So now Ed Miliband has a new political hero, and is recommending that his aides and advisers to study the US president Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt who he says fought the trusts and corporations of the time on behalf of the American people. For Miliband the rallying call is now ‘Power to the Consumer’.
SOYMB will let the Socialist Party of America (no relation) presidential contender, Eugene Debs, repudiate the role-model of Roosevelt:
‘I charge President Roosevelt with being a hypocrite, the most consummate that ever occupied the executive seat of the nation. His profession of pure politics is false, his boasted moral courage the bluff of a bully and his “square deal” a delusion and a sham. Theodore Roosevelt is mainly for Theodore Roosevelt and incidentally for such others as are also for the same distinguished gentleman, first, last and all the time. He is a smooth and slippery politician, swollen purple with self-conceit: he is shrewd enough to gauge the stupidity of the masses and unscrupulous enough to turn it into hero worship. This constitutes the demagogue, and he is that in superlative degree.. He has never been anything but an enemy of the working class. He joined a labor organization purely as a demagogue. In all his life he never associated with working people. His writings, before he became a politician, show that he held them in contempt. When he entered political life he soon learned how to shake hands with a fireman for the camera and have his press agent do the rest, and it was this species of demagoguery, the very basest conceivable, that idolized him with the ignorant mass and gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart despised as an inferior race...In his book on Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail,...Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for those who toil. After describing cowboys when “drunk on the villainous whiskey of the frontier towns,” he closes with this comparison, which needs no comment: “They are much better fellows and pleasanter companions than small farmers or agricultural laborers; nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath...Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an autocrat. His affected democracy is spurious and easily detected. He belongs to the “upper crust” and at the very best he can conceive of the working class only as contented wage-slaves...The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was made president by the industrial captains and the robbers in general of the working class. They picked him for a winner and he has not failed them. Elected by the trusts and surrounded by trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt is essentially the monarch of a trust administration.’
Debs recalls the corruption of Roosevelt if Miliband wishes rather to overlook it. ‘ It was Roosevelt who denounced large campaign contributions, while his secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the corporations out of one of the biggest slush funds ever known in the history of American politics...The manner in which President Roosevelt manipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends of its dignitaries can only be hinted at...Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who condemns workingmen as murderers when they are objectionable to the trusts that control his administration.”
[Theodore Roosevelt] is above all "a practical man." He was practical in allowing the steel trust to raid the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; he was practical when he legalized the notorious "Alton Steal": he was practical when he had Harriman raise $240,000 for his campaign fund, and he is practical now in having the steel trust and the harvester trust, who made an anteroom of the White House when he was president, pour out their slush funds by millions to put him back in the White House and keep him there. Taft and Roosevelt, and the Republican party of which they are the candidates, are all financed by the trusts, and is it necessary to add that the trusts also consist of practical men and that they do not finance a candidate or a party they do not control?” Debs later added.
The journalist, John Reed, could write ‘In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt issued his Covenant with the American People, assuring them that he would never desert them, and affirming the unalterable principle of Social Justice for which he stood. Not the intelligent radicals—no matter how much they wanted Teddy, they knew he would betray them when it suited him—but the common, ordinary, unenlightened people, the backwoods idealists, as it were.—they trusted Teddy. Hadn’t he said he would never desert them? ...Little did they know that Theodore Roosevelt, in New York, was referring to them as “rabble,” and planning how he could shake himself free from enthusiasts, from idealists, from the dirty and stupid lower classes. Little did they know that he was saying impatiently about them “You can’t build a political party out of cranks. I have got to get rid of the ‘lunatic fringe.’ “ And by “lunatic fringe” he meant those people who believed in Social Justice and wanted to put it into effect.”
We can perhaps understand Miliband’s admiration of Roosevelt. After all, he was willing to break precedent and tradition where needed. He formed a new organization that strove to end the traditional ties of the old parties. His denunciation of the obsolete penetrated even his literary activities, where he appeared as a protagonist for simplified spelling. Theodore Roosevelt was the type of man in politics that Nazi sympathiser Henry Ford could idolise, a man who could get things done, who believed in work and not talk. Roosevelt marked an epoch in American politics more suited to the requirements concentrated industry . It called for the extension of the functions of the Federal government, regulation equally of capital and labor, the Strong Man policy of administrative centralization of the powers of the state, and the necessity of co-ordinating and unifying all the forces of the capitalist class through the national administrative control of industry, – in all essentials, a form of state capitalism. Virtues, no doubt in the eyes of a professional politician like Miliband. Yet the capitalists knew Roosevelt well and he served them well. They know that his instincts, associations, tastes and desires are with them, that he was in fact one of them and that he had nothing in common with the working class.
Theodore Roosevelt, is known as the the first “trust-buster” in the White House yet the monopolies were bigger and more entrenched when his term expired. Under his presidency, the trusts prospered as never before despite his demagogic fulminations in behalf of the anti-monopoly coalition. Today Big Business is stronger than ever. Roosevelt constituted the left wing of the capitalist regime. As member of the loyal opposition, he did not desire to abolish but to moderate the despotism of the plutocracy, to curtail its powers, and reduce the privileges of the magnates of industry and finance. The principal planks in their economic platforms expressed the interests and put forward the demands of the small businessmen. Teddy Roosevelt did not dream of going beyond restricting the power of King Capital, his moneyed aristocracy, and his trusted favourites. To dethrone this despot by expropriation and thereby end the rule of his nobles forever—that was regarded as the end of civilisation! Indeed, perhaps Roosevelt has much to offer Miliband, another loyal retainer at the court of Capital.
AJJ
SOYMB will let the Socialist Party of America (no relation) presidential contender, Eugene Debs, repudiate the role-model of Roosevelt:
‘I charge President Roosevelt with being a hypocrite, the most consummate that ever occupied the executive seat of the nation. His profession of pure politics is false, his boasted moral courage the bluff of a bully and his “square deal” a delusion and a sham. Theodore Roosevelt is mainly for Theodore Roosevelt and incidentally for such others as are also for the same distinguished gentleman, first, last and all the time. He is a smooth and slippery politician, swollen purple with self-conceit: he is shrewd enough to gauge the stupidity of the masses and unscrupulous enough to turn it into hero worship. This constitutes the demagogue, and he is that in superlative degree.. He has never been anything but an enemy of the working class. He joined a labor organization purely as a demagogue. In all his life he never associated with working people. His writings, before he became a politician, show that he held them in contempt. When he entered political life he soon learned how to shake hands with a fireman for the camera and have his press agent do the rest, and it was this species of demagoguery, the very basest conceivable, that idolized him with the ignorant mass and gave him the votes of the millions he in his heart despised as an inferior race...In his book on Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail,...Roosevelt reveals his innate contempt for those who toil. After describing cowboys when “drunk on the villainous whiskey of the frontier towns,” he closes with this comparison, which needs no comment: “They are much better fellows and pleasanter companions than small farmers or agricultural laborers; nor are the mechanics and workmen of a great city to be mentioned in the same breath...Roosevelt is an aristocrat and an autocrat. His affected democracy is spurious and easily detected. He belongs to the “upper crust” and at the very best he can conceive of the working class only as contented wage-slaves...The simple fact is that Theodore Roosevelt was made president by the industrial captains and the robbers in general of the working class. They picked him for a winner and he has not failed them. Elected by the trusts and surrounded by trust attorneys as cabinet advisers, Roosevelt is essentially the monarch of a trust administration.’
Debs recalls the corruption of Roosevelt if Miliband wishes rather to overlook it. ‘ It was Roosevelt who denounced large campaign contributions, while his secretary of commerce and labor was fleecing the corporations out of one of the biggest slush funds ever known in the history of American politics...The manner in which President Roosevelt manipulates the supreme court by bestowing lucrative offices upon the sons and other relatives and friends of its dignitaries can only be hinted at...Such is Theodore Roosevelt, the president who condemns workingmen as murderers when they are objectionable to the trusts that control his administration.”
[Theodore Roosevelt] is above all "a practical man." He was practical in allowing the steel trust to raid the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; he was practical when he legalized the notorious "Alton Steal": he was practical when he had Harriman raise $240,000 for his campaign fund, and he is practical now in having the steel trust and the harvester trust, who made an anteroom of the White House when he was president, pour out their slush funds by millions to put him back in the White House and keep him there. Taft and Roosevelt, and the Republican party of which they are the candidates, are all financed by the trusts, and is it necessary to add that the trusts also consist of practical men and that they do not finance a candidate or a party they do not control?” Debs later added.
The journalist, John Reed, could write ‘In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt issued his Covenant with the American People, assuring them that he would never desert them, and affirming the unalterable principle of Social Justice for which he stood. Not the intelligent radicals—no matter how much they wanted Teddy, they knew he would betray them when it suited him—but the common, ordinary, unenlightened people, the backwoods idealists, as it were.—they trusted Teddy. Hadn’t he said he would never desert them? ...Little did they know that Theodore Roosevelt, in New York, was referring to them as “rabble,” and planning how he could shake himself free from enthusiasts, from idealists, from the dirty and stupid lower classes. Little did they know that he was saying impatiently about them “You can’t build a political party out of cranks. I have got to get rid of the ‘lunatic fringe.’ “ And by “lunatic fringe” he meant those people who believed in Social Justice and wanted to put it into effect.”
We can perhaps understand Miliband’s admiration of Roosevelt. After all, he was willing to break precedent and tradition where needed. He formed a new organization that strove to end the traditional ties of the old parties. His denunciation of the obsolete penetrated even his literary activities, where he appeared as a protagonist for simplified spelling. Theodore Roosevelt was the type of man in politics that Nazi sympathiser Henry Ford could idolise, a man who could get things done, who believed in work and not talk. Roosevelt marked an epoch in American politics more suited to the requirements concentrated industry . It called for the extension of the functions of the Federal government, regulation equally of capital and labor, the Strong Man policy of administrative centralization of the powers of the state, and the necessity of co-ordinating and unifying all the forces of the capitalist class through the national administrative control of industry, – in all essentials, a form of state capitalism. Virtues, no doubt in the eyes of a professional politician like Miliband. Yet the capitalists knew Roosevelt well and he served them well. They know that his instincts, associations, tastes and desires are with them, that he was in fact one of them and that he had nothing in common with the working class.
Theodore Roosevelt, is known as the the first “trust-buster” in the White House yet the monopolies were bigger and more entrenched when his term expired. Under his presidency, the trusts prospered as never before despite his demagogic fulminations in behalf of the anti-monopoly coalition. Today Big Business is stronger than ever. Roosevelt constituted the left wing of the capitalist regime. As member of the loyal opposition, he did not desire to abolish but to moderate the despotism of the plutocracy, to curtail its powers, and reduce the privileges of the magnates of industry and finance. The principal planks in their economic platforms expressed the interests and put forward the demands of the small businessmen. Teddy Roosevelt did not dream of going beyond restricting the power of King Capital, his moneyed aristocracy, and his trusted favourites. To dethrone this despot by expropriation and thereby end the rule of his nobles forever—that was regarded as the end of civilisation! Indeed, perhaps Roosevelt has much to offer Miliband, another loyal retainer at the court of Capital.
AJJ
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