Reading Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” Speech | A Primary Source Close Read w/ BRI

0:04 Hi, this is Tony Williams, Senior Fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute, and we want to welcome you to another Close Read. This one will be on Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. Speaking each and it’s our great honor to have an esteemed historian and friend of mine over at the College of the Sequoia, Stephen Tootle.

0:26 Steven, welcome to the show. Thank you. Really appreciate it. You’re going to help us dig around in the New Nationalism speech, so I really appreciate it. You’re an expert on American history, specifically modern American history, so we’re very honored to have you along to offer your expertise on this document and some of it’s background.

0:52 Excellent. Can’t wait. It’s one of my favorites to cover and hopefully we can mix it up a little bit. Okay, let’s dive right in, Stephen, and if you can provide a little bit of background for the viewers on the context of this speech. In okay, well, Theodore Roosevelt was giving the speech at

1:18 a meeting of veterans who were dedicating a park to John Brown. So there are a lot of references in it to John Brown and the history of the Republican Party. And there’s a deeper context with Theodore Roosevelt as well, who had spent his entire life in politics and in Republican politics.

1:39 Then after his split with Taft, he feels like he needs to take his more traditional ideas and apply them to the challenges of America. In what we kind of lumped together is

2:00 the Progressive Era, and that is constant panics in the financial markets, the growth of corporations in terms of their size dwarf anything that had ever existed in the world.

2:23 This is also the era in which individuals were becoming much wealthier than anybody in history had ever become, especially in comparison to the average working person. Massive industrialization in terms of the amount of wealth that was

2:49 being created and the complexity of the companies that were being put together. Products were being delivered more cheaply, more uniformly and in higher quality than anything the world had ever experienced. In many ways, the challenges of the Progressive Era were

3:11 foreshadowing what would happen to the rest of the world as the kind of American economic system spread throughout the world. Urbanization again, it’s a trend that’s only been accelerating since the Progressive Era, but people moving into cities for economic opportunity.

3:32 And then there’s also a time of almost completely open borders, so people pouring into the United States from all over the world. This is the time in American history with the highest level of immigration. And to use the term that he would have used at the time, this is the time in American history

3:53 with the highest number of what they called at the time hyphenated Americans, meaning Americans with at least one parent who was foreign born. And so as much as people think that immigration increased in the night, we have these big waves that would happen in the 1980s or maybe ten years ago. No, it was at this time.

4:15 And this is also a time of massive political participation. One of the most stark other statistics to look at is you just have these massive increases of wealth, but you also have massive voter turnout. So we don’t see voter turnout return

4:36 to the levels of the Progressive Era maybe until today, in the last election. We’re starting to see some of those voter turnouts match the heights of the Progressive Era. So that’s just a kind of background to many of the things that were going on. But it led to this overall sense of chaos and crisis among the American people.

5:00 Right. So rapid social economic change and thus calls for reform from farmers like Tr and Wiggle Wilson and others. When people ask which person would experience the most social change, I always use Eisenhower as a benchmark because he was born in 1890.

5:23 But if you were someone who was born in 1890 and lived a relatively long life, it’s potential that you were born into a pre industrial setting and you died with a man landing on the moon and nuclear weapons. So what people were going through in this period was really unlike anything that any

5:47 group of human beings anytime in world history had ever gone through. Totally unprecedented. Okay, so looking at the document here from the New Nationalism, you alluded to the fact that he channeled some John Brown, which is kind of interesting, maybe a little bit more on the radical end of things, especially with the massacre

6:13 aslotomy but then also refers to some Abraham Lincoln, which is not on the document here, but is in the speech, not on the screen. How does he talk about Lincoln and labor? One of the things that is

6:34 just to refer to what’s in the first lines that you just brought up. But TR immediately frames his argument in terms of the long struggle for the rights of man. And that comes directly out of his understanding of all of the constitutional and legal and philosophical debates that come out of the Civil War period.

6:58 And he considers this to be yet another struggle for the uplift of humanity. So again, he’s dealing with this contemporary crisis, but he’s going back to history and trying to say to the American people, what we need is a deeper understanding of our founding principles and how they would apply to this crisis today.

