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Teddy Roosevelt was a great president. No, listen to me: Teddy Roosevelt was a great president.
We've been extremely fortunate as a nation. It seems at the most critical times the very leaders we needed, the ones with the right temperament for the moment, the courage and strength of character, the humility that made their confidence real, came forward.
Who are my top three?
George Washington is most expert's favorite, and he is mine. The bravery and sense of service to leave his farm after having won the revolution, to become our first president. But almost more importantly, the humility and big picture vision to know it wasn't about him, to step aside after two terms when many would make him king.
Less humility, and less devotion to what this country is about, and we could be a very different nation today.
Abraham Lincoln is in everyone's top two with Washington, sometimes in reverse order than I have them here. Whichever you choose you can't go wrong.
He was given a hand-me-down problem from the founders. Slavery. It was time to pay the piper.
Lincoln's deep passion to free the slaves was tempered by an astute pragmatism. He had to tune out the extremists on both sides and proceed at a pace at which most of the population could keep up. His sensitivity to the moment is mind-boggling.
Had he charged ahead or lagged behind, America might have been eternally broken. I shudder to think.
And then there's Teddy.
At the turn of the twentieth century mega-monopolies like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil roamed the countryside. From state to state they pounced, gobbling up small companies across America and making them their own. Through graft and intimidation they dominated the landscape unabated.
The railroads were bought and sold so that only the mega-monopolies had access to the most efficient transportation of the day. And many of the politicians and judges were bought and sold too, so the mega-monopolies would be free to do as they pleased.
Not to be outdone, the meatpackers and other American food producers were putting out filthy, disgusting, germ riddled food and few blinked an eye. With no real checks, pharmaceutical companies rubber stamped proven and unproven cures and dangerous drugs infiltrated the market.
Working and living conditions of most working Americans, especially in the larger cities, were dangerous and deplorable.
Indeed, employees were churned up like sausage. There was little regard for their safety, their quality of life or their upward mobility. Lose one, hire another desperate fool was the order of the day. They were lambs to the slaughter.
Profits, profits, profits were all that mattered to these monsters of monopoly. Feed the beasts profits, that's all.
The climb from poor to rich, from have not to have, was growing ever more sheer.
The working people of America were restless. They had no voice, but through the relatively weak unions of the day. Unions that were frequently scattered by government soldiers and too often undone by their own leaders' graft and betrayal. Too, their reputations were tarnished by the violence they repeatedly resorted to.
In the end, the American working man found a voice through certain periodicals of the day and the dawn of investigative journalism. This is especially true of the briefly powerful, McClure's Magazine.
Detailed in the brilliant book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, the facts dragged out by credible writers, slung in front of the eyes of those in power, fell like manna in the desert to the common man.
They brought the abused sustenance and brought substance to their complaints.
Facts as they became known jacked American people's emotions to a feverish pitch, and America itself to the tipping point.
If power didn't find a way to balance itself, if the abuses wouldn't abate, if the capitalists at the top would have had their way, then anarchy might have poured out on the land like agitating lava from a vomiting volcanic cesspool.
And the America we know today, once again, might look very different.
Socialism was an extreme reaction to capitalism's extremes and was creeping over Europe like a gray fog. It was stirring here in America too, prepared to fill the void of its failed economic system. Socialists hoped for anarchy. They waited for the last shoe to drop.
But it never did. Because on came Teddy, walking softly but carrying his big stick.
Roosevelt was not a liberal. Nor was he a pure competition conservative.
He was a republican but also a pragmatic progressive. He wanted a "fair shake" for the little guy. He got it by tapping into the power of public opinion and making the government bend to its will.
He had the temperament to forge ahead, but, like Lincoln, at a pace in which people could follow. He derided the extremists on both sides, too. (Lincoln, by the way, was his hero.)
Teddy Roosevelt is called "The Trustbuster." Yeah, you got that right. He knew that there must be a balance between competition and regulation. Government had a responsibility to keep its people safe and to make sure everyone played fair.
And he faced down the roaming monsters of the day. And he beat them.
And we are the better for it.
Yep, pencil in Teddy Roosevelt for spot number three.
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