TR Speaks!

by hilzoy

A couple of days ago, John McCain put out a video of which Sam Boyd aptly said that it "gives you an idea of what it’d be like to be Norman Podhoretz on shrooms." Eric Rauchway at EOTAW noticed something I missed, though. One of the many fighting white guys of history whom McCain quotes is Teddy Roosevelt:

"With all my heart and soul ... I pledge you my word to do everything I can to put every particle of courage, of common sense, and of strength that I have at your disposal. ... Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are in."

When I saw the ad, I didn't think to ask: what fight was TR talking about, I wonder? It turns out that McCain's quote is from Roosevelt's 'A Confession of Faith', in which he explains his guiding principles to the first convention of the Progressive Party (aka the Bull Moose Party.) Several of Roosevelt's concerns seem particularly important to him. One is the extent to which the existing political parties have grown detached from the needs of the people they ostensibly serve:

"Neither the Republican nor the Democratic platform contains the slightest promise of approaching the great problems of today either with understanding or good faith; and yet never was there greater need in this Nation than now of understanding, and of action taken in good faith, on the part of the men and the organizations shaping our governmental policy. Moreover, our needs are such that there should be coherent action among those responsible for the conduct of National affairs and those responsible for the conduct of State affairs; because our aim should be the same in both State and Nation; that is, to use the Government as an efficient agency for the practical betterment of social and economic conditions throughout this land. There are other important things to be done, but this is the most important thing. It is preposterous to leave a movement in the hands of men who have broken their promises as have the present heads of the Republican organization (not of the Republican voters, for they in no shape represent the rank and file of Republican voters). These men by their deeds give the lie to their words. There is no health in them, and they cannot be trusted. But the Democratic party is just as little to be trusted..."

Another is controlling the trusts. But here is a third:

"I especially challenge the attention of the people to the need of dealing in far-reaching fashion with our human resources, and therefore our labor power. (...) In the last twenty years an increasing percentage of our people have come to depend on industry for their livelihood, so that today the wage-workers in industry rank in importance side by side with the tillers of the soil. As a people we cannot afford to let any group of citizens or any individual citizen live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare. Industry, therefore, must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency. We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure.

The first charge on the industrial statesmanship of the day is to prevent human waste. The dead weight of orphanage and depleted craftsmanship, of crippled workers and workers suffering from trade diseases, of casual labor, of insecure old age, and of household depletion due to industrial conditions are, like our depleted soils, our gashed mountain-sides and flooded river bottoms, so many strains upon the National structure, draining the reserve strength of all industries and showing beyond all peradventure the public element and public concern in industrial health.

Ultimately we desire to use the Government to aid, as far as can safely be done, in helping the industrial tool-users to become in part tool-owners, just as our farmers now are. Ultimately the Government may have to join more efficiently than at present in strengthening the hands of the workingmen who already stand at a high level, industrially and socially, and who are able by joint action to serve themselves. But the most pressing and immediate need is to deal with the cases of those who are on the level, and who are not only in need themselves, but, because of their need, tend to jeopardize the welfare of those who are better off. We hold that under no industrial order, in no commonwealth, in no trade, and in no establishment should industry be carried on under conditions inimical to the social welfare. The abnormal, ruthless, spendthrift industry of establishment tends to drag down all to the level of the least considerate."

In this speech, Roosevelt stood for a living wage:

"We stand for a living wage. Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations. The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living--a standard high enough to make morality possible, to provide for education and recreation, to care for immature members of the family, to maintain the family during periods of sickness, and to permit of reasonable saving for old age."

He called for social insurance:

"It is abnormal for any industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear, and the hazzards of sickness, accident, invalidism, involuntary unemployment, and old age should be provided for through insurance. This should be made a charge in whole or in part upon the industries the employer, the employee, and perhaps the people at large, to contribute severally in some degree. Wherever such standards are not met by given establishments, by given industries, are unprovided for by a legislature, or are balked by unenlightened courts, the workers are in jeopardy, the progressive employer is penalized, and the community pays a heavy cost in lessened efficiency and in misery. What Germany has done in the way of old age pensions or insurance should be studied by us, and the system adapted to our uses, with whatever modifications are rendered necessary by our different ways of life and habits of thought."

