by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
When in doubt, wheel on Teddy Roosevelt. It’s in every Democratic president’s playbook. TR was president from 1901 to 1909. He was manly, ranching in North Dakota, exploring the Amazon and nearly expiring on the River of Doubt. He was an imperialist con amore, charging up San Juan Hill, sending the Great White Fleet round the world, proclaiming America’s destiny as an enforcer on the world stage. He loved wilderness, mostly through the sights of a big game hunter’s rifle — a wilderness suitably cleansed of Indians. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians,” he wrote in The Winning of the West, “but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
When necessary he could play the populist rabble-rouser’s card, flaying the trusts, railing against “the malefactors of great wealth”. But on TR’s watch the modern, centralized corporate American state came of age. H.L. Mencken writes of him in Prejudices II that
“Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts. He didn’t believe in democracy. He believed simply in government. His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority. He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen… He was for a paternalism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic pattern – a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights… When he tackled the trusts the thing that he had in his mind’s eye was not the restoration of competition but the subordination of all private trusts to one great national trust with himself at its head.”
Mencken compared TR to the German Kaiser:
“Both dreamed of gigantic navies, with battleships as long as Brooklyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft-pedal on the duty of the state to the citizen. Both praised the habitually gravid wife. Both believed in the armed pursuit of the lower fauna… Both were intimates of God and announced His desires with authority.”
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