“For Men and Not for Property”: Lessons for the President from Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt

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“For Men and Not for Property”: Lessons for the President from Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt

by David Woolner

In channeling TR, perhaps Obama will channel both men’s mission to use government to ensure a more equal society.

“In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity.” -Theodore Roosevelt

It was just a month ago that President Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas to lay out a new, more populist agenda for his re-election campaign and to press Congress to extend the two percent payroll tax cut he instigated last year...In his remarks, President Obama rejected what he called “you’re on your own economics.” He argued strongly — like TR did more than a century earlier — that the triumph of democracy means not merely the triumph of the free market but the triumph, as TR said, of “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

He also spoke eloquently about the alarming rise of income disparity in the United States, fueled in part by the steady decline of wages among the middle class over the past few decades and in part by the more recent decision to lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans to the lowest rates in more than half a century. This inequality, Obama continued, not only “distorts our democracy,” it also makes a mockery of the perennial American belief that even those born with nothing can, through hard work, earn their way into the middle class.

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The great gap that has once again emerged in the United States between the wealthy few and the seemingly permanently impoverished many, separated by a shrinking middle class, is not something that either Theodore or Franklin Roosevelt would have found acceptable. Both men, in fact, dedicated themselves to the idea, as TR said in his Osawatomie speech, that one of the “chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege.” Both men also believed, to quote TR again, that the “essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.” In his day, TR noted, this struggle appeared as the effort of freemen “to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.” This was especially necessary at that time, he went on, because the “absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

Sadly, Theodore Roosevelt, running as a third party candidate, lost the 1912 election and hence never got the opportunity to take on the forces of special privilege he attacked so eloquently in his Osawatomie speech. But his distant cousin Franklin (who was an enormous admirer of TR) did, and in the process transformed the federal government — for the first time in American history — into an active instrument of social and economic justice.

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http://www.newdeal20.org/2012/01/05/for-men-and-not-for-property-lessons-for-the-president-from-theodore-and-franklin-roosevelt-68573/

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