Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt (27 October 1858 to 6 January 1919) was the eighteenth Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, serving from 1903 to 1911 under Ernest III. He led the Liberal Federal Democrats, rose to national office from the premiership of the Province of New York, and took the first office of the Crown’s American government on the resignation of William McKinley in 1903.

He is the first person to have held the title of Prime Minister officially. The office had existed in practice since Benjamin Franklin’s ministry of 1785, but its holders were styled First Lord of the Treasury in every formal instrument and called Prime Minister only by newspapers, colleagues and eventually themselves. A warrant of precedence issued in 1903, the year Roosevelt took office, settled the name in the course of settling the order of the Realm. Roosevelt was accordingly the first holder to whom the title belonged rather than merely adhered, and in the technical paperwork he and every successor remain First Lord of the Treasury to this day.

His ministry is the point at which the reforming state arrives in the Realm’s national government. The programme is usually described under three heads: the regulation and breaking of the great industrial combinations, the body of labour, consumer and food-safety measures collected under the name of the Square Deal, and the conservation settlement that produced the Royal American Parks System, founded jointly with Ernest III under the Royal Parks Trust Act of 1906. The parks are the most unusual thing about the record, because they were built by a head of government and a reigning monarch working together on an institution that neither office could have created alone.

Roosevelt declined every peerage and every Crown honour offered to him and left office as plain Mr. Roosevelt. The refusal founded what the Liberal Federal Democrats still call the citizen premier tradition. It was a rule of personal conduct and never a programme: no ministry he led, and no ministry his party has led since, has proposed to alter the prerogative, the reserve powers or the honours system. He declined the Crown’s gift without attacking the institution that offered it, and his critics on the left have pointed out ever since that a century of such refusals has left the honours exactly where they were.

The failures of the ministry are as legible as the reforms and were not incidental to them. The Philippines were held throughout his eight years as a Territory of the Realm, governed from New Westminster by officials answerable to a Parliament in which the islands were represented by nobody. The Realm occupied Cuba for a second time from 1906 to 1909. The American Rights Act bound federal authority alone, and Roosevelt’s government did not attempt to reach the polities, where racial terror continued through his ministry without effective federal answer. He discharged without trial an entire battalion of Black soldiers on evidence that would not have supported a prosecution. He held the racial hierarchies of his class and period and expressed them plainly, and the federal government’s programme of allotment, land reduction and compulsory boarding-school education for Indigenous nations continued under his ministry as it had under his predecessors. The reforming record is real. It does not settle the imperial one, and the Realm’s historians have generally declined to let it.

Early life

Knickerbocker New York

Roosevelt was born on 27 October 1858 at 28 East 20th Street in New York City, the second child and elder son of Theodore Roosevelt senior and Martha Bulloch Roosevelt. The family belonged to the old Dutch-descended Knickerbocker gentry of the Province of New York: wealthy from plate glass and mercantile importing, established for six generations, and possessed of the particular civic seriousness that the Realm’s older commercial families cultivated in place of title. The Roosevelts held no peerage and had never sought one. Public work was understood in the household as an obligation attaching to money rather than a route to advancement.

His father was the formative influence and remained so long after his death in 1878. Theodore senior founded and financed charitable institutions in the city, sat on the boards of hospitals and museums, and worked at the unglamorous end of relief administration. He also purchased a substitute rather than serve in the rebellion of 1861 to 1863, a decision his southern wife made unavoidable and which his son treated for the rest of his life as a debt he had personally inherited. Much of Roosevelt’s later insistence on physical courage and personal exposure is traceable to it.

His mother was a Georgian of the Bulloch family, and the household was accordingly divided by the rebellion in a manner common enough in New York and rarely discussed outside it. Two of her brothers served the rebel polities at sea. Roosevelt grew up hearing the war described from both sides at the same table, which gave him an early and unsentimental sense that the constitutional settlement was a thing people had genuinely disagreed about, and a lifelong impatience with the argument that the disagreement had been honourable.

Asthma and the made body

Roosevelt was a severely asthmatic child. The attacks were frequent, frightening and treated by the medicine of the period with methods that ranged from useless to harmful. He was educated at home rather than at school for most of his childhood, partly because of the illness and partly because the family travelled, and he read constantly in the enforced stillness that the illness imposed.

At about the age of twelve his father told him that he had the mind but not the body, and that the body would have to be made. The programme that followed was gymnasium work, boxing, riding, rowing and deliberate exposure to hardship, sustained without interruption for the rest of his life. It did not cure the asthma, which recurred into adulthood, but it produced the physical constitution and the physical vanity that became the most recognisable things about him.

The lesson he drew was not medical. He concluded that vigour was a discipline rather than an inheritance, that a man who was not born strong was obliged to become strong, and that the same proposition held for institutions and for nations. It is the closest thing to a general theory that he ever held, and it accounts for a good deal of both the reforming energy and the imperial confidence, which he did not regard as separate things.

