First, he would enforce every law on the statute book, without
exception in favor of any individual or company; next, he
suggested to Congress the need of new legislation to resist
further encroachments by capitalists in the fields where they had
already been checked; finally, he pointed out that Congress must
begin at once to protect the national resources which had been
allowed to go to waste, or to be seized and exploited by private
concerns.
I do not intend to take up in chronological sequence, or in
detail, Roosevelt's battles to secure proper legislation. To do
so would require the discussion of legal and constitutional
questions, which would scarcely fit a sketch like the present.
The main things to know are the general nature of his reforms and
his own attitude in conducting the fight. He aimed directly at
stopping abuses which gave a privileged few undue advantage in
amassing and distributing wealth. The practical result of the
laws was to spread justice, and equality throughout the country
and to restore thereby the true spirit of Democracy on which the
Founders created the Republic. He fought fairly, but warily,
never letting slip a point that would tell against his opponents,
who, it must be said, did not always attack him honorably.
At first, they regarded the President as a headstrong young man--
he was the youngest who had ever sat in the Presidential chair--
who wished to have his own way in order to show the country that
he was its leader. They did not see that ideals which dated back
to his childhood were really shaping his acts. He had seen law in
the making out West; he had seen law, and especially corporation
law, in the making when he was in the New York Assembly and
Governor of New York; he knew the devices by which the Interests
caused laws to be made and passed for their special benefit, or
evaded inconvenient laws. But he suffered no disillusion as to
the ideal of Law, the embodiment and organ of Justice. Legal
quibbles, behind which designing and wicked men dodged, nauseated
him, and he made no pretense of wishing to uphold them.
The champions of the Interests found out before long that the
young President was neither headstrong nor a mere creature of
impulse, but that he followed a thoroughly rational system of
principles; and so they had to abandon the notion that the next
gust of impulse might blow him over to their side. They must take
him as he was, and make the best of it. Now, I must repeat, that,
for these gentlemen, the very idea that anybody could propose to
run the American Government, or to organize American Society, on
any other standard than theirs, seemed to them preposterous. The
Bourbon nobles in France and in Italy were not more amazed. when
the Revolutionists proposed to sweep them away than were the
American Plutocrats of the Rooseveltian era when he promoted laws
to regulate them. The Bourbon thinks the earth will perish unless
Bourbonism governs it; the American Plutocrat thought that
America existed simply to enrich him. He clung to his rights and
privileges with the tenacity of a drowning man clinging to a
plank, and he deceived himself into thinking that, in desperately
trying to save himself and his order, he was saving Society.
Most tragic of all, to one who regards history as the revelation
of the unfolding of the moral nature of mankind, was the fact
that these men had not the slightest idea that they were living
in a moral world, or that a new influx of moral inspiration had
begun to permeate Society in its politics, its business, and its
daily conduct. The great ship Privilege, on which they had
voyaged with pomp and satisfaction, was going down and they knew
it not.