What Would Teddy Roosevelt Say Right Now to the GOP (and the Nation)?
The Right of the People to Rule
History never repeats itself. Each moment in time is a unique assemblage of static and dynamic elements, of historical forces that are sui generis, of qualities and quantities that will never be seen again. But this does not mean that there are no recurrent structures or patterns of resemblance. Historical conjunctures do not replay previous ones, but they do iterate familiar themes, especially if conditions prove similar to past conjunctures.
Pondering on the GOP primaries, I was struck by the resonance of Theodore Roosevelt’s “The Right of the People to Rule” speech, delivered at Carnegie Hall on 20th March 1912. In this address, Roosevelt gave a characteristically ranging oration that was crafted to meet the particular demands of that political moment in the United States.
Composed as part of his bid for the 1912 Republican nomination, Roosevelt had jumped back into the fray, in order to block William Taft’s nomination. His former VP had strayed too far into the status quo conservatism of establishment interests for TR, and so, as one would expect, back into the arena he dove. Ever the champion for popular spirits, Roosevelt wanted to see through that Edwardian wave of social reform that had swept the English-speaking world over the preceding decade, but it was not to be.
TR failed to obtain the endorsement of the Republican Party in June of that year, and so he left the party he had led from the White House just a few years before and founded the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party the day after the GOP convention. However, in his nomination campaign he was always able to articulate his political posture and proposed program in terms of the wider American political culture that he valued so highly.
His Carnegie Hall speech has something to tell us today in our own time of sclerotic late-neoliberalism, internecine identity politics, and anti-democratic minority fetishism, just as it had for Americans who were – at the twilight of the belle époque – fed up with the trusts, oligarchs, and minority interest rule.
Take it away, Teddy!
The great fundamental issue now before [the Republican Party and] our people can be stated briefly. It is: Are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I believe the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them. I believe, again, that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes. Our opponents pay lip-loyalty to this doctrine; but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham. . . .
I have scant patience with this talk of the tyranny of the majority. Wherever there is tyranny of the majority, I shall protest against it with all my heart and soul. But we are today suffering from the tyranny of minorities. It is a small minority that is grabbing our coal deposits, our water powers, and our harbor fronts. A small minority is battening on the sale of adulterated foods and drugs. It is a small minority that lies behind monopolies and trusts. It is a small minority that stands behind the present law of master and servant, the sweatshops, and the whole calendar of social and industrial injustice. It is a small minority that is today using our convention system to defeat the will of a majority of the people in the choice of delegates to the Chicago Convention. The only tyrannies from which men, women, and children are suffering in real life are the tyrannies of minorities. If the majority of the American people were in fact tyrannous over the minority, if democracy had no greater self-control than empire, then indeed no written words which our forefathers put into the Constitution could stay that tyranny.
No sane man who has been familiar with the government of this country for the last twenty years will complain that we have had too much of the rule of the majority. The trouble has been a far different one that, at many times and in many localities, there have held public office in the states and in the nation men who have, in fact, served not the whole people, but some special class or special interest. . . .
Now there has sprung up a feeling deep in the hearts of the people—not of the bosses and professional politicians, not of the beneficiaries of special privilege—a pervading belief of thinking men that when the majority of the people do in fact, as well as theory, rule, then the servants of the people will come more quickly to answer and obey, not the commands of the special interests, but those of the whole people.
Amen. It barely needs exegesis.
With a managerial class acting more like priests than servants of the public trust, and while enduring as we do beneath a ruling 1% who have nothing but contempt for us, we face a similar edifice to the one Roosevelt opposed in the 1900s.
Despite his bear-like stature, Roosevelt failed to wrest the Republican party in his direction. Another public figure is attempting a similar feat right now. Whether he will be successful is anyone’s guess, but what with the array of ideological forces and material resources that the oligarchy has brought to bear upon him, it is surely a herculean undertaking.
Regardless. In any struggle of magnitude, there are historical antecedents that furnish inspiration for those who seek it, and those offerings should be mined for all they can give. The dynamic of struggle against the powerful recurs, even if the particulars are historically unique, and in this case the struggle for democratic majorities to slough off the rule of oligarchic minorities is nothing new.
No final victory; no final defeat. From time to time we have to remind ourselves of the Right of the People to Rule, and right now is another one of those times.
[The full text of Roosevelt’s speech can be found here].
John, as an observer of America from overseas, what do you make of the fact that 74m people voted for Trump in the 2020 election (47% of those who voted)? What does that say about TR's trust in the common sense of voters? Of course, TR could not have foreseen the Internet and social media, but I imagine (I haven't studied the history) that there might have been conspiracy theories like QAnon and cults and other forms of irrationalism even in TR's time.