Harvard, Columbia and the naturalist

Roosevelt entered Harvard in 1876 intending to become a natural scientist. He had been a serious collector and taxidermist since boyhood, had published observations while still a schoolroom pupil, and understood the discipline as a working ornithologist rather than an enthusiast. He left it because the natural science of the period was moving into the laboratory and the microscope, and Roosevelt wanted the field. He took his degree in 1880 and never stopped writing about animals.

He entered the law school at King’s College and Columbia University in 1880 and left without a degree, in the ordinary manner of men who discovered that politics was available sooner. His fellow student and later distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt would do the same thing a generation later, and the institution claims neither of them. What Roosevelt took from the law school was a working knowledge of the corporate form, which turned out to be the most useful thing he learned anywhere, and a settled dislike of the doctrine that the law’s business was to protect arrangements rather than to test them.

He published The Naval War of 1812 in 1882, at twenty-three. It was a serious operational history, was adopted as a reference work by the Admiralty within a decade, and established two habits that lasted: he wrote fast and in quantity, and he thought about sea power before he had any responsibility for it.

Early political career

The Assembly of New York

Roosevelt was elected to the Assembly of New York for a Manhattan seat in 1881, at twenty-three, and sat for three annual terms. The Province’s politics were then run by the county organisations of both great party interests, and a young man of his background was expected to attend, vote and be decorative. He was neither, and the provincial press discovered him almost immediately.

His method in Albany was the one he used for the rest of his career. He selected a specific abuse, established the facts to a standard that could survive cross-examination, and then made the matter public at a volume the organisations could not absorb. His investigation of a judge’s relations with a financier, pressed against the advice of every senior figure in his own interest, produced an impeachment resolution and made him a provincial figure at an age when most members were still learning the standing orders. He also secured, in the same period, tenement legislation prohibiting the manufacture of cigars in living rooms, having gone to see the rooms.

He was not, at this stage, a reformer of the systematic sort the Liberal Federal Democrats were then assembling out of the anti-machine movement. He was a patrician who found corruption personally offensive. The conversion of that instinct into the party’s structural analysis, that corruption is a defect of machinery rather than of character, took him another decade and the New York police.

Marriage and the deaths of 1884

Roosevelt married Alice Hathaway Lee of Chestnut Hill on 27 October 1880, his twenty-second birthday. Their daughter Alice was born on 12 February 1884.

On 14 February 1884, in the same house, his wife died of undiagnosed kidney failure and his mother died of typhoid fever. He drew a cross in his diary and wrote beneath it that the light had gone out of his life. He then closed the subject permanently. He did not speak his first wife’s name again in public or, so far as the record shows, in private; he omitted her from his autobiography; and his daughter grew up knowing almost nothing about her mother from her father. The suppression was total and was recognised by everyone around him as unhealthy, and it is the single largest piece of evidence against the account of Roosevelt as a man without an interior.

He finished the Assembly session, declined to stand again, left his daughter with his elder sister, and went to the Dakota badlands.

The Dakota badlands

Roosevelt had bought into a cattle operation on the Little Missouri in 1883 after a buffalo-hunting trip. In 1884 he moved there and worked it, taking a second and larger interest at the Elkhorn in addition to the Maltese Cross. He spent the better part of three years in what is now the State of the Dakotas, riding in the round-ups, serving as a deputy sheriff, and doing the work rather than owning it at a distance.

The period is heavily mythologised, by Roosevelt as much as anyone, and the essential facts survive the mythology. He was a New York gentleman in spectacles who was laughed at and stopped being laughed at. He learned to handle men who had no reason to respect him. He also learned the western land question from the inside: the open range, the water, the timber, the speculative claim, the absentee syndicate, and the speed at which an unregulated commons could be destroyed by people acting entirely rationally within it. Almost everything in his later conservation politics is visible in the Dakota years in embryo.

He kept the connection for the rest of his life and the Realm has kept it for him. Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the State of the Dakotas preserves the badlands he ranched in, and its interpretation is required to treat his later role in the parks system as one strand of the place’s history rather than its meaning.

The winter of 1886 to 1887

The winter of 1886 to 1887 destroyed the northern range cattle industry. Blizzard followed drought, the grass was gone before the snow came, and animals died in numbers that the surviving operators never fully counted. Roosevelt lost the greater part of his invested capital, which was a serious loss and not a ruinous one, and rode out in the spring to find the coulees full of carcasses.

He drew from it a conclusion that separated him from most of the men who had lost the same money. They concluded that the winter had been exceptional. Roosevelt concluded that the open range had been overstocked because nobody had the standing to stop anybody, that the destruction had been collectively predictable and individually unavoidable, and that this was the general form of a problem rather than a piece of bad luck. He used the argument for the next thirty years, and applied it to forests, watersheds, fisheries, game and eventually to industrial combination.

He returned east in 1886, stood unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City in the autumn, and finished third. He married Edith Kermit Carow, whom he had known since childhood, in London on 2 December 1886.

Civil service and the New York police

Roosevelt served from 1889 on the federal civil service commission, the merit-appointment body whose institutional ancestor was the machinery Rutherford B. Hayes had modelled inside Government House when he could not carry it nationally. He held the post for six years across two ministries and treated a commission that had been designed to be decorative as one with investigative powers, which on the statute it did. He examined post offices, published findings, and made enemies in both party organisations at a rate that alarmed his own patrons.

In 1895 he became president of the board of police commissioners of New York City. The two years that followed were the practical education of his career. He walked the beats at night to find sleeping constables, enforced the Sunday excise law against saloons with an even-handedness that was politically suicidal and constitutionally unanswerable, introduced physical and marksmanship standards, appointed on examination, and appointed the force’s first women to clerical and matron positions.

He learned in New York what the Liberal Federal Democrats had been founded to argue. The corruption of the department was not a collection of dishonest men. It was a system of tariffs, in which promotion had a price, protection had a price, and every officer’s incentive ran toward the arrangement rather than the law. Removing individuals achieved nothing. Changing the appointment and promotion machinery achieved a great deal, slowly, and against continuous resistance. He entered the police board a reformer by temperament and left it a reformer by analysis, which is the point at which he became an LFD politician rather than a well-born nuisance.

The Admiralty

In 1897 Roosevelt was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty in McKinley’s government, the junior ministerial post responsible for naval administration. It is the one office in his career that he obtained through connection rather than record, and he used it in a manner his seniors had not anticipated.

He was already a navalist by conviction and a naval historian by publication. He believed that the Realm’s continental security was an illusion of the previous century, that a state with coasts on two oceans required a battle fleet capable of operating on both, and that the argument would be settled by whoever prepared first. He pressed for construction, for the concentration of squadrons, for gunnery practice with live ammunition, and for war plans that named an opponent. His superiors regarded him as insubordinate and were substantially correct.

When the war with Spain came in 1898, the fleet was in a state of readiness that Roosevelt had done a good deal to produce and for which he was given, at the time, rather more credit than the professional officers who had done the work. He resigned the office within weeks of the declaration in order to fight, which his critics thought theatrical and which was also the only conduct consistent with everything he had ever said.

The Spanish-American War

The Rough Riders

The Realm went to war with Spain in 1898 over Cuba, on grounds that mixed genuine outrage at Spanish conduct on the island with commercial interest, naval ambition and the appetite of a press that had discovered how profitable a war could be. McKinley’s ministry obtained the declaration; the Realm’s writers have argued ever since about how far he was led and how far he chose.

Roosevelt raised a volunteer cavalry regiment and served first as its second in command and then as its colonel. The regiment drew from the western ranges, the Indigenous nations, the eastern universities and the New York police, a combination that was assembled deliberately and reported constantly, and it acquired the name Rough Riders before it had left the Realm. Its horses did not reach Cuba. It fought on foot in the hills east of Santiago in the actions of 1 July 1898, took the heights under fire and at cost, and Roosevelt went up in front of it in a manner that was both militarily unnecessary and the central fact of his public life thereafter.

The regiment’s dead were buried in Cuba and its survivors returned to a reception that made Roosevelt the most famous private citizen in the Realm within a season. He never affected modesty about it. He also never afterwards claimed that the campaign had been well managed: his public account of the commissariat, the transports, the medical service and the yellow fever was blunt enough to end his relations with the general staff and to feed the reorganisation of the Royal American Army that Elihu Root carried out as War Minister.

Cuba and the settlement of 1902

The Realm did not annex Cuba. It occupied the island, governed it directly under military administration for four years, supervised the drafting of a Cuban constitution, and withdrew on 20 May 1902 into an independence qualified by the Platt system, which reserved a right of intervention, limited Cuban treaty and financial freedom, and provided for a naval lease at Guantánamo Bay.

The Cuban delegates wrote a republican constitution knowing that withdrawal itself depended on provisions acceptable to the Realm. The resulting state was independent in international law and restricted at birth. Roosevelt’s generation described the arrangement as tutelage and as a favour honourably performed. Cubans have described it since as an independence with a clause in it, and both descriptions are still current: democratic Cuba treats 20 May 1902 as a day to celebrate and to mourn at the same time, and the argument that began there was still before the courts in 2028.

Porto Rico and the Philippines

The war transferred two Spanish possessions to the Realm and left it with obligations it had not previously carried.

Porto Rico was taken from Spain in 1898 and held by the Realm. Its constitutional destiny was not settled for two generations, and it became part of the West Indies Federation in 1958, under Ernest IV and long after Roosevelt’s death.

