#49 — Sunday, 7th December 1901
On Tuesday, Theodore Roosevelt sent his first annual message to Congress. He was not present — the tradition at the time is for the text to be delivered, not spoken — so twenty thousand words arrived on paper, and the members of the 57th Congress read what the youngest president in American history had to say about the country he had led for exactly eighty days.
He began with the dead.
“The Congress assembles this year under the shadow of a great calamity.” McKinley was praised — the kindly eyes, the forgiving lips, the mortal agony and the unfaltering trust. “We mourn a good and great President who is dead.” Roosevelt quoted McKinley’s last speech, the one about reciprocity, delivered the day before the bullet. He mourned his predecessor publicly and warmly, and then — having paid the toll of grief that the office required — he turned the page.
And on the other side of the page was the twentieth century.
The message covers everything. Foreign affairs, the navy, the merchant marine, the postal system, the civil service, the forestry reserves, the Indian question, the isthmian canal. But its centre — the section that will be remembered when everything else has faded — is about the trusts.
Roosevelt’s argument is careful. He is not an enemy of business. He says so explicitly: “The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance.” He praises the industrial achievements that have placed America at the head of the world’s commercial nations. He acknowledges that combination and concentration of capital are necessary features of modern enterprise.
And then — with the steady, deliberate force of a man who knows he is rewriting the rules — he says this: “There is a widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare.” And this conviction, he says, is right.
The nation should assume the power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business. He proposes a new cabinet officer — a Secretary of Commerce — with authority to investigate corporate practices. He calls for publicity, for transparency, for the government to know what the corporations know about themselves.
This is not a radical document. It does not call for the abolition of trusts. It does not call for the redistribution of wealth. It does not mention the word socialism. What it calls for — modestly, reasonably, in the language of a patrician who has studied the problem and reached a measured conclusion — is the principle that the government has the right to look inside the machinery and see how it works. The right to supervise. The right to regulate.
J. P. Morgan will hear this and come to the White House and suggest, as one gentleman to another, that their respective attorneys settle any disagreements. Roosevelt will reply that he does not intend to settle. He intends to prosecute. The Northern Securities case will reach the Supreme Court. The trust will be dissolved. And the principle that Roosevelt articulated this week — that the government has jurisdiction over the corporations — will become the foundation of the regulatory state that the twentieth century will spend the next hundred years building, dismantling, rebuilding, and arguing about.
Morgan will never forgive him. The century will never stop arguing about whether he was right.
But here is what the message does not say.
It does not say anything about the concentration camps in South Africa, where twenty-eight thousand people — twenty-four thousand of them children — have died. The camps are not America’s responsibility. The war is not America’s war. But Roosevelt, who will win the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, has nothing to say this week about the camps where British subjects are dying at a rate of three hundred and forty-four per thousand.
It does not say anything meaningful about the Philippines beyond praising Taft’s civilian government and expressing confidence that the islands are being pacified. It does not mention Balangiga by name. It does not mention General Smith by name. It does not mention the order to kill everyone over ten. The howling wilderness is not referenced in the twenty thousand words.
And when it turns to the Indians — what Roosevelt calls “the Indian question” — the message says this: that the General Allotment Act is “a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.” That the fastest path to civilisation is private property. That the Indian must be recognised as an individual, not as a member of a tribe, because the tribe is the obstacle and the individual is the raw material from which a useful citizen can be forged.
A mighty pulverizing engine. The phrase is Roosevelt’s own. He does not mean it as criticism. He means it as praise. The machine that grinds the tribe into individuals is, in his view, a tool of progress. The sorting — the separation of the communal from the private, the collective from the individual, the land that belongs to everyone from the land that belongs to someone — is, in his view, the purpose of governance.
I said the sorting is the crime. Roosevelt says the sorting is the policy. We cannot both be right.
I am hard on Roosevelt. I know this. I am hard on him because the century will be easy on him — will put his face on a mountain and name him among the greatest — and someone has to hold the other side of the ledger. The trusts matter. The parks matter. The canal matters. But the pulverizing engine also matters, and Balangiga also matters, and the camps in the Philippines also matter, and the twenty thousand words that do not mention them are also words, and silence is also a language.
He is the most consequential president the century will produce before Franklin Roosevelt, who happens to be his fifth cousin and who will inherit both his name and his conviction that the government must act. He is also the man who sees the Indian as raw material, the Filipino as a ward, and the African American as a dinner guest who cannot be invited twice. The century will forgive him for all of this because the century forgives energy. Roosevelt has more energy than any president before or after him, and the century mistakes energy for justice, and I am here to note the difference.
The century is forty-nine weeks old. Three weeks remain.
In three days, the first Nobel Prizes will be awarded in Stockholm, on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. I will tell you about them next week. The prizes are the century’s conscience — or rather, they are one man’s conscience, purchased with dynamite money and distributed to the people the century has decided to honour. The first laureates have been chosen. The names are not yet public.
In five days, on a cliff in Newfoundland, Guglielmo Marconi will listen for a signal from Cornwall. Three dots. The letter S. The first wireless message to cross the Atlantic. The air will speak. The silence between continents will end. And the speed of communication will make its greatest leap since the telegraph, and the loneliness of the world will not diminish by a single degree.
Three weeks. Nobel. Marconi. Christmas. The year’s end. Everything is converging — the oil and the flight and the camps and the music and the trusts and the wind tunnel and the signal on the cliff — and I am here, at the table, writing, watching the century’s first year close its account.
The ledger is heavy. The balance is unclear. But the entries are complete, and the ink is dry, and the century — the century is just beginning.
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