Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
the protection of wild life in Alaska, the District of Columbia, and
on National bird reserves. These measures may be briefly enumerated as
follows:
The enactment of the first game laws for the Territory of Alaska in
1902 and 1908, resulting in the regulation of the export of heads and
trophies of big game and putting an end to the slaughter of deer for
hides along the southern coast of the Territory.
The securing in 1902 of the first appropriation for the preservation of
buffalo and the establishment in the Yellowstone National Park of the
first and now the largest herd of buffalo belonging to the Government.
The passage of the Act of January 24, 1905, creating the Wichita Game
Preserves, the first of the National game preserves. In 1907, 12,000
acres of this preserve were inclosed with a woven wire fence for
the reception of the herd of fifteen buffalo donated by the New York
Zoological Society.
The passage of the Act of June 29, 1906, providing for the establishment
of the Grand Canyon Game Preserve of Arizona, now comprising 1,492,928
acres.
The passage of the National Monuments Act of June 8, 1906, under which
a number of objects of scientific interest have been preserved for all
time. Among the Monuments created are Muir Woods, Pinnacles National
Monument in California, and the Mount Olympus National Monument,
Washington, which form important refuges for game.
The passage of the Act of June 30, 1906, regulating shooting in the
District of Columbia and making three-fourths of the environs of the
National Capital within the District in effect a National Refuge.
The passage of the Act of May 23, 1908, providing for the establishment
of the National Bison Range in Montana. This range comprises about
18,000 acres of land formerly in the Flathead Indian Reservation, on
which is now established a herd of eighty buffalo, a nucleus of which
was donated to the Government by the American Bison Society.
The issue of the Order protecting birds on the Niobrara Military
Reservation, Nebraska, in 1908, making this entire reservation in effect
a bird reservation.
The establishment by Executive Order between March 14, 1903, and
March 4, 1909, of fifty-one National Bird Reservations distributed in
seventeen States and Territories from Porto Rico to Hawaii and Alaska.
The creation of these reservations at once placed the United States
in the front rank in the world work of bird protection. Among these
reservations are the celebrated Pelican Island rookery in Indian River,
Florida; the Mosquito Inlet Reservation, Florida, the northernmost home
of the manatee; the extensive marshes bordering Klamath and Malhuer
Lakes in Oregon, formerly the scene of slaughter of ducks for market
and ruthless destruction of plume birds for the millinery trade; the
Tortugas Key, Florida, where, in connection with the Carnegie Institute,
experiments have been made on the homing instinct of birds; and the
great bird colonies on Laysan and sister islets in Hawaii, some of the
greatest colonies of sea birds in the world.
CHAPTER XII
THE BIG STICK AND THE SQUARE DEAL
One of the vital questions with which as President I had to deal was the
attitude of the Nation toward the great corporations. Men who understand
and practice the deep underlying philosophy of the Lincoln school of
American political thought are necessarily Hamiltonian in their belief
in a strong and efficient National Government and Jeffersonian in their
belief in the people as the ultimate authority, and in the welfare
of the people as the end of Government. The men who first applied the
extreme Democratic theory in American life were, like Jefferson, ultra
individualists, for at that time what was demanded by our people was the
largest liberty for the individual. During the century that had elapsed
since Jefferson became President the need had been exactly reversed.
There had been in our country a riot of individualistic materialism,
under which complete freedom for the individual--that ancient license
which President Wilson a century after the term was excusable has called
the "New" Freedom--turned out in practice to mean perfect freedom for
the strong to wrong the weak. The total absence of governmental control
had led to a portentous growth in the financial and industrial world
both of natural individuals and of artificial individuals--that is,
corporations. In no other country in the world had such enormous
fortunes been gained. In no other country in the world was such power
held by the men who had gained these fortunes; and these men almost
always worked through, and by means of, the giant corporations which
they controlled. The power of the mighty industrial overlords of
the country had increased with giant strides, while the methods of
controlling them, or checking abuses by them, on the part of the people,
through the Government, remained archaic and therefore practically
impotent. The courts, not unnaturally, but most regrettably, and to
the grave detriment of the people and of their own standing, had for a
quarter of a century been on the whole the agents of reaction, and by
conflicting decisions which, however, in their sum were hostile to the
interests of the people, had left both the nation and the several
States well-nigh impotent to deal with the great business combinations.
Sometimes they forbade the Nation to interfere, because such
interference trespassed on the rights of the States; sometimes they
forbade the States to interfere (and often they were wise in this),
because to do so would trespass on the rights of the Nation; but always,
or well-nigh always, their action was negative action against the
interests of the people, ingeniously devised to limit their power
against wrong, instead of affirmative action giving to the people power
to right wrong. They had rendered these decisions sometimes as upholders
of property rights against human rights, being especially zealous in
securing the rights of the very men who were most competent to take care
of themselves; and sometimes in the name of liberty, in the name of
the so-called "new freedom," in reality the old, old "freedom,"
which secured to the powerful the freedom to prey on the poor and the
helpless.
One of the main troubles was the fact that the men who saw the evils and
who tried to remedy them attempted to work in two wholly different ways,
and the great majority of them in a way that offered little promise of
real betterment. They tried (by the Sherman law method) to bolster up
an individualism already proved to be both futile and mischievous; to
remedy by more individualism the concentration that was the inevitable
result of the already existing individualism. They saw the evil done
by the big combinations, and sought to remedy it by destroying them and
restoring the country to the economic conditions of the middle of the
nineteenth century. This was a hopeless effort, and those who went into
it, although they regarded themselves as radical progressives, really
represented a form of sincere rural toryism. They confounded monopolies
with big business combinations, and in the effort to prohibit both
alike, instead of where possible prohibiting one and drastically
controlling the other, they succeeded merely in preventing any effective
control of either.
On the other hand, a few men recognized that corporations and
combinations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was
folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them
without thoroughgoing control. These men realized that the doctrines
of the old laissez faire economists, of the believers in unlimited
competition, unlimited individualism, were in the actual state of
affairs false and mischievous. They realized that the Government must
now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation
to the public welfare, and to shackle cunning and fraud exactly as
centuries before it had interfered to shackle the physical force which
does wrong by violence.
The big reactionaries of the business world and their allies and
instruments among politicians and newspaper editors took advantage of
this division of opinion, and especially of the fact that most of their
opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to keep matters absolutely
unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an immunity from
governmental control which, if granted, would have been as wicked and as
foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century. Many of them
were evil men. Many others were just as good men as were some of
these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval
castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was. There
have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at
stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for
our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of
tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere
wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.
When I became President, the question as to the method by which the
United States Government was to control the corporations was not yet
important. The absolutely vital question was whether the Government had
power to control them at all. This question had not yet been decided in
favor of the United States Government. It was useless to discuss methods
of controlling big business by the National Government until it was
definitely settled that the National Government had the power to control
it. A decision of the Supreme Court had, with seeming definiteness,
settled that the National Government had not the power.
This decision I caused to be annulled by the court that had rendered
it; and the present power of the National Government to deal effectively
with the trusts is due solely to the success of the Administration in
securing this reversal of its former decision by the Supreme Court.
The Constitution was formed very largely because it had become
imperative to give to some central authority the power to regulate and
control interstate commerce. At that time when corporations were in
their infancy and big combinations unknown, there was no difficulty
in exercising the power granted. In theory, the right of the Nation
to exercise this power continued unquestioned. But changing conditions
obscured the matter in the sight of the people as a whole; and
the conscious and the unconscious advocates of an unlimited and
uncontrollable capitalism gradually secured the whittling away of the
National power to exercise this theoretical right of control until it
practically vanished. After the Civil War, with the portentous growth
of industrial combinations in this country, came a period of reactionary
decisions by the courts which, as regards corporations, culminated in
what is known as the Knight case.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was enacted in 1890 because the formation of
the Tobacco Trust and the Sugar Trust, the only two great trusts then
in the country (aside from the Standard Oil Trust, which was a gradual
growth), had awakened a popular demand for legislation to destroy
monopoly and curb industrial combinations. This demand the Anti-Trust
Law was intended to satisfy. The Administrations of Mr. Harrison and Mr.
Cleveland evidently construed this law as prohibiting such combinations
in the future, not as condemning those which had been formed prior
to its enactment. In 1895, however, the Sugar Trust, whose output
originally was about fifty-five per cent of all sugar produced in the
United States, obtained control of three other companies in Philadelphia
by exchanging its stock for theirs, and thus increased its business
until it controlled ninety-eight per cent of the entire product. Under