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THE US CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE CORNER
HOME PRESIDENT
THE US CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE CORNER
Theodore
Roosevelt
"The Man with
Over a century ago
The material problems that
face us to-day are not such as they were in
It is about some of these
that I wish to say a word to-day. In Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” you
may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look
no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial
crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he
was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.
In “Pilgrim’s
Progress” the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose
vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies
the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and
fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.
Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and
debasing. There is filth on the floor and it must be scraped up with the
muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed
of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything
else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the
muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good,
but one of the most potent forces for evil.
There are, in the body
politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent
necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of
and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil
practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a
benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book,
magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided
always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is
absolutely truthful. The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his
mendacity takes the form of slander, he may be worse than most thieves. It puts
a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with
hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. An epidemic of
indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great harm. The
soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest man is assailed, or even
when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.
Now, it is easy to twist out
of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and, if it
is slurred over in repetition, not difficult really to misunderstand it. Some
persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud-slinging
does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing; and both the interested
individuals who need whitewashing, and those others who practice mud-slinging,
like to encourage such confusion of ideas. One of the chief counts against those
who make indiscriminate assault upon men in business or men in public life, is
that they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in favor of the
unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought to be attacked, who ought to be exposed,
who ought, if possible, to be put in the penitentiary. If Aristides is praised
overmuch as just, people get tired of hearing it; and overcensure of the unjust
finally and from similar reasons results in their favor.
Any excess is almost sure to
invite a reaction; and, unfortunately, the reaction, instead of taking the form
of punishment of those guilty of the excess, is very apt to take the form either
of punishment of the unoffending or of giving immunity, and even strength, to
offenders. The effort to make financial or political profit out of the
destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless
assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book,
create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a
profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them
from entering the public service at any price.
As an instance in point, I
may mention that one serious difficulty encountered in getting the right type of
men to dig the Panama Canal is the certainty that they will be exposed, both
without, and, I am sorry to say, sometimes within, Congress, to utterly reckless
assaults on their character and capacity.
At the risk of repetition
let me say again that my plea is, not for immunity to but for the most unsparing
exposure of the politician who betrays his trust, of the big business man who
makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a
resolute effort to hunt every such man out of the position he has disgraced.
Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal; but remember that even in the case
of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fashion, the
attack may do more damage to the public mind than the crime itself. It is
because I feel that there should be no rest in the endless war against the
forces of evil that I ask that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with
resolution.
The men with the muck-rakes
are often indispensable to the well-being of society; but only if they know when
to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them,
to the crown of worthy endeavor.
There are beautiful things
above and roundabout them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the whole
world is nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is gone. If the whole
picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals
for distinction from their fellows. Such painting finally induces a kind of
moral color-blindness; and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no
man is really black, and no man is really white, but they are all gray. In other
words, they neither believe in the truth of the attack, nor in the honesty of
the man who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of the accusation as of the
offense; it becomes well-nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath against
wrong-doing or to enthusiasm for what is right; and such a mental attitude in
the public gives hope to every knave, and is the despair of honest men.
To assail the great and
admitted evils of our political and industrial life with such crude and sweeping
generalizations as to include decent men in the general condemnation means the
searing of the public conscience. There results a general attitude either of
cynical belief in and indifference to public corruption or else of a distrustful
inability to discriminate between the good and the bad. Either attitude is
fraught with untold damage to the country as a whole. The fool who has not sense
to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well-nigh as dangerous
as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more
distressing to every good patriot, to every good American, than the hard,
scoffing spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty in a public man as a
cause for laughter.
Such laughter is worse than
the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind,
but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to
fruition.
There is any amount of good
in the world, and there never was a time when loftier and more disinterested
work for the betterment of mankind was being done than now. The forces that tend
for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage
and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It
is a foolish and timid, no less than a wicked, thing to blink the fact that the
forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail to take into account the
strength of the forces that tell for good.
Hysterical sensationalism is
the very poorest weapon wherewith to fight for lasting righteousness. The men
who with stern sobriety and truth assail the many evils of our time, whether in
the public press or in magazines, or in books, are the leaders and allies of all
engaged in the work for social and political betterment. But if they give good
reason for distrust of what they say, if they chill the ardor of those who
demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray the good cause, and play
into the hands of the very men against whom they are nominally at war.
In his “Ecclesiastical
Polity” that fine old Elizabethan divine, Bishop Hooker, wrote: “He that
goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they
ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers; because they know
the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regimen is subject, but the secret
lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are innumerable and
inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider.”
This truth should be kept
constantly in mind by every free people desiring to preserve the sanity and
poise indispensable to the permanent success of self-government. Yet, on the
other hand, it is vital not to permit this spirit to sanity and self-command to
degenerate into mere mental stagnation. Bad though a state of hysterical
excitement is, and evil though the results are which come from the violent
oscillations such excitement invariably produces, yet a sodden acquiescence in
evil is even worse.
At this moment we are
passing through a period of great unrest—social, political, and industrial
unrest. It is of the utmost importance for our future that this should prove to
be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness against life, of mere dissatisfaction
with the inevitable inequality of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and
eager ambition to secure the betterment of the individual and the nation. So far
as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce
discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the authors of evil, whether
in industry or politics, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of
healthy life.
If, on the other hand, it
turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite, of a contest between the
brutal greed of the “have-nots” and the brutal greed of the “haves,”
then it has no significance for good, but only for evil. If it seeks to
establish a line of cleavage, not along the line which divides good men from
bad, but along that other line, running at right angles thereto, which divides
those who are well off from those who are less well off, then it will be fraught
with immeasurable harm to the body politic.
We can no more and no less
afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital.
The wealthy man who exults because there is a failure of justice in the effort
to bring some trust magnate to an account for his misdeeds is as bad as, and no
worse than, the so-called labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul
class feeling on behalf of some other labor leader who is implicated in murder.
One attitude is as bad as the other, and no worse; in each case the accused is
entitled to exact justice; and in neither case is there need of action by others
which can be construed into an expression of sympathy for crime.
It is a prime necessity that
if the present unrest is to result in permanent good the emotion shall be
translated into action, and that the action shall be marked by honesty, sanity,
and self-restraint. There is mighty little good in a mere spasm of reform. The
reform that counts is that which comes through steady, continuous growth;
violent emotionalism leads to exhaustion.
It is important to this
people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous
fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in
business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well-won
and fortunes ill-won; between those gained as an incident to performing great
services to the community as a whole, and those gained in evil fashion by
keeping just within the limits of mere law-honesty.
Of course no amount of
charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in
making them. As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to
discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall ultimately
have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax
on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or devised or
bequeathed upon death to any individual—a tax so framed as to put it out of
the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a
certain amount to any one individual; the tax, of course, to be imposed by the
National and not the State Government.
Such taxation should, of
course, be aimed merely at the inheritance or transmission in their entirety of
those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits. Again, the National Government
must in some form exercise supervision over corporations engaged in interstate
business—and all large corporations are engaged in interstate
business—whether by license or otherwise, so as to permit us to deal with the
far-reaching evils of overcapitalization.
This year we are making a
beginning in the direction of serious effort to settle some of these economic
problems by the railway-rate legislation. Such legislation, if so framed, as I
am sure it will be, as to secure definite and tangible results, will amount to
something of itself; and it will amount to a great deal more in so far as it is
taken as a first step in the direction of a policy of superintendence and
control over corporate wealth engaged in interstate commerce, this
superintendence and control not to be exercised in a spirit of malevolence
toward the men who have created the wealth, but with the firm purpose both to do
justice to them and to see that they in their turn do justice to the public at
large.
The first requisite in the
public servants who are to deal in this shape with corporations, whether as
legislators or as executives, is honesty. This honesty can be no respecter of
persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral honesty. The danger is not
really from corrupt corporations; it springs from the corruption itself, whether
exercised for or against corporations.
The eighth commandment
reads: “Thou shalt not steal.” It does not read: “Thou shalt not steal
from the rich man.” It does not read: “Thou shalt not steal from the poor
man.” It reads simply and plainly: “Thou shalt not steal.”
No good whatever will come
from that warped and mock morality which denounces the misdeeds of men of wealth
and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their expense; which denounces bribery,
but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with rage if a corporation secures
favors by improper methods, and merely leers with hideous mirth if the
corporation is itself wronged. The only public servant who can be trusted
honestly to protect the rights of the public against the misdeeds of a
corporation is that public man who will just as surely protect the corporation
itself from wrongful aggression.
If a public man is willing
to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to rich
corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes he
will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the interest of a
corporation.
But, in addition to honesty,
we need sanity. No honesty will make public man useful if that man is timid or
foolish, if he is a hot-headed zealot or an impracticable visionary.
As we strive for reform we
find that it is not at all merely the case of a long up-hill pull. On the
contrary, there is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work; to depend
only on traces means that there will soon be a runaway and an upset.
The men of wealth who today
are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the
interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in
my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed
they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind,
for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform
coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth.
On the other hand, the wild
preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire
existing order, the men who act crookedly, whether because of sinister design or
from mere puzzle-headedness, the men who preach destruction without proposing
any substitute for what they intend to destroy, or who propose a substitute
which would be far worse than the existing evils—all these men are the most
dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get their way they will lead the
people into a deeper pit than any into which they could fall under the present
system. If they fail to get their way they will still do incalculable harm by
provoking the kind of reaction which, in its revolt against the senseless evil
of their teaching, would enthrone more securely than ever the very evils which
their misguided followers believe they are attacking.
More important then aught
else is the development of the broadest sympathy of man for man. The welfare of
the wage-worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, upon these depend the
welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down
others; but their good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.
Materially we must strive to
secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a
better chance to show the stuff of which he is made.
Spiritually and ethically we
must strive to bring about clean living and right thinking. We appreciate also
that the things of the soul are immeasurably more important.
The foundation-stone of
national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the average
citizen.
Theodore ("Teddy")
Delivered 14 April 1906
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