Okay, good, good, good, because we're talking about Teddy Roosevelt this morning.
And I think it's fair to say there have been worse presidents than Theodore Roosevelt.
There have been better presidents than Theodore Roosevelt.
There have been smarter presidents and dumber presidents, taller and shorter.
But I think there's one thing you cannot take away from Teddy, and that is,
This conclusion is the result of deep, profound reflection and study on my part.
Teddy Roosevelt was the craziest president in American history.
And yet he played a decisive role in shaping the presidency into the office we know today.
Politically he was a committed nationalist.
He thus could barely bring himself even to speak of Thomas Jefferson, whom he loathed.
And as late as the 1880s, he was still condemning Jefferson Davis as a traitor.
The Confederate cause, of course, since it denied that a large, consolidated nation
was its own justification, only enraged him.
Philosophically, he was the consummate progressive,
determined to bring efficiency and coordinated intelligence to bear
against the trusts, against the spoilers of the natural environment, against international disorder.
He was, as one historian put it, the first great president reformer of the modern industrial era.
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.
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.
For Roosevelt brought to the presidency a thorough and consistent philosophy of the presidency.
And what a previous chief executive may have done hesitatingly or without fanfare, Roosevelt made a matter of principle.
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.
One presidential scholar observed that Roosevelt gave the office, quote, the absorbing drama of a western movie.
And no wonder, Mark Twain, who met with the president twice, declared him clearly insane.
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.
He told a friend in 1884 that when he donned his special cowboy suit, which featured revolver
and rifle, quote, I feel able to face anything.
When he killed his first buffalo, he, quote, abandoned himself to complete hysteria, as
historian Edmund Morris put it, whooping and shrieking, while his guide watched in stolid
amazement.
His reaction was similar in 1898 when he killed his first Spaniard.
He loathed inactivity.
At one point during the 1880s, he wrote to a friend that he'd been working so hard lately
that he was going to do nothing at all for the next month except relax and write a life
of Oliver Cromwell.
Henry Adams said that, quote, all Roosevelt's friends know that his restless and combative
of Energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the
range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter, the
quality that medieval theology assigned to God. He was pure act. One of his sons has
said to have remarked, Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse
at Every Funeral.
Bringing such a personality to the presidency, Roosevelt increased very significantly the
visibility of the office and the popular fascination with the person of the president.
One presidential historian explained it this way, as no president in memory and probably
none up to that time, TR became a personality, a politician whose every action seemed newsworthy
and Exciting, his family, his friends, his guests, his large teeth, his thick glasses,
his big game hunting and his horseback riding, all were sources of media attention and delight.
In a way that Washington and Lincoln had not done, and even Jackson avoided, TR became
a very visible tribune of the people, a popular advocate whose personality seemed immediate,
and several coaches and other officials to the White House and held a summit on this
incredibly important issue that, of course, only the president could have possibly dealt
with.
And it seems like a relatively minor episode.
When you think about it, it really begins, I think, a new stage in the presidency when
issues that clearly belong to the realm of civil society and to individuals to deal with
are now shifted to the federal government, and it accelerates the process by which Americans
have become accustomed to looking superstitiously to Washington and to the President in even
the most minor matters. So when Bill Clinton lectures you on cigarette smoking, you can
think about football in 1903. But of course, TR didn't limit himself to matters of minor
importance. He intended to overhaul the U.S. presidency itself. He was very clear about
about this. He said there inheres in the presidency more power than in any other office in any
great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern times. But far from deploring the
state of affairs, he went on to say, I believe in a strong executive, I believe in power.
I don't think that any harm comes from the concentration of power in one man's hands,
provided the holder does not keep it for more than a certain definite time and then returns
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.
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.
He could therefore, quote, do anything that the needs of the nation demanded, unless expressly prohibited in the Constitution.
Quote, under this interpretation of executive power, I did and caused to be done many things not previously done.
I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power.
The cry of executive usurpation hounded Andrew Jackson during the 1830s when he attempted to put a similar theory of the presidency into practice.
What effrontery John C. Calhoun had exclaimed in response to the suggestion that the President was the immediate representative of the American people.
Continuing with Calhoun, the American people are not represented in a single department of the government.
And the people of these states are united in a constitutional compact forming distinct
and sovereign communities, and therefore no such community or people as the American people
taken in the aggregate exists.
