{"id":16188,"date":"2013-08-06T05:30:36","date_gmt":"2013-08-06T09:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=16188"},"modified":"2013-08-04T21:13:13","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T01:13:13","slug":"what-are-we-to-make-of-teddy-roosevelt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2013\/08\/what-are-we-to-make-of-teddy-roosevelt\/","title":{"rendered":"What are we to make of Teddy Roosevelt?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican.\u00a0 He was also a Progressive.\u00a0 Showing that contemporary categories don\u2019t always apply to issues of even the recent past, people today on both the left and the right don\u2019t know quite what to make of the Rough Rider.\u00a0 Some conservatives blame him for the mindset that gave us big government.\u00a0 Others hail him as a champion of \u201cfamily values\u201d and see him as the original \u201csocial conservative.\u201d\u00a0 After the jump is an excerpt from a four-way debate sponsored by the Claremont Institute.<\/p>\n

From The Claremont Institute \u2013 Upon Further Review: A CRB Discussion of Theodore Roosevelt<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[R. J.] Pestritto<\/strong>: Thanks for the opportunity to expand upon some points on T.R., which I made in my recent CRB review of Jean Yarbrough\u2019s fine book. The passage from Jean\u2019s essay strikes me as consistent both with T.R.\u2019s major political speeches and with his more philosophic and historical writings. If we break it down, there are several key parts that bear further examination.<\/p>\n

\n

T.R.\u2014and the Progressives generally\u2014relied upon an evolutionary account of human nature to justify loosening the constitutional protections against what the American Founders believed were the permanent dangers of faction. The Progressive Era was certainly not the first time in American political history that a progressive argument about human nature had been made. In Federalist 6, Alexander Hamilton finds himself rebutting the progressive notion of human nature that had been put forward by those who believed human beings, as a result of the Enlightenment, were no longer in need of a strong national government to referee factious disputes. Hamilton characterized this view as \u201cutopian,\u201d and pointed to the permanent factiousness in human nature that could be found in historical examples both ancient and contemporary. This is why the evolutionary thinking of the 19th century was so influential on the likes of T.R. (as Jean\u2019s book does a nice job of showing in its treatment of his historical essays)\u2014it helped to provide a foundation for contending that the focus of the founders\u2019 political science on the problem of majority tyranny had been rendered outdated by historical progress. In his 1912 speech on \u201cThe Right of the People to Rule,\u201d T.R. expressed his frustration that constitutional restraints on the unfettered rule of the majority continued to hamper progressive policy aims: \u201cI have scant patience with this talk of tyranny of the majority.\u201d<\/p>\n

As to freeing elected officials from constitutional restraint, T.R. was certainly impatient with constitutional limits on his own authority. He posited a view of constitutionalism directly at odds with the enumerated powers structure of the American Constitution (the idea, in other words, that the government has only those powers granted to it through the Constitution\u2019s enumeration of its powers), posing instead a plenary conception of federal power (that is, that the government may do whatever it wishes, so long as there is nothing specific in the Constitution that prohibits it). This plenary view\u2014rejected explicitly by Hamilton in Federalist 84 as a throwback to the days of monarchy\u2014was the central part of T.R.\u2019s \u201cStewardship Theory\u201d of executive government, expounded in his Autobiography.<\/p>\n

This view that the president, as both the embodiment of the people\u2019s will and the steward of their needs, ought to exercise plenary power is interesting in light of the final part of the Public Interest statement\u2014the trust in enlightened administrators. T.R.\u2014as his New Nationalism program indicates\u2014advocated vigorous and centralized government by administrative experts. He seems not to have perceived that expert administration could be at odds with the plenary power of a popular leader. Woodrow Wilson, in his \u201cStudy of Administration,\u201d seems to have understood this difficulty much more clearly than T.R., who seems to have believed that a popular president could keep the bureaucracy in line. This belief may have had something to do with the fact that T.R. fully expected himself\u2014and his friends\u2014to be the leaders of the people. . . .<\/p>\n

[Robert]\u00a0 Patterson:<\/strong> For a certain subgroup of conservative political theorists, chipping Theodore Roosevelt off Mount Rushmore is a full-time preoccupation\u2014even obsession. One such scholar is Jean Yarbrough, who exhibits the same overconfidence shared by many of these conservatives who presume their understanding of fidelity to the Declaration and the Constitution exceeds that of all others.<\/p>\n

