 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
VI
AT FITCHBURG, MASS., SEPTEMBER 2, 1902
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-citizens:
There are two or three things that I should like to say
to this audience, but before beginning what I have to say
on some of the problems of the day, I wish to thank for
their greeting, not only all of you, my fellow-citizens here,
but particularly the men of the great war, and second only
to them my comrades of a lesser war, where, I hope, we
showed that we were anxious to do our duty, as you had
done yours, only the need did not come to us.
We have great problems before us as a nation. I will
not try to discuss them at length with you to-day, but I
can speak a word as to the manner in which they must be
met if they are to be met successfully. All great works,
though they'differ in the method of doing them, must be
solved by substantially the same qualities. You who upheld
the arms of Lincoln, who followed the sword of
Grant, were able to do your duty not because you found
some patent device for doing it, but by going down to
the bedrock principles which had made good soldiers
since the world began.
There was no method possible to devise which would
have spared you from heart-breaking fatigue on the
marches, from hardships at night, from danger in battle.
The only way to overcome those difficulties and dangers
was by drawing on every ounce of hardihood, of courage,
of loyalty, and of iron resolution. That is how you had
38
had won before you, as we of the younger generation
must win if ever the call should be made upon us to face
a serious foe. Arms change, tactics change, but the
spirit that makes the real soldier does not change. The
spirit that makes for victory does not change.
It is just so in civic life. The problems change, but
fundamentally the qualities needed to face them in the
average citizen are the same. Our new and highly complex
industrial civilization has produced a new and complicated
series of problems. We need to face those
problems and not to run away from them. We need to
exercise all our ingenuity in trying to devise some effective
solution, but the only way in which that solution can
be applied is the old way of bringing honesty, courage,
and common-sense to bear upon it. One feature of
honesty and common-sense combined is never to promise
what you do not think you can perform, and then never
to fail to perform what you have promised. And that
applies to public life just as much as in private life.
If some of those who have seen cause for wonder in
what I have said this summer on the subject of the great
corporations, which are popularly, although with technical
inaccuracy, known as trusts, would take the trouble to
read my messages when I was Governor, what I said on
the stump two years ago, and what I put into my first
message to Congress, I think they would have been less
astonished. I said nothing on the stump that I did not
think I could make good, and I shall not hesitate now to
take the position which I then advocated.
I am even more anxious that you who hear what I say
should think of it than that you should applaud it. I am
not going to try to define with technical accuracy what
ought to be meant when we speak of a trust. But if by
trust we mean merely a big corporation, then I ask you
to ponder the utter folly of the man who either in a spirit
without giving you an idea of what he means really to do.
I will go with him gladly if he says "Destroy the evil in
the trusts." I will try to find out that evil, I will seek to
apply remedies, which I have already outlined in other
speeches. But if his policy, from whatever motive,
whether hatred, fear, panic, or just sheer ignorance, is
to destroy the trusts in a way that will destroy all our
property—no. Those men who advocate wild and foolish
remedies which would be worse than the disease, are doing
all in their power to perpetuate the evils against which
they nominally war, because, if we are brought face to
face with the naked issue of either keeping or totally destroying
a prosperity in which the majority share, but in
which some share improperly, why, as sensible men, we
must decide that it is a great deal better that some
people should prosper too much than that no one should
prosper enough. So that the man who advocates destroying
the trusts by measures which would paralyze the industries
of the country is at least a quack, and at worst an
enemy to the Republic.
In 1893 there was no trouble about anybody making
too much money. The trusts were down, but the trouble
was that we were all of us down. Nothing but harm to
the whole body politic can come from ignorant agitation,
carried on partially against real evils, partially against
imaginary evils, but in a spirit which would substitute for
the real evils evils just as real and infinitely greater.
Those men, if they should succeed, could do nothing to
bring about a solution of the great problems with which
we are concerned. If they could destroy certain of the
evils at the cost of overthrowing the well-being of the
entire country, it would mean merely that there would
come a reaction in which they and their remedies would
be hopelessly discredited.
Now, it does not do anybody any good, and it will do
check any proper growth in a corporation. We wish not
to penalize but to reward a great captain of industry or
the men banded together in a corporation who have the
business forethought and energy necessary to build up a
great industrial enterprise. Keep that in mind. A big
corporation may be doing excellent work for the whole
country, and you want, above all things, when striving
to get a plan which will prevent wrong-doing by a corporation
which desires to do wrong, not at the same time
to have a scheme which will interfere with a corporation
doing well, if that corporation is handling itself honestly
and squarely. What I am saying ought to be treated as
simple, elementary truths. The only reason it is necessary
to say them at all is that apparently some people
forget them.
I believe something can be done by national legislation.
When I state that, I ask you to note my words. I say I
believe. It is not in my power to say I know. When
I talk to you of my own executive duties, I can tell you
definitely what will and what will not be done. When I
speak of the actions of any one else, I can only say that
I believe something more can be done by national legislation.
I believe it will be done. I think we can get laws
which will increase the power of the Federal Government
over corporations; if we fail, then there will have to be an
amendment to the Constitution of the nation conferring
additional power upon the Federal Government to deal
with corporations. To get that will be a matter of difficulty,
and a matter of time.
Let me interrupt here by way of illustration. You of
the great war recollect that about six weeks after Sumter
had been fired on there began to be loud clamor in the
North among people who were not at the front, that you
should go to Richmond; and there were any number of
people who told you how to go there. Then came Bull
had been yelling "On to Richmond at once," turned
around and said the war was over. All the hysteric
brotherhood said so. But you did n't think so. The
war was not over. It was not over for three years and
nine months, and then it was over the other way.
And you got it over by setting your faces steadily toward
the goal, by not relying upon anything impossible,
but by each doing everything possible that came in his
line to do, by each man doing his duty. You did not
win by any patent device; you won by the generalship
of Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan, and,
above all, by the soldiership of the men who carried the
muskets and the sabres. It did not come as quick as you
wanted, and the men who said it would come at once did
not help you much either.
In dealing with any great problem in civil life, be it the
trusts or anything else, you are going to get along in just
about the same fashion. There is not any patent remedy
for all the ills. All we can do is to make up our minds
definitely that we intend to find some method by which
we shall be able to tell, in the first place, what are the
real evils and what of the alleged evils are imaginary; in
the next place, what of those real evils it is possible to
cure by legislation, and then to cure them by legislation
and by an honest administration of the laws after they
have been enacted. That statement of the problem will
never be attractive to the man who thinks that somehow,
by turning your hand, you are going to get a complete
solution at once.
Grant's plan of fighting it out on that line, if it took all
summer, was not attractive to the men who wanted it
done in a week. But it was the only plan that won.
The only way we can ever work out even an approximately
satisfactory solution of these great industrial problems,
of which this so-called problem of the trusts is but
equally sanity and self-restraint on the one hand and
resolute purpose on the other.
It is not given to me or to any one else to promise a
perfect solution. It is not given to me or to any one else
to promise you even an approximately perfect solution in
a short time. But I think that we can work out a very
great improvement over the present conditions, and the
steps taken must, I am sure, be along these lines—along
the lines, in the first place, of getting power somewhere
so that we shall be able to say, the nation has power, let
it use that power—and not as it is at present, where it is
out of the question to say exactly where the power is.
We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly,
but with moderation. Let me say that again—with
moderation, with sanity, with self-restraint. The mechanism
of modern business is altogether too delicate and
too complicated for us to sanction for one moment any
intermeddling with it in a spirit of ignorance, above all
in a spirit of rancor. Something can be done, something
is being done now. Much more can be done if
our people resolutely but temperately will that it shall
be done. But the certain way of bringing greatest harm
upon ourselves, without in any way furthering the solution
of the problem, but, on the contrary, deferring indefinitely
its proper solution, would be to act in a spirit
of ignorance, of violence, of rancor, in a spirit which
would make us tear down the temple of industry in which
we live because we are not satisfied with some of the
details of its management.
I want you to think of what I have said, because it
represents all of the sincerity and earnestness that I have,
and I say to you here, from this platform, nothing that
I have not already stated in effect, and nothing I would
not say at a private table with any of the biggest corporation
managers in the land.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |