BULLY FOR AMERICA

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich constantly invokes the Rough Rider. Ultra-liberal senator and presidential hopeful Paul Wellstone used images of TR on his campaign posters, while ultra-conservative commentator and presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan touts him on Crossfire.

It’s all a little odd, because ours is not an era in which Roosevelt would have felt at home, with its gentle focus-group politics, its rituals of self- exposure, and its soft gender-gap issues. Nonetheless, deep in the heart of many American leaders there seems to lurk Rooseveltian longings.

It’s possible Theodore Roosevelt represents a style of masculine leadership that it is now impermissible to talk about — at least without getting ridiculed. But deeper than that, Teddy Roosevelt embodies a governing philosophy that has been drained out of the American debate, and many politicians of many ideologies instinctively feel its loss.

Roosevelt was a nationalist. One reason the Republican party seems so shallow since the departure of Ronald Reagan is that it has largely abandoned the nationalist impulse and with it the mystic chords of national memory that play in people’s hearts. Republicans in the post-Reagan era can play to narrow selfinterest — more money in your pocket — and they can play to the desire for freedom — get government off your back. But the GOP no longer speaks persuasively about a national destiny.

There are, of course, many different kinds of nationalism. Roosevelt’s was a distinctly American kind that married nationalism to individualism. This tradition, which draws on Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln, balances individual economic opportunity with national political and cultural union. It believes in economic diversity mitigated by social cohesion. It is a tradition far less populist than the present-day Republican party, and far less anti-statist. Unlike the present-day Republican party, it is a tradition that calls forth government activism.

Before Americans learned to hate big government, they respected limited, vigorous government that tackled concrete problems. And when it was founded out of the husk of the Whig party, the Republican party was that kind of energetic government’s champion. In the 19th century and up through the era of Teddy Roosevelt, the Republicans were the party of a dynamic federal government while the Democratic party stood for laissez faire and states’ rights. When you look at the Lincoln presidency, for example, you see dizzying activism: Not only the strengthening of the executive prompted by the Civil War, but a slew of federal programs such as the Homestead Act, a land-grant college act, a Pacific railroad act, an act providing government loans and land grants for a transcontinental railroad, a banking act, and a higher tariff.

But this was not liberal activism of the sort we are familiar with. The Republican activists didn’t use government to make an egalitarian utopia, and they didn’t look to government to create a new sort of compassionate society, or to create a secure and comfortable nanny state. These Republican activists considered themselves conservatives, and with their concern for preserving order, protecting property, and promoting a distinctly American cultural heritage, they were right.

Obviously the leading lights of the tradition that culminated with Teddy Roosevelt are not religious icons. They’re not prophets who deliver unto us great truths about how to conduct politics at the turn of this century. But the Roosevelt example does suggest a different approach for today’s Republican party, an agenda that will help Republicans accomplish the delicate balancing act that lies before them: Namely, as Gertrude Himmelfarb captures it in a recent essay in Commentary, “To discredit and dismantle the welfare state while retaining a healthy respect for the state itself and its institutions.”

Teddy Roosevelt is still best known for his trust-busting and his attacks on the “malefactors of great wealth,” a charge that doesn’t seem very Republican to our ears. And it’s true that TR was no great admirer of the business community. He grew up with inherited wealth and never really worked in business.

But TR was by no means anti-capitalist. He opposed some trusts — notably the railway trusts — because they discriminated against small businesses by setting lower freight rates or offering rebates for well-connected, big clients such as Standard Oil, the Armour Company, and the American Sugar Refining Company. Far from trying to soften the marketplace, TR was trying to help small companies compete with the big ones. “The true function of the state, as it interferes in social life,” TR wrote, “should be to make the chances of competition more even, not to abolish them.”

By crushing competition, Roosevelt felt the trusts had made themselves the enemies of the three values he championed in his 1905 inaugural address: ” Energy, self-reliance and individual initiative.” He was a walking advertisement for a certain sort of vigorous individual, whose life was taken up with striving, ambition, and moral responsibility. “The chief factor in the success of each man — wageworker, farmworker and capitalist alike,” he preached, “must ever be the sum total of his own individual qualities and abilities. Second only to this comes the power of acting in combination or association with others.”

It’s the individualistic half of Roosevelt that is most congenial to modern conservatives. Searching for the core of Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy, the British writer Shirley Robin Letwin concluded that Thatcherism was designed to promote the individual who possesses the vigorous virtues: who is “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against enemies.” That’s a list Roosevelt would have admired. And Letwin argues that Thatcher tried to encourage home ownership, spread share ownership, and spur entrepreneurial activity by deregulation exactly to promote those vigorous qualities. In America the supply-side movement in the Reagan years argued for a reduction in marginal tax rates using the same moral vocabulary — because low rates would encourage risk- taking and entrepreneurial heroism. Under Roosevelt and Reagan, Republicans stood for the full, strenuous life over the secure, comfortable one.

Today, in a global marketplace, corporations rarely succeed in using monopoly status to crush competition. But corporations do seek unfair competitive advantage nonetheless, often by manipulating government. They lobby for corporate welfare programs that reduce the risks they have to take to create and design new products and find new markets. They seek environmental regulations that will reward their kind of pollution-control equipment and impose costs on their competitors’ kind. They seek to entrench regulatory hurdles on, say, drug approval so that upstart competitors will not be able to afford the long lead times caused by the regulatory review process. A Teddy Roosevelt figure today, seeking to enhance competition and protect the upstart firm, might begin by declaring a Square Deal for American business. That would mean a radical reduction in those tax loopholes, corporate subsidies, and regulatory rules that give some companies competitive advantage over their rivals; in exchange, all companies would get a 1 or 2 percent cut in the corporate tax rate.

Second, while private trusts are no longer much of a problem, today we are faced with the public-sector trusts: a Medicare system that doesn’t allow people to take control of their own health-care choices, a socialsecurity monopoly that takes pension responsibility out of the hands of individuals, a public-school trust that squashes vigorous competition. A Roosevelt agenda for today would dismantle these. It would encourage parents to become actively involved in selecting the best education for their children. It would encourage energy self-reliance, and individual initiative when it comes to selecting a pension or choosing among health-care options.

These are not exactly novel ideas; they are part of the broader Republican agenda now. But the problem with the Republican party is not that it doesn’t have good policy proposals. The problem is that it lacks a governing philosophy, a set of ideas to help Republican officials organize their thinking while they serve in government and use the power of government to conservative ends.

Instead, Republicans, overreliant on anti-statist rhetoric, have encouraged people to despise government or to think of Washington as some alien malevolence. In so doing, the Republicans have ended up soiling their own nest. Americans now distrust government so much, they don’t trust Republicans to reform it. Moreover, voters have simply abandoned the public realm, retreating from politics into the realm of private concerns that is the natural milieu of Dick Morris and Bill Clinton — a president who goes on the radio and courageously supports safe car seats for babies.

Teddy Roosevelt, on the other hand, was a conservative who didn’t have a bad conscience about serving in government. He believed that public service was the highest calling because he believed the country needed a dynamic federal government to hold together the heroic and rambunctious innovators and opportunists within its borders. TR was able to relegitimize public life in a time of corruption and apathy, exactly the sort of task the Republicans need to undertake if they are going to persuade the American people to accept their other reforms.

TR was a firm subscriber to that most conservative belief, the pervasiveness of sin. As he said in his final message to Congress in 1909, ” Every new social relation begets a new type of wrong doing — of sin, to use an old-fashioned word — and many years always elapse before society is able to turn this sin into crime which can be effectively punished at law.” He was more likely than today’s free-marketeers to believe that people would use their strength in the marketplace to oppress others. Therefore, TR felt that government must work as a rapid deployment force to crush malefactors. He stepped in to clean up the meat-packing industry. With characteristic evenhandedness, he stepped in when coal operators were thuggish toward striking workers and he stepped in when miners’ unions were thuggish toward the operators. He slammed both the Wall Street titans and the muckrakers who he thought were committing journalistic violence against them. Ever the buttinsky, TR even stepped in to make college football safer.

In many ways TR’s style of conservative activism is his most influential legacy. The closest thing we have to it today is New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Like Roosevelt, whose picture adorns Giuliani’s office wall, the mayor straps on his armor each morning to battle entrenched interests that inhibit competition, whether it is the Mafiosi who rig the fish and trash-collection markets, or the education and police bureaucrats who inhibit competition between schools or precincts. Giuliani, like TR, believes that, done right, government activism is a good thing. He brags that his most important achievement is to demonstrate that New York is governable, that the problems of crime and incivility, which many people had concluded were beyond control, can in fact be meliorated by a strong magistrate.

Teddy Roosevelt’s attitude toward immigration offers a good example of how he married his faith in individual opportunity to his belief in an active government that fosters national union. Roosevelt supported relatively open immigration. He opposed the nativist sentiment that was prevalent at the time, as exemplified by the American Protective Association, an anti-Catholic group.

But TR was acutely conscious of the dangers of ethnic and racial separatism. “We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good fellowship to every man and woman, no matter their creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good citizen like the rest of us,” he wrote in an essay published in 1894 in a magazine called the Forum, “but we have a right and it is our duty to demand that they shall indeed become so.” That meant, in Roosevelt’s eyes, the immigrant had to leave Old World quarrels behind. It meant he had to learn English — “We believe that English and no other language is that in which all school exercises should be conducted.” And it meant no ethnic voting: “We have no room in a healthy American community for a German-American vote or an Irish-American vote and it is contemptible demagoguery to put into any party platform [rhetoric] with the purpose of catching such a vote.”

He summed up, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”

TR was not always as good as his rhetoric. His record on racial equality was mediocre. But his noblest intentions provide clear guidance to those who seek to follow in his tradition. “The time has arrived,” he said in 1901, ” when we should definitely make up our minds to recognize the Indian as an individual and not as a member of a tribe.” Above all, the government, he insisted, should promote Americanism (a word that has since slipped into the category of phrases only used ironically).

From the beginnings of his political climb, Roosevelt’s speeches rang with fervent paeans to American unity. And toward the end of his career, he delivered his famous New Nationalism speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, which opened with an invocation of the soldiers who died for the Union in the Civil War. Because of their sacrifice, we belong “not to one of a dozen little squabbling commonwealths” but to “the mightiest nation upon which the sun shines.”

One way to promote a sense of national union, TR recognized, was to conduct an active foreign policy that demonstrates America’s distinct national character and reminds diverse Americans of their common role in the world. His famous 1899 address, “The Strenuous Life,” was in fact a foreign policy speech arguing that just as a great individual should choose a life of effort and ambition, so should a great nation. “We cannot sit huddled within our borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond,” TR declared. Later, in 1905, he argued that just as individuals have moral responsibilities, so do nations: “We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities.” He put this creed into practice in a number of ways. First, he built up American military power, particularly the Navy. During his presidency he increased the number of American battleships from 17 to 27. The number of naval enlisted men rose by 19,000 to 44,500. He achieved these increases in military power at a time when Americans were bored by foreign affairs and suspicious of foreign entanglements.

Furthermore, he argued that America should play global policeman where agents of chaos threatened world order. He was an avid, maybe too avid, guardian of American power in the Western hemisphere. He turned out to be a deft mediator (winning the Nobel Peace prize for helping to resolve the Russo- Japanese War) and believed that it was America’s role to preserve the balance of power between other great nations. He warned that American foreign policy should be conducted on more than merely commercial grounds. And, being a nationalist, he strongly opposed the global idealism later advanced by Woodrow Wilson.

Domestically, Whigs and Republicans in the nationalist tradition have supported great projects designed to physically and spiritually unify the nation: canals, railroads, roads, and highways to knit the national economy. They have funded science and engineering projects like the Hoover Dam or TR’s own Panama Canal to give the nation common pursuits. These efforts were not based on airy goals about a better society, like a vague war on poverty. They were literally concrete missions with concrete goals.