In general, Roosevelt does not seem to think, as today's conservatives tend to, that the government is a necessarily inefficient and generally counterproductive force best used only in cases, like the national defense, where there is no workable alternative. He agrees with today's progressives, who tend to think that while of course the government should be made as efficient and flexible as possible, used well, it can help us to set the terms of economic activity in ways that benefit everyone, and ameliorate some problems that we, as a people, decide we should not have to live with. He seems to see government as an essential tool for achieving some collective goals; and while he seems quite clear that that tool must be used wisely and with skill, he does not seem to think that our efforts to use it will inevitably be counterproductive. To judge by this speech, he would have been baffled by Ronald Reagan's quip: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

If McCain wants to sign on to the idea of using government to ameliorate social problems, requiring employers to insure their employees against illness, unemployment, accident, and age, providing a living wage, and keeping people from falling too far into want and penury, it's news to me. If he doesn't, he should stop using this speech in his ads. And he should also consider actually reading the sources of quotes he uses, rather than finding them in Roget's Thesaurus Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (duh, thanks Christopher M) and assuming the people who wrote them are on his side.

Comments

[Christopher M]

Indeed!

But you mean Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, right, not Roget's Thesaurus? I don't think Roget's has quotations.

[Ugh]

hilzoy - typo, first line.

[russell]

our aim should be the same in both State and Nation; that is, to use the Government as an efficient agency for the practical betterment of social and economic conditions throughout this land.

What is it with these Roosevelt boys?

[cleek]

McCain doesn't have to convince you that he's the second coming of TR. he only needs to convince the percentage of people who are still unsure as to the degree of Obama's rejection of his Muslim past.

[grul]

Hilzoy and Publius,

I can't wait to read your posts on Spitzer. The post on Larry Craig were so good and went up so quickly. I assume your lack of posts is due to being busy and uninterested. Not any kind of double standard or anything.

[gwangung]

I can't wait to read your posts on Spitzer. The post on Larry Craig were so good and went up so quickly. I assume your lack of posts is due to being busy and uninterested. Not any kind of double standard or anything.

Too busy posting and running to bother reading, eh?

[JakeB]

You know, I'd bet my second-best wig that the congruity between the entity posting as 'grul' and that that posted as 'bril' approaches 1.

[Jay C]

What cleek said - It's really unlikely that Sen. McCain, or his campaign staff, still less his intended audience, have the least idea about what constituted Teddy Roosevelt's philosophy of government, or his ideas on national economics (and could probably care less).

All they are going to hear (and are meant to hear) is:

"Teddy Roosevelt" [Republican, Rough Rider]
"pledge", "strength" and "fight".

Anything else is just going to confuse them.

[rea]

Evidently Hilzoy hasn't Rejectingly Denounced enough for some people . . .

[felix culpa]

“industrial statesmanship”, “beyond all peradventure’. What a great speech; clearly from another time. [Suppressed impulse to deplore debased public speech.]

The stuff of speculative fiction to imagine McCain speaking those words, framing those thoughts. The citizenry and its dignity in labor as the nation’s most precious treasure— easily seen as cognate with Obama’s platform, but remote from McCain’s efforts to meld with the slipstream.

[Ugh]

[Suppressed impulse to deplore debased public speech.]

3ggz@tly, puhbl!ck sp33ch iz teh suXXOr!!1!

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[yoyo]

Don't worry abotu national defense, lets wait a few election cycles to make sure conservatives aren't crowing about how much more efficient "private contracting security" is than "government millitary"

[Nate]

I think the simple answer is, John McCain (or whoever made the ad) don't have the foggiest clue what they're talking about and didn't bother to look up the context for the quote.

Just like the guy I heard who was trying to say how the US was founded as a "Christian Nation" and how "the words were all over the Washington Monument, the Jefferson memorial..." because they had obviously never read ANYTHING Thomas Jefferson had written (or many of the other Founding Fathers, for that matter). The "for I have sworn upon the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" quote is in a letter about priests who wanted to establish their version of Christianity as the only one in the country, for example.

Sometimes, just because somebody uses a particular word, be it "freedom" or "strength" or "God", they don't always mean what you assume they mean.

[John Thullen]

No wonder the late, great United States went down the tubes @ 1910.

You can't run an economy with that sort of big government and historians look askance at the coddling of the broken, the crippled, and the destitute.

