19 - Mister Imperialism
How Capitalists Rule/Pt. 19
THE REPUBLOCRATS
Part 19:
Mister Imperialism
By Vince Copeland
Theodore Roosevelt has been a subject of fascination for biographers because of his tempestuous personality, his energy and the rather romantic path he took to power. But the biographers--with the possible exception of Henry F. Pringle and Gabriel Kolko--have all left out the most obvious thing about him as an individual. At the age of 42, shortly after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 and his own accession to the presidency, Roosevelt changed from a reactionary to a "progressive"--while within the Republican Party.
This oversight is partly because they don't recognize his basic conservatism in earlier life. He was even then generally regarded as a reformer because he was a fighter against corruption in politics and government.
It is also because they are somewhat dazzled by his more socially oriented reformist posture later on as president, and fail to see it in a critical light. And in spite of his services to the big capitalists, he was never loved by the majority of them. This tends to obscure the class reality underneath.
Their omission probably arises also from their failure to see that his "progressivism" was one-sided in the first place, where it was not actually phony. We have already noted his desire in 1896 to line some of the left Democrats up against the wall.
Roosevelt purposely oriented toward regulation of big monopoly business without discouraging the further growth and concentration of that monopoly. (Kolko's "Triumph of Conservatism" is a thoroughgoing documentation of the regulatory aspect of "progressivism" and how big business needed it, if it did not always welcome it.)
"There are good corporations as well as bad corporations," said Roosevelt, "good trusts and bad trusts." Since all the trusts survived his supposed trust-busting, we have to assume that the bad ones reformed. And where his progressivism actually did give some benefits to the people, it was calculated to win them over for the new imperialist course the country was now taking.
His changeover might be considered a personal aberration of Roosevelt's and only of slight interest to us here. But considering that he started a whole new trend in government--one common to both Republicans and Democrats, although the Democrats are more identified with it in modern times--it is worth examining more closely.
REFORMER IN ALBANY
TR had a reputation for civil service reform and honest government, having served several terms in the New York State Assembly where he defied the machine politicians and their various "bosses." But practically all his legislation in Albany was around this and similar issues, having little to do with social benefits for the masses of people or even with regulating the excesses of big business at that time. However, he was radical enough to antagonize the important political leaders of the Republican Party machine.
At one point, he actually voted to reduce the elevated railway fare in New York City from ten cents to five. Grover Cleveland, Governor of New York, vetoed the law with a tortured explanation of its possible unconstitutionality. The Republican Roosevelt thanked the Democratic governor for his perspicacity and changed his vote so as not to override the veto.
Meanwhile, New York working people were getting one to two dollars a day in wages, from which they paid the banker-owners of the elevated a dime for each trip to and from work.
PREACHER OF MANIFEST DESTINY
Being a prolific writer, Roosevelt left his mind-prints in several books written during the 1880s. His well-known "Winning of the West" reveals him as an anti-Native chauvinist and, in effect, a preacher of Manifest Destiny. But the book does have merit as a kind of history.
On the other hand, two biographies he wrote for the American Statesman series were nothing but excuses to put every half-baked right-wing theory of the age into print. These were his biographies of Gouverneur Morris and of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The following quotations are from his "Thomas Hart Benton," written in 1884, 17 years before Roosevelt became president.
On the Native people, he wrote:
"Much maudlin nonsense has been written about the governmental treatment of the Indians, especially as regards taking their land. For the simple truth is that they had no possible title to most of the lands we took, not even that of occupancy, and at the most were in possession merely by having butchered the previous inhabitants." (pp. 51-52)
In front of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History, you still may see a statue of the flamboyant "Westerner," as this scion of New York bankers liked to be called, seated on a horse beside which a Native man is shown kneeling in a supplicating way. Indian groups today have protested this turning of the truth on its head.
Another gem, this one from his ideas on government, is as follows:
"The presidential power of veto is among the best features of our government." (p. 114)
During the French Revolution of 1789, someone thought up the bright idea of giving the power of veto to the French king and queen. This prompted the Parisian people to call the monarchs "Monsieur et Madame Veto" before chopping off their heads. But of course Roosevelt would have called the Parisians of that time an ungovernable mob.
In our own time President Gerald Ford issued 50 vetoes in two years, nearly all of them against progressive legislation. And Ford wasn't even elected by the people; he was foisted upon them by a cabal using the House of Representatives to "elect" him. President George Bush, by the fall of 1992, had issued 32 vetoes, only two of which were overridden.
ABOLITIONISTS WERE A NUISANCE
Not wasting much time on his hero, Senator Benton, TR devotes a great deal of his book to the thesis that the Abolitionists were a nuisance and a harmful lot in general, who should have stepped aside and let the Republican Party (as he knew it) take care of freeing the slaves.
This was beginning to be a common thesis with the ascendancy of the New York banks, who indeed had wanted no "meddling" (as Roosevelt put it) with slavery before the Civil War and did their best to reenslave the slaves--in a more modern way--after the Civil War.
Roosevelt made the following argument to support his thesis that the Abolitionists were wrong to try to change the government in favor of ending slavery. Note how he belittles the rights of women in order to belittle the horrors of slavery.
"The plea that slavery was a question of principle on which no compromise could be accepted, might have been made and could still be made on twenty other points--women suffrage, for instance. Of course, to give women their just rights does not by any means imply that they should necessarily be allowed to vote, any more than the bestowal of the rights of citizenship upon blacks and aliens must necessarily carry with it the same privilege. But there were until lately and in some states there are now, laws on the statute books in reference to women that are in principle as unjust, and that are quite as much the remnants of archaic barbarism as was the old slave code; and though it is true they do not work anything like the evil of the latter, they yet certainly work evil enough. The same laws that in one Southern state gave a master the right to whip a slave also allowed him to whip his wife provided he used a stick no thicker than his little finger; the legal permission to do the latter was even more outrageous than that to do the former, yet no one considered it a ground for wishing a dissolution of the Union or for declaring against the existing parties." (p. 263)
CONSOLATION FROM THE TIMES
Roosevelt was around 26 at the time these books were published. However superficial his thought may have been, there is no doubt about the depth of his conviction. That is, he sure did believe what he was saying, and with all the self-confidence of a strong ego and a pugnacious mentality.
Furthermore, at the age of 39, when he was running for governor of New York State, he republished the books without changing a line. This was just three years before he became president.
The New York Times raved about these books when they first came out and in fact the paper helped him in his political career. Coming from the newspaper organ of the big New York bankers with whom he was so intimate from birth, this was not so surprising. But it was an especially nice plum.
The Times also wrote editorial consolation when he lost the election for mayor of New York City in 1886. It referred, in a cloudy sort of way, to his someday running for president. He actually came in third for mayor. The Democrat Abram Hewitt, another millionaire, froze out Henry George, a Populist advocate of free land and a "Single Tax" on the mine owners and other monopolists of the land.
It was widely thought that Tammany stole the vote for Hewitt, even though Hewitt was a reformer pledged to clean up Tammany. The Republican machine was told to take the fall and vote for the Democratic Hewitt in order to beat Henry George, who ran on a labor party ticket and had the support of most of the oppressed workers in the city.
Appointed chief of police of New York City in the 1890s and then to the national Civil Service Commission, Roosevelt gained additional credibility from his five-volume "Winning of the West." Then, after the 1896 campaign, McKinley named him Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a job that was straight up his alley.
The story has been told many times of how the regular Secretary of the Navy was out of town the day the U.S. declared war on Spain. Theodore Roosevelt, sitting in Secretary Long's chair, cabled orders to Admiral Dewey in Hong Kong telling him to steam up to Manila and take the Philippines from Spain.
But why was Dewey in Hong Kong in the first place? It is seldom mentioned, but he must have been waiting for just such orders as the ones he got from Roosevelt.
UP SAN JUAN HILL TO THE WHITE HOUSE
A frustrated militarist if ever there was one, Roosevelt couldn't wait to enlist in the war. Right after the famous cable to Dewey, he collected a group of Western acquaintances and others to form a so-called "Rough Riders" regiment and got himself made a colonel. The regiment was shipped to Cuba but its horses were on a different boat, so its performance was somewhat ragged.
However, there was a battle area that succumbed to its prowess. It was called San Juan Hill. And Roosevelt was heralded as the leader of the charge. Actually, according to widely circulated stories, a Black regiment rescued the Rough Riders from the hill and provided them with some horses they otherwise would not have had.
However, public relations was already a developing art in 1898. Roosevelt was soon known as "the hero of San Juan Hill." He ran for governor of New York State almost as soon as he got home, and won the election by a close majority.
During the campaign, as was the custom in those days, he spoke from the observation platform on the last car of his train. And at every town and whistle stop, he was preceded by a bugler in uniform, who sounded "Charge!" on his instrument.
EXILED TO VICE PRESIDENCY
He proved to be an independent governor, defying the political "bosses" on several occasions. They decided to ice him out by making him vice president in 1900. Mark Hanna was said to oppose the nomination and warned that no good could come of electing this "cowboy." But the New York machine leaders were adamant and Hanna yielded. Then, with McKinley's assassination in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became president.
He was hardly in office more than a few weeks when he surprised both friend and foe by a series of announcements for radical change. He spoke strongly against the rule of the big financial and industrial monopolies--the "trusts."
How was it that he changed from being so conservative to adopting much of the program of the very people he had wanted to line up against the wall?
We have shown the general social situation. Roosevelt saw it as clearly as anyone else. While most of his talk about "trust-busting" was empty bluster, and his and the Senate's activities for regulation of big business--the pure food laws, etc.--were geared for the perpetuation of the status quo, he nevertheless became the most popular of U.S. presidents. He sponsored arbitration of a big coal mining strike, the first time a president had done this. And along with many warnings against excesses, etc., he spoke more favorably of organized labor than any previous president.
Next: His Wall Street connections
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