 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
XX
AT SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, APRIL 6, 1903
Fellow-citizens:
There are many, many lesser problems which go to
make up in their entirety the huge and complex problems
of our modern industrial life. Each of these problems is,
moreover, connected with many of the others. Few indeed
are simple or stand only by themselves. The most
important are those connected with the relation of the
farmers, the stock-growers, and soil-tillers, to the community
at large, and those affecting the relations between
employer and employed. In a country like ours it is
fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller of the
soil and the wage worker is the well-being of the State.
If they are well off, then we need concern ourselves but
little as to how other classes stand, for they will inevitably
be well off too; and, on the other hand, there can be no
real general prosperity unless based on the foundation of
the prosperity of the wage worker and the tiller of the
soil.
But the needs of these two classes are often not the
same. The tiller of the soil has been of all our citizens
the one on the whole the least affected in his ways of life
and methods of industry by the giant industrial changes
of the last half century. There has been change with
him, too, of course. He also can work to best advantage
if he keeps in close touch with his fellows; and the success
of the national Department of Agriculture has shown
Government. Nor is it only through the Department
that the Government can act. One of the greatest and
most beneficent measures passed by the last Congress,
or indeed by any Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation
Act, which will do for the States of the Great Plains
and the Rocky Mountain region at least as much as ever
has been done for the States of the humid region by river
and harbor improvements. Few measures that have
been put upon the statute books of the nation have done
more for the people than this law will, I firmly believe,
directly and indirectly accomplish for the States in
question.
The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole
energy to working for the welfare of farmers and stock-growers.
In every section of our country it aids them in
their constantly increasing search for a better agricultural
education. It helps not only them, but all the nation,
in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills of
health, and that there is rigid inspection of all meats
that enter into interstate commerce. Thirty-eight million
carcasses were inspected during the last fiscal year. Our
stock-growers sell forty-five million dollars' worth of live
stock annually, and these animals must be kept healthy
or else our people will lose their trade. Our export of
plant products to foreign countries amounts to over six
hundred million dollars a year, and there is no branch of
its work to which the Department of Agriculture devotes
more care. Thus the Department has been successfully
introducing a macaroni wheat from the headwaters of the
Volga, which grows successfully in ten inches of rainfall,
and by this means wheat-growing has been successfully
extended westward into the semi-arid region. Two million
bushels of this wheat were grown last year; and
being suited to dry conditions it can be used for forage
as well as for food for man.
The Department of Agriculture has been helping our
fruit men to establish markets abroad by studying
methods of fruit preservation through refrigeration and
through methods of handling and packing. On the Gulf
coasts of Louisiana and Texas, thanks to the Department
of Agriculture, a rice suitable to the region was imported
from the Orient and the rice crop is now practically equal
to our needs in this country, whereas a few years ago it
supplied but one fourth of them. The most important
of our farm products is the grass crop; and to show what
has been done with grasses, I need only allude to the
striking change made in the entire West by the extended
use of alfalfa.
Moreover, the Department has taken the lead in the
effort to prevent the deforestation of the country.
Where there are forests we seek to preserve them; and
on the once treeless plains anc the prairies we are doing
our best to foster the habit of tree planting among our
people. In my own lifetime I have seen wonderful
changes brought about by this tree planting here in your
own State and in the States immediately around it.
There are a number of very important questions, such
as that of good roads, with which the States alone can
deal, and where all that the National Government can do
is to co-operate with them. The same is true of the
education of the American farmer. A number of the
States have themselves started to help in this work and
the Department of Agriculture does an immense amount
which is in the proper sense of the word educational, and
educational in the most practical way.
It is therefore clearly true that a great advance has
been made in the direction of finding ways by which the
Government can help the farmer to help himself—the
only kind of help which a self-respecting man will accept,
or, I may add, which will in the end do him any good.
Much has been done in these ways, and farm life and
farmer himself still retains, because of his surroundings
and the nature of his work, to a pre-eminent degree the
qualities which we like to think of as distinctly American
in considering our early history. The man who tills his
own farm, whether on the prairie or in the woodland, the
man who grows what we eat and the raw material which
is worked up into what we wear, still exists more nearly
under the conditions which obtained when the "embattled
farmers" of '76 made this country a nation than
is true of any others of our people.
But the wage workers in our cities, like the capitalists
in our cities, face totally changed conditions. The development
of machinery and the extraordinary change
in business conditions have rendered the employment of
capital and of persons in large aggregations not merely
profitable but often necessary for success, and have
specialized the labor of the wage worker at the same time
that they have brought great aggregations of wage
workers together. More and more in our great industrial
centres men have come to realize that they cannot live as
independently of one another as in the old days was the
case everywhere, and as is now the case in the country
districts.
Of course, fundamentally each man will yet find that
the chief factor in determining his success or failure in
life is the sum of his own individual qualities. He can
not afford to lose his individual initiative, his individual
will and power; but he can best use that power if for
certain objects he unites with his fellows. Much can be
done by organization, combination, union among the
wage workers; finally, something can be done by the
direct action of the State. It is not possible empirically
to declare when the interference of the State should be
deemed legitimate and when illegitimate.
The line of demarcation between unhealthy over-interference
well defined, and shifts with the change in our industrial
needs. Most certainly we should never invoke the interference
of the State or Nation unless it is absolutely
necessary; but it is equally true that when confident of
its necessity we should not on academic grounds refuse it.
Wise factory laws, laws to forbid the employment of
child labor and to safeguard the employees against the
effects of culpable negligence by the employer, are necessary,
not merely in the interest of the wage worker, but
in the interest of the honest and humane employer, who
should not be penalized for his honesty and humanity
by being exposed to unchecked competition with an unscrupulous
rival. It is far more difficult to deal with the
greed that works through cunning than with the greed
that works through violence. But the effort to deal with
it must be steadily made.
Very much of our effort in reference to labor matters
should be by every device and expedient to try to secure
a constantly better understanding between employer and
employee. Everything possible should be done to increase
the sympathy and fellow-feeling between them,
and every chance taken to allow each to look at all
questions, especially at questions in dispute, somewhat
through the other's eyes. If met with a sincere desire
to act fairly by one another, and if there is, furthermore,
power by each to appreciate the other's standpoint, the
chance for trouble is minimized. I suppose every thinking
man rejoices when by mediation or arbitration it
proves possible to settle troubles in time to avert the
suffering and bitterness caused by strikes. Moreover, a
conciliation committee can do best work when the trouble
is in its beginning, or at least has not come to a head.
When the break has actually occurred, damage has been
done, and each side feels sore and angry; and it is difficult
to get them together—difficult to make either forget
If possible the effort at conciliation or mediation or arbitration
should be made in the earlier stages, and should
be marked by the wish on the part of both sides to try to
come to a common agreement which each shall think in
the interests of the other as well as of itself.
When we deal with such a subject we are fortunate in
having before us an admirable object-lesson in the work
that has just been closed by the Anthracite Coal Strike
Commission. This was the Commission which was appointed
last fall at the time when the coal strike in the
anthracite regions threatened our nation with a disaster
second to none which has befallen us since the days of
the Civil War. Their report was made just before the
Senate adjourned at the special session; and no Government
document of recent years marks a more important
piece of work better done, and there is none which teaches
sounder social morality to our people. The Commission
consisted of seven as good men as were to be found in the
country, representing the bench, the church, the army,
the professions, the employers, and the employed. They
acted as a unit, and the report which they unanimously
signed is a masterpiece of sound common-sense and of
sound doctrine on the very questions with which our
people should most deeply concern themselves. The
immediate effect of this Commission's appointment and
action was of vast and incalculable benefit to the nation;
but the ultimate effect will be even better, if capitalist,
wage worker, and lawmaker alike will take to heart and
act upon the lessons set forth in the report they have
made.
Of course the National Government has but a small
field in which it can work in labor matters. Something
it can do, however, and that something ought to be done.
Among other things I should like to see the District of
Columbia, which is completely under the control of the
Washington is not a city of very large industries, but
still it has some. Wise labor legislation for the city of
Washington would be a good thing in itself, and it would
be a far better thing, because a standard would thereby
be set for the country as a whole.
In the field of general legislation relating to these subjects
the action of Congress is necessarily very limited.
Still there are certain ways in which we can act. Thus
the Secretary of the Navy has recommended, with my
cordial and hearty approval, the enactment of a strong
employers' liability law in the navy-yards of the nation.
It should be extended to similar branches of the Government
work. Again, sometimes such laws can be enacted
as an incident to the nation's control over interstate
commerce. In my last annual message to Congress I advocated
the passage of a law in reference to car couplings
—to strengthen the features of the one already on the
statute books so as to minimize the exposure to death
and maiming of railway employees. Much opposition
had to be overcome. In the end an admirable law was
passed "to promote the safety of employees and travellers
upon railroads by compelling common carriers engaged
in interstate commerce to equip their cars with
automatic couplers and continuous brakes, and their
locomotives with driving-wheel brakes." This law received
my signature a couple of days before Congress
adjourned. It represents a real and substantial advance
in an admirable kind of legislation.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |