Address of president roosevelt

About Address of president roosevelt

I am glad indeed to see you and to speak to you in this thriving city of your great and prosperous State. I believe with all my heart in the people of Iowa, for I think that you are good, typical Americans, and that among you there has been developed to a very high degree that body of characteristics which we like to regard as distinctively American.

During the last few years we of the United States have been forced to consider very seriously certain economic problems. We have made a beginning in the attempt to deal with the relations of the National Government—that is, with the relations of the people of the country—to the huge and wealthy corporations, controlled for the most part by a few very rich men, which are engaged in interstate business—especially the great railway corporations. You know my views on this matter. You know that I believe that the National Government, in the interests of the people, should assume much the same supervision and control over the management of the interstate common carriers that it now exercises over the national banks. You know furthermore that I believe that this supervision and control should be exercised in a spirit of rigid fairness toward the corporations, exacting justice from them on behalf of the people but giving them justice in return.

Recently I have been reading the work of the eminent Italian scholar Ferrero on the history of the Roman Republic, when the life of the Roman state had become that of a complex and luxurious industrial civilization. I am happy to say that the differences between that civilization and our own are more striking than the resemblances; and there is no warrant for our being drawn into any pessimistic comparison between the two civilizations. But there is every reason why we should study carefully the past in order to draw from it lessons for use in the present. One of the most striking features of the years which saw the downfall of the Roman Republic was the fact that the political life of Rome became split between two camps, one containing the rich who wished to exploit the poor, and the other the poor who wished to plunder the rich. Naturally, under such circumstances, the public man who was for the moment successful tended to be either a violent reactionary or a violent demagogue. Any such condition of political life is as hopelessly unhealthy now as it was then. I believe so implicitly in the future of our people, because I believe that the average American citizen will no more tolerate government by a mob than he will tolerate government by a plutocracy; that he desires to see justice done to and justice exacted from rich man and poor man alike. We are not trying to favor any man at the expense of his fellows. We are trying to shape things so that as far as possible each man shall have a fair chance in life; so that he shall have, so far as by law this can be accomplished, the chance to show the stuff that there is in him. We have no intention of trying to work for the impossible and undesirable end of giving to the lazy, the thriftless, the weak, and the vicious, the reward that belongs to, and in the long run can only come to, the hard working, the thrifty, the resolute, and the honest. But we do wish to see that the necessary struggle in life shall be carried on under genuinely democratic conditions; that, so far as human action can safely provide it, there shall be an approximately fair start; that there shall be no oppression of the weak, and that no man shall be permitted to acquire or to use a vast fortune by methods or in ways that are tortuous and dishonest.