And, using Germany as a paragon of civilization for introducing old-age pensions! P E N S I O N S rhymes with POOL and led directly to Auschwitz and Treblinka, not to mention Krupp being out a few marks before that.

"casual labor". The last time I labored casually Larry Kudlow popped his monocle and spluttered something about how work will make us free.

The only saving grace back then was that those people didn't have sex and certainly weren't naked underneath their clothing, which is what is putting all of us in dire moral straits.

[Bill]

When Theodore Roosevelt was President, social spending was zero percent of the federal budget. In 1947, social spending was 10% with the New Deal established. Today it is two-thirds of the budget and rising unsustainably. See the dollar.

Theodore Roosevelt would probably agree with the 1947 program. But he would probably consider unsustainable programs for dependent populations like we have today to be unethical. He would be angry at the forces that put such a system in place. He could get really angry.

I took the red-eye out of LAX last night. Lights and humanity as far as you could see out of both sides of the plane. Over ten million people; the majority on some sort of government assistance. Buildings and pavement. It is awesome to think about just the food that it takes to sustain a city like Los Angeles for a week.

[dr ngo]

Over ten million people; the majority on some sort of government assistance.

Source, please?

[Bill]

In our nation of 300+ million people, only 22 million produce goods. That number is dropping and includes government deliveries.

30 million people provide us retail and business services. This number is dropping too.

There are 40 million government workers of one stripe or another. Number rising.

14 million among us serve the others drinks and food.

Over a hundred and fifty million of us do not have legitimate jobs and rely on someone else for their needs.

John Adams wrote of the inherent stability of an export-based agricultural economy. He was right but maybe LA is different. I’ll keep away just in case. Good bet that TR would have him a little farm in 2008.

Source: Monthly Jobs Report

[dr ngo]

"do not have legitimate [sic] jobs and rely on someone else for their needs" is not - no, it really isn't - equivalent to being "on government assistance."

Does this number include dependent spouses and children? Those who have retired and live on their own investments or pension plan? Or is it only those who are collecting "welfare"? (And do you include the military - current and retired - in that number?)

I'm sorry, but your own data do not even remotely support the point you were apparently trying to make.

I Call Bovine Manure.

[Turbulence]

Over a hundred and fifty million of us do not have legitimate jobs and rely on someone else for their needs.

That makes perfect sense to me: given an average life expectancy of around 82 years, and given the fact that people under 18 don't work full time and given the fact that people over 65 don't generally work, about 43% of the average person's lifespan is spent not working. Which means that right off the bat, at least 43% of the population should not be working. Add in the fact that in many conservative communities, women are encouraged not to work and the fact that in many places (hi rustbelt!) there are nowhere near enough jobs for the population, and 50% seems like a very reasonable number.

How innumerate do you have to be in order to be shocked and appalled by the number 150 million?

[Bill]

…about 43% of the average person's lifespan is spent not working.

Central America is a very interesting place.

Those people seem to correlate work with food. But then those workers are a world away. Brown people. Dumb. Right?

Right? Wait a second. I’m an American. This food service thing is temporary. The United States of America. I have dependents. Theodore?

[Tsam]

People who have paid into Social Security and now are being paid from it are not on government assistance. It's their money.

Congress has hidden its deficits by pretending that this money is its own. More bovine by-product! Like the Lincoln quote about how many legs a dog has, saying something "ain't" doesn't make it go away.

[yoyo]

Related to Nate's post, its impressive how the first century or so of american presidents mostly consists of deists, unitarians, and people who some historians think might have been batised in an episcopal church but noone has any evidence of them being in a church again before they were a corpse.

[magistra]

Central America is a very interesting place.

Those people seem to correlate work with food.

Bill - it's not Central America, it's the whole world, not too long ago. When you couldn't work you starved and died or you depended on the vagaries of family, friends or charity. The UK had the workhouses, I'm not sure if there was a US equivalent. And as the country got richer, people decided, it's not right that the old and the sick and children just die on our streets like that, and they also thought, if there are too many healthy people who can't get jobs and so can't eat, they might start trying to take the money from us rich people by violence. So they started welfare programmes. If you're going to say that those ideas are wrong, look back at the accounts of those who lived pre-welfare and see if you really want to live like that.

[Gromit]

I think Bill is on record as wanting to return to a time of greater inequality.

[Nate]

There are 40 million government workers of one stripe or another. Number rising.

