Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 1 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

I did not expect to have the chance of speaking to any of you of Virginia on this trip. I only wish it had been my good fortune to be able to go through your grand and beautiful historic State by daylight. But you have not escaped me, gentlemen; I am going to come again.

Yesterday and to-day I spent in Tennessee and North Carolina. I have enjoyed much those two days. It is a good thing for any American, and it is an especially good thing for the American who happens to be President at any time, to go around in the country and meet his fellow-Americans of different sections and different States. The more he sees of his fellow-Americans the more he will realize that the differences which divide them are trivial and that the likenesses which unite them are fundamental. A good American is a good American wherever he is, and a bad American is a poor one wherever he is. If a man is a decent citizen, if he does his duty to his family, to his neighbors, to the State and the nation, as a decent man ought to, then he is a man who has a right to claim kinship and comradeship with every other decent American from one end of this country to the other. If he is a straight man he is a credit to all of us, and if he is a crooked man he is a disgrace to all of us. Fundamentally, for weal or for woe, we are knit together; we shall go up or go down together. If hard times come they come without much regard to State lines. If good times come they come without regard to State lines. Wherever a deed is done by an American which reflects credit upon our country, each of us can walk with his head a little higher in consequence; and wherever anything happens through the fault of any of us that is discreditable it discredits all of us more or less.

Gentlemen and ladies, I thank you greatly for having come down here to greet me. It is a genuine pleasure to see you. No man of the United States, proud of the history of the United States, can fail to feel certain associations of reverence and regard awakened when he treads the soil of Virginia, which has taken so leading a part in peace and in war throughout our history.

AT MUSIC HALL, CINCINNATI, OHIO, ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1902

Mr. Mayor, and you, my Fellow-Americans:

I shall ask your attention to what I say to-night, because I intend to make a perfectly serious argument to you, and I shall be obliged if you will remain as still as possible; and I ask that those at the very back will remember that if they talk or make a noise it interferes with the hearing of the rest. I intend to speak to you on a serious subject and to make an argument as the Chief Executive of a nation, who is the President of all the people, without regard to party, without regard to section. I intend to make to you an argument from the standpoint simply of one American talking to his fellow-Americans upon one of the great subjects of interest to all alike; and that subject is what are commonly known as trusts. The word is used very loosely and almost always with technical inaccuracy. The average man, however, when he speaks of the trusts means rather vaguely all of the very big corporations, the growth of which has been so signal a feature of our modern civilization, and especially those big corporations which, though organized in one State, do business in several States, and often have a tendency to monopoly.

The whole subject of the trusts is of vital concern to us, because it presents one, and perhaps the most conspicuous, of the many problems forced upon our attention by the tremendous industrial development which has taken place during the last century, a development which is occurring in all civilized countries, notably in our own. There have been many factors responsible for bringing about these changed conditions. Of these, steam and electricity are the chief. The extraordinary changes in the methods of transportation of merchandise and of transmission of news have rendered not only possible, but inevitable, the immense increase in the rate of growth of our great industrial centres—that is, of our great cities. I want you to bring home to yourselves that fact. When Cincinnati was founded news could be transmitted and merchandise carried exactly as has been the case in the days of the Roman Empire. You had here on your river the flat-boat, you had on the ocean the sailing-ship, you had the pack-train, you had the wagon, and every one of the four was known when Babylon fell. The change in the last hundred years has been greater by far than the changes in all the preceding three thousand. Those are the facts. Because of them have resulted the specialization of industries, and the unexampled opportunities offered for the employment of huge amounts of capital, and therefore for the rise in the business world of those master-minds through whom alone it is possible for such vast amounts of capital to be employed with profit. It matters very little whether we like these new conditions or whether we dislike them; whether we like the creation of these new opportunities or not. Many admirable qualities which were developed in the older, simpler, less progressive life have tended to atrophy under our rather feverish, high-pressure, complex life of to-day. But our likes and dislikes have nothing to do with the matter. The new conditions are here. You can’t bring back the old days of the canalboat and stagecoach if you wish. The steamboat and the railroad are here. The new forces have produced both good and evil. We can not get rid of them—even if it were not undesirable to get rid of them; and our instant duty is to try to accommodate our social, economic and legislative life to them, and to frame a system of law and conduct under which we shall get out of them the utmost possible benefit and the least possible amount of harm. It is foolish to pride ourselves upon our progress and prosperity, upon our commanding position in the international industrial world, and at the same time have nothing but denunciation for the men to whose commanding position we in part owe this very progress and prosperity, this commanding position.

