THE MIDDLE WAY:
STATESMANSHIP AS MODERATION
In the changing use of language one can sometimes notice the altered status of legitimate rule. At the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt embarked upon a series of rhetorical campaigns to secure passage of legislation to regulate the railroads. He did not hesitate to describe these tours as “swings around the circle”—the same label that signified the discredited practice that impeached Andrew Johnson. Roosevelt could use Johnson’s phrase because he appropriated the arguments of Johnson’s opponents to defend his activity. If popular rhetoric was proscribed in the nineteenth century because it could manifest demagoguery, impede deliberation, and subvert the routines of republican governance, it could be defended by showing itself necessary to contend with these very same political difficulties. Appealing to the founders’ general arguments while abandoning some of their concrete practices, Roosevelt’s presidency constituted a middle way between the statecraft of the preceding century and the rhetorical presidency that was to follow.
Between two understandings of the presidency’s place in the polity, Roosevelt offers us an extraordinary perspective upon the constitutional order. Looking back upon the nineteenth century, Roosevelt can see problems that accompany the delimitation of presidential leadership. Looking forward to our time, Roosevelt’s thought reveals the dilemmas that attend leadership’s routinization.
Roosevelt’s best-known and most important “swings around the circle” were on behalf of legislation that came to be known as the Hepburn Act of 1906. This legislation delegated power to the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroad shipping rates and to maintain and enforce compliance with those regulations. Roosevelt’s campaign for this Act and the principle behind it came to represent or symbolize his whole domestic policy. Roosevelt called his policy “the square deal,” naming a principle he believed could mediate the claims on behalf of and against wealth.1 For Roosevelt, the label “square deal” would summon consideration of a principle of fairness—an idea formed and enunciated prior to its advertisement in this catchy phrase.
Nearly all subsequent presidents would define their administrations in similar terms: The New Freedom, The New Deal, The Fair Deal, The Great Society, The New Federalism, and WIN (“Whip inflation now,” Gerald Ford’s unintentional parody). But after the first Roosevelt, only Woodrow Wilson would be as self-conscious in the articulation of his principles and their relation to the demands of popular leadership. We now take for granted what Roosevelt experienced as fresh and new. As leadership through capsulization would become routine, it would become an expectation—and as an expectation it would structure as much as service presidential policy.2
Theodore Roosevelt’s “middle way” was, in fact, a campaign for moderation—moderate use of popular rhetoric, moderate appeals for moderate reform (that did not socialize but merely regulated industrial capitalism), and most importantly, an appeal to moderate disputes that Roosevelt feared might anticipate and signal class antagonism severe enough to prompt civil war.
To break precedent as decisively—which is to say as extremely—as Roosevelt did in the service of moderation is the most general of several ironies that characterize his statesmanship. In this chapter I explore why he tried to use popular rhetoric against popular rhetoric, why he denounced demagoguery demagogically, and why he formed an alliance with his opposition party on a matter of utmost importance to his own party. To justify these tactics, Roosevelt had to step outside of the constitutional order to see it whole. To understand Roosevelt’s statesmanship and its importance to American political development, we have to recover his systemic perspective.
Can the lessons of Theodore Roosevelt’s statecraft be embodied in a constitutional order and taught to subsequent presidents? Or does any attempt to institutionalize this sort of discretionary “personal” power transform and subvert that very power? Can one construct a political order that encourages extreme tactics and moderate policy, or must institutions necessarily be biased against extreme tactics if they are to tend to moderation in result? The story of Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign for the Hepburn Act illustrates the ambivalence of the rhetorical presidency.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE HEPBURN ACT
In his Annual Message to Congress, delivered in December of 1904, Theodore Roosevelt urged the legislature to draft a law that would stop railroads from providing discriminatory rebates for large shippers, and to empower the Interstate Commerce Commission to set maximum allowable railroad rates in order “to keep the highways of commerce open to all on equal terms.… The government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce; and such increased supervision is the only alternative to an increase of the present evils on the one hand or a still more radical policy on the other.”3
The House of Representatives quickly passed the Esch–Townsend Bill in February 1905, but the Senate killed it in committee. One concession to emerge from the Senate committee, however, was a commitment to hold extensive hearings on the issue during the spring. Two months were given over to this technical and difficult subject, and a five-volume record thousands of pages long was produced. The report of the hearings was so extensive that there later arose a dispute over the cost of publishing them. While the Senate hearings proceeded, Roosevelt campaigned for a railroad bill on a “swing” through the middle west and southwest, en route to a Rough Riders reunion in Texas. Speeches in Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, and Chicago received extensive coverage in the press. A series of commencement speeches and other addresses later that summer continued the campaign. And in early fall, Roosevelt embarked upon another “swing” through the southeast en route to a visit to his mother’s family in Georgia, speaking in Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Little Rock. His rhetorical campaign culminated with an Annual Message to Congress in December that devoted its first eighteen pages to railroad rate regulation.
In January, Iowa Congressman Peter Hepburn introduced his bill, and again, the House quickly passed the regulatory legislation at the beginning of February. The House vote was overwhelming (346 yea; 7 nay; 29 not voting, 3 present). The bill was referred to the Senate Commerce Committee, where Jonathan Dolliver, a Republican from Iowa, prepared to lead the fight for it. But the majority leader of the president’s own Republican Party, Nelson Aldrich, was vehemently opposed, along with the president’s close friends, Henry Cabot Lodge and Philander Knox. “Virtually all the most influential newspapers of the country were also opposed to it. The prevailing opinion in press and public was that the measure would never pass the Senate.”4
Aldrich succeeded in taking away management of the bill from Dolliver, giving it instead to a Democrat, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina. “Ben Tillman’s vituperative race-baiting had done little to endear him even to many southerners of his own party.”5 This demagogue had not been on speaking terms with the president since the Senate had censured him for brawling in the Senate chamber four years earlier. Tillman had no love for a president who claimed in a magazine article that the senator “embodied retribution on the South for having failed to educate the cracker, the poor white,” or a president who also took delight in claiming that Tillman’s brother “had been frequently elected to Congress on the issue that he never wore an overcoat or an undershirt.”6
By placing “that serpent-tongued agrarian as its guide, the bill could not be labeled ‘Republican.’ For Dolliver, this was a staggering personal blow; for Aldrich, a beguiling triumph; for Roosevelt, an embarrassing problem.…”7 Aldrich hoped to force Roosevelt to seek support from Democrats, and further divide and alienate his own party. Tillman surprisingly rose to the task, illustrating the founders’ proposition that an institutional station could elevate a man of low motives and questionable character. The South Carolinian adopted a statesmanlike demeanor in the Senate and, for a time, achieved practical accommodation with the president, who dealt with him through intermediaries. For his part, the president, who once said, “When I’m mad at a man I want to climb right up his chest,” reconciled himself to the situation, claiming that he didn’t “care a rap” who got credit for a good bill as long as it was a good bill. “I was delighted to go with [Tillman] or with any one else just so long as he was traveling my way—and no longer.”8
The debate on the floor of the Senate lasted eleven weeks. Dolliver supplied some of the thoughtful defenses of the bill for Tillman, while Aldrich relied upon the acumen of Senators Foraker (of Ohio), Lodge, and Knox. The status of private property in the regime and the economic consequences of governmental interference motivated the partisans of big business and of the railroads, of course. Yet discussion on these large themes quickly transformed itself in Senate debate into disputes over the constitutionality of the delegation of power to the ICC and over the intended scope of judicial review of ICC findings.
Opinion on the latter issue dominated the debate and divided into three camps. Aldrich and his followers pressed for review broad enough to allow the courts to rescind all or any commission actions, to rehear evidence presented in administrative proceedings, and to suspend ICC enforcement until the conclusion of litigation. Fearful that the courts, well known in the nineteenth century for their protections of capital, would render the ICC impotent to act, Tillman and his supporters advocated legislation that would explicitly restrict judicial review to determinations of whether the ICC had exceeded its authority. Dolliver staked out a middle position: that the courts should themselves determine the scope of review based upon their understanding of judicial power inherent in the Constitution.
Roosevelt waited several months before committing himself to one of these positions. In April, convinced that with the president’s support, Tillman could forge a bipartisan coalition with twenty-six Democratic votes, Roosevelt endorsed the narrow review stance, providing Tillman with an amendment drafted by his attorney general. However, Tillman’s coalition appeared to be one vote short when the Democrats caucused, so Roosevelt shifted his position and supported the moderate Republican position of Dolliver, supplying him with another amendment drawn by the attorney general. He did so without informing Tillman who, feeling betrayed, resorted to some of the oratorical flourishes for which he had become famous. Dolliver and Roosevelt persuaded one of Aldrich’s supporters, Senator William Allison, to sponsor the amendment, which provided for judicial review but left it up to the the Court to decide its scope. On May 18, 1906, Roosevelt’s bill was passed into law by an exceptionally large majority, with only three senators voting against it.
The Hepburn Act gave the ICC the power to replace maximum rates; to supervise private cars, switching facilities, and other arrangements with big business; to forbid special passes for favored customers; to impose a triple-damage penalty for rebating; and to require and audit uniform accounting systems.9 In the following decade, the Supreme Court considered the scope of judicial review under the law, refused to rehear the evidence upon which the commission made its decisions, and established for itself, in essence, Tillman’s narrow review of statutory or constitutional authority. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the Hepburn Act gave birth to the modern administrative state.
CONDITIONS OF SUCCESS
Defeated in 1904 on this issue, opposed by the leadership of his own party, allied to a partisan for whom he had nothing but contempt—how did Roosevelt do it? How did he win, and win so decisively? No answer to this question could be fully satisfactory, because with only one case it is difficult to isolate the peculiar features or to assess their weights in contributing to victory. If one cannot establish precisely the forces of political success, one can nevertheless discuss the configuration of these conditions or characteristics which appear together relatively rarely in American political history, and which call attention to analogous characteristics in the very few later presidential triumphs. Formally, the conditions that were remarkable in this political success were: 1) the character of the issue; 2) the salience of the issue; 3) the quality of the president’s legislative skills; and 4) the character and quality of the president’s rhetorical skills.
The Issue
Although railroad regulation resulted from an interest group battle to secure material reward in a commercial economy, the character of the issue is not best described in strictly economic terms. Railroad regulation was perceived to be a moral issue that raised a number of politically constitutive questions, including the meaning of privilege, wealth, social standing, corruption, and conspiracy in a republican regime. For this reason, railroad regulation had as much to do with—perhaps more to do with—the reaffirmation and reinterpretation of American political principles as with material readjustment per se. For Americans, railroad regulation raised questions about the meaning of a regime that encouraged economic gain—that is, about the principles upon which the pursuit of economic gain is based.
This deeply political dimension of the dispute was addressed forthrightly by Roosevelt in his speeches, which I will discuss below. Because on first glance these issues appear to be, if not technical, at least more sophisticated than normal citizen concerns, one wonders why this policy engaged average Americans. Why did railroad regulation prompt fundamental, regime-level debate, since most political disputes, if pushed far enough, could raise the same sorts of concerns? Why not, say, oil regulation, or banking regulation? Why did railroad regulation so galvanize the public’s attention, and provide Roosevelt with considerable leverage in the Congress? Part of the answer, of course, is simply that Roosevelt made this an issue. But he claims to have focused upon it because it already was a public concern, and historians seem to agree. It was a deep public concern, I think, because it summoned powerfully negative symbols. These symbols derive their power from characteristics peculiar to railroading as an industry or to the history of the railroad industry in America, and they mark this issue as exceptional, if not unique.
For example, the fundamental question of the relation of rich and poor is raised dramatically by an industry that divides at the same time that it connects. It may be no accident that “the other side of the tracks” has become a synonym for poverty, or that “railroad” has become a verb meaning “to push through without due process.” The physical division that railroads embodied was accompanied by the simultaneous enrichment of some and impoverishment of others as towns flourished or died according to their proximity to the railroad. Unlike most public utilities, the railroad established service according to class, “first” or “second.”
The belief that railroad companies formed the center of a vast conspiracy on the part of huge corporations was supported not only by the fact that it was often true, but also by the physical representation of the railroad system itself—a vast network of arteries connecting the nation’s parts to each other. Business interconnections with railroad companies resembled the routes of the railways where complicated switching was visible to all who ventured to the next town.
As railroads extended their routes, they often encountered private property owners who were not inclined to sell their land. There were occasions known to many when a “farmer, moved by his affection for the land that was almost a part of himself, or instinctively fearful of the disruption which the railroad would bring to his familiar and beloved ways of life, or suspicious about the city strangers who would be brought to his door, or solicitous for the safety and peace of mind of his cattle and horses that would be terrified by the engine’s noise and endangered by its speed, was flatly unwilling to sell at all.”10 In situations like these, the railroads asserted their rights of eminent domain and took over the land for modest compensation. The question of the meaning of the “public interest” was thus made concrete and symbolically real as law equated the interests of these vast corporations with the good of the public.
The railroad was reinforced as a negative symbol by a more contingent factor. Railroad executives could not help it if the map of a national system resembled an interlocking directorate, or if they needed to confiscate some land to complete a project. These sorts of images and activities are inherent to the building of railroads. Peculiarly American, however, was the practice of giving “passes” for unlimited free transportation each year to governors, party leaders, entire legislatures, municipal leaders, friendly newspaper editors, “to virtually every person in a position either to influence legislation, court decision, administrative action or public opinion.” Party bosses could, and often did, solicit thousands of “trip passes” (good for only one trip) around election time.11
These passes not only symbolized the corruption that they induced; they also became signs of an American social hierarchy, as annual passes were treated as honors, flashed proudly as a “gesture of distinction.” They might even be viewed as the precursors to “gold” and “platinum” credit cards in our time, except that the most prestigious annual passes were actually made of gold.12
The power of these negative symbols was made still more intense by their conflict with an often-repeated identity of the building of the railroad and the nation. Late-nineteenth-century presidents often spoke, in very general ways, of the railroad as exemplar and carrier of a beneficent national industrialism. The contrast between the railroad’s promise and its real development as seen and felt alerted public attention and fueled public concern.
Railroad regulation raised fundamental regime-level questions. That fact alone distinguishes the case from the vast majority of legislation introduced in Congress. Closely connected to the character of the issue is its salience. Because the matters raised by railroad regulation were so fundamental, it is not surprising that considerable public attention was given to it. It need not have been so, however. Grave issues could, in some instances, remain shielded from public view or remain uninteresting to the public. In this case, public attention was riveted on the issue.
The high salience of railroad regulation was due in part to the power of symbols discussed above, but also to very extensive media coverage, which pitted colorful “muckrakers” against a well-endowed propaganda campaign engineered by the railroad industry. In 1905 especially, articles regularly appeared in most major magazines, including McClure’s, Arena, and Current Literature. McClure’s devoted several issues to detailed editorials by Ray Stannard Baker that were billed as “investigative reports” on the abuses of the railroads. Baker’s particular gift was to explain the mechanics of railroad ratemaking and to connect that very technical discussion to questions regarding the quality of life on the farm or the birth and death of cities.13
Reinforcing and responding to public interest were congressmen who regularly appealed “to the people” on this issue. Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin made the issue the centerpiece of his calls for socialist reform. During the debate in the Senate, he made his maiden speech on this issue, speaking to a near-empty chamber until he declared: “I pause in my remarks to say this. I can not be wholly indifferent to the fact that Senators by their absence at this time indicate their want of interest in what I may have to say upon this subject. The public is interested. Unless this important question is rightly settled seats now temporarily vacant may be permanently vacated by those who have the right to occupy them at this time.” David Chalmers reports that “the galleries applauded, and senators began to drift back into the chamber.”14
The railroads did not remain mute while journalists “muckraked.” Considerable sums were spent on a public relations campaign that spanned the continent. Ads were placed in newspapers; editorials and articles were commissioned; speeches of partisans were published and circulated. And politicians were put on notice that their opinions were being monitored by the most powerful lobby in the nation. At the turn of the century, Americans could not avoid the issue.
Presidential Skills
In addition to the nature and salience of the issue, several political tactics contributed to Roosevelt’s great success. These comprised a fairly sophisticated political strategy. Roosevelt coordinated his legislative and rhetorical efforts, bargained in a manner that appeared to give much but in fact gave little to his opponents, and articulated public principles with sufficient clarity to educate, not simply arouse public opinion.
Although Roosevelt was the first president to successfully appeal “over the heads” of Congress, he did so in a way that preserved, and did not preempt, Congress’s deliberative capacities and responsibilities. Elmer Cornwell has pointed out that Roosevelt began and ended his “swings” before Congress took up the bill.15 As Congress deliberated, the president eschewed public speech on the question, although he did encourage the speech of others, leak news items, and maintain private contact with congressmen. At one crucial juncture during the Senate debate in March, Roosevelt had his Bureau of Corporations release its report on the Standard Oil Corporation, showing that it had benefited by secret railroad rates. It was as if the “facts” could speak while Roosevelt himself remained statesmanlike.16
Roosevelt did not speak directly to the people on the eve of crucial votes, as is sometimes the case in our time, nor did he attack congressmen during the debate. For him, there was a marked contrast between campaign speeches, where such attacks were justified and a pleasure, and governing speech, where they were not. After passage of the legislation, Cornwell notes, Roosevelt took his case to the people again, this time to facilitate its implementation by reassuring those who had lost that the law was not as radical as they had feared.17 In this activity, Roosevelt abandoned nineteenth-century practice, to be sure, but he did so in a way that retained nineteenth-century objectives and accommodated that “nineteenth-century” institution, the Senate.
Roosevelt’s principled posture might suggest a politician averse to compromise. To the extent that bargains undermined important principles, Roosevelt would not enter into them. And he did not offer his bargains in public address, though he might explain them as consistent with his principles after they were concluded. But Roosevelt was willing to trade support in ways that others believed were substantial compromises, but in fact were not.
John Morton Blum has persuasively shown that Roosevelt feigned interest in a bill to revise and reduce the tariff, in order to trade that project for support for his most important objective, railroad regulation. The Republican party was divided on the tariff issue. Roosevelt managed to consolidate the party by supporting the weaker side (for revision) until its political futility had been made manifest to its partisans. The president then agreed to support the opponents of tariff revision in exchange for support on railroad regulation.
In late November 1904, the president sent Speaker of the House Joe Cannon, “that archpriest of protection,” a draft of a Special Message to Congress that urged tariff revision. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt delivered his Annual Message, in which nothing was mentioned of the tariff, but which highlighted railroad regulation as “the most important legislative act now needed.”18
Roosevelt turned his party’s division on the tariff to his advantage, because it mirrored division on the railroad issue. “Stand-patters” on the tariff tended to be “laissez faire” regarding railroad regulation, while the advocates of tariff revision supported railroad regulation. “The low tariff, antirailroad group was to have one reform. The high tariff, prorailroad group to hold one redoubt. Saving what he considered vital by sacrificing what he considered marginal, Roosevelt for the sake of railroad regulation jettisoned the draft of the Special Message on the tariff that had worried Cannon.” Subsequently, Cannon—on record against regulation—provided no obstacle to the passage of the Hepburn Act. When others of Cannon’s stripe tried to fight Hepburn, Roosevelt raised the tariff issue until they retreated. “For eighteen months, he employed adroitly the specter of tariff agitation.”19
To make the distinction between matters of principle and matters of expediency required an understanding both of the place of a particular policy in the conspectus of administration efforts and of the core features of the particular policy itself. On the latter, I have already indicated how Roosevelt was willing to support various versions of judicial review. Each kind of compromise also required an ability to explain the shift in the president’s position.
Roosevelt was an exceptionally skillful orator, well known for his engaging and distinctive speaking style. In addition, Roosevelt’s speech was distinguished from most subsequent presidential speech by the care he took to state his case in terms of principle, not detailed policy; to repeat principles often; and to moderate public expectations of the success of the policy.
“As to the details of carrying out … general principles we cannot expect everybody to agree.”20 Roosevelt left the details to Congress, where bargaining was, and ought to have been, public and legitimate. To articulate the principles clearly and often was the function of the presidential “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt used the issue of railroad regulation to raise and defend his principle of the “square deal.”
[At Dallas, Texas:] … no more intention of discrimination against the rich man than the poor man, or against the poor man than the rich man; with the intention of safeguarding each man, rich or poor, poor or rich, in his rights, and giving him as nearly as may be a fair chance to do what his powers permit him to do.
[At Austin, Texas:] It is essential, in dealing thus by legislative action with corporate wealth, or indeed with wealth in any form, that we remember and act upon certain rules simple enough … to state, but not always easy to act upon. Most emphatically, we can not as good Americans bear hostility to any rich man as such any more than to any poor man as such.… That is my interpretation of the doctrine of the square deal.
