Fall 2008

Note well that there is a great vacuum of substance in Boot's discussion of TR and the expansion of the Federal government. There is a massive literature on the counter-productive results of anti-trust "enforcement" -- and the anti-competitive use of anti-trust by established businesses. There is also a literature on the counter-productive results of the U.S. Forest Service ("fire prevention" , and the capture of the agency by cattle interests, etc. And on and on. Boot is dealing with the external impressions the historically ignorant. He isn't engaging the actual substance of history, discussed by the critics of TR and his policies. So there is a real and consequential hollowness at the core of Boot's all hat, no cattle punditry. >>One can also claim, as many conservatives do, that government has grown too large today, but that wasn’t the case in Roosevelt’s day, either. Thus his creation of a few government agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, did not lead to a Leviathan state. When TR took office in 1901, the federal government consumed just 2 percent of gross domestic product. When he left office in 1909, the figure was 1.7 percent. Hardly Bolshevism. Even with his advocacy of income and inheritance taxes, Roosevelt imagined a government much smaller than the one we have today, when Washington takes for itself roughly 20 percent of GDP. A related item in Beran’s and Powell’s indictment concerns Roosevelt’s support for government regulation. Arguing for more regulation today, at a time when the Federal Register runs to thousands of pages, would certainly raise legitimate questions about a candidate’s conservatism. But in Roosevelt’s day there were far fewer government-imposed standards. The bar had been set fairly low when he pushed for legislation bolstering the Interstate Commerce Commission’s regulation of railways and creating the Food and Drug Administration and a Bureau of Corporations to investigate (but not regulate) companies engaged in interstate commerce. As part of his “trust-busting policy,” TR also revived a dead letter, the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act, promoting the breakup of J. P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, the huge railroad conglomerate. By contrast, aside from a few extremist libertarians, few conservatives today believe our condition would improve by abolishing the FDA or permitting trusts to operate unimpeded. Indeed, Beran actually scores Roosevelt for not doing enough trust-busting—his successor, William Howard Taft, he writes, “during a shorter spell of executive power brought nearly twice as many antitrust suits, and without nearly as much ranting and raving.” That, of course, ignores the fact that Taft was merely continuing what Roosevelt bravely began.

Posted by Greg Ransom | December 27, 2008 8:07:14 PM EST

Of course TR wasn't a conservative in any traditional sense. In fact all these attempts to draw political analogies with figures from another age are rather fatuous surely. And TR truly was emblematic of his age. He was a nationalist progressive. Bismark, Joseph Chamberlain, Georges Clemenceau and David Lloyd George fall into exactly the same category. The only reason why Republicans continually evoke his ghost is because he's really the only Republican president over the last 100 years to leave a lasting mark on US society and have any pretensions to the appellation of a "great president." By contrast over the same period the Democrats can claim two real "greats" in FDR and Truman who are responsible for the entire modern system of govt. Even some of their presidents with a much more mixed legacy like Wilson or Johnson have often left a lasting mark like desegegration and medicare, or like Kennedy because of personality and circumstances become part of the heroic national pantheon. By contrast most of the Republicans of the last hundred years are a sorry bunch which also accounts for the continuing not very succesful attempts to elevate Reagan on largely spurious grounds. TR was a great or near great president but he certainly wasn't a conservative, nor in the context of the times did he govern like a traditional Republican.


Posted by John | December 29, 2008 10:08:34 AM EST