The National Government of right has, and must exercise, its power for the protection of labor which is connected with the instrumentalities of inter-State commerce.
Teddy Roosevelt
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.
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The National power over inter-State commerce warrants our dealing with such questions as employers’ liability in inter-State business, and the protection and compensation for injuries of railway employees.
We are all Americans; our common interests are as broad as the continent; the most vital problems are those that affect us all alike.
But those functions of government which no wisdom on the part of the States will enable them satisfactorily to perform must be performed by the National Government.
Each community should be required to deal with all that is of merely local interest; and nothing should be undertaken by the Government of the whole country which can thus wisely be left to local management.
I do not ask for over-centralization; but I do ask that we work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism when we deal with what concerns our people as a whole.
But the betterment must be accomplished partly, and I believe mainly, through the National Government.
The most serious troubles of the present day are unquestionably due in large part to lack of efficient governmental action, and cannot be remedied without such action; but neither can any remedy permanently avail unless back of it stands a…
In other words, our democracy depends on individual improvement just as much as upon collective effort to achieve our common social improvement.
We must make popular government responsible for the betterment both of the individual and of society at large.
We should work cautiously and patiently and with complete absence of animosity, except toward the individuals whom we are certain have been guilty of flagrant evil; but we should also work firmly to realize the democratic purpose…
This I know implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions than we have hitherto seen in this country; but I think we have to face the fact that such increase in governmental activity is…
We should only permit it to be gained and kept so long as the gaining and the keeping represent benefit to the community.
It is not even enough that the fortune should have been gained without doing damage to the community.
But the fortune must not only be honorably obtained and well used; it is also essential that it should not represent a necessary incident of widespread, even though partial, economic privation.
We grudge no man a fortune which represents merely his own power and sagacity exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.
Some of them have gained their power by cheating and swindling, just as some very small business men cheat and swindle; but, as a whole, big men are no better and no worse than their small competitors, from a moral standpoint.
Any feeling of special hatred toward these men is as absurd as any feeling of special regard.
It is this very freedom—this absence of State and National restraint—that has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.
Nevertheless, we as Americans must now face the fact that this great freedom which the individual property-owner has enjoyed in the past has produced evils which were inevitable from its unrestrained exercise.
Nevertheless, the fact that there are dangers in following a given course merely means that we should follow it with a cautious realization of these dangers, and not that we should abandon it, if on the whole it is the right course.
We should make it fully understood by the workingmen—by the men of small means—that we will do everything in our power for them except what is wrong; but that we will do wrong for no man—neither for them nor for any one else.
We should set our faces like flint against any such abuse.
The collective power of the State can help; but it is the individual’s own power of self-help which is most important.
The wage-earner primarily needs what it is pre-eminently to the interest of our democratic commonwealth that he should obtain—that is, a high standard of living, and the opportunity to acquire the means whereby to secure it.
Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt
