Theodore Roosevelt by Theodore Roosevelt (read this if .TXT) 📕

ill if it seeks profit in restricting production and then by extorting high prices from the community by reason of the scarcity of the product; through adulterating, lyingly advertising, or over-driving the help; or replacing men workers with children; or by rebates; or in any illegal or improper manner driving competitors out of its way; or seeking to achieve monopoly by illegal or unethical treatment of its competitors, or in any shape or way offending against the moral law either in connection with the public or with its employees or with its rivals. Any corporation which seeks its profit in such fashion is acting badly. It is, in fact, a conspiracy against the public welfare which the Government should use all its powers to suppress. If, on the other hand, a corporation seeks profit solely by increasing its products through eliminating waste, improving its processes, utilizing its by-products, installing better machines, raising wages in the effort to secure more efficient help, introducing the principle of cooperation and mutual benefit, dealing fairly with labor unions, setting its face against the underpayment of women and the employment of children; in a word, treating the public fairly and its rivals fairly: then such a corporation is behaving well. It is an instrumentality of civilization operating to promote abundance by cheapening the cost of living so as to improve conditions everywhere throughout the whole community. Does Mr. Wilson controvert either of these statements? If so, let him answer directly. It is a matter of capital importance to the country that his position in this respect be stated directly, not by indirect suggestion.

 

Much of Mr. Wilson’s article, although apparently aimed at the Progressive party, is both so rhetorical and so vague as to need no answer. He does, however, specifically assert (among other things equally without warrant in fact) that the Progressive party says that it is “futile to undertake to prevent monopoly,” and only ventures to ask the trusts to be “kind” and “pitiful”! It is a little difficult to answer a misrepresentation of the facts so radical—not to say preposterous—with the respect that one desires to use in speaking of or to the President of the United States. I challenge President Wilson to point to one sentence of our platform or of my speeches which affords the faintest justification for these assertions. Having made this statement in the course of an unprovoked attack on me, he cannot refuse to show that it is true. I deem it necessary to emphasize here (but with perfect respect) that I am asking for a plain statement of fact, not for a display of rhetoric. I ask him, as is my right under the circumstances, to quote the exact language which justifies him in attributing these views to us. If he cannot do this, then a frank acknowledgment on his part is due to himself and to the people. I quote from the Progressive platform: “Behind the ostensible Government sits enthroned an invisible Government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day… . This country belongs to the people. Its resources, its business, its laws, its institutions, should be utilized, maintained, or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest.” This assertion is explicit. We say directly that “the people” are absolutely to control in any way they see fit, the “business” of the country. I again challenge Mr. Wilson to quote any words of the platform that justify the statements he has made to the contrary. If he cannot do it—and of course he cannot do it, and he must know that he cannot do it—surely he will not hesitate to say so frankly.

 

Mr. Wilson must know that every monopoly in the United States opposes the Progressive party. If he challenges this statement, I challenge him in return (as is clearly my right) to name the monopoly that did support the Progressive party, whether it was the Sugar Trust, the Steel Trust, the Harvester Trust, the Standard Oil Trust, the Tobacco Trust, or any other. Every sane man in the country knows well that there is not one word of justification that can truthfully be adduced for Mr. Wilson’s statement that the Progressive programme was agreeable to the monopolies. Ours was the only programme to which they objected, and they supported either Mr. Wilson or Mr. Taft against me, indifferent as to which of them might be elected so long as I was defeated. Mr. Wilson says that I got my “idea with regard to the regulation of monopoly from the gentlemen who form the United States Steel Corporation.” Does Mr. Wilson pretend that Mr. Van Hise and Mr.

Croly got their ideas from the Steel Corporation? Is Mr. Wilson unaware of the elementary fact that most modern economists believe that unlimited, unregulated competition is the source of evils which all men now concede must be remedied if this civilization of ours is to survive? Is he ignorant of the fact that the Socialist party has long been against unlimited competition? This statement of Mr. Wilson cannot be characterized properly with any degree of regard for the office Mr. Wilson holds. Why, the ideas that I have championed as to controlling and regulating both competition and combination in the interest of the people, so that the people shall be masters over both, have been in the air in this country for a quarter of a century. I was merely the first prominent candidate for President who took them up.

They are the progressive ideas, and progressive business men must in the end come to them, for I firmly believe that in the end all wise and honest business men, big and little, will support our programme.

Mr. Wilson in opposing them is the mere apostle of reaction. He says that I got my “ideas from the gentlemen who form the Steel Corporation.” I did not. But I will point out to him something in return. It was he himself, and Mr. Taft, who got the votes and the money of these same gentlemen, and of those in the Harvester Trust.

 

Mr. Wilson has promised to break up all trusts. He can do so only by proceeding at law. If he proceeds at law, he can hope for success only by taking what I have done as a precedent. In fact, what I did as President is the base of every action now taken or that can be now taken looking toward the control of corporations, or the suppression of monopolies. The decisions rendered in various cases brought by my direction constitute the authority on which Mr. Wilson must base any action that he may bring to curb monopolistic control. Will Mr. Wilson deny this, or question it in any way? With what grace can he describe my Administration as satisfactory to the trusts when he knows that he cannot redeem a single promise that he has made to war upon the trusts unless he avails himself of weapons of which the Federal Government had been deprived before I became President, and which were restored to it during my Administration and through proceedings which I directed? Without my action Mr. Wilson could not now undertake or carry on a single suit against a monopoly, and, moreover, if it had not been for my action and for the judicial decision in consequence obtained, Congress would be helpless to pass a single law against monopoly.

 

Let Mr. Wilson mark that the men who organized and directed the Northern Securities Company were also the controlling forces in the very Steel Corporation which Mr. Wilson makes believe to think was supporting me. I challenge Mr. Wilson to deny this, and yet he well knew that it was my successful suit against the Northern Securities Company which first efficiently established the power of the people over the trusts.

 

After reading Mr. Wilson’s book, I am still entirely in the dark as to what he means by the “New Freedom.” Mr. Wilson is an accomplished and scholarly man, a master of rhetoric, and the sentences in the book are well-phrased statements, usually inculcating a morality which is sound although vague and ill defined. There are certain proposals (already long set forth and practiced by me and by others who have recently formed the Progressive party) made by Mr. Wilson with which I cordially agree. There are, however, certain things he has said, even as regards matters of abstract morality, with which I emphatically disagree. For example, in arguing for proper business publicity, as to which I cordially agree with Mr. Wilson, he commits himself to the following statement:

 

“You know there is temptation in loneliness and secrecy. Haven’t you experienced it? I have. We are never so proper in our conduct as when everybody can look and see exactly what we are doing. If you are off in some distant part of the world and suppose that nobody who lives within a mile of your home is anywhere around, there are times when you adjourn your ordinary standards. You say to yourself, ‘Well, I’ll have a fling this time; nobody will know anything about it.’ If you were on the Desert of Sahara, you would feel that you might permit yourself—well, say, some slight latitude of conduct; but if you saw one of your immediate neighbors coming the other way on a camel, you would behave yourself until he got out of sight. The most dangerous thing in the world is to get off where nobody knows you. I advise you to stay around among the neighbors, and then you may keep out of jail. That is the only way some of us can keep out of jail.”

 

I emphatically disagree with what seems to be the morality inculcated in this statement, which is that a man is expected to do and is to be pardoned for doing all kinds of immoral things if he does them alone and does not expect to be found out. Surely it is not necessary, in insisting upon proper publicity, to preach a morality of so basely material a character.

 

There is much more that Mr. Wilson says as to which I do not understand him clearly, and where I condemn what I do understand. In economic matters the course he advocates as part of the “New Freedom”

simply means the old, old “freedom” of leaving the individual strong man at liberty, unchecked by common action, to prey on the weak and the helpless. The “New Freedom” in the abstract seems to be the freedom of the big to devour the little. In the concrete I may add that Mr. Wilson’s misrepresentations of what I have said seem to indicate that he regards the new freedom as freedom from all obligation to obey the Ninth Commandment.

 

But, after all, my views or the principles of the Progressive party are of much less importance now than the purposes of Mr. Wilson. These are wrapped in impenetrable mystery. His speeches and writings serve but to make them more obscure. If these attempts to refute his misrepresentation of my attitude towards the trusts should result in making his own clear, then this discussion will have borne fruits of substantial value to the country. If Mr. Wilson has any plan of his own for dealing with the trusts, it is to suppress all great industrial organizations—presumably on the principle proclaimed by his Secretary of State four years ago, that every corporation which produced more than a certain percentage of a given commodity—I think the amount specified was twenty-five per cent—no matter how valuable its service, should be suppressed. The simple fact is that such a plan is futile. In operation it would do far more damage than it could remedy.