WEBVTT NOTE Teddy Roosevelt and the Origins of the Modern Welfare-Warfare State 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Okay, good, good, good, because we're talking about Teddy Roosevelt this morning. 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:12.000 And I think it's fair to say there have been worse presidents than Theodore Roosevelt. 3 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:16.000 There have been better presidents than Theodore Roosevelt. 4 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:24.000 There have been smarter presidents and dumber presidents, taller and shorter. 5 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 But I think there's one thing you cannot take away from Teddy, and that is, 6 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:35.000 This conclusion is the result of deep, profound reflection and study on my part. 7 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:45.000 Teddy Roosevelt was the craziest president in American history. 8 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:53.000 And yet he played a decisive role in shaping the presidency into the office we know today. 9 00:00:53.000 --> 00:00:56.000 Politically he was a committed nationalist. 10 00:00:56.000 --> 00:01:01.400 He thus could barely bring himself even to speak of Thomas Jefferson, whom he loathed. 11 00:01:01.400 --> 00:01:06.760 And as late as the 1880s, he was still condemning Jefferson Davis as a traitor. 12 00:01:06.760 --> 00:01:11.680 The Confederate cause, of course, since it denied that a large, consolidated nation 13 00:01:11.680 --> 00:01:15.720 was its own justification, only enraged him. 14 00:01:15.720 --> 00:01:18.840 Philosophically, he was the consummate progressive, 15 00:01:18.840 --> 00:01:23.640 determined to bring efficiency and coordinated intelligence to bear 16 00:01:23.640 --> 00:01:31.160 against the trusts, against the spoilers of the natural environment, against international disorder. 17 00:01:31.160 --> 00:01:39.000 He was, as one historian put it, the first great president reformer of the modern industrial era. 18 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:48.360 He thus had little patience with federalism and indeed most of the constitutional impediments that stood between him and the construction of a new American state. 19 00:01:48.360 --> 00:01:58.360 Roosevelt deserves credit for innovation even, paradoxically enough, in cases in which he was exercising an executive prerogative that one of his recent predecessors had in fact pioneered. 20 00:01:58.360 --> 00:02:04.360 For Roosevelt brought to the presidency a thorough and consistent philosophy of the presidency. 21 00:02:04.360 --> 00:02:12.360 And what a previous chief executive may have done hesitatingly or without fanfare, Roosevelt made a matter of principle. 22 00:02:12.360 --> 00:02:31.360 Presidential scholar Edward Corwin has spoken of the personalization of the presidency, by which he means that the accident of personality has played a considerable role in shaping the office, and indeed it is hard to think of a stronger personality than that of TR, whoever served as president. 23 00:02:31.360 --> 00:02:38.360 One presidential scholar observed that Roosevelt gave the office, quote, the absorbing drama of a western movie. 24 00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:46.360 And no wonder, Mark Twain, who met with the president twice, declared him clearly insane. 25 00:02:51.360 --> 00:03:01.360 In a way, Roosevelt set the tone for his future public life at age 20, when, after an argument with his girlfriend, he went home and shot and killed his neighbor's dog. 26 00:03:01.360 --> 00:03:08.360 He told a friend in 1884 that when he donned his special cowboy suit, which featured revolver 27 00:03:08.360 --> 00:03:15.520 and rifle, quote, I feel able to face anything. 28 00:03:15.520 --> 00:03:21.380 When he killed his first buffalo, he, quote, abandoned himself to complete hysteria, as 29 00:03:21.380 --> 00:03:27.660 historian Edmund Morris put it, whooping and shrieking, while his guide watched in stolid 30 00:03:27.660 --> 00:03:29.580 amazement. 31 00:03:29.580 --> 00:03:34.560 His reaction was similar in 1898 when he killed his first Spaniard. 32 00:03:34.560 --> 00:03:36.940 He loathed inactivity. 33 00:03:36.940 --> 00:03:41.100 At one point during the 1880s, he wrote to a friend that he'd been working so hard lately 34 00:03:41.100 --> 00:03:46.380 that he was going to do nothing at all for the next month except relax and write a life 35 00:03:46.380 --> 00:03:52.380 of Oliver Cromwell. 36 00:03:52.380 --> 00:03:57.720 Henry Adams said that, quote, all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative 37 00:03:57.720 --> 00:04:03.320 of Energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the 38 00:04:03.320 --> 00:04:09.800 range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter, the 39 00:04:09.800 --> 00:04:16.520 quality that medieval theology assigned to God. He was pure act. One of his sons has 40 00:04:16.520 --> 00:04:22.040 said to have remarked, Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse 41 00:04:22.040 --> 00:04:28.120 at Every Funeral. 42 00:04:28.120 --> 00:04:32.840 Bringing such a personality to the presidency, Roosevelt increased very significantly the 43 00:04:32.840 --> 00:04:39.600 visibility of the office and the popular fascination with the person of the president. 44 00:04:39.600 --> 00:04:44.280 One presidential historian explained it this way, as no president in memory and probably 45 00:04:44.280 --> 00:04:51.300 none up to that time, TR became a personality, a politician whose every action seemed newsworthy 46 00:04:51.300 --> 00:04:58.200 and Exciting, his family, his friends, his guests, his large teeth, his thick glasses, 47 00:04:58.200 --> 00:05:05.140 his big game hunting and his horseback riding, all were sources of media attention and delight. 48 00:05:05.140 --> 00:05:10.620 In a way that Washington and Lincoln had not done, and even Jackson avoided, TR became 49 00:05:10.620 --> 00:05:17.220 a very visible tribune of the people, a popular advocate whose personality seemed immediate, 50 00:05:47.220 --> 00:05:54.580 and several coaches and other officials to the White House and held a summit on this 51 00:05:54.580 --> 00:05:58.060 incredibly important issue that, of course, only the president could have possibly dealt 52 00:05:58.060 --> 00:05:59.780 with. 53 00:05:59.780 --> 00:06:02.620 And it seems like a relatively minor episode. 54 00:06:02.620 --> 00:06:07.900 When you think about it, it really begins, I think, a new stage in the presidency when 55 00:06:07.900 --> 00:06:13.020 issues that clearly belong to the realm of civil society and to individuals to deal with 56 00:06:13.020 --> 00:06:18.340 are now shifted to the federal government, and it accelerates the process by which Americans 57 00:06:18.340 --> 00:06:22.780 have become accustomed to looking superstitiously to Washington and to the President in even 58 00:06:22.780 --> 00:06:28.020 the most minor matters. So when Bill Clinton lectures you on cigarette smoking, you can 59 00:06:28.020 --> 00:06:35.820 think about football in 1903. But of course, TR didn't limit himself to matters of minor 60 00:06:35.820 --> 00:06:41.020 importance. He intended to overhaul the U.S. presidency itself. He was very clear about 61 00:06:41.020 --> 00:06:47.300 about this. He said there inheres in the presidency more power than in any other office in any 62 00:06:47.300 --> 00:06:52.820 great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern times. But far from deploring the 63 00:06:52.820 --> 00:06:58.460 state of affairs, he went on to say, I believe in a strong executive, I believe in power. 64 00:06:58.460 --> 00:07:03.340 I don't think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man's hands, 65 00:07:03.340 --> 00:07:07.580 provided the holder does not keep it for more than a certain definite time and then returns 66 00:07:07.580 --> 00:07:21.580 He agreed with Andrew Jackson, who had argued that the president, by virtue of his election by the nation as a whole, possessed a unique claim to be the representative of the entire American people. 67 00:07:21.580 --> 00:07:32.580 Each member of the executive branch, but especially the president, quote, was a steward of the people, bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, he maintained. 68 00:07:32.580 --> 00:07:40.580 He could therefore, quote, do anything that the needs of the nation demanded, unless expressly prohibited in the Constitution. 69 00:07:40.580 --> 00:07:48.580 Quote, under this interpretation of executive power, I did and caused to be done many things not previously done. 70 00:07:48.580 --> 00:07:53.580 I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power. 71 00:07:53.580 --> 00:08:02.580 The cry of executive usurpation hounded Andrew Jackson during the 1830s when he attempted to put a similar theory of the presidency into practice. 72 00:08:02.580 --> 00:08:12.580 What effrontery John C. Calhoun had exclaimed in response to the suggestion that the President was the immediate representative of the American people. 73 00:08:12.580 --> 00:08:18.580 Continuing with Calhoun, the American people are not represented in a single department of the government. 74 00:08:18.580 --> 00:08:24.100 And the people of these states are united in a constitutional compact forming distinct 75 00:08:24.100 --> 00:08:29.380 and sovereign communities, and therefore no such community or people as the American people 76 00:08:29.380 --> 00:08:32.620 taken in the aggregate exists. 77 00:08:32.620 --> 00:08:36.360 Calhoun was characteristically perceptive when he pondered why Jackson would put forth 78 00:08:36.360 --> 00:08:38.700 such a theory. 79 00:08:38.700 --> 00:08:42.580 But why all this solicitude on the part of the President to place himself near to the 80 00:08:42.580 --> 00:08:48.300 people and to push us off, meaning the Senate, to the greatest distance? 81 00:08:48.300 --> 00:08:54.080 Why this solicitude to make himself their sole representative, their only guardian and protector, 82 00:08:54.080 --> 00:08:56.800 their only friend and supporter? 83 00:08:56.800 --> 00:08:58.840 The object cannot be mistaken. 84 00:08:58.840 --> 00:09:04.260 It is preparatory to further hostilities, to an appeal to the people, and is intended to 85 00:09:04.260 --> 00:09:09.440 prepare the way in order to transmit to them his declaration of war against the Senate, 86 00:09:09.440 --> 00:09:14.100 with a view to enlist them as his allies in the war which he contemplates waging against 87 00:09:14.100 --> 00:09:17.000 this branch of the government. 88 00:09:17.000 --> 00:09:29.000 Calhoun's remark applies equally well to T.R. Roosevelt, as we shall see, convinced he was doing the will of the people and what was best for the country, did not hesitate to disregard the Senate or the Congress as a whole. 89 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:38.000 He honestly believed himself to be doing the people's will and his solemn responsibility to see that will vindicated overrode concerns regarding the separation of powers. 90 00:09:38.000 --> 00:10:07.000 Roosevelt's innovations in the area of domestic policy were more subtle than those he introduced in foreign affairs, which I'll get to in a few minutes. 91 00:10:07.000 --> 00:10:11.840 previous presidents following both American tradition and the spirit and letter of the constitution 92 00:10:11.840 --> 00:10:19.500 had not entered office with an extensive legislative program whose passage they vigorously prosecuted. 93 00:10:19.500 --> 00:10:23.760 They deferred instead to Congress, the branch which it was generally understood was to retain 94 00:10:23.760 --> 00:10:26.620 the initiative in such matters. 95 00:10:26.620 --> 00:10:31.740 Roosevelt found a certain virility in bold leadership and in situations in which decisive 96 00:10:31.740 --> 00:10:36.740 actions seemed to be called for, he considered deference to Congress or to other legal restraints 97 00:10:36.740 --> 00:10:41.460 on Executive Power as a sign of pusillanimity and decadence. 98 00:10:41.460 --> 00:10:43.820 He wrote in his autobiography, 99 00:10:43.820 --> 00:10:47.340 In theory, the executive has nothing to do with legislation. 100 00:10:47.340 --> 00:10:52.420 In practice, as things are now, the executive is or ought to be peculiarly representative 101 00:10:52.420 --> 00:10:54.740 of the people as a whole. 102 00:10:54.740 --> 00:10:59.540 As often as not, the action of the executive offers the only means by which the people 103 00:10:59.540 --> 00:11:02.940 can get the legislation they demand and ought to have. 104 00:11:02.940 --> 00:11:16.940 Therefore, a good executive under the present conditions of American political life must take a very active interest in getting the right kind of legislation in addition to performing his executive duties with an eye single to the public welfare. 105 00:11:16.940 --> 00:11:30.940 Although the political parties of Roosevelt's day, as in our own, shared a great deal in common, political discourse in the United States was still fluid enough that matters of real import were still discussed within the halls of Congress. 106 00:11:30.940 --> 00:11:46.940 And I want to be able to move on to foreign affairs, so I'm just going to let this quotation double on the one hand as evidence of what I'm talking about Roosevelt and domestic policy, and at the same time evidence that you used to be able to read the congressional record and walk away saying, well, that was actually not a bad speech. 107 00:11:46.940 --> 00:11:51.940 This is Senator Isidore Rayner in 1906. 108 00:11:51.940 --> 00:11:59.440 Here we were, day after day, struggling with questions of constitutional law as if we really had anything to do with their settlement, 109 00:11:59.440 --> 00:12:05.940 laboring under the vain delusion that we had the right to legislate, that we were in an independent branch of the government, 110 00:12:05.940 --> 00:12:11.940 that we were one department and the executive another, each with its separate and well-defined distinctions. 111 00:12:11.940 --> 00:12:18.440 Imagining these things and following a vision and a mirage while the President was at work dominating the legislative will, 112 00:12:18.440 --> 00:12:26.440 Interposing his offices into the law-making power, assuming legislative rights to a greater extent than if he were sitting here as a member of this body. 113 00:12:26.440 --> 00:12:37.440 Dismembering the Constitution and exercising precisely and identically the same power and control as if the Constitution had declared that the Congress shall pass no law without the consent of the President. 114 00:12:37.440 --> 00:12:47.440 Adopting a system that practically blends and unites legislative and executive functions, a system that prevailed in many of the ancient governments that have forever gone to ruin. 115 00:12:47.440 --> 00:12:51.840 and which today still obtains in other governments the rebellious protests of 116 00:12:51.840 --> 00:12:55.800 whose subjects are echoing over the earth and whose tottering fabrics I hope 117 00:12:55.800 --> 00:13:00.720 are on the rapid road to dissolution. Of course today you'd be flattering the 118 00:13:00.720 --> 00:13:08.680 congressional record if you used it to wrap fish with. The annual presidential 119 00:13:08.680 --> 00:13:13.780 message read to Congress in December 1905 contained a lengthy plea from 120 00:13:13.780 --> 00:13:17.100 Roosevelt for a series of regulatory legislation which I'll mention in just a 121 00:13:17.100 --> 00:13:27.820 The New York World, a democratic newspaper, called it the most amazing program of centralization 122 00:13:27.820 --> 00:13:31.540 that any president of the United States has ever recommended. 123 00:13:31.540 --> 00:13:35.700 One disgruntled commentator remarked after the legislation was passed that Roosevelt's 124 00:13:35.700 --> 00:13:40.420 policies betrayed a marked tendency toward the centralization of power in the United 125 00:13:40.420 --> 00:13:45.300 States and a corresponding decrease in the old-time sovereignty of the states or of the 126 00:13:45.300 --> 00:13:46.300 individual. 127 00:13:46.300 --> 00:13:56.300 Roosevelt's top legislative achievements, such as, for example, the Meat Inspection Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Hepburn Act, 128 00:13:56.300 --> 00:14:02.300 reflect the President's confidence in expert commissions and more broadly his stewardship theory of the executive branch. 129 00:14:02.300 --> 00:14:09.300 As one scholar put it, these acts taken together might well be considered as marking the birth of the modern regulatory state. 130 00:14:09.300 --> 00:14:14.220 not everyone was especially sanguine at this prospect one conservative Republican 131 00:14:14.220 --> 00:14:18.060 observed that the president was quote consciously or unconsciously trying to 132 00:14:18.060 --> 00:14:22.860 concentrate all power in Washington to practically wipe out state lines and to 133 00:14:22.860 --> 00:14:28.340 govern the people by commissions and bureaus now the issue of railroad 134 00:14:28.340 --> 00:14:32.500 regulation was a matter of such import that I've just want to give it a special 135 00:14:32.500 --> 00:14:38.700 treatment which I'm afraid means about 90 seconds but it's fashionable in 136 00:14:38.700 --> 00:14:43.620 and historical circles to describe Roosevelt as a conservative, because he advocated reform 137 00:14:43.620 --> 00:14:49.500 in large part simply to keep at bay more radical initiatives. So, for example, the claim goes, 138 00:14:49.500 --> 00:14:54.780 and it's probably true, he called for legislation to regulate the railroads in order to counter 139 00:14:54.780 --> 00:15:00.060 calls for outright nationalization. Now, historians of the New Left have gone even further than 140 00:15:00.060 --> 00:15:05.620 this, arguing that since big business itself frequently played a role in agitating for 141 00:15:05.620 --> 00:15:11.220 for and even shaping the emerging regulatory apparatus, the ostensible effort by Roosevelt 142 00:15:11.220 --> 00:15:15.860 and his successors to rein in business interests was a sham. 143 00:15:15.860 --> 00:15:20.260 Now these new left scholars have indeed added a necessary corrective to the previously existing 144 00:15:20.260 --> 00:15:24.540 literature, and their claims certainly hold water in such obvious cases as the Federal 145 00:15:24.540 --> 00:15:26.100 Reserve system. 146 00:15:26.100 --> 00:15:30.580 The Fed, which while perhaps still not as centralized as some bankers may have wanted, 147 00:15:30.580 --> 00:15:38.980 The American regime at the turn of the century is beyond dispute, but new left historians 148 00:15:38.980 --> 00:15:43.660 fail to acknowledge that the state always maintained the upper hand in this partnership. 149 00:15:43.660 --> 00:15:46.780 Their critique stems partially from the fact that new left historians would have considered 150 00:15:46.780 --> 00:15:51.680 nothing short of nationalizing or dismantling large interests to be satisfactory, and from 151 00:15:51.680 --> 00:15:56.180 such a perspective, Roosevelt can indeed seem the reactionary. 152 00:15:56.180 --> 00:16:00.380 The battle over railroad regulation and the Interstate Commerce Commission provides a 153 00:16:00.380 --> 00:16:15.380 Roosevelt supported further railroad regulation, in addition to that already on the books, and ultimately signed the Hepburn Act of 1906, which while not as radical as what TR had sought, he considered satisfactory. 154 00:16:15.380 --> 00:16:23.380 The Act increased the number of members of the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it the authority to set just and reasonable rail rates. 155 00:16:23.380 --> 00:16:33.380 Whatever rates the Commission decided upon were to take effect immediately, and although the railroads had a right to appeal to the courts, the burden of proof rested on them and not on the Commission. 156 00:16:33.380 --> 00:16:43.380 The results were devastating. In a book that earned the Columbia University Prize in American Economic History in 1971, Albro Martin described the situation in detail. 157 00:16:43.380 --> 00:17:00.380 His thesis stated simply is that Roosevelt's Hepburn Act, combined with subsequent regulatory enactments, for example Taft's Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, deprived the railroads of the rate increases they needed, and especially debilitating handicap in an inflationary atmosphere. 158 00:17:13.380 --> 00:17:26.880 The railroads needed investment capital following the reorganizations of the 1890s if they were to preserve their capital stock, rebuild and modernize. 159 00:17:26.880 --> 00:17:29.380 In other words, they needed to be left alone. 160 00:17:29.380 --> 00:17:34.880 Instead, they got policies that both increased labor costs and refused the rate increases they needed. 161 00:17:34.880 --> 00:17:42.880 The result was that by 1911 profits had vanished and the collapse of the system of private management of the railroads followed soon afterwards. 162 00:17:42.880 --> 00:17:59.880 This arbitrariness, this apparent belief that seeing vindication of his own will, his iron will, was an adequate substitute for a sober assessment of the situation, was a central feature of Roosevelt's personality and it appears in his dealings with big business. 163 00:17:59.880 --> 00:18:08.880 Unlike some progressives whom he dubbed the lunatic fringe, Roosevelt did not consider business concentration a trend to be avoided or reversed. 164 00:18:08.880 --> 00:18:12.880 He saw it as an inevitable and even beneficial development of industrial society. 165 00:18:12.880 --> 00:18:17.880 It's also true that Roosevelt's reputation as a trust buster has been exaggerated. 166 00:18:17.880 --> 00:18:25.880 Historians rightly point out that the Taft administration initiated twice as many antitrust suits in its one term as Roosevelt did in his two. 167 00:18:25.880 --> 00:18:31.800 But the question isn't so much whether he was especially severe in this or that area, 168 00:18:31.800 --> 00:18:35.520 but what precedents did he set? And how did he help to strengthen the executive? Well, 169 00:18:35.520 --> 00:18:42.980 the Northern Securities case, which was alluded to yesterday, was the case that got Roosevelt 170 00:18:42.980 --> 00:18:47.440 his reputation as a trustbuster. And I'm afraid it's a very, very detailed thing, and I don't 171 00:18:47.440 --> 00:18:51.720 want to get into it, but just when the paper comes out, you can see, you can take my word 172 00:18:51.720 --> 00:19:00.280 for it. It was a completely bogus case. The rates on these lines that became part of the 173 00:19:00.280 --> 00:19:05.640 Northern Securities Holding Company fell, were falling consistently from 1901 when the 174 00:19:05.640 --> 00:19:13.000 Northern Securities was created until the case began in 1903. It's completely ridiculous 175 00:19:13.000 --> 00:19:19.640 but it's an example of Roosevelt hating there being other competing power centers in society 176 00:19:19.640 --> 00:19:24.720 and he felt that he had to crush them and he also sought to overturn the E.C. Knight 177 00:19:24.720 --> 00:19:33.080 case of 1895 which had seemed to promise that there was at least some hope that antitrust 178 00:19:33.080 --> 00:19:38.800 law would no longer be quite so arbitrary but Roosevelt gloried in the fact that he 179 00:19:38.800 --> 00:19:44.920 himself quote caused to be annulled by the court this same decision that had originally 180 00:19:44.920 --> 00:19:59.920 So I'll skip the details about Northern Securities. It's Roosevelt being wicked, got that. But I want to move right along because I can't believe how fast I'm running out of time. 181 00:19:59.920 --> 00:20:10.920 I want to talk about the matter of foreign affairs. Now in domestic affairs, Roosevelt explained, Congress could generally be trusted to come around to the correct position. 182 00:20:10.920 --> 00:20:16.920 But in the conduct of foreign policy, senators who were, as he put it, 183 00:20:16.920 --> 00:20:20.920 wholly indifferent to national honor or national welfare, 184 00:20:20.920 --> 00:20:25.920 and primarily concerned in getting a little cheap reputation among ignorant people, 185 00:20:25.920 --> 00:20:29.920 could interfere with the conduct of an honorable course abroad. 186 00:20:29.920 --> 00:20:33.920 More and more, Roosevelt declared to Congress in 1902, 187 00:20:33.920 --> 00:20:38.920 the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations 188 00:20:38.920 --> 00:20:51.800 The contention that Congress was the more popular branch of government, and therefore, even 189 00:20:51.800 --> 00:20:55.760 prescinding from the constitutional question, deserved special deference in matters of peace 190 00:20:55.760 --> 00:20:58.560 and war, would not have dissuaded him. 191 00:20:58.560 --> 00:21:03.880 He had privately called public opinion, quote, the voice of the devil, or what is still worse, 192 00:21:03.880 --> 00:21:05.920 the voice of a fool. 193 00:21:05.920 --> 00:21:10.080 And in a calmer moment, speaking in particular of foreign affairs, he observed that, quote, 194 00:21:10.080 --> 00:21:14.480 our prime necessity is that public opinion should be properly educated. 195 00:21:14.480 --> 00:21:19.240 Hence, while he favored executive supremacy in all areas of governance, the need for it 196 00:21:19.240 --> 00:21:23.080 in foreign policy was correspondingly greater. 197 00:21:23.080 --> 00:21:27.160 Roosevelt's fascination with war is corroborated both by his own testimony and by that of those 198 00:21:27.160 --> 00:21:28.820 who knew him. 199 00:21:28.820 --> 00:21:35.160 A college friend wrote in 1885, he would like above all things to go to war with someone. 200 00:21:35.160 --> 00:21:39.860 He wants to be killing something all the time. 201 00:21:39.860 --> 00:21:42.280 Roosevelt told another friend a few years later, 202 00:21:42.280 --> 00:21:47.180 frankly, I don't know that I should be sorry to see a bit of a spar with Germany. 203 00:21:47.180 --> 00:21:51.600 The burning of New York and a few other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson in the 204 00:21:51.600 --> 00:21:55.540 need of an adequate system of coast defenses. 205 00:21:55.540 --> 00:21:59.440 And I think it would have a good effect on our large German population to force them 206 00:21:59.440 --> 00:22:05.480 to an ostentatiously patriotic display of anger against Germany. 207 00:22:05.480 --> 00:22:09.200 Over and over again, Roosevelt insisted that the country needed a war. 208 00:22:09.200 --> 00:22:15.900 He gushes over war, wrote the philosopher William James, as the ideal condition of human society 209 00:22:15.900 --> 00:22:22.080 for the manly strenuousness which it involves and treats peace as a condition of blubber-like 210 00:22:22.080 --> 00:22:28.620 and swollen ignobility fit only for huckstering weaklings dwelling in grey twilight and heedless 211 00:22:28.620 --> 00:22:34.460 of the Higher Life. One foe is as good as another, for aught he tells us. One of the 212 00:22:34.460 --> 00:22:41.460 top scholars of TR's foreign policy has explained that the Rough Rider sought a big navy, quote, 213 00:22:41.460 --> 00:22:48.900 because it would prevent war, but also because it was such fun to have a big navy. So attached 214 00:22:48.900 --> 00:22:52.940 was Roosevelt, I might just state parenthetically, to the issues of national readiness and the 215 00:22:52.940 --> 00:22:57.860 martial virtues that after leaving office, he suggested adapting some of the wartime 216 00:22:57.860 --> 00:23:02.420 model to the needs of peacetime. He became an advocate of universal obligatory military 217 00:23:02.420 --> 00:23:07.280 training and in a comment that unwittingly reveals the rarely acknowledged link between 218 00:23:07.280 --> 00:23:12.560 universal suffrage and universal conscription, Roosevelt declared, let us demand service 219 00:23:12.560 --> 00:23:17.980 from women as we do from men and in return give the suffrage to all men and women who 220 00:23:17.980 --> 00:23:23.980 in peace and war perform the service. There's a lot more many more incriminating quotations 221 00:23:23.980 --> 00:23:36.360 Roosevelt these days among historians is experiencing a tremendous comeback after being pilloried 222 00:23:36.360 --> 00:23:41.280 by the new left historians and you read the standard accounts of TR and they all agree 223 00:23:41.280 --> 00:23:46.180 that the one thing we can take away from TR is that he was much more restrained in his 224 00:23:46.180 --> 00:23:50.300 conduct of foreign policy than you ever would have imagined and isn't he a great statesman 225 00:23:50.300 --> 00:23:51.300 and so on. 226 00:23:51.300 --> 00:24:06.300 Now, the only way that you can maintain this thesis is simply either to downplay or simply not mention at all the fact that he did, as Vice President and President, oversee the suppression of the Filipino Nationalists. 227 00:24:06.300 --> 00:24:11.300 And you can't assess his tenure as President without looking at this. 228 00:24:11.300 --> 00:24:18.740 You know, we all know how the U.S. acquired the Philippines after the war in 1898, and 229 00:24:18.740 --> 00:24:23.980 after it became clear to the nationalists that the U.S. had no intention of granting 230 00:24:23.980 --> 00:24:26.720 them their independence, at least not for a long time. 231 00:24:26.720 --> 00:24:31.960 Guerrilla warfare broke out, and the size of the American effort to suppress these nationalists 232 00:24:31.960 --> 00:24:37.680 has rarely been fully appreciated, but we're talking some 126,000 American troops seeing 233 00:24:37.680 --> 00:24:43.040 Fighting Action in Suppression Campaigns, and an incredible 200,000 Filipinos Losing 234 00:24:43.040 --> 00:24:45.080 Their Lives. 235 00:24:45.080 --> 00:24:49.560 Now while the fighting was going on, the Philadelphia Ledger featured a front page story by a correspondent 236 00:24:49.560 --> 00:24:55.640 covering General J. Franklin Bell's campaign, and here's an excerpt from that story. 237 00:24:55.640 --> 00:25:01.880 Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners 238 00:25:01.880 --> 00:25:07.320 soldiers and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up, 239 00:25:07.320 --> 00:25:12.780 an idea prevailing at the Filipino as such was little better than a dog, a mere reptile 240 00:25:12.780 --> 00:25:17.280 in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap. 241 00:25:17.280 --> 00:25:22.500 Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, have taken prisoner people 242 00:25:22.500 --> 00:25:27.060 who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence 243 00:25:27.060 --> 00:25:31.780 to show that they were even inserectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by 244 00:25:31.780 --> 00:25:39.780 by one to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses. 245 00:25:39.780 --> 00:25:44.780 This correspondent might seem to be a critic of American policy. 246 00:25:44.780 --> 00:25:55.780 In fact, he joined Roosevelt's generals in pointing to the primitive and uncivilized Filipinos as an excuse for disregarding the norms of civilized warfare. 247 00:25:55.780 --> 00:26:00.780 It is not civilized warfare, he admitted, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. 248 00:26:00.780 --> 00:26:22.780 Roosevelt's own views on race, which would take an entire paper to describe in detail, only encouraged this barbarism, and more than once he insisted that he had no intention of dealing with peoples he called backward with the same treatment he afforded to civilized countries. 249 00:26:22.780 --> 00:26:37.780 Only after American conduct in the Philippines was given embarrassing publicity at home in 1902 did Roosevelt take any action at all, ordering the court-martial of General Smith and Major Glenn, and even then he seemed clearly annoyed that the subject had been broached at all. 250 00:26:37.780 --> 00:26:45.780 In fact, he took the opportunity to condemn lynchings in the South as much, much worse than what was going on in the Philippines. 251 00:26:45.780 --> 00:26:51.780 Glenn ended up being fined $50, and Smith was admonished. 252 00:26:51.780 --> 00:27:02.780 TR's utter lack of interest was made especially manifest when, immediately following his court-martial of General Smith, he wrote J. Franklin Bell to congratulate him on his conduct of the war. 253 00:27:02.780 --> 00:27:11.780 Bell was a man whose methods Henry Cabot Lodge himself had described as cruel, and it was well known that Bell had ordered 100,000 Filipinos into concentration camps. 254 00:27:11.780 --> 00:27:16.780 In 1906, Roosevelt went even further and appointed Bell as his chief of staff. 255 00:27:16.780 --> 00:27:24.780 I'm really, really running out of time, so I'm just going to give a very quick example. 256 00:27:24.780 --> 00:27:38.780 The first example, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which essentially said that if there was a chance because of unpaid debts or anything like that, that it looked as though European intervention in our hemisphere may be imminent, 257 00:27:38.780 --> 00:27:45.780 The U.S. would essentially intervene to prevent that intervention, try to resolve the matter and restore order. 258 00:27:45.780 --> 00:27:51.780 The first case of this occurs in the Dominican Republic, and if I had more time I'd give you the quotations, 259 00:27:51.780 --> 00:27:59.780 but it's clear that Roosevelt had hoped to get away with not having to consult the Senate at all on this, and he simply defied them. 260 00:27:59.780 --> 00:28:07.780 Once the Senate refused to approve this treaty, he just issued an executive agreement and went right over their heads and didn't care at all. 261 00:28:07.780 --> 00:28:15.380 This is absolutely central to evaluating Roosevelt and his contributions to the modern presidency. 