Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [60]
With no war immediately at hand, Carey thought little of this strange remark. He had no inkling, and Roosevelt’s subconscious may not have acknowledged, any connection between their current trot and the charge of the Twenty-first Lancers at Omdurman. Yet it had been there, some five months before, that Roosevelt had committed to come to Cheyenne.
ADDRESSING BOTH HOUSES of the Colorado legislature in Denver the next day, Roosevelt gave Eastern conservatives the first hint of radical oratory to come. He accused the Supreme Court of favoring big corporations and creating a judicial no-man’s-land around them, into which neither state nor federal government could trespass. A notorious case in point, he said, was Lochner v. New York. By striking down as unconstitutional a state law against excessive workplace hours, the Court had shown itself to be “against popular rights.”
The word popular sounded, to conservative ears, like populist, and the idea that the Court was capable of hostile acts in defense of liberty of contract showed how far Roosevelt had come from his Social-Darwinist youth. President Taft, who venerated appellate justice as something superior to vox populi, thought his remark smacked of anarchy. But Roosevelt was only warming up.
At 2:15 P.M. on the thirty-first, he climbed onto a kitchen table in a grove outside Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had fought the Missouri raiders in 1856. A crowd of thirty thousand Kansans waited to hear him declaim his “credo.” The prairie sun was strong, but there had been a cloudburst earlier in the day, and many stood ankle deep in mud.
Addressing himself repeatedly toward the Civil War veterans who sat in a special place on the battleground, Roosevelt roared over the calls of food vendors, “There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was perpetuated.” The name of John Brown, he declared, would “be forever associated” with the second of these national crises. Having said that, he avoided any further tribute to the bloody old fanatic.
It was a looming third crisis he wished to discuss—one utterly modern, yet still subject to the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipator had advocated harnessing a universal dynamic, whose power derived from the struggle between those who produced, and those who profited. Roosevelt quoted Lincoln’s famous maxim, Labor is the superior of capital, and joked, “If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a communist agitator than I shall be anyhow.”
Nevertheless, he was willing to go further in insisting that property rights must henceforth be secondary to those of the common welfare. A maturing civilization should work to destroy unmerited social status. “The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been … to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”
America’s corporate elite, Roosevelt said, was fortifying itself with the compliance of political bosses. He revived one of his favorite catchphrases: “I stand for the square deal.” Granting that even monopolistic corporations were entitled to justice, he denied them any right to influence it, or to assume that they could buy votes in Congress.
The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend