John McCain and TR

I think that one of the most telling things a presidential candidate can do is indicate which previous presidents he most admires and on whom he would base his theory of governance. Whose portrait will hang in the Oval Office in 2009? It was then with particular interest that I read this article in which John McCain makes himself out to be a “Roosevelt Republican”:

"I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said, referring to Roosevelt's reputation for reform, environmentalism and tough foreign policy.

After the great expansion of executive power in the last eight years, this is perhaps one of the most troubling statements I have heard throughout this campaign. TR currently enjoys a great legacy in the US largely because of his big personality and adherence to the “strenuous life”. He is consistently ranked as one of America’s best presidents and even had his faced carved into a South Dakota mountain. Why then do I find John McCain’s statement so objectionable?

As Gene Healy writes in his newest book, The Cult of the Presidency (which is thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with everything he says), TR’s administration was characterized by a “loud-mouthed cult of manliness; a warped belief that war can be a wonderful pick-me-up for whatever ails the national spirit and a contemptuous attitude toward limits on presidential power.”

Roosevelt was a progressive. If a Democrat actually picked up a history book and learned about the early nineteenth century progressives, he might from this word almost as fast as he ran from the word “liberal”. Also from Healy’s book:

The Progressives were “the nearest to presidential absolutists of any theorists and practitioners of the presidency,” Raymond Tatalovich and Thomas S. Engeman write in their intellectual history of the office, The Presidency and Political Science. In Progressive ideology, the president was “the agent of modern revolution,” and his powers needed to be “greatly invigorated to complete the herculean tasks” that revolution required. “To create a rational, egalitarian society,” Tatelovich and Engeman explain, “the Progressive president marshals public opinion while forcefully leading the political and social agencies of scientific progress. For both tasks, he needs the great rhetorical power provided by the Progressives’ intellectual vision.”

There is certainly an argument to be made that the Progressives, including TR, did make a lot of, well, progress in areas like conservation and workers’ rights. Nonetheless, the unitary executive theory of the twenty-first century finds its roots in the Progressive presidencies of Roosevelt and Wilson, and to a lesser extent, Taft.

After the modern student of history gets past Roosevelt’s objectionable racial beliefs – he wrote in The Winning of the West, “it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races” and “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages” – one is met with TR’s disturbing devotion to the power of the Executive and his disdain and disregard for the Constitution.

It was during Roosevelt’s administration that the US “acquired” the Panama Canal zone (incidentally, where John McCain was born) and asserted itself as an imperial world power. To give credibility to this claim, Roosevelt ordered that the American navy, “The Great White Fleet”, circumnavigate the globe as a demonstration of this newly acquired power, and perhaps unintentionally, hubris.

It is also in TR’s administration that we find the real origins of the “Executive Order”. This is perhaps his greatest legacy in the area of presidential power. Essentially, it is Roosevelt who developed rule by presidential fiat. As a demonstration of his newfound power, TR wanted to direct the military to break a coal strike in Pennsylvania.

While John McCain may be hoping to tie a popular figure to his candidacy, it is important that Americans not forget history. I hope that someone in the mainstream press will challenge McCain on the issues that I have raised, but I find that unlikely. Anyone who has found Bush’s assertions of executive power in his terms disturbing must be very wary of John McCain. Now, which president does Obama like?