Let's not forget that authoritarian leaning Woodrow Wilson

One hundred years of solicitude: From Teddy to Barack

FRANK MIELE

In the past year, I have sought answers to the question of American decline — how exactly did we come to the point of audacious despair that led us to jettison our cherished traditions and values and embrace mediocrity as the new excellence.

This exploration has taken me from the know-it-all superiority of John Dewey’s progressive education to the dangerous radicalism of terrorist Bill Ayers — from the “New Deal” of FDR to the “Great Society” of LBJ — and finally from the incipient socialism of Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 to the insidious socialism of Barack Obama in 2012.

And don’t blame me for making the connection to our current president — that was done not by me, but by President Obama himself, when he visited Osawatomie, Kansas, last December to draw comparisons between himself and Teddy Roosevelt — and between the complaints of “economic inequality” one hundred years ago and those heard today in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It turns out that those comparisons between then and now provide the Rosetta stone that lets us once and for all decipher the American decline as the work of do-gooders who allowed their own worst fears to shape our ever-worsening national nightmare.

To adapt a phrase from the great South American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, we can proclaim with sadness that the last century in America has been “one hundred years of solicitude.”

As defined by Merrian-Webster, solicitude is “an uneasy state of mind, usually over the possibility of an anticipated misfortune or trouble.” The second definition refers to it as “attention accompanied by protectiveness and responsibility.”

Could any word better describe the American ethos that has evolved over the past 100 years? Is not the nanny state the exact manifestation of “protection and responsibility” that is foisted upon a formerly sovereign citizenry as a result of “an uneasy state of mind... over the possibility of ... anticipated misfortune or trouble”?

There’s never really been any doubt that President Obama and his fellow progressives think they have a responsibility to protect us all from our own foolishness and misfortune — but Teddy Roosevelt helps put into perspective exactly where that Big Brother-ish concern came from and why, little by little, Americans have almost completely surrendered their independence in exchange for government handouts and the illusion of a “safety net.”

In large measure, it was Teddy Roosevelt who set the stage for the increasing size of government in the 20th century, and the increasing role it played in the everyday lives of Americans. And the speech he gave at Osawatomie in 1910 is considered the cornerstone of that philosophy.

Professor George E. Mowry, author of the 1946 classic “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement,” said that the Osawatomie speech was “the most radical speech ever given by an ex-president ... His concept of the extent to which a powerful federal government could regulate and use private property in the interest of the whole and his declarations about labor, when viewed [with]... the eyes of 1910, were nothing short of revolutionary.”

Indeed, Roosevelt’s ideas were not just considered revolutionary by mainstream Democrats and Republicans of the day, but even by the Socialist party itself, which was in full swing then.

In an article published in the Van Wert (Ohio) Daily Bulletin on Oct. 30, 1912, author James Boyle, who had been private secretary to President McKinley, marveled at the transformation of Roosevelt, who had served as vice president under McKinley and had now “lost his bearings” and become at the very least an “unconscious Socialist.”

“It is interesting and somewhat instructive,” Boyle notes, “to know what the Socialists now think of Theodore Roosevelt. The ‘Appeal to Reason.’ the most extreme and the most widely circulated of the Socialist papers — of which [Eugene] Debs, the Socialist candidate for president, is one of the editors — in speaking of the Chicago Bull Moose platform, declares that ‘many of Roosevelt’s theories are so radical that they make the Socialists gasp with amazement.’”

If the socialists were amazed by Roosevelt’s transformation, the gilded aristocrats of the New York Times were absolutely astonished. In 1913, the year after Roosevelt came in a respectable second place as a third party candidate for president (a feat never matched), the Times devoted well over 30 column inches to an editorial entitled “Roosevelt’s Super-Socialism.”

It was a response to Roosevelt’s article on “The Progressive Party” that had been published in The Century Magazine and which, as the Times saw it, laid out Roosevelt’s form of socialism for all to see.

“Mr. Roosevelt achieves the redistribution of wealth in a simpler and easier way [than Karl Marx]. He leaves the land, the mines, the factories, the railroads, the banks — all the instruments of productlon and exchange in the hands of their individual owners, but of the profits of their operation he takes whatever share the people at any given time may choose to appropriate to common use... Marx left Socialism in its infancy, a doctrine that stumbled and sprawled under the weight of Its own inconsistencies. Mr. Roosevelt’s doctrine is of no such complexity. It has all the simplicity of theft and much of its impudence.”

This theft is, in essence, the basis of the modern socialistic state that we have become — the theft of taxation on those who have built up society in order to fund programs to benefit those who have contributed little or nothing to society. It’s no wonder that President Obama has adopted Teddy Roosevelt as his economic guru.

Of course, neither Obama nor Roosevelt publicly accept the title of socialist — except when they do. For Mr. Obama it was when he told Joe the Plumber that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” For Mr. Roosevelt it was when he said, “The goal is not socialism, but so much of socialism as will best permit the building thereon of a sanely altruistic individualism, an individualism where self-respect is combined with a lively sense of consideration for and duty toward others, and where full recognition of the increased need of collective action goes hand in hand with a developed instead of an atrophied power of individual action.”

In other words, Roosevelt just wanted enough socialism to turn you and me into people who do what he wants us to do. It’s either socialism or it’s fascism, but one thing it is not is Americanism. Maybe we should call it by the politically neutral term of “social engineering,” as really that is what “progressivism” is — a movement to herd mankind forward by using government to guide and protect us because of the solicitude of our overseers who are worried just what might happen if we are left to our own devices.

Like it or not, this is where we have gotten after 100 years later — with just the kind of government that Teddy Roosevelt promised us when he spelled out the goals of the Progressive Party: “It will be necessary to invoke the use of governmental power to a degree hitherto unknown in this country, and in the interest of democracy, to apply principles which the purely individualistic democracy of a century ago would not have recognized as democratic.”

Marx called it the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” I just call it dictatorship.