Most of those 40 million government employees work for the Post Office. Delivering mail and packages to every house in the country, no matter how remote. Others are policemen, firemen, building inspectors, a very few are toy or food inspectors, judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers, sanitation workers, engineers and maintenance folks for roads, sewage, water, electricity, and so on.

Those government employees are producing goods and services as well. What criteria makes a government employee, anyway? Are people working for companies on government contracts "government employees"? Are you just counting federal employees, or local and state governments too? Or did you just find a number that sounded big but is ultimately meaningless?

[Just Dropping By]

I'm not a fan of McCain, but he is perfectly well aware of Teddy Roosevelt's policies and beliefs. Hilzoy and many of the commenters seem to be laboring under the delusion that McCain is a "small government" conservative. He is not.

[John Thullen]

Just Dropping By:

"Hilzoy and many of the commenters seem to be laboring under the delusion that McCain is 'a small-government' conservative."

If being deluded counts as labor, when do I get paid?

Actually, to be serious, I think more accurately John McCain, knowing the Republican base is deeply skeptical of his bonafides, is trying to delude said base, and when they are sufficiently and securely deluded, then he'll begin deluding moderates into believing that he actually wasn't sincere about previous delusions.

I'll bet Hilzoy knows this.

I once took a cross-country flight and by way of deciding who's doing what, I counted the number of people on the ground sitting down and the number of people standing up, and then divided the difference by the number of people sitting in traffic who were on their way somewhere to stand up and tell the people who are sitting down to get off their butts.

The stewardesses on the plane alternated between standing up and sitting down, which skewed the running total. Plus, the pilot came back to happy talk the passengers midflight, so I counted him as employed. The co-pilot was sitting down having a good old time in the cockpit, the malingerer. Which caused no shortage of jumping up and screaming when I pointed out that no one was flying the plane, a situation the airline considered efficient and additive to productivity, if you consider shareholder-value, which must increase over time so that people currently standing up can retire and take a load off their feet.

Then, a Muslim guy stood up and went to the bathroom, presumably to pray, and this caused many of the people below who were sitting down to quickly stand up, particularly in the White House, while the people already standing up started to scurry in all directions in what looked like highly productive panic.

John McCain himself stood up and ran to the nearest microphone, which caused Osama Bin Laden to stand up and find another cave, having been deluded into thinking John McCain knew exactly where he was but was withholding the information until next January.

Michelle Malkin alone did the work of 17 people.

From this total I derived the number of people working in the food service industry in Central and South America and, for that matter, Asia where you can have 71 people sitting on a bus pull up to a stop and some hundreds of food service entrepreneurs rush the bus, each selling roasted sparrows on a stick, or crunchy fertilized duck eggs, or maybe warm soda and a rice cake.

I did my part to add to gross national output by ordering three drinks on the plane while the going was good.

[John Thullen]

Some ROUGH numbers and I hope Gary Farber shows up to give less rough numbers:

2007:
1.8 million Federal civilian employees (not including CIA, NSA, DIA, and National Imagery and Mapping Agency whose numbers are secret)
800,000 Postal Service employees
2.6 million military, including National Guard ----- current population of U.S.: something just over 300 million.

These folks administer a $2.1 trillion Federal budget in FY2000 dollars.

Compare:

2.5 million Federal civilian and postal service employees in 1962 administering a $99 billion budget (not adjusted for inflation, I think) U.S. population in 1962: 186 million

Me: "Wow, that looks like improved efficiency and productivity to me."

Others, maybe: "The government is inefficient and unproductive. The only thing worse is when it's efficient and productive."

Me (re generally speaking, employment private and public):
"I desire full employment."

Others, maybe (same subject): "We desire full employment. Now, fire as many people as possible to reach maximum efficiency and productivity.

More rough numbers:

Federal government receipts as a percentage of GNP have stayed in a fairly narrow range (17% to 21%) since 1944.

8 million state and local public employees, not including education and hospitals. Seven out of ten of these employees are in local government.

4 million public school teachers

[John Thullen]

The 2007 Federal budget in 2007 was @2.8 trillion, not $2.1 trillion.

Which, natch, proves my point.

Also everyone elses'.

Hello?

[Gary Farber]

"People who have paid into Social Security and now are being paid from it are not on government assistance. It's their money."

That's not how it actually remotely works.