7:21 And so he says, what we really want is very old, a triumph of real democracy that he’ll define later, a triumph of popular government and in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. And both of these things are extremely Hamiltonian.

7:42 He often described himself as a thorough going Hamiltonian. And you’ll notice that every time in this speech that he mentions equality or he will always throw the word equality of opportunity, and it’s opportunity to show the best that is within you. So he’s not talking about any kind of society.

8:06 And we’ll see this later in the document, too, where he says, I stand for the square deal, and that just means fairness. We want people to get what they have earned, but that will always result in inequality of condition. And that places him at odds with Woodrow Wilson’s answer, which is to focus on equality of condition.

8:27 That’s not what Theodore Roosevelt is saying, and that’s not his understanding of justice. And then this next paragraph, he shifts the focus back and says that’s why the history of America is now the central feature of the history of the world. This demonstrates that he also understands Federalist One and American exceptionalism, properly understood,

8:49 which is the proper role of the United States, is to serve as an example for the rest of the world that our democratic institutions still work even facing this kind of challenge. And so he says that’s for the world has set its face hopefully, towards our democracy. And then he puts the burden back on people as citizens.

9:11 Saying that each one of you even uses those words. Each one of you as an individual. Not as a group. As an individual. Carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your country. But the burden of doing well and seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind. So this is another difference that he has with Woodrow Wilson or many of the socialist thinkers at the time

9:37 who were trying to respond to these crisis with other ideas. But he says, no, you have to understand that the only way through this is by understanding that each of you is entitled to things as individuals. But every individual also has a burden. You have an individual responsibility

9:57 to yourself and to your government, and it’s a different understanding. It’s not libertarianism, certainly, and it’s not socialism, and it’s not Woodrow Wilson. Right. In these next two slides, he seems to be saying he talked about the special interests of all times, and then he really sort of does seem

10:18 to have that classic progressive vision of kind of the people versus the interest. That the special interest, the corporations that they’ve manipulated politics and our free government and really kind of cheated the system and hurted sort of the little guy, right?

10:41 Do you see this vision? Absolutely. But I want to, again, make this distinction between what he was proposing and what socialists or the Willsonians were proposing. So you see in these next few lines, at many stages in the advanced community, this conflict between men who possess more than they’ve earned and men who have earned more than they possess is a central condition of progress.

11:03 And he says. We have this in our day. It appears. As the struggle of the freeman again. It’s never far from his mind the issues that had to be worked out in years after the Civil War and to hold the right of self government against a special interest. Meaning the slave owner and the people who wanted to continue to Preston and who would twist the methods of free

11:25 government in order to defeat the popular will. And so he says, at every stage. In all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, not condition. Opportunity, and destroy privilege, which and he later defines as making sure that we always target unearned privilege.

11:47 He’s very careful to always make the distinction, which is something that Wilson would disagree with, and say, no, individuals aren’t guilty of individual crimes, they just live under a bad system. And TR was always careful to say, no, what we want to destroy is special privilege. What we want to destroy is anybody who’s

12:09 taking advantage in order to deny someone else justice. Look at the first line. There’s practical equality of opportunity. Right. He always puts equality of opportunity and then he points out, what we want is to give every person a fair chance to make themselves

12:31 everything in life, reach the highest capacity. And then again, second, equality of opportunity means that you’ll be able to carry this burden with you. But that’s where you see him filling out those concepts. Yes, it seems that the special privileges, these corporations, these monopolies,

12:52 are destroying that opportunity, that equality of opportunity for ordinary Americans and small businesses and so forth. Well, they could be. And if they were doing it using an unfair advantage, that’s where he would want to intervene. But he didn’t think of success in and of itself as being a bad thing.

13:13 This was another contrast with Wilson. Wilson’s basic argument was that big was bad. And Theodore Roosevelt’s argument is that big can be bad or big can be good. It depends on what they do. So if there is somebody who is successful in life and there’s a corporation who’s

13:36 succeeding, but they’re not doing anything wrong, leave them alone. But if they’re doing something wrong, then we need to punish them. But we need to punish them under the old rules, and we don’t need any new legal theories of governance in order to do so. In order to punish what is, in essence, bad behavior.

13:58 We come to the Square deal. Now, he had used this earlier when he was president, and this is after his term in office, and he’s going to run again in 1912. What is the purpose of this Square deal?