Whenever great social or industrial changes take place, no matter how much good there may be to them, there is sure to be some evil; and it usually takes mankind a number of years and a good deal of experimenting before they find the right ways in which so far as possible to control the new evil, without at the same time nullifying the new good. I am stating facts so obvious that if each one of you will think them over you will think them trite, but if you read or listen to some of the arguments advanced, you will come to the conclusion that there is need of learning these trite truths. In these circumstances the effort to bring the new tendencies to a standstill is always futile and generally mischievous; but it is possible somewhat to develop them aright. Law can to a degree guide, protect and control industrial development, but it can never cause it, or play more than a subordinate part in its healthy development—unfortunately it is easy enough by bad laws to bring it to an almost complete stop.

In dealing with the big corporations which we call trusts, we must resolutely purpose to proceed by evolution and not revolution. We wish to face the facts, declining to have our vision blinded either by the folly of those who say there are no evils, or by the more dangerous folly of those who either see, or make believe that they see, nothing but evil in all the existing system, and who if given their way would destroy the evil by the simple process of bringing ruin and disaster to the entire country. The evils attendant upon over-capitalization alone are, in my judgment, sufficient to warrant a far closer supervision and control than now exists over the great corporations. Wherever a substantial monopoly can be shown to exist we should certainly try our utmost to devise an expedient by which it can be controlled. Doubtless some of the evils existing in or because of the great corporations can not be cured by any legislation which has yet been proposed, and doubtless others, which have really been incident to the sudden development in the formation of corporations of all kinds, will in the end cure themselves. But there will remain a certain number which can be cured if we decide that by the power of the Government they are to be cured. The surest way to prevent the possibility of curing any of them is to approach the subject in a spirit of violent rancor, complicated with total ignorance of business interests and fundamental incapacity or unwillingness to understand the limitations upon all law-making bodies. No problem, and least of all so difficult a problem as this, can be solved if the qualities brought to its solution are panic, fear, envy, hatred, and ignorance. There can exist in a free republic no man more wicked, no man more dangerous to the people, than he who would arouse these feelings in the hope that they would redound to his own political advantage. Corporations that are handled honestly and fairly, so far from being an evil, are a natural business evolution and make for the general prosperity of our land. We do not wish to destroy corporations, but we do wish to make them subserve the public good. All individuals, rich or poor, private or corporate, must be subject to the law of the land; and the government will hold them to a rigid obedience thereof. The biggest corporation, like the humblest private citizen, must be held to strict compliance with the will of the people as expressed in the fundamental law. The rich man who does not see that this is in his interest is indeed short-sighted. When we make him obey the law we ensure for him the absolute protection of the law.

The savings banks show what can be done in the way of genuinely beneficent work by large corporations when intelligently administered and supervised. They now hold over twenty-six hundred millions of the people’s money and pay annually about one hundred millions of interest or profit to their depositors. There is no talk of danger from these corporations; yet they possess great power, holding over three times the amount of our present national debt, more than all the currency, gold, silver, greenbacks, etc., in circulation in the United States. The chief reason for there being no talk of danger from them is that they are on the whole faithfully administered for the benefit of all, under wise laws which require frequent and full publication of their condition, and which prescribe certain needful regulations with which they have to comply, while at the same time giving full scope for the business enterprise of their managers within these limits.