From that high perch, she fails to grasp how the \u201cfounding principles\u201d provided insufficient help to T.R.\u2019s imperative and preeminent concern: nation-building. The challenges facing the 26th president were not necessarily more complex than those of the founders but were different: reducing the oppression of Jim Crow; quelling the radical ideologies emerging in response to industrialization; and dealing with a new economic force, the national corporation. Moreover, T.R. was reluctant to equate Americanism with allegiance to political or philosophical ideals. He focused more on social and biological realities. As Allan Carlson notes, by placing the child-rich family at the centerpiece of American identity, the devoted father of six children inspired a movement that predates today\u2019s political conservatism: social conservatism.<\/p>\n

Yarbrough understates all these achievements. Because T.R. was a progressive\u2014and because progressivism was the prominent political force of his generation\u2014she claims that he drank uncritically from that well. Like all presidents, Roosevelt was a creature of his time, but he was far more a pro-active challenger than a passive captive of the reigning beliefs that she identifies. Indefatigable and perhaps the most intellectually engaged of American presidents, the Rough Rider was his own man: he carried water for no rote ideology.<\/p>\n

T.R. may have been enamored with Darwin in his youth, but he forcefully rejected Social Darwinism as an adult. As Carlson also observes, Roosevelt regularly mounted the bully pulpit to denounce the \u201cscientific\u201d racists and their contention that natural selection and conflict would perfect the human race. Instead, T.R. posited cooperation and altruism\u2014rooted in maternal love and affection\u2014at the centerpiece of human progress, which he believed occurred in spite of natural selection. Nor did he entertain illusions of man overcoming his selfish nature, witness T.R.\u2019s harsh critique of his privileged peers for failing to procreate in sufficient numbers.<\/p>\n

With other progressives, T.R. agreed that changes in American life since the late 18th century warranted social-insurance legislation like Social Security\u2014and constitutional amendments like the 16th. But Roosevelt never considered the Constitution a relic nor did he suggest that elected officials could ignore its constraints. He harbored no more reservations with the Constitution than modern-day conservatives who offer their pet amendments to deal with problems the founders could not foresee.<\/p>\n

Roosevelt did, however, object to an abstract rendering of the founding documents, including a notion of \u201cunalienable rights\u201d that blatantly favored the \u201cmalefactors of great wealth\u201d\u2014and slavery at an earlier time\u2014while ignoring the plight of the \u201caverage American\u201d or those Abraham Lincoln called the \u201cplain people.\u201d Moreover, he presciently warned of the grave danger of a Supreme Court thwarting the will of \u201cWe the People\u201d by striking down commonsense legislation and inventing \u201crights\u201d not found in the text of the Constitution. Yarbrough can surely disagree, but she has no right to suggest that T.R. or his policies marred the founding charter or weakened our constitutional system.<\/p>\n

Finally, T.R.\u2019s dismissal of majority tyranny as \u201cno longer a threat\u201d was no uncritical acceptance of the Zeitgeist<\/em> but an astute recognition that the crisis of his day actually arose from the tyranny of elites\u2014a lesson conservatives seeking their way in the 21st century would do well to heed.<\/p>\n

I urge you to read the entire debate, which was occasioned by a new book on Roosevelt written by one of the participants, Jean M. Yarbrough\u2019s Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (American Political Thought)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But is it possible to think outside of our boxes and re-enter the categories of Roosevelt\u2019s day as a way to break out of our current political dead-ends?\u00a0 Could we recover what Roosevelt saw as a connection between building strong families and programs like Social Security, trust-busting, and worker protection?<\/p><\/div>\n<\/blockquote><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican.\u00a0 He was also a Progressive.\u00a0 Showing that contemporary categories don\u2019t always apply to issues of even the recent past, people today on both the left and the right don\u2019t know quite what to make of the Rough Rider.\u00a0 Some conservatives blame him for the mindset that gave us big government.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[561,2679,2678,2199],"class_list":["post-16188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-conservatism","tag-progressive-movement","tag-social-conservatism","tag-theodore-roosevelt"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat are we to make of Teddy Roosevelt?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican.\u00a0 He was also a Progressive.\u00a0 Showing that contemporary 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