Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [61]
Gifford Pinchot sat listening with collaborative satisfaction. He, James Garfield, and William Allen White, the progressive editor of the Emporia Gazette, had drafted significant sections of the Colonel’s speech.
Roosevelt explained that there could be no check to the growth of special interests so long as channels of collusion flowed back and forth between secretive boardrooms and secretive halls of government. To that end, the people must insist on “complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs,”* and a law prohibiting “the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes.”
There should be federal regulation, and physical valuation, of the stock flotations of all industrial combinations doing an interstate business: not only railroads and steamship lines, but those dealing in meat, oil, coal, and other necessities. Executives and “especially” the board members of such corporations should be held responsible for breaches of antitrust law. Roosevelt cited one of the proudest creations of his own administration, the Federal Bureau of Corporations, and said that it and the Interstate Commerce Commission should be handed greater powers. He further advocated “the great central task” of conservation of natural resources, second only to national security on his agenda; graduated income and inheritance taxes on big fortunes; a judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions; comprehensive workmen’s compensation acts; national laws to regulate the labor of children and women; higher safety and sanitary standards in the workplace; and public scrutiny of all political campaign spending, both before and after elections.
Throughout his address, the food vendors had loudly continued to advertise peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs, and pink lemonade, and a merry-go-round whistled not far away. But Kansans stood rapt as the Colonel, acknowledging that there could be such a thing as too much federal power, called for a compensatory spirit of democratic redress, as strong in the extremities of the country as at its center.
Three times, he defined this spirit as “New Nationalism.” One of its principal features would be a judiciary that favored individual over property rights. “I rank dividends below human character,” Roosevelt shouted, and swung into his peroration:
If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part of our affairs. We need to make our political representatives more quickly and sensitively responsive to the people whose servants they are.… It is particularly important that all moneys received or expended for campaign purposes should be publicly accounted for, not only after election, but before election as well.…
No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives, if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation. That is imperative; but it must be an addition to, and not a substitution for, the qualities that make us good citizens.… The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.
ROOSEVELT’S “NEW NATIONALISM” speech made front-page headlines all over the country. Newspapers printed the text in full. Progressive editors reacted with understandable warmth, forgiving the Colonel for his reluctance—still—to condemn the administration outright. “The dominant note of the whole address was its humanity,” remarked the Fort Wayne Sentinel, “its demand for the square deal, and its placing of the rights of man above the rights of property.” Conservative organs