The Public Record
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. A member of the Republican Party, he was born on October 27, 1858, in New York. Roosevelt was a prominent leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for domestic policies that included trust-busting, regulation of corporations, and conservation of natural resources. His administration is noted for significant reforms and the establishment of national parks and forests.
But the fact remains that the effect of political life, and of the associations that it brings, is of very great benefit in producing a better understanding and a keener fellow-feeling among men who otherwise would know one another not at…
The result is that in a very short time the men whose purposes are the same forget about all differences, save in capacity to carry out the purpose.
Given that he and they have a common object, the one test that he must apply to them is as to their ability to help in achieving that object.
He speedily finds that the quality of successful management, the power to handle men and secure results, may exist in seemingly unlikely persons.
It is often quite as irritating to be patronized as to be plundered; as reformers have more than once discovered when the mass of the voters stolidly voted against them, and in favor of a gang of familiar scoundrels, chiefly because they…
No one can succeed who attempts to go in on any other basis; above all, no one can succeed if he goes in feeling that, instead of merely doing his duty, he is conferring a favor upon the community, and is therefore warranted in adopting an…
If they are to be successful they must necessarily be democratic, in the sense that each man is treated strictly on his merits as a man.
Under such circumstances the men who work together for the achievement of a common result in which they are intensely interested are very soon certain to disregard, and, indeed, to forget, the creed or race origin or antecedent social…
A tie may remain between the members of a caste, based merely upon the similarity of their habits of life; but this will be much less strong than the ties based on identity of passion, of principle, or of ways of looking at life.
On the other hand, if the men can be mixed together in some way that will loosen the class or caste bonds and put each on his merits as an individual man, there is certain to be a regrouping independent of caste lines.
The average man, when he has no means of being brought into contact with another, or of gaining any insight into that other’s ideas and aspirations, either ignores these ideas and aspirations completely, or else feels toward them a more or…
As long as men are separated by their caste lines, each body having its own amusements, interests, and occupations, they are certain to regard one another with that instinctive distrust which they feel for foreigners.
The only way to avoid the growth of these evils is, so far as may be, to help in the creation of conditions which will permit mutual understanding and fellow-feeling between the members of different classes.
As a matter of fact, the enormous mass of our legislation and administration ought to be concerned with matters that are strictly for the commonweal; and where special legislation or administration is needed, as it often must be, for a…
This produces the thoroughly unhealthy belief that it is for the interest of one class as against another to have its class representatives dominant in public life.
The tendency is for the relations always to be between class and class instead of between individual and individual.
We have sharp rivalries, and our politics are by no means always what they should be, but at least we do not divide on class lines, for the very good reason that there has been no crystallization into classes.
The only way to provide against the evils of a horizontal cleavage in politics is to encourage the growth of fellow-feeling, of a feeling based on the relations of man to man, and not of class to class.
The result might be an oligarchy, or it might be mob rule; it mattered little which, as regards the ultimate effect, for in both cases tyranny and anarchy were sure to alternate.
Republics have fallen in the past primarily because the parties that controlled them divided along the lines of class, so that inevitably the triumph of one or the other implied the supremacy of a part over the whole.
Just so far, however, as the lines are drawn horizontally, the result is unhealthy, and in the long run disastrous, for such a division means that men are pitted against one another in accordance with the blind and selfish interests of the…
The resulting government, whether of the upper or of the lower class, is not a government of the whole people, but a government of part of the people at the expense of the rest.
It is impossible for a democracy to endure if the political lines are drawn to coincide with class lines.
But the betterment must come through the slow workings of the same forces which always have tended for righteousness, and always will.
Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt
