We are coming up on the centennial of a truly remarkable speech. Given on August 31st, 1910 in Osawatomie, Kansas when Teddy Roosevelt had been out of office for almost two years. Though the occasion was a dedication of John Brown Memorial Park, the speech was largely a reaction to Roosevelt's chosen successor, Williamm Howard Taft, & his weakness if not downright subversion of reforms Roosevelt had proposed.
Someone with better writing skills, or a better grounding in history - & their numbers are legion here on dkos - will, no doubt, write a better post on the actual centennial of this speech in four weeks. Wealth disparity is deservedly a hot topic on these pages these days, so perhaps the Bull Mooses' words from a hundred years ago should be heard again.
Roosevelt begins with an acknowledgment of the occasion - John Brown & slavery & the larger conflagration that resulted - the Civil War, as fresh in the mind then as Vietnam would be today. He frames his thesis on the balance of a few quotations from Abraham Lincoln.
Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said:
"I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind."
And again:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln’s. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now, let the working man hear his side.
"Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. . . . Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world."
And then comes a thoroughly Lincoln-like sentence:
"Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."
Of course T.R. was correct in assuming he would be denounced as a Communist after this speech & you could add Anarchist, Socialist & a few other ists to the list. The speech is among the bedrock of Progressive thought & economic policy. It contains much of what we must fight for today. This speech has so many blockquotable passages - I encourage everyone to find their own favorites & add them in the comments. A few that strike me as imperative are:
Re: Corporate/Special Interest in Government
The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
Re: Corporate Responsibity (hey BP):
I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.
Re: Wealth Disparity & its creation:
The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.
&
No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.
John McCain says Teddy Roosevelt is his favorite president, but I have to assume it is only because of one half of the "walk softly" quote, McCain being a "big stick" kinda guy. Wonder what he & his Republican brethren make of the conclusion of that paragraph:
Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.
I am growing weary of hitting the blockquote button. I urge you all to read the whole speech, it is a great one. I also urge President Obama to mark the Centennial of this speech with one of his own, one that will be compared a hundred years from now with this one. The times demand it & when the calls of "Communist/Fascist/Anarchist" are applied to him, (& of course, they already have been) he will be associated more with Theodore Roosevelt than William Howard Taft.