Calhoun was characteristically perceptive when he pondered why Jackson would put forth
such a theory.
But why all this solicitude on the part of the President to place himself near to the
people and to push us off, meaning the Senate, to the greatest distance?
Why this solicitude to make himself their sole representative, their only guardian and protector,
their only friend and supporter?
The object cannot be mistaken.
It is preparatory to further hostilities, to an appeal to the people, and is intended to
prepare the way in order to transmit to them his declaration of war against the Senate,
with a view to enlist them as his allies in the war which he contemplates waging against
this branch of the government.
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.
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.
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.
previous presidents following both American tradition and the spirit and letter of the constitution
had not entered office with an extensive legislative program whose passage they vigorously prosecuted.
They deferred instead to Congress, the branch which it was generally understood was to retain
the initiative in such matters.
Roosevelt found a certain virility in bold leadership and in situations in which decisive
actions seemed to be called for, he considered deference to Congress or to other legal restraints
on Executive Power as a sign of pusillanimity and decadence.
He wrote in his autobiography,
In theory, the executive has nothing to do with legislation.
In practice, as things are now, the executive is or ought to be peculiarly representative
of the people as a whole.
As often as not, the action of the executive offers the only means by which the people
can get the legislation they demand and ought to have.
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.
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.
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.
This is Senator Isidore Rayner in 1906.
Here we were, day after day, struggling with questions of constitutional law as if we really had anything to do with their settlement,
laboring under the vain delusion that we had the right to legislate, that we were in an independent branch of the government,
that we were one department and the executive another, each with its separate and well-defined distinctions.
Imagining these things and following a vision and a mirage while the President was at work dominating the legislative will,
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.
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.
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.
and which today still obtains in other governments the rebellious protests of
whose subjects are echoing over the earth and whose tottering fabrics I hope
are on the rapid road to dissolution. Of course today you'd be flattering the
congressional record if you used it to wrap fish with. The annual presidential
message read to Congress in December 1905 contained a lengthy plea from
Roosevelt for a series of regulatory legislation which I'll mention in just a
The New York World, a democratic newspaper, called it the most amazing program of centralization
that any president of the United States has ever recommended.
One disgruntled commentator remarked after the legislation was passed that Roosevelt's
policies betrayed a marked tendency toward the centralization of power in the United
States and a corresponding decrease in the old-time sovereignty of the states or of the
individual.
Roosevelt's top legislative achievements, such as, for example, the Meat Inspection Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and the Hepburn Act,
reflect the President's confidence in expert commissions and more broadly his stewardship theory of the executive branch.
As one scholar put it, these acts taken together might well be considered as marking the birth of the modern regulatory state.
not everyone was especially sanguine at this prospect one conservative Republican
observed that the president was quote consciously or unconsciously trying to
concentrate all power in Washington to practically wipe out state lines and to
govern the people by commissions and bureaus now the issue of railroad
regulation was a matter of such import that I've just want to give it a special
treatment which I'm afraid means about 90 seconds but it's fashionable in
and historical circles to describe Roosevelt as a conservative, because he advocated reform
in large part simply to keep at bay more radical initiatives. So, for example, the claim goes,
and it's probably true, he called for legislation to regulate the railroads in order to counter
calls for outright nationalization. Now, historians of the New Left have gone even further than
this, arguing that since big business itself frequently played a role in agitating for
for and even shaping the emerging regulatory apparatus, the ostensible effort by Roosevelt
and his successors to rein in business interests was a sham.
Now these new left scholars have indeed added a necessary corrective to the previously existing
literature, and their claims certainly hold water in such obvious cases as the Federal
Reserve system.
The Fed, which while perhaps still not as centralized as some bankers may have wanted,
The American regime at the turn of the century is beyond dispute, but new left historians
fail to acknowledge that the state always maintained the upper hand in this partnership.
Their critique stems partially from the fact that new left historians would have considered
nothing short of nationalizing or dismantling large interests to be satisfactory, and from
such a perspective, Roosevelt can indeed seem the reactionary.
The battle over railroad regulation and the Interstate Commerce Commission provides a
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.
The Act increased the number of members of the Interstate Commerce Commission and gave it the authority to set just and reasonable rail rates.
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.