262 00:28:15.380 --> 00:28:22.480 There are so many examples. The Panama Canal. I took the canal while Congress debated. He boasted later. 263 00:28:22.480 --> 00:28:28.680 So many examples of how he alone would conduct such matters. 264 00:28:28.680 --> 00:28:36.680 How many minutes do I have? Probably about three. Boy, that's a lot. Okay, I can give one more example. 265 00:28:36.680 --> 00:28:44.220 A lot of Roosevelt's contemporaries favored an expansionist foreign policy because they 266 00:28:44.220 --> 00:28:49.280 believed that American businesses needed to sell their unsold surpluses and so we needed 267 00:28:49.280 --> 00:28:50.280 foreign markets. 268 00:28:50.280 --> 00:28:54.040 I mean, you know, it's a ridiculous thesis, but everybody, everybody in the 1890s believed 269 00:28:54.040 --> 00:28:55.600 it. 270 00:28:55.600 --> 00:28:59.600 Roosevelt seems to have believed it, but that wasn't the main reason that he did the things 271 00:28:59.600 --> 00:29:00.600 he did. 272 00:29:00.600 --> 00:29:04.400 He mainly did them because he wanted to vindicate the U.S. as a world power. 273 00:29:04.400 --> 00:29:09.400 It was only when economic matters touched on national honor that he really cared about them. 274 00:29:09.400 --> 00:29:17.400 And there's one little known example, apparently in 1905, the Chinese cancelled a railroad concession they had granted to J.P. Morgan. 275 00:29:17.400 --> 00:29:25.400 And it wasn't without reason. Apparently Morgan had finished only 28 miles of what was supposed to be an 840-mile track. 276 00:29:25.400 --> 00:29:31.400 It was a total disaster. But they gave him a handsome compensation package, and he was glad to get away with that. 277 00:29:31.400 --> 00:29:39.400 But Roosevelt was furious, and he later commented that if Morgan had wanted to fight that, 278 00:29:39.400 --> 00:29:43.400 Roosevelt would have put the entire strength of the executive behind Morgan. 279 00:29:43.400 --> 00:29:49.900 So we see here why, 50 years later, half a century or so later, when the Bricker Amendment is introduced, 280 00:29:49.900 --> 00:29:53.400 which among other things would have restrained the executive in foreign affairs, 281 00:29:53.400 --> 00:29:57.400 it's big business that above all opposes it. 282 00:29:57.400 --> 00:30:01.400 Looking back on his years in office, Roosevelt told his son in 1909, 283 00:30:01.400 --> 00:30:04.400 I have been a full president right up to the end. 284 00:30:04.400 --> 00:30:09.400 And just as he promised, Roosevelt had seized all the power that adhered in the presidency, 285 00:30:09.400 --> 00:30:14.400 and through his actions in office, permanently strengthened the executive for his successors. 286 00:30:14.400 --> 00:30:18.400 Quote, whenever I could establish a precedent for strengthen the executive, as I did, for instance, 287 00:30:18.400 --> 00:30:23.400 as regards external affairs in the case of sending the fleet around the world, taking Panama, 288 00:30:23.400 --> 00:30:29.200 Settling Affairs of Santo Domingo and Cuba, or as I did in Internal Affairs in Settling 289 00:30:29.200 --> 00:30:34.080 the Anthracite Coal Strike, in Keeping Order in Nevada this year when the Federation of 290 00:30:34.080 --> 00:30:39.640 Miners threatened anarchy, or as I have done in bringing the big corporations to book, 291 00:30:39.640 --> 00:30:45.560 why in all these cases I have felt not merely that my action was right in itself, but that 292 00:30:45.560 --> 00:30:50.480 in showing the strength of or in giving strength to the executive I was establishing a precedent 293 00:30:50.480 --> 00:30:52.760 of value. 294 00:30:52.760 --> 00:30:55.640 Long gone was the view of Charles Pinckney, who had said, 295 00:30:55.640 --> 00:31:00.640 We mistake the object of our government if we hope or wish that it is to make us respectable 296 00:31:00.640 --> 00:31:01.840 abroad. 297 00:31:01.840 --> 00:31:06.040 Conquest or superiority among other powers is not or ought never to be the object of 298 00:31:06.040 --> 00:31:07.860 republican systems. 299 00:31:07.860 --> 00:31:12.320 If they are sufficiently active and energetic to rescue us from contempt and preserve our 300 00:31:12.320 --> 00:31:16.200 domestic happiness and security, it is all we can expect from them. 301 00:31:16.200 --> 00:31:20.140 It is more than almost any other government insures to its citizens. 302 00:31:20.140 --> 00:31:24.060 Instead of this classical vision of the American Republic, Roosevelt gave us the beginnings 303 00:31:24.060 --> 00:31:26.180 of what we have now. 304 00:31:26.180 --> 00:31:31.580 Neoconservatives and other nationalists cherish his legacy, but the Roosevelt legacy is one 305 00:31:31.580 --> 00:31:35.580 that all Americans attached to the old republic must deplore.