[At Denver, Colorado:] A spirit of envy on the part of those less well off against the better off is as bad as and no worse than a spirit of arrogant disregard for the rights of the man of small means on the part of the man of large means. The arrogance and the envy are not two different qualities; they are the same quality shown by men under different circumstances.
[At Richmond, Virginia:] This government was formed with as its basic idea the principle of treating each man on his worth as a man, of paying no heed to whether he was rich or poor, no heed to his creed or his social standing, but only to the way in which he performed his duty to himself, to his neighbor, to the state. From this principle we can not afford to vary by so much as a hand’s breadth.21
Roosevelt’s principle was substantively moderate—mediating the claims of rich and poor. He made this moderation an even more general principle of statecraft. “We have been scrupulously careful on the one hand to be moderate in our promises, and on the other hand to keep these promises in letter and in spirit.” If leaders overpromise, warned Roosevelt, “you will be laying up for yourselves a store of incalculable disappointment in the future.” Because all campaigns for reform raise expectations of the populace, it is necessary for the leader to not only moderate his own promises and predictions, but also to combat the false hopes engendered by others. “I believe [the Hepburn Act] will work a measurable betterment for the public. Listen to what I say—a measurable benefit for the public. I do not believe that it will produce the millennium, or anything approaching it; and I am quite certain that some of its most ardent advocates will be disappointed with the results.”22
THE OLD WAY REVISED
In his Inaugural Address of 1905, Roosevelt remarked, “Though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced … remains essentially unchanged.…”23
Repeating this thought many times during his tenure as president, Roosevelt expressed a bi-level, Lincolnian approach to constitutional interpretation and statecraft. If the essential objects and most general principles of the Constitution could be adumbrated, specific constitutional prescriptions could be altered or abandoned as a matter of constitutional fidelity.
Roosevelt presumed that, periodically, the perspective of founder need be adopted to preserve or improve the constitutional order. Occasional “refoundings” would be necessary. In the same Inaugural, Roosevelt likens himself to Washington and Lincoln, founder and refounder. He suggests there, and often in subsequent addresses, that his is a time of fundamental crisis, in which the very capabilities of republican self-governance are to be tested. “… Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations.”24 This sentiment echoes the very first number of The Federalist:
It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their interest and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.25
As discussed in Chapter 2, The Federalist defended a theory of governance that would not require and did not provide support for the statesmanship of founders after the founding. Prominent among the arguments against popular leadership was the claim that an administrative republic would not need great leaders because the most difficult political issues would be replaced by the smaller concerns of citizens no longer contentious about the kind of regime they wished to constitute. The founders also feared provision for popular leadership because they expected that, as an institutional practice, statesmanship would quickly degenerate into demagoguery, which might raise anew the great divisions of class, section, or constitutive principle.
But what should the nation do if it found itself contending again with regime-level questions and disputes despite the founder’s best efforts to settle those questions? And what should it do if those disputes were fueled by demagogues—demagogues who were not presidents, but demagogues nonetheless. This was the state of political life and these were the most important political questions in turn-of-the-century America, as Theodore Roosevelt viewed it. By speech and example, Roosevelt showed the need for plebiscitary leadership in order for the nation to achieve the founder’s objectives, including those of moderating demagoguery and restoring the administrative republic.
Demagoguery had long been both an interest and a political concern for Roosevelt. During the presidential campaign of 1896, he accused William Jennings Bryan of demagoguery, and one of Roosevelt’s campaign speeches was later republished with the title “The Menace of the Demagogue.” The founder’s worry to prevent “hard” demagogues—those who appeal to passion to exploit division—was Roosevelt’s worry, too. “What [demagogues] appeal to is the spirit of social unrest, the spirit of discontent. They have invoked the aid of mean and somber vices of envy, of hatred for the well-to-do, and of sectional jealousy.”26
Paradoxically, to oppose this form of leadership, Roosevelt adopted a rhetoric of alarm and exaggeration—that is, of untruth—in a political campaign. This sort of popular leadership could only be justified by its object or result, and could only be vouchsafed for the public by the character of its wielder. Said Roosevelt:
Mssrs Bryan, Altgeld, Tillman, Debs, Coxey and the rest have not the power to rival the deeds of Marat, Barriere, and Robespierre, but they are strikingly like the leaders of the Terror of France in mental and moral attitudes, plus an added touch of the grotesque rising from the utter folly of trying to play such a rôle in such a country as ours.…
[Altgeld] would connive at wholesale murder and would justify it by elaborate and cunning sophistry for reasons known only to this own tortuous soul.27
Roosevelt isolated two features of comtemporary demagoguery as the objects to which the central tenets of his public philosophy would be directed. Demagogues appealed to the passions of envy or of fear. Those who exaggerated the corruption of wealth appealed to the envy of the poor and middle class. Those who raised the specter of socialism appealed to the fears of the wealthy and middle class. From this observation, Roosevelt concluded that his public philosophy must distinguish individuals and corporations from the classes or categories in which they were subsumed. He would go after bad individuals and evil corporations, but he would chastize as demagogues those who opposed wealth as such or the impoverished as such.
He believed the nation was heading toward class war. “Above all, we need to remember that any kind of class animosity in the political world is, if possible, even more wicked, even more destructive to the national welfare, than sectional, race, or religious animosity.” He wrote these startling words in a message to Congress in 1902. I pause to note that it is not necessary to assess the historical accuracy of Roosevelt’s political analysis. Rather, we need only assume the plausibility of its central concerns. For if the nation could face a crisis of the sort he describes, then or later, the adequacy of the constitutional order to satisfy its original aspirations is seriously questioned.28
The campaign for the Hepburn Act was the forum in which Roosevelt publicly diagnosed and addressed his constitutional crisis. He tried to show how his seemingly novel policy and his new form of leadership were consistent with Hamiltonian principles even while they departed from nineteenth-century customs. Hamilton had argued in The Federalist against those who would attempt to guard against the abuses of governmental power by trimming power. Instead, argued Hamilton, government needed to possess all the power necessary to accomplish its ends.
A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.29
To those who repeatedly warned of the potential for abuse of unlimited power, Hamilton responded: “All observations founded upon the danger of usurpation ought to be referred to the composition and structure of the government, not to the extent or nature of its powers.”30
Roosevelt thought that opposition to railroad regulation posed the same issue, this time on two planes. The power to regulate the railroads was, like the power to tax, a necessary means toward legitimate ends; and the power to make this argument to the people was, likewise, a necessary power to accomplish legitimate purposes. Each power was subject to abuse, but the founders’ argument for the legislative power to tax subverted their proscription of presidential power to speak. Said Roosevelt:
The power of taxation is liable to grave abuse, and yet it must exist in the appropriate legislative body. You can not give any needed power to the representatives of the people without exposing yourselves to the danger of that power being abused. There must be the possibility of abuse or there can not be the possibility of effective use.31
Moreover, the power of popular speech is not necessary only to accomplish the positive purposes of government; it is necessary too, to accomplish the tasks of “negative” leadership emphasized by the founders. The Federalist candidly points out that it is the task of statesmen to act as a break upon public opinion, to contest it if it contradicts the Constitution or its own deeper aspirations. “… It is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of [the people’s] interests to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.”32 Roosevelt argued that popular leadership was sometimes necessary to withstand popular pressure. “… If the public ignorantly demands that the railroad shall do more than it can with propriety do, then just as fearlessly [a leader] must antagonize public sentiment, even if the public sentiment is unanimous.”33
Pushed to its conclusion, the logic of Roosevelt’s position justifies blatant appeals to passion, demagoguery in its worst guises, if that is necessary to preserve or restore the constitutional order. His attempt to exercise extraordinary power moderately, and with constant warnings about its possible abuse, was his attempt to resolve the perennial problem that faces any statesman or institutional theorist who wishes to provide for emergency power on the one hand, yet make it safe on the other.
Roosevelt’s conception of statesmanship was the product of long reflection upon the difficulties of crisis rule. While governor of New York, he published his most thoughtful book, Oliver Cromwell, which probed the problem of providing order in the absence of a constitution. The key difficulty, thought Roosevelt, is to exercise necessary discretionary power without making that emergency power routine. “In great crises it may be necessary to overturn constitutions and disregard statutes, just as it might be necessary to establish a vigilance committee, or take refuge in a lynch law; but such a remedy is always dangerous, even when absolutely necessary; and the moment it becomes the habitual remedy it is proof that society is going backward.”34
From Cromwell’s errors Roosevelt learned the importance of forms and formalities in politics, and the need for the statesman to look to the long-term preservation of these forms even as he violates them in a crisis. “Cromwell himself was no theorist: in fact, he was altogether too little of one. He wished to do away with concrete acts of oppression and injustice, he sought to make life easier for any who suffered tangible wrong. Though earnestly bent upon doing justice … he failed to see that questions of form … might be themselves essential instead of, as they seemed to him, non-essential.”35 Roosevelt tried to temper the tendency of his theory to legitimize extreme behavior through the precedent of his example. He wished his moderate statesmanship, more than his immoderate theory, to be the precedent for future presidents.
His example did indeed become the precedent for future presidents, but not in the way Roosevelt had hoped. As I show in the next chapter, Woodrow Wilson constructed a still more radical constitutional theory than Roosevelt’s, gaining support for it partly because of public familiarity with Roosevelt’s popular leadership. By justifying Roosevelt’s practice with a new theory that would make popular rhetoric routine, Wilson would transform the bully pulpit and Roosevelt’s America.
1 Theodore Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy, ed. William Griffith, 2 vols. (New York: The Current Literature Publishing Co., 1919), 1:252.
2 It is worth noting that the most popular presidents since the second world war—Eisenhower and Reagan—have not labeled their overall policies and in this respect resemble presidents of the nineteenth century.
See Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden Hand Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 1982), and James W. Ceaser, “The Theory of Governance of the Reagan Administration,” in The Reagan Presidency and the Governing of America, ed. Lester M. Salamon and Michael S. Lund (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 1984), 57–90.
3 Presidential Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, 4 vols. (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, n.d.), 3:133–34. In this section, I rely upon the crisp legislative history presented in David M. Chalmers, Neither Socialism nor Monopoly (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Co., 1976); John M. Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954); Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931); and especially Congressional Record, 59th Congress, First Session, 1906, Volume 40.
4 Joseph B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 2:1.
5 Chalmers, Neither Socialism nor Monopoly, 22.
6 Review of Books (September 1896), quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States 1900–1925, 3 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 3:231.
7 Blum, Republican Roosevelt, 95.
8 Sullivan, Our Times, 232. Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Co., 1913), 475.
9 Chalmers, Neither Socialism nor Monopoly, 25.
10 Sullivan, Our Times, 194.
11 Ibid., 204.
12 Ibid., 205, 210.
13 See especially Ray Stannard Baker, “The Railroad Rate: A Study in Commercial Autocracy,” McClure’s 36 (November 1905).
14 Chalmers, Neither Socialism nor Monopoly, 23. Congressional Record, 59th Cong. 1st Sess., 1906, vol. 40, p. 5688.
15 Elmer Cornwell, Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 24–25.
16 Pringle, Roosevelt, 421.
17 Cornwell, Presidential Leadership, 24–25.
18 Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, 80.
19 Ibid., 85.
20 Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy, 1:253 (Speech at Dallas, Texas, April 5, 1905). See also ibid., 1:263 (Speech at Denver, Colorado, May 9, 1905).
21 Ibid., 1:253, 255, 261, 300. There are at least fifty more variations on, and amplifications of, this theme.
22 Ibid., 1:209 (also 254), 261, 278 (also 270).
23 Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1905, in The Roosevelt Policy, 1:248; see also 1:265, 271–72.
24 Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy, 248. In a remarkable speech devoted to the Hepburn Act, delivered in Denver, Colorado, Roosevelt again likens himself to Lincoln, a “rescuer” of the Republic (266).
25 Federalist, no. 1, p. 33.
26 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Menace of the Demagogue,” in Works, vol. 16 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 401.
27 Roosevelt, “The Menace,” 394–95.
28 Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy, 1:110. One indication that the debate raised fundamental issues, and also one measure of the distance between our political culture and Roosevelt’s, is the fact that partisans of both sides of that debate used the terms “capitalist” and “worker” as a matter of course and without apology.
29 Federalist, no. 31, p. 194.
30 Ibid., 196.
31 Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy, 1:264.
32 Federalist, no. 71, p. 432.
33 Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy, 1:254.
34 Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Cromwell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 54. For the best statement of Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s self-prescribed educations for statesmanship, see John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
35 Roosevelt, Cromwell, 109.