These Times

One man’s views on the American way

Kirk Ericson | Feb 27, 20250

“It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.” — Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president, Republican, millionaire

A 1988 cartoon in the New Yorker magazine shows two old, wealthy men in suits sitting in a gentleman’s club. One says to the other: “The poor are getting poorer, but with the rich getting richer it all averages out in the long run.”

We’re turning this week’s column over to the views of a long-dead human whose words have a lot to say about the United States in 2025. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you President Theodore Roosevelt.

In the summer of 1907, Roosevelt, well into his second term, delivered a speech in Provincetown, Rhode Island. His line, “Malefactors of great wealth have arrogantly ignored the public welfare,” proved prescient. As you read the following quotes, you might have to remind yourself the United States once had a president who was willing to — and capable of — uttering these words:

“Many men of large wealth have been guilty of conduct which from the moral standpoint is criminal, and their misdeeds are particularly reprehensible because those committing them have no excuse of want, of poverty, of weakness and ignorance to offer as partial atonement. … I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country — the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men who wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.” — “The Puritan Spirit and the Regulation of Corporations,” speech delivered in Rhode Island, Aug 20, 1907.

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“This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.” — from a speech delivered in Memphis, Tenn., in 1905

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“The men of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interest of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in my judgment, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth.” — from the speech “A Man with a Muck Rake,” April 15, 1906

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“I am simply unable to understand the value placed by so many people upon great wealth.” — letter, April 11, 1908

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“The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack.” — Outlook, April 10, 1909

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“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts … Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” — From an editorial Roosevelt wrote for the Kansas City Star in 1918

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“Working women have the same need to protection that working men have; the ballot is as necessary for one class as to the other; we do not believe that with the two sexes there is identity of function; but we do believe there should be equality of right.” — from a speech delivered in Chicago in August 1912

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“Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.” — “History as Literature, and other Essays,” January 1913

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“The man of great wealth owes a peculiar obligation to the state because he derives special advantages from the mere existence of government.” — message to Congress, December 1906