14:19 I think you’ve already alluded to this quality of opportunity, but what is the Square deal for him? Well, he says that he does want some rules changes. I mean, not merely that I stand for fair play into the present rules of games, but I stand for having those rules changed as long as they work for a more

14:42 substantial equality of opportunity, right? Not of condition, always careful. But he says one word of warning, which I think you don’t need to say to the good people of Kansas, but maybe I need to say this to people who don’t understand this, but he wants to make sure that people understand that part of freedom and part of equality of opportunity is you must be free to fail.

15:06 He says, I do not mean that. I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he’s not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who had a chance will not make good, then he’s got to quit. What we all want is we want justice according to what American culture had always called justice, which is justice for the brave man

15:30 who fought punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Again, it’s a large contrast with what Wilson always argued, which is that these people who are caught up in this system, it’s not their fault. And thus what we needed was permanent regulation.

15:53 And so the square deal was going to be specific, targeted legislation, but it was targeted at specific ills in society. In other words, we’re going to use legislation to fix specific problems and we’re going to also use that legislation, we’re going to revisit it because

16:15 we’re going to constantly be passing new laws and that’s not going to change. But at the same time, we don’t necessarily need new laws or new powers for the executive in order to punish people who are engaged in bad behavior. But always with this idea that what the goal should be is something

16:36 approximating what Americans would recognize as justice. So he starts to dial in on what he means by that or how we’re going to achieve the Square deal. It’s interesting here he starts to get into some discussion about a thoroughgoing and effective regulation.

16:59 So it seems to me that, and I think we’ll see it on some other slides he is talking about some national regulations, especially in the executive branch, like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Bureau of Corporations and some other regulatory agencies. And he says we don’t want to be forced

17:20 into the ownership of the railways if it can be avoided. But the alternative is some regulations. What do you think of that? Well, in many ways it sounds very much like the debates that we’re having now over the Internet. In many ways the railroads were the high tech commodity industry that was driving

17:41 the American economy in the late 19th, early 20th century. So people view the railways much in the way that we view the tech giants. People thought of the railways the way that we think of Apple and Google and Microsoft. So what Theodore Roosevelt is essentially

18:04 doing here is firing this as a warning shot and saying what we’re going to do is we’re going to use the old systems of government to really rethink what these are within the context of American society. So we understand that they are doing an interstate business, which means that this is within the purview of the federal government.

18:26 But he says, I don’t want to see the nation forced into ownership of the railways if it can be avoided. And maybe we need to look into Rogoing and effective regulation, but we’re going to do that based on a full knowledge of all the facts. I know that it can seem very similar to what Wilson was talking about, but you can see time after time all

18:50 of these qualifications that Theodore Roosevelt is putting into it in his speech, and Wilson just has none of this. Wilson just says, we’re going to do this. He already knows what the answer is. And so in each case, Theodore Roosevelt is taking this crisis and he’s forcing it back into the American system of government and saying that our existing institutions, with our existing rules and

19:14 most of our existing laws, are already capable of handling this crisis. And maybe we will need to have government ownership of the railroads. Maybe that’s where we’ll end up. But before we do that, we’re going to have a full knowledge of the facts. We’re going to have a physical valuation of the property.

19:36 And if it is determined through our democratic institutions that we need to take this over and we need to fix rates, then that will not be something that necessarily permanently alters the free market of the United States. It will just simply be something that we regulate on a national level.

20:00 There’s a very important distinction that Republicans in the 19th century had to make about economics. And this is the point that he makes in the speech where he quotes Lincoln, where he makes sure to always put politics above economic interests. And it’s a very important point

20:23 that Republicans always felt like they needed to make in order to say no no, we understand that the political system of the United States and our representative institutions are supreme, and that means supreme to everything. Everything else needs to be negotiated in this pluralistic system.

20:43 But it’s the system that protects liberty for all Americans. And if that means that we need to balance the relationship a little bit between the free market functioning and ownership of railroads or something.

21:04 It’s something that you do reluctantly. And you only do it after it gets through the House and through the Senate and through the Supreme Court. Which means it’s probably not going to happen. But it’s not something that you take off the table entirely because of the Civil War experience. We’ve already said that our democratic institutions are the most important thing.

