The article, headlined “The Trusts, the People, and the Square Deal,” appeared in The Outlook on 16 November. It proved to be not so much a cry of outrage as a sober, detailed statement of his regulatory philosophy, adapted to new conditions, and accepting that combination was a fact of American life. For all its lack of sensationalism, it quickly sold out its press run, and tens of thousands of offprint copies had to be issued to satisfy public demand. Newspapers reprinted it nationwide.
Roosevelt tersely reaffirmed his self-defense in the Tennessee Coal & Iron matter, as testimony confirmed by all the principals involved. He devoted the rest of his space to a repudiation of Taft’s “chaotic” and overly judicial antitrust program. Admitting that he had invoked the Sherman Act himself against such trusts as Northern Securities, American Tobacco, and Standard Oil (and succeeded all the way to the Supreme Court), he said he had done so only when convinced of corporate mischief. Throughout his presidency he had exhorted Congress to create an independent agency that would constantly regulate, rather than sporadically punish, the doings of trusts—most of which were law-abiding, and all of which were entitled to be as big as they liked, as long as they did not monopolize their sector of the economy. “Size in itself does not signify wrong-doing.”
The time had come, he wrote, for an administrative policy of “close and jealous” monitoring of business combinations. Whatever body was created to exercise this authority—perhaps a strengthened version of his own Bureau of Corporations—must have power to override states’ rights and restrain unbridled competition. He acknowledged that the last word was holy to many self-styled progressives. But those who thought that the Sherman Act was good for competitive rights represented “not progress at all but a kind of sincere rural toryism.” They dreamed of bringing back the primitive freedoms enjoyed by village shopkeepers and smallholding farmers before the Civil War. “The effort to restore competition as it was sixty years ago, and to trust for justice solely to this proposed restoration of competition, is just as foolish as if we should go back to the flintlocks of Washington’s Continentals as a substitute for modern weapons of precision.”
Roosevelt insisted that in arguing for less prosecution and more regulation, he was not advocating socialism. He merely wanted a government that was democratic, and an economy that was moral. Under federal regulation, competition would flourish without becoming “an all-sufficient factor” that justified the exploitation of workers. Plutocrats in future should be held to account on “all questions connected with the treatment of their employees, including the wages, the hours of labor, and the like.” Once again he paid La Follette a compliment by noting that Wisconsin had already pioneered such a policy. There was not a hint, elsewhere in his text, of any personal animus against President Taft, or any desire to return to power.
FOR ALL THE article’s reticence, it was regarded as an “editorial explosion” by the Boston Globe, and was the talk of financial and political circles for days. Steel shares on the New York Stock Exchange registered a confident surge. Roosevelt was widely seen as having regained his conservative senses, and in an ironic reversal of image, earned praise for opposing the administration’s “war on business interests.” Henry Clews, the oracle of the finance industry, was outspoken in his approval. The Washington Post said that he had mutated into “an able and highly influential advocate of constructive business policies.” Joseph Pulitzer’s anticorporate New York World did not know whether to be suspicious or admiring. In an article headed HAS THEODORE ROOSEVELT NOW BECOME MR. MORGAN’S CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT?, it commented:
He presents Wall Street’s resentment against Mr. Taft more forcefully and coherently than Wall Street itself has been able to do.… He provides the mask of radicalism which any movement to prevent Mr. Taft’s renomination requires in order to be successful.
Mr. Roosevelt is palpably a candidate, and his extraordinary political genius has set for itself the task of bringing about a coalition of the anti-Taft progressives in the West and the anti-Taft plutocrats of Wall Street.
As so often before, Roosevelt found himself misunderstood by partisan critics for seeing things in the round. “Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions,” he complained to Charles D. Villard, a California progressive. He had no desire to challenge Taft, and even less interest in speaking for investment bankers—about the only living species that bored him. All he asked in their behalf was a square deal. Never before had he openly advocated federal price-fixing, yet conservatives chose to think that he liked the idea of guaranteed profits. And manifestly, in his dismissal of “rural toryism,” he had once again dashed the hopes of progressives that he might lead them.
Or so he thought. James Garfield’s Republican club in Ohio annoyed him exceedingly by endorsing him for President in 1912. At once the Philadelphia North American, whose editor, E. A. Van Valkenburg, often served as a spokesman for the Colonel, printed “an authoritative statement” of his nonavailability. On 27 November, Gifford Pinchot assured a dinner of the Insurgents’ Club that “Bob” La Follette would be the nominee of the Republican Party in 1912.
Asked if he was acting on orders from Sagamore Hill, he said no. “Since Mr. Roosevelt eliminated himself, Senator La Follette is his logical successor.”
LA FOLLETTE WAS not flattered by this grudging endorsement. “I’m nobody’s cloak. I’ll fight to the finish!” Money from both the wealthy Pinchot brothers mollified him, but as precinct and district bosses plotted the GOP state conventions that would begin to choose delegates early in the new year, the Senator’s principal weakness—a lack of support east of the Mississippi—became apparent. The Wall Street Journal remarked that if Taft faltered at the national convention, his support was unlikely to devolve to La Follette. A compromise candidate was sure to emerge: “someone who has personal qualifications, the voice, the power greatly to stimulate enthusiasm, the impressive presence.… That man’s name need not be spoken to the convention, for every delegate has it in his heart.”
Unauthorized Roosevelt “clubs” began to sprout in Idaho, Montana, Michigan, and Ohio. On 11 December, the Republican National Committee held its annual meeting in Washington, D.C. It split at once into progressive and conservative factions. Taft members were in control of the proceedings, but their loyalty to the President (sulky and ailing in the White House, too gouty to venture outside) was more out of reflex than conviction. Nobody could see where funds for next year’s campaign were going to come from. Postmaster General Frank Hitchcock, an ornithological friend of the Colonel, made no secret of his disillusionment with the administration. The atmosphere was funereal, even doom-laden, as both sides agreed to summon their delegates to Chicago at noon on 18 June 1912.
A group of three progressive state chairmen, led by W. Franklin Knox of Michigan, telephoned Roosevelt in New York to ask if they could come to see him. He said he would prefer to be left alone. But the group was persistent, and descended on him at Sagamore Hill.
KNOX Colonel, I never knew you to show the white feather, and you should not do so now.
TR (angrily) What do you mean by that?
KNOX Why, you are basing your refusal on the possibly bad effect another term might have on your reputation. I contend that you ought to look at this thing from the Party’s interests and not your own. The Party has honored you, and it now turns to you to do a service for it. It is in distress and it needs you.
TR By George, that would be a good argument if I were the only man available, but I am not. I agree that Taft cannot be elected, but if the Party can win, I am not the only Republican with whom it can win. I am not ungrateful for the honor I have had, but I think I have repaid in service. When I left the White House every state we had any right to expect was in the Republican column. It is not my job to put them back again.
There was no arguing with him, and the group left frustrated.
IN A MONTH FULL of adulation and importuning, opposite in all political respects to his dark December of 1
910, Roosevelt chose to publish an extraordinary essay—what was, for him, almost a religious confession. Entitled “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit,” it appeared in The Outlook just as his private will not to run was wavering. Nothing he had written in that piously inclined periodical compared with it in philosophical, if not theological weight, and never had he come so close to confessing his own faith. It was ignored by the political commentators who had read so much into his previous editorial on the trusts. Yet to an intellectual minority able to follow him in his self-avowed “search” toward a universal understanding beyond that of any contemporary public figure—Arthur Balfour alone excepted—it was an infinitely more important statement, indicating that whatever Theodore Roosevelt did with the rest of his life would have to have moral purpose.
The essay was a review of twelve recent scientific, religious, historical, and philosophical books, including Carlos Reyles’s La morte du cygne, Thomas Dwight’s Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist, Alfred Russel Wallace’s The World of Life, Henry M. Bernard’s Some Neglected Factors in Evolution, Émile Boutroux’s Science et religion dans la philosophie contemporaine, William De Witt Hyde’s From Epicurus to Christ, and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will. Concentrating mainly on the pessimistic materialism of Reyles, the Christian apologetics of Dwight, and the radiant, octogenarian wisdom of Wallace, Roosevelt synthesized multiple points of view into his own argument for wider recognition of “the psychical accompaniment of physical force”—by which he meant the spiritual qualities inherent in all materialistic pursuits, from science to business and politics.
Reyles’s dying swan was a metaphor for Latin civilization in Europe, which the author, a wealthy Uruguayan and disciple of Nietzsche, believed to be doomed unless France, Italy, and Spain shook themselves free of political and clerical absolutism and turned to the acquisition of money and arms. As long as those countries remained at peace, they should cultivate an “ideology of force” to avoid being left behind by Northern powers, particularly Germany and the United States.
Roosevelt was revolted by the book, and not just because parts of it echoed his frequent celebrations of strenuosity. He found in it a “hard dogmatic materialism” indistinguishable from that of his new boosters on Wall Street. Modern worship of the golden calf (Reyles actually used the phrase métaphysique de l’Or) struck him as more pernicious than any medieval superstition. He rejected the pro-Americanism of a writer who could not distinguish between the democratic tradition of Washington and Lincoln and the anti-constitutionalism of tycoons.
Rigid materialistic standards in science, rejecting the imaginative or metaphysical eurekas that had always aided advances in knowledge, were equally retrogressive, in Roosevelt’s opinion. They worked against discovery. But he was uneasy with the Catholic values that Dwight, a venerable figure at Harvard, sought to apply to “infidel science.” Logically extended, they could “plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages.” He quoted Henry Osborn Taylor’s characterization of medieval man: “Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”
Dwight was effective, however, in reminding the young czars of evolutionary theory of what Roger Bacon had proclaimed in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’ ” There could be no advancement, Roosevelt wrote, in a scientific dogma that saw only itself, and liked what it saw:
The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts of the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the (surely very slight) strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does move around the sun need not have any apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation. Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by one only as they are affected by the other.
He took up the ancient antithesis of fides versus ratio and argued that an embrace of both faith and reason was necessary for a person of “conscience” to search for truth, as something wholly practical, yet (since truth-seeking was a form of prayer) divine. An egregious preacher of “intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism” was Dwight’s didactic opposite, the German anatomist Ernst Haeckel. Not only were Haeckel’s assumptions “unscientific” in their absolute refusal to accept mystery as part of knowledge, they were as ideological as the ecclesiastical tenets they sought to refute. Roosevelt noted that Boutroux, Bergson, and William James felt the same way about Haeckel as he did. It said something for the materialism of contemporary Germany that the man was still admired there.
For himself as a natural historian and social reformer, he most admired and identified with the great English prophet of natural selection. Wallace had followed a curious trajectory since his days of co-discovery with Darwin, becoming more mystical (and politically progressive) as his scientific expertise grew.
Meanwhile, Henry Bernard had gone further than Wallace in opening up what Roosevelt considered to be “a new biological and even sociological field of capital importance”—the theory that the principle of group development in human beings was as instinctive, and organic, as that in biological evolution. Bernard was willing to entertain the role of the soul in science. But he fell “into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence cannot understand it.” This incomprehension led him to call illogically for the remoralization of society, and for judicial reforms that would catch up with modern psychical perceptions. Roosevelt did not boast that he had recently called for the same things himself, but he remarked that a perfect community was unattainable “if there are no such things as freedom of the will and accountability.”
Not to mention love, an emotion scientists hesitated to analyze. It bonded the basic human cluster, the family, better than economic or environmental forces. Saint Augustine had correctly proclaimed that “the truths of love are as valid as the truths of reason.” Another essential was plain old common sense—too common for most philosophers, but not for Bergson, who regarded it as different from, and superior to, reason. In his new masterwork, the French philosopher had, in Roosevelt’s words, shown that “Reason can deal effectively only with certain categories [of knowledge]. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume a sway outside its limitations; and where experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid reason to be humble—just as under like conditions it would bid theology be humble.”
Roosevelt felt that Dwight and other cautionaries against purely materialistic thought were performing “a real service” in warning that dogmas, no matter how provable they seemed in the laboratory or the marketplace, were often as not swept away by the currents of historical change. Today’s “law” might be tomorrow’s superstition. But if there was to be any steady scientific or social advance, theists and materialists alike must give way to “bolder, more self-reliant spirits … men whose unfettered freedom of soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search to attain it.”
The word progress sounded repeatedly in his essay as he continued to equate faith and reason as coefficients, not opposites, in improving the human lot. “In the world of politics,” he wrote, “it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of extremists.”
For a moment Roosevelt seemed tempted to ve
er into one of his habitual either-or mantras, but remembering that the theme he had set himself was truth-seeking in a spirit of reverence, he resumed his assault on “the narrowness of a shut-in materialism.” While praising materialistic scholars for “the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical universe and of man’s physical place in that universe,” he ascribed superior wisdom to James, Boutroux, and Bergson because they understood “that outside the purely physical lies the psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the purely psychic.”
He argued that those who professed faith while allowing reason to persuade them that evolution was a material fact were not having philosophy both ways. They were, on the contrary, “in a position of impregnable strength,” rightly holding that religion itself was evolutionary: it too had to adapt as it progressed. Roosevelt came near to articulating his own spiritual aspirations in summarizing theirs: “To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches: for, as M. Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need give no other reason, for its existence than ‘its own incorruptible disinterestedness.’ ”
In conclusion, he wrote:
Surely we must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations both of the mind and the soul.… To those who deny the ethical obligation implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens; and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their creed or system of philosophy.
Colonel Roosevelt Page 20
