Bully Boy The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy

CHAPTER ONE: WHY DID ROOSEVELT BELIEVE MORE GOVERNMENT POWER WOULD SOLVE PEOPLE'S PROBLEMS? Theodore Roosevelt believed that if only politicians had enough power, they could solve the world's problems. Heralding the era of big government, he urged "far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country." Although Abraham Lincoln dramatically expanded the power of the federal government during wartime, the peacetime expansion of federal power began with Theodore Roosevelt. Disregarding the dismal history of arbitrary and oppressive government, he declared, "I think [the presidency] should be a very powerful office, and I think the President should be a very strong man who uses without hesitation every power the position yields." At another point he said, "I believe in a strong executive. I believe in power." Where did these beliefs originate? The defining event of Theodore Roosevelt's life was the American Civil War. It showed how a powerful federal government could forge people into a single nation. As the Harvard-educated poet and critic James Russell Lowell wrote, "every man feels himself a part, sensitive and sympathetic, of a vast organism." During the war, federal spending expanded by a factor of 20. Even after postwar military cutbacks, the U.S. army remained about 50 percent larger than it had been before the war. Postwar federal spending was four or five times higher than before the war, and spending never returned to prewar levels. War debts forced the federal government and state governments to scramble for tax revenues. Rather than pay off its debts, the federal government spent substantial sums to finance pensions for Civil War veterans and schemes such as a transcontinental railroad. During the postwar years, many Americans looked to government for solutions to their problems. In 1865, Illinois governor Richard Yates remarked that "The war . . . has tended, more than any other event in the history of our country, to militate against the Jeffersonian idea, that 'the best government is that which governs least.' The war has not only, of necessity, given more power to, but has led to a more intimate provision of the government over every material interest of society." Before the Civil War, the most revered of the American Founders was Thomas Jefferson. His antislavery writings had inspired the abolitionists, and his other writings--especially the Declaration of Independence--articulated a compelling vision of a libertarian, democratic society with a government of strictly limited powers. But after the war, Jefferson's reputation plummeted. Nobody wanted to hear about Jefferson, who had defended the right to secede from the Union, after some 625,000 people had been killed in the war to preserve the Union. As Theodore Roosevelt's contemporary, the historian Henry Adams, remarked: It was "always safe to abuse Jefferson." After the Civil War, the most revered Founder was Alexander Hamilton, George Washington's secretary of the Treasury, who championed a strong central government. Hamilton helped establish a central bank and managed federal finances to make possible an expansion of government power. His efforts to impose a federal excise tax on whiskey--part of his plan to have the federal government assume responsibility for paying off state debts after the Revolutionary War--triggered the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion among Pennsylvania farmers. The writer and editor George W. Curtis wrote a friend: "Have you thought what a vindication this [Civil War] is of Alexander Hamilton? He was one of our truly great men, as Jefferson was the least of the truly great." Henry Cabot Lodge, for many years one of Theodore Roosevelt's best friends, produced a biography of Hamilton and anPowell, Jim is the author of 'Bully Boy The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy', published 2007 under ISBN 9780307237231 and ISBN 0307237230.