21:28 So he goes on to talk about good versus bad trust and talking about not attempting to prevent such combinations, because, as you say, some can act in can act good

21:50 and not break the laws and so forth, he says, in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare and for that purpose, as I said, federal Bureau of the Corporations, interstate Commerce Commission. He’s talking about sort of achieving that progressive goal of efficiency and social order by, as he says, largely increasing their powers.

22:15 Yeah, Theodore Roosevelt was such a smart guy, and he had absorbed so many of these ideas, and so we see so much of his political theory in every sentence that he says is because he absorbed this stuff so much. He says that combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law

22:36 which can’t be repealed by political legislation. So the first thing to understand is that these economic laws that we live under, this is going to happen. And unlike Woodrow Wilson, which says that we can control this, theodore Roosevelt says we can’t control

23:00 the people becoming successful without trampling on all of our liberties. So he says the effort at prohibiting all combination has failed. And the way out lies not in attempting to prevent but completely controlling this in the interest of public welfare. And for that purpose we need an agency that like the Bureau of Corporations.

23:24 And he says we need more powers for these two executive agencies. And I don’t know if we would place all of the blame for the growth of the administrative state over the course of the 20th century belongs with Theodore Roosevelt or Taft as they

23:49 conceived of or use the powers of the federal government. Because in so many cases, what Theodore Roosevelt and what Taft actually did was only go after combinations of large businesses that were

24:14 doing things that were widely perceived of or in actuality were either angering the American people very much or actually hurting people. And in those cases

24:36 they wanted the executive departments and the court system to have the powers to punish people who were guilty of crimes. And in some cases they needed more powers and more authorities, more authority in order to do that. I think

24:58 one of the other public education elements here is that Roosevelt was able to tell a crowd of progressives who wanted to cheer him on that we’re going to do this, we’re going to go after the big baddies and we’re going to go after him with a big stick and don’t you worry about it.

25:22 And he would throw out a phrase like we’re completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare. Well, that could sound a little bit scary to give an executive agency that kind of authority. But then he followed it up immediately with a description of the tool he was going to use. And that was a combination of both specific and vague.

25:46 We’re going to use the Federal bureau of Corporations and the interstate commerce. But how he’s going to do it is effectively in a law enforcement capacity. So we’re going to still treat these as crimes. And he seems to have in this slide,

26:07 he starts to talk about his understanding of property and wealth. And I think in the next slide maybe even sort of a little clearer, where he says that he talks about excessive wealth and so forth and maintains that the public, the community can regulate its

26:34 use, can regulate property, can regulate wealth in the public welfare. And so how does that fit into Roosevelt’s understanding? Well, I mean, again, I would say you got to keep returning to a lot of the debates of the 19th century that give the basis of what we

26:58 would call what people now call capitalism. But what they were really describing in the 19th century was freedom. Let’s just call it freedom. You don’t need the word capitalism. But what this means is the individual right to earn, spend, keep, live a free life.

27:22 And what that means in a society where you have to protect the rights of other people. And how do these things apply? So how do those lessons that we just learned or were forced to learn because of the crisis of the Civil War, how do these apply to this new crisis?

27:43 And so that man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare who rightly maintains that every man who holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it. Now, again, this stuff only makes sense.

28:07 It’s sort of interesting because of how people misunderstand what capitalism is. But free markets can only exist in a free society. Capitalism is the absence of violence. So capitalism is nothing more than peace, right? We are not going to use violence in order to force you to

28:29 work or shop or buy or sell anything you don’t want to buy or sell. In order to have that level of freedom in society, you must first dedicate yourself to keeping as your first priority a system of ordered liberty. And that is thoroughly Hamilton’s understanding of the ordered liberty

28:50 that was set up under the Constitution of the United States. And so when Theodore Roosevelt is stating what would be obvious to everyone because everyone who had spent the last 80 years saying that the property claims of slave owners is of secondary importance to the right

29:11 of this individual person, the slave, to keep his own labor, to live a free life. So this is not contrary to capitalism. I hate the word capitalism because it messes us all up. But this is not contrary to the ideals

29:33 of freedom that we just settled in the 19th century. This is freedom. Understanding that economics and your economic system is one of your freedoms. But economic freedom is not the only freedom that you have. And one person’s economic freedom, you’re economically free up until the part

29:57 where your economic freedom interferes with my economic freedom. And then it is the role of politics, the peaceful negotiation in society to settle those issues. I guess I’m wondering where he talks about the right to regulate the use of wealth and the public interest is universally admitted.

30:19 I mean, I’m not sure it was universally admitted just in the sense of what if an industrialist made hundreds of millions of dollars but did so in a lawful way just by building a very successful corporation and then would turn around and was very

30:41 philanthropic with it and benefit the community. Would the government or the state then have the public then have the right to regulate that person’s wealth in the public interest? Well, in thea Roosevelt’s case, when he says things like that, he’s essentially taking Hamilton’s case in the bank of the United States.

31:03 He’s taking McKinley’s position in tariffs. And that is to say that we’ve already said and we already understood or Lincoln, when Lincoln was advocating for canals, these disastrous canals in Illinois, right. These things that the government does will have implications with regards to personal wealth of Americans.

31:28 And when it is something that involves interstate commerce, this will be done at the federal level. So he’s taking the Hamilton, Lincoln, McKinley and continuing that understanding of the regulation of government action that will affect the wealth.

31:54 When Republican politicians grant are settling Civil War debt, this is another way that they are affecting the personal wealth of millions of Americans through a political process. So in that sense, within the Republican tradition, he would say,

32:19 we’ve already crossed that many times over and now let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth directly in the interest of the common good. This is one that I don’t know, maybe I’d be interested in your thoughts on that. Do you think he’s seeing

32:40 this more as a continuation and saying we need to take this one step further? Well, I think that during the progressive era there was an awful lot of labor legislation that was regulating the terms and conditions of labor, whether working hours, minimum wages laws were passed, factory conditions and sort of safety regulations and so forth.

33:06 I think he does see in a very expansive role for the state, not only in corporate regulation, but then also in sort of what’s going on in the factory floor in the interests of workers and the common good, as he calls it. Well, I think we’re running out of time, but I wanted to dial in a little bit as we

33:28 wrap up here on the new nationalism because he seems to say that his very national outlook puts the need before section or localism personal advantage or maybe what we might call individualism.

33:50 And he says later on in that paragraph regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. So sort of seeing at least the way I’m reading it, this new nationalism is going to see a much larger role for the national government and for the executive branch, rather than maybe to contradict some of your earlier statements.

34:14 But these new powers are going to supersede some of the older ways of doing things because of the necessity of needs of this new age, this new industrial age with all of its rapid social and economic change. Is that how you’re reading it or maybe a little differently?

34:36 No, I mean, I don’t disagree with it. I think that in most cases, though, calling it the new nationalism for him was really him saying, we just need to remember the old nationalism. We have these new challenges.

34:56 But the way to solve these new challenges is to go back to how we work these things out in the past. How did we work things out with the bank of the United States? We learned some lessons there the compromises with private property, with tariff law, the debates over slavery and individual and private property,

35:19 and the relationship between states and the federal government. And what he’s saying is we need to rethinking of all of this stuff. Yes, the executive power as the steward of the public welfare, a judiciary interested in primarily in human welfare rather than property. But he’s not saying we need to invent new things.

35:42 We just need to look at these new challenges in light of what we’ve already learned. And so, just as the demands the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any class or section of the people, and I can’t help but read these things as

36:02 an echo of the arguments that Republicans were making in the 19th century about why the federal government had the right to regulate slavery. And what Theodore Roosevelt is saying in almost every one of these cases is, we’ve already settled these arguments because we had all these arguments over slavery.

36:24 We just need to apply those same legal principles and understand that, just like we were saying, no class of people in the United States got to have a dictatorial power over the entire rest of the country. We’re saying the same thing about people who just happen to have giant piles of money or our corporations.

36:48 We just need to apply those old principles to the challenges of today. Steven Tootle we thank you very much for joining us from the College of Sequoias and for all that you do for BRI. Thank you for joining us. Members of the viewing audience,

37:09 our Primary Source Close Reads, come out every other Thursday. Come back in two weeks for another close read on Frederick Douglas. Thank you. Thank you.