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.
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.
The railroads needed investment capital following the reorganizations of the 1890s if they were to preserve their capital stock, rebuild and modernize.
In other words, they needed to be left alone.
Instead, they got policies that both increased labor costs and refused the rate increases they needed.
The result was that by 1911 profits had vanished and the collapse of the system of private management of the railroads followed soon afterwards.
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.
Unlike some progressives whom he dubbed the lunatic fringe, Roosevelt did not consider business concentration a trend to be avoided or reversed.
He saw it as an inevitable and even beneficial development of industrial society.
It's also true that Roosevelt's reputation as a trust buster has been exaggerated.
Historians rightly point out that the Taft administration initiated twice as many antitrust suits in its one term as Roosevelt did in his two.
But the question isn't so much whether he was especially severe in this or that area,
but what precedents did he set? And how did he help to strengthen the executive? Well,
the Northern Securities case, which was alluded to yesterday, was the case that got Roosevelt
his reputation as a trustbuster. And I'm afraid it's a very, very detailed thing, and I don't
want to get into it, but just when the paper comes out, you can see, you can take my word
for it. It was a completely bogus case. The rates on these lines that became part of the
Northern Securities Holding Company fell, were falling consistently from 1901 when the
Northern Securities was created until the case began in 1903. It's completely ridiculous
but it's an example of Roosevelt hating there being other competing power centers in society
and he felt that he had to crush them and he also sought to overturn the E.C. Knight
case of 1895 which had seemed to promise that there was at least some hope that antitrust
law would no longer be quite so arbitrary but Roosevelt gloried in the fact that he
himself quote caused to be annulled by the court this same decision that had originally
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.
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.
But in the conduct of foreign policy, senators who were, as he put it,
wholly indifferent to national honor or national welfare,
and primarily concerned in getting a little cheap reputation among ignorant people,
could interfere with the conduct of an honorable course abroad.
More and more, Roosevelt declared to Congress in 1902,
the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations
The contention that Congress was the more popular branch of government, and therefore, even
prescinding from the constitutional question, deserved special deference in matters of peace
and war, would not have dissuaded him.
He had privately called public opinion, quote, the voice of the devil, or what is still worse,
the voice of a fool.
And in a calmer moment, speaking in particular of foreign affairs, he observed that, quote,
our prime necessity is that public opinion should be properly educated.
Hence, while he favored executive supremacy in all areas of governance, the need for it
in foreign policy was correspondingly greater.
Roosevelt's fascination with war is corroborated both by his own testimony and by that of those
who knew him.
A college friend wrote in 1885, he would like above all things to go to war with someone.
He wants to be killing something all the time.
Roosevelt told another friend a few years later,
frankly, I don't know that I should be sorry to see a bit of a spar with Germany.
The burning of New York and a few other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson in the
need of an adequate system of coast defenses.
And I think it would have a good effect on our large German population to force them
to an ostentatiously patriotic display of anger against Germany.
Over and over again, Roosevelt insisted that the country needed a war.
He gushes over war, wrote the philosopher William James, as the ideal condition of human society
for the manly strenuousness which it involves and treats peace as a condition of blubber-like
and swollen ignobility fit only for huckstering weaklings dwelling in grey twilight and heedless
of the Higher Life. One foe is as good as another, for aught he tells us. One of the
top scholars of TR's foreign policy has explained that the Rough Rider sought a big navy, quote,
because it would prevent war, but also because it was such fun to have a big navy. So attached
was Roosevelt, I might just state parenthetically, to the issues of national readiness and the
martial virtues that after leaving office, he suggested adapting some of the wartime
model to the needs of peacetime. He became an advocate of universal obligatory military
training and in a comment that unwittingly reveals the rarely acknowledged link between
universal suffrage and universal conscription, Roosevelt declared, let us demand service
from women as we do from men and in return give the suffrage to all men and women who
in peace and war perform the service. There's a lot more many more incriminating quotations
Roosevelt these days among historians is experiencing a tremendous comeback after being pilloried
by the new left historians and you read the standard accounts of TR and they all agree
that the one thing we can take away from TR is that he was much more restrained in his
conduct of foreign policy than you ever would have imagined and isn't he a great statesman
and so on.
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.
And you can't assess his tenure as President without looking at this.
You know, we all know how the U.S. acquired the Philippines after the war in 1898, and
after it became clear to the nationalists that the U.S. had no intention of granting
them their independence, at least not for a long time.
Guerrilla warfare broke out, and the size of the American effort to suppress these nationalists
has rarely been fully appreciated, but we're talking some 126,000 American troops seeing
Fighting Action in Suppression Campaigns, and an incredible 200,000 Filipinos Losing
Their Lives.
Now while the fighting was going on, the Philadelphia Ledger featured a front page story by a correspondent
covering General J. Franklin Bell's campaign, and here's an excerpt from that story.
Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners
soldiers and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten and up,
an idea prevailing at the Filipino as such was little better than a dog, a mere reptile
in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap.
Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, have taken prisoner people
who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence
to show that they were even inserectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by
by one to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses.
This correspondent might seem to be a critic of American policy.
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.
It is not civilized warfare, he admitted, but we are not dealing with a civilized people.
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.
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.
In fact, he took the opportunity to condemn lynchings in the South as much, much worse than what was going on in the Philippines.
Glenn ended up being fined $50, and Smith was admonished.
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.
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.
In 1906, Roosevelt went even further and appointed Bell as his chief of staff.
I'm really, really running out of time, so I'm just going to give a very quick example.
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,
The U.S. would essentially intervene to prevent that intervention, try to resolve the matter and restore order.
The first case of this occurs in the Dominican Republic, and if I had more time I'd give you the quotations,
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.
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.
This is absolutely central to evaluating Roosevelt and his contributions to the modern presidency.
There are so many examples. The Panama Canal. I took the canal while Congress debated. He boasted later.
So many examples of how he alone would conduct such matters.
How many minutes do I have? Probably about three. Boy, that's a lot. Okay, I can give one more example.
A lot of Roosevelt's contemporaries favored an expansionist foreign policy because they
believed that American businesses needed to sell their unsold surpluses and so we needed
foreign markets.
I mean, you know, it's a ridiculous thesis, but everybody, everybody in the 1890s believed
it.
Roosevelt seems to have believed it, but that wasn't the main reason that he did the things
he did.
He mainly did them because he wanted to vindicate the U.S. as a world power.
It was only when economic matters touched on national honor that he really cared about them.
And there's one little known example, apparently in 1905, the Chinese cancelled a railroad concession they had granted to J.P. Morgan.
And it wasn't without reason. Apparently Morgan had finished only 28 miles of what was supposed to be an 840-mile track.
It was a total disaster. But they gave him a handsome compensation package, and he was glad to get away with that.
But Roosevelt was furious, and he later commented that if Morgan had wanted to fight that,
Roosevelt would have put the entire strength of the executive behind Morgan.
So we see here why, 50 years later, half a century or so later, when the Bricker Amendment is introduced,
which among other things would have restrained the executive in foreign affairs,
it's big business that above all opposes it.
Looking back on his years in office, Roosevelt told his son in 1909,
I have been a full president right up to the end.
And just as he promised, Roosevelt had seized all the power that adhered in the presidency,
and through his actions in office, permanently strengthened the executive for his successors.
Quote, whenever I could establish a precedent for strengthen the executive, as I did, for instance,
as regards external affairs in the case of sending the fleet around the world, taking Panama,
Settling Affairs of Santo Domingo and Cuba, or as I did in Internal Affairs in Settling
the Anthracite Coal Strike, in Keeping Order in Nevada this year when the Federation of
Miners threatened anarchy, or as I have done in bringing the big corporations to book,
why in all these cases I have felt not merely that my action was right in itself, but that
in showing the strength of or in giving strength to the executive I was establishing a precedent
of value.
Long gone was the view of Charles Pinckney, who had said,
We mistake the object of our government if we hope or wish that it is to make us respectable
abroad.
Conquest or superiority among other powers is not or ought never to be the object of
republican systems.
If they are sufficiently active and energetic to rescue us from contempt and preserve our
domestic happiness and security, it is all we can expect from them.
It is more than almost any other government insures to its citizens.
Instead of this classical vision of the American Republic, Roosevelt gave us the beginnings
of what we have now.
Neoconservatives and other nationalists cherish his legacy, but the Roosevelt legacy is one
that all Americans attached to the old republic must deplore.