One hundred and twenty years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt tried out the same phrase for different audiences to describe his
vision of an executive who would mediate the divisions roiling America: the “square
deal.” The term proved so popular that several successors in the Oval Office adapted
it to characterize their own domestic programs.
Over the past 20 years, while other White House
occupants have risen appreciably (Ulysses S. Grant) or plunged just as
drastically (Andrew Jackson) in C-Span’s Presidential Historians Survey, Roosevelt has remained consistently at #4, placing him among the “near
great” among those holding our nation’s highest office. Crucial to his success was
his use of what he called his “bully pulpit.”
Few Presidents have surpassed TR as a phrasemaker. Mark
Mancini’s 2018 Mental Floss article identified 11 of them, including “square
deal”—his shorthand for a fair arrangement.
When he came to the mining town of Butte in May 1903 on a cross-country tour,
Roosevelt vowed to deal even-handedly between the claims of union workers and
capitalists—a position that had won him considerable acclaim when he helped achieve
a settlement in the anthracite coal strike crisis the prior fall.
That is why he told the Silver Bow Labor and Trades
Assembly of Butte that day that he was “one who tries to be an American
president, acting upon the principle of giving a square deal to each and every
one.”
But during his visit, the President also acknowledged a gift from Butte’s
black minority: a pair of silver scales. At a time when Jim Crow legislation
was abridging voting rights and African-Americans were subjected to rampant lynching,
he pointed out his personal debt to the group for their part at San Juan Hill
in the Spanish-American War, the battle that made him a national celebrity—"In
Santiago I fought beside the colored troops of the 9th and 10th Cavalry”—before
the sentence in this “Quote of the Day.”
As this account in Dickinson State University’s Theodore Roosevelt Center indicates, TR, finding that the phrase was gaining
traction with audiences, began to use it in other speeches and his private correspondence.
It soon came to describe the hallmarks of his domestic policies: consumer protection,
corporate regulation, and conservation.
When he began to stake out his opposition to successor
William Howard Taft in 1910, Roosevelt came up with another phrase: the “New
Nationalism.” TR and Taft's successful Democratic opponent in the Presidential campaign
two years later, Woodrow Wilson (no mean phrasemaker himself), implicitly drew
a contrast with the phrase “The New Freedom.”
Subsequent Presidents with similar ambitious
legislative goals then used variations on these:
·
“The New Deal”: Samuel Rosenman floated four different possibilities for the pledge that Franklin Roosevelt
made when he accepted the nomination at the 1932 Democratic Convention. The
candidate placed no special importance on what Rosenman called the “two monosyllables,”
and the speechwriter disclaimed any intention of fusing the slogans of TR and
Wilson, according to Safire’s Political Dictionary. But the phrase
appealed to Progressives desperate for a return to activist government amid the
Great Depression.
·
“The Fair Deal”: The popularity of
FDR’s domestic program led successor Harry Truman to call for his own
comprehensive program in the 1949 State of the Union address. Whether he
intended to or not, “fair” also echoed TR’s “square.” Only some of Truman’s
proposals ended up being enacted. But his call for national health insurance would
lay the groundwork for Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare program.
·
“The New Frontier”: Just as FDR did a try run of “New Deal” when he accepted the Democratic nomination for President, John
F. Kennedy used a variant when he did so in 1960. JFK used it to describe what
he would do to meet the uncharted territory of new challenges facing Americans.
But, even as he sought to distinguish this program from its forebears, JFK
embodied the kind of youthfulness and energy that had characterized TR nearly
60 years before.
·
“The Great Society”: First deployed at Ohio University and the University of Michigan in the run-up to his 1964 Presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson’s
phrase for his program contained no words that echoed any of these earlier
programs. But, in his civil-rights and anti-poverty legislation, he sought to
extend and surpass anything achieved by his predecessors.
·
“The New American Revolution”:
Speechwriter William Safire used this as the theme of a 1971 address in which
Richard Nixon called for revenue sharing. The idea, as historian Richard Norton Smith noted, was to reverse “the flow of power, dollars and
decisions to Washington that had commenced 40 years earlier with the New Deal.”
Yet, while the movement has informed much of conservative policy ever
since, the phrase itself never really caught on to describe the larger
administration program.
·
“The New Foundation”: “The New
Spirit” didn’t really catch on after Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inaugural address. Two
years later, his speechwriting team sought, with a notable lack of enthusiasm,
to take a different tack in evoking the programs of his predecessors, according
to Martin Tolchin’s account of the 1979 State of the Union address. But,
though the phrase may have struck a chord with the builder in Carter, it came
off as lukewarm and played out—a bad omen for his reelection campaign the
following year.
·
“The New Beginning”: Ronald Reagan,
an admirer of FDR as a young man, continually re-deployed phrases of the
three-term President, such as “rendezvous with destiny.” His echo of FDR’s “New
Deal” during his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican National Convention
and in his inaugural address the following year was fully in keeping with that
rhetorical tendency. At the same time, while Reagan equaled TR’s success as a
vote-getter, his full-throated embrace of free-market, loosely regulated capitalism
was arguably a reversal of the Republican Roosevelt’s more ambivalent view of
big business.
No comments:
Post a Comment