Teddy Roosevelt also used federal power to promote unifying cultural institutions. “There should be a national gallery of art established in the capital city of this country,” he wrote to Congress in 1907. He had already, in 1906, played a key role in helping the federal government acquire the art collection of Charles L. Freer, which is now displayed in its own building on the Mall. Roosevelt set up the Council of Fine Arts Council, to provide guidance to government agencies on artistic matters. Unlike governors and senators today, who too often let bureaucrats make architectural and aesthetic decisions, Roosevelt was deeply involved in these matters. “Would it be possible,” he asked his treasury secretary, “without asking permission of Congress to employ a man like [Augustus] Saint-Gaudens to give us a coinage that would have some beauty?” Roosevelt didn’t spend arts money as we do today, out of the vague sentiment that art is good and there should be more appreciation of it. Rather, he spent public money to express a unifying American creed and to make manifest American glory. A genuine historian, he was careful to preserve and champion the national heritage. The National Monuments Act was passed in 1906; there would be 18 undertaken during TR’s presidency.

Since this is a New World country, America’s spiritual sense of itself has always been lodged in its natural frontiers, and TR was keen to preserve that as well. He has developed a bad reputation among some current Republicans as a proto-environmentalist. But it’s simply wrong to read today’s environmental pseudo-religion back onto TR. In fact, his environmental policy, like so much else, was a careful balancing of the need for individual initiative and the need to preserve the national patrimony. Here’s a passage from a 1908 speech that is worth quoting at length, especially for the last seven words:

There has been a good deal of a demand for unrestricted individualism, for the right of the individual to injure the future of all of us for his own temporary and immediate profit. The time has come for a change. As a people we have the right and the duty, second to none other but the right and duty of obeying the moral law, of requiring and doing justice, and to protect ourselves and our children against the wasteful development of our natural resources, whether that waste is caused by the actual destruction of such resources or by making them impossible of development hereafter.

Roosevelt was no enemy of consumption and had no guilt about his or the nation’s wealth. His was a prosperous environmentalism. “The fundamental idea of forestry is the perpetuation of forests by use,” he argued. His environmental guru, Gifford Pinchot, underlined the sentiment. Forests, he said, are not preserved “because they are beautiful . . . or because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness.” The primary goal, rather, was to produce products to build “prosperous homes. . . . Every other consideration is secondary.”

Roosevelt pioneered the national parks, set up a game preserve in the Grand Canyon, and even issued hunting regulations for the District of Columbia. The Newlands Act asserted that vast tracts of land were part of the American patrimony. It set up national control over resource policy. But these measures were supported by the forestry industry as well as conservationists. Roosevelt believed in preservation by use, a rough balance that ideally allows for economic opportunity and the safeguarding of national treasures, a balance not often evident in today’s environmental movement.

Theodore Roosevelt was a creature of his time, and there are aspects of his governing philosophy that we wouldn’t want to duplicate. Living when government was reasonably small, he did not appreciate the potential arrogance of government bureaucrats. He was more taken with the idea of disinterested experts than we could be after the lessons of Hayek and James Buchanan. He was a believer in the distinction between the civilized and uncivilized races. He lived in an age of consolidation, when small units were amalgamating into large companies and large organizations, so some of his formulae are inappropriate in our decentralizing age.

But these days the Teddy Roosevelt tradition is worth reviving even if the man himself is inimitable. This nationalist-individualist tradition is more optimistic and forward-looking than the styles of nationalism preached by Pat Buchanan or Michael Lind. It’s more inspiring than the pure private-sector individualism of Dick Armey or the cut-their-pay-and-send-them-home populism of Lamar Alexander. It doesn’t invade private life as aggressively as the social conservatives sometimes do, and it is not as mushy as the communitarians. There is an agenda that can be built on the back of the Roosevelt tradition: rolling back the nanny state; eliminating regulations and subsidies that inhibit competition; conducting a strenuous and democratic foreign policy; promoting national cohesion through cultural policy and national education standards to balance school choice; beautifying public spaces and the public infrastructure with nationalistic public projects; funding basic scientific research while restricting the use of technologies like cloning that violate American decency.

As Harvey Mansfield wrote in this magazine last year, one of the worst effects of the vast post-Great Society government is that it has caused Americans to lose all respect for our government. The welfare state was supposed to bring America together; instead it has stirred up resentment and weakened national attachments. A Republican agenda of limited but energetic government could restore lost luster to our public square. In this square, there should be a statue of TR, challenging us from a pedestal in the corner.

Senior editor David Brooks’s last cover story for THE WEEKLY STANDARD was “A Return to National Greatness” (March 3).