Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, Warning About 'Special Interests’ vs. Democracy)

"At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth.” —U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “The New Nationalism,” speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on “The Worst Offense… Against the Republic’)

“The worst offense that can be committed against the Republic is the offense of the public man who tries to persuade others that an honest and efficient man is dishonest or unworthy. This wrong can be committed in a great many ways. Downright foul abuse may be, after all, less dangerous than incessant misstatements, sneers, and those half-truths that are the meanest lies.”—U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “The Duties of Privilege,” originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1894, reprinted as “The College Graduate and Public Life” in American Ideals and Other Essays, Social and Political (1897)

Theodore Roosevelt might have imagined individuals given to “downright foul abuse” or “incessant misstatements, sneers, and those half-truths that are the meanest lies,” but not a politician who could engage in both.

He could denounce robber barons resorting to ruthless business practices like monopolies, price-fixing, and bribery, but he could never foresee that one of these “malefactors of great wealth” he had criticized in a 1907 address could simply eliminate the middle man by entering politics as a means of further enriching himself and his family.

He could call for the idle rich of his time to enter politics in order to rescue it from machine politicians, but could never have guessed that many in this educated class would acquiesce in corruption themselves.

Most of all, though he did not have much use for the Democratic Party of his day, he would never have believed that his Republican Party—the same one to which his beloved father belonged, the party of Lincoln that had saved the Union and advocated for the rights of freedmen—might one day meekly yield to new forces of disunion and leave the nation dangerously fractured along racial, ethnic, class, and religious lines.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on a Republic’s ‘Wide Differences of Opinion’)

“In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.”— U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “Citizenship in a Republic” speech delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, Apr. 23, 1910, reprinted in The Man in the Arena: Speeches andEssays by Theodore Roosevelt, edited by John Allen Gable (1990)

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on a ‘Square Deal’ for All Americans)

“If a man is good enough to be put up and shot at, then he is good enough for me to do what I can to get him a square deal.” —U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), Remarks Upon Receiving a Memento From the African-American Citizens of Butte, Montana, May 27, 1903

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.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on ‘The Men of Mere Wealth’)

“The men of mere wealth never can have and never should have the capacity for doing good work that is possessed by the men of exceptional mental training; but that they may become both a laughing stock and a menace to the community is made unpleasantly apparent by that portion of the New York business and social world which is most in evidence in the papers.”—Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26^th President of the United States, “The College Graduate and Public Life,” originally printed in The Atlantic Monthly, August 1894, reprinted in American Ideals, and Other Essays, Social and Political (1897)

TR explained further about the dangers of “malefactors of great wealth” in a speech 13 years after the publication of the above article. I considered his prescient warning about these men who hoped to “enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing” in this post from 14 years ago.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on Effort, Failure and Success)

“We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.”—Theodore Roosevelt, 26^th President of the United States (1858-1919), “The Strenuous Life,” address delivered in Chicago, Apr. 10, 1899

Quote of the Day (Finley Peter Dunne, on Miracles and Wall Street)

“Miracles are laughed at by a nation that reads thirty million newspapers a day an’ supports Wall Street.”—Irish-American journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Mr. Dooley's Philosophy (1900)

I wish Finley Peter Dunne had tried a lighter touch in his use of dialect. Between all the exaggerated misspellings and contractions, it becomes difficult to read his pieces at any length. In the case of this quote, for instance, the auto-correct function of my word processing program kept changing what I typed so much that I finally gave up. 

Maybe it did you a favor, Faithful Reader. At his best, this Chicago newspaper columnist could be among the most bitingly funny of American writers. Assessing Theodore Roosevelt’s memoir The Rough Riders, for instance, Martin Dooley, the bartender and mouthpiece for Dunne’s jibes, noted that it might have better called Alone in Cuba.  More than a few people have quoted his phrases while being blissfully unaware of the original source (e.g., “Politics ain’t beanbag” and “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”).

But the quote above really made me nod in agreement. More than a century removed from the robber barons—the fat cats that T.R. lambasted as “malefactors of great wealth”—America is still trying to make sense of Wall Street.

One American who tried but failed was H.R. Haldeman, best known to history as among the palace guard who abetted Richard Nixon in covering up Watergate—and who went to jail for the offense. As the President’s Chief of Staff and a former ad man, Haldeman had zero sympathy for anti-capitalist sentiments. But even he threw up his hands at the bipolar tendencies of The Street.

Fifty years ago this week, for instance, the nation’s weak economy, combined with growing unrest of the Vietnam War, led to a market crash, from a prior high of around 1,000 to 630. (How quaint, those numbers seem now!) Then, just the mere announcement of a dinner at the White House, in which the President and his economic advisers explained administration policy to Wall Street and industry leaders, was enough to produce a 31-point gain, the largest in history to that point.

You can practically see Haldeman shake his head as his notes in the diary he faithfully kept as Nixon’s Chief of Staff, “Really neurotic.”

And don’t even get me started on how the market has performed since the pandemic outbreak. I don’t think I understood Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s great quote in John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage—“I despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime”—until I understood how much “bubble,” in all its irrationality, has been associated with Wall Street. Nearly two months ago, for instance, U.S. stocks rallied at the thought that the pandemic might be slowing.

You might think, as the death toll reaches 100,000, that investors might be a bit more careful this time. No such luck. With an announcement looming that U.S. jobless claims would pass 40 million, Wall Street rallied again over the belief that reopened markets would set everything right again.

Well, let’s see how that turns out, okay?

(The image accompanying this post is a cartoon, “Wall Street bubbles - Always the same," which appeared in the May 22, 1901 issue of the British satirical magazine Puck. The cartoon shows American financier J. P. Morgan as a bull, blowing soap bubbles for eager investors. Several bubbles are labeled, "Inflated values." The image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division, under the digital ID cph.3g07880)

Photo of the Day: Spring at Roosevelt Common, Tenafly, NJ

Just before the weekend, Gov. Phil Murphy signed an executive order reopening New Jersey’s state parks and golf courses. I have never been interested in the latter, but lack of access to the former because of the coronavirus—and the associated shutdown of county and city parks—did as much as anything this past month to dispirit me and make me feel closed in by this all-engulfing crisis.

Still, I decided this weekend not to take my chances with even the county parks, as the governor’s relaxation of his prior order came with a cap of 50% of parking capacity. With temperatures over 70 degrees this weekend, and with the possibility of New York visitors pouring in, I did not want to be around any areas sure to test Murphy’s (not to mention the police’s) tolerance for “knuckleheads.”

So I went to a smaller, less frequented park—Roosevelt Common, about two miles from my home in Bergen County, NJ. Even here, there were limits, with the tennis court closed off to users, along with the centerpiece of the site: a stone monument honoring the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first conservation President.

I had wanted to get a picture of this memorial to T.R. for a different reason: to honor his strenuous effort in 1906 in passing perhaps the most enduring and beneficial legislation of the entire Progressive Era:  the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. 

To state what should be obvious but which, painfully, far too many don’t see today: that achievement has been undermined in the last few weeks by the current occupant of the White House, an individual who, by undercutting any Presidential role in safeguarding every American against untested and even insane medical "cures" and food hazards, richly deserves the nickname given him by one of my friends: “The Orange Menace.”

Though I was sorry that a fence kept me from photographing the Roosevelt memorial, the Common still offered unfettered access to the principal feature of its natural landscape: the pond. It doesn’t take long to circle it, but for decades it has never failed to soothe my spirit. I hope others may enjoy it for generations to come.

This Day in Reconstruction History (TR-Boosted Lynch Becomes 1st African-American Party Chair)

June 3, 1884—In a Republican National Convention mirroring the deep racial divisions of the nation, the delegates selected John R. Lynch of Mississippi—a three-term Congressman continually fighting white supremacy in the post-Civil War South—as Temporary Chairman. 

The title, though largely honorific, still represented the last time an African-American would be named a party chairman for the next hundred years—just as, at the same gathering, Lynch would become the only African American to deliver a keynote address at a national political convention until 1968.

At the convention, Lynch impressed two young politicos who became friends and would go on to lead the GOP at the start of the 20^th century, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge (a future President and Senate Majority Leader, respectively). 

Alarmed at the National Committee’s nomination of Arkansas’ Powell Clayton—a byword for corruption in his state—to the chairmanship, they had stayed up the night before, buttonholing delegates to switch their votes to Lynch. 

By nominating Lynch—and in persuading delegates to make the unprecedented move—TR, in his first appearance on the national stage, was already serving notice that he would not be bound by the normal partisan rules. (The story of that little-known convention fight is told by Jon Knokey’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of American Leadership.)

Son of an Irish immigrant overseer and a female slave, Lynch successfully managed a photographer’s studio, then invested in local real estate. 

Still just a decade and a half before, Lynch—then only in his early 20s—was a political star, rising successfully from a local justice of the peace to speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives to Congressman. 

His increasing marginalization since then symbolized the larger fate of African-Americans in an America that had abandoned its Reconstruction experiment in postwar racial justice.

Throughout his six years in Congress, Lynch pushed for several important pieces of legislation, including:

*funds to reimburse a Natchez orphanage damaged in the war;

*appropriations to improve the shoreline of the Mississippi River;

*dividing the state into two judicial districts; 

*laws to reimburse depositors who lost money when the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company failed;

*appropriations for a National Board of Health; and 

*supporting the Civil Rights Bill of 1875.

In advocating for the Civil Rights Bill, Lynch was especially cogent. While denying any inclination on the part of African-Americans to mingle in the social life of whites, he still denounced the indignities heaped upon his race by segregated public accommodations and public transportation.

Systematic disenfranchisement of African-American voters meant that Lynch could not hold onto his congressional seat. Sometimes the methods were blunt: threats and killings of those who exercised the franchise, for instance. Other times it was more subtle, such as “grandfather clauses” forbidding the vote to anyone whose grandfather was not a citizen, or literacy or property tests administered inequitably between the races.

For the remaining half-century of his life, as white America retreated further from the struggle for civil rights for all, Lynch fought a rear-guard action. He had used words, in Congress and at the GOP convention, to advance the cause of African-Americans and their GOP allies, and from now on he would use words to puncture holes in the negative thinking of historians then taking hold.

Jim Crow legislation, aided by adverse Supreme Court decisions, continually eroded the gains won under dire circumstances by Lynch and other freedmen. By the time of his death in the late 1930s, African-Americans may have been plunged into the deepest heart of the abyss, as they could not enact even anti-lynching legislation. He was, in fact, working on a defense of Reconstruction at the time of his death.

The fate of Lynch and other freedmen are coming increasingly into the history books as a result of a new understanding of Reconstruction that flowered with the civil-rights movement approximately 60 years ago, demonstrated most recently by Stony the Road, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s book-PBS documentary tie-in.