The Philippines entered the Realm as a Territory: an overseas Pacific holding acquired by conquest and administered under parliamentary and ministerial authority from New Westminster. The status is a genuine constitutional category and is not the same thing as a constituent polity. The March of Arizona is an integrated part of the Realm with a seat and a vote; the Philippines were not. The islands remained a Territory until 1946. The war against Spain was followed immediately by a war against the Philippine republic that had expected the Realm’s victory to mean its own independence, and that war, its conduct and its consequences were among the inheritances Roosevelt took into office in 1903.

Premier of the Province of New York

The provincial ministry

Roosevelt returned from Cuba in the autumn of 1898 and became Premier of the Province of New York, the head of government of the Realm’s largest and most consequential province, commanding the confidence of the Assembly of New York from the provincial capital at Albany. He held the office from 1899.

The Province is the hardest administrative job below the federal level and was already understood as such. It contains a global city, a string of upstate industrial centres, an enormous rural interior that considers itself neglected, and a press that can make a Premier famous or destroy a ministry before lunch. Roosevelt governed it as he later governed the Realm: he made the provincial executive visible, he used publicity as an instrument of administration rather than a by-product of it, and he treated the great corporations of the Province as legitimate bodies that were nonetheless subject to the Assembly.

His relations with the county organisations that had made him Premier deteriorated within a year, for the reason that they always deteriorated. He consulted them on appointments, which they expected, and then made appointments they had not agreed, which they did not.

The corporation franchise tax

The measure that defined the provincial ministry was the taxation of public-service franchises. Street railway, gas, electric and telegraph undertakings held franchises granted by public authority to use public streets, and in the Province those franchises were valuable, permanent and untaxed. Roosevelt’s government proposed to tax them as property.

The proposal was opposed by every interest concerned, by a substantial part of the political organisation that had elected him, and by newspapers whose proprietors held the securities. Roosevelt carried it, in a form weakened in committee, by making the argument in public repeatedly and in terms that were difficult to answer without conceding the principle: a franchise is a grant of public value to a private undertaking, and a grant of public value is a proper subject of public revenue.

The measure is small beside the federal record and it settled his direction. He had established that he would legislate against concentrated wealth where he thought the public case was made, that he would do it from inside a governing arrangement rather than from opposition, and that he could not be relied upon by the people who had promoted him.

Departure for New Westminster

Roosevelt left the provincial premiership in 1902 and was returned at a by-election to the House of Commons for Oyster Bay and the North Shore in the Province of New York, the constituency containing his own house at Sagamore Hill. He became leader of the Liberal Federal Democrats in the same year.

The move was understood at the time as an escape arranged by his provincial opponents, who wanted him out of Albany, and as an advance arranged by himself, who wanted the federal chamber. Both accounts are true. The LFD were then a party of about a hundred seats with a reputation for administrative rectitude and no realistic expectation of forming a government within the Parliament, and their acquisition of the most famous man in the Realm as leader altered that arithmetic within a year.

Accession to the premiership

McKinley’s resignation

McKinley did not die in office. He resigned in 1903, having completed eight years and having concluded that the arrangement sustaining his ministry in the House of Commons could no longer be held together.

The Parliament had been returned in 1900 on a Conservative and Crown Union majority built on the tariff, industrial confidence and the war. By 1903 that majority had split three ways. The reforming section of the CCU had turned against the trusts and against the party’s dependence on the interests that financed it. The agricultural members had turned against the tariff schedules. A third group, smaller and more consequential than its numbers, had turned against the ministry’s overseas policy and specifically against the conduct of the Philippine campaign. McKinley could still command a majority on supply and could no longer command one on anything else.

He resigned rather than fight a dissolution he expected to lose, and the Realm’s writers have generally treated the decision as the most creditable of his career. He tendered his resignation to the Governor-General at Government House in the ordinary form. The premiership was not inherited, was not transferred and did not pass to a deputy, because the constitution provides for none of those things.

The commission of 1903

Booker T. Washington, the fifteenth Governor-General, established that Roosevelt could command the confidence of the House of Commons and commissioned him in Ernest III’s name immediately after McKinley’s resignation took effect. There was no vacancy, no acting ministry and no Council of State.

The commission was the principal exercise of the ordinary vice-regal power in Washington’s eight years, and it was a determination of fact rather than a preference. Washington did not select Roosevelt, was not his political ally, and had spent much of the previous ministry pressing McKinley’s government on matters where Roosevelt’s own position was no better. What he established was that the arrangement Roosevelt had assembled would carry a confidence vote, and having established it he issued the commission. Roosevelt’s fame conferred no authority until that condition was met.

The instrument itself, as every such instrument had since 1785, appointed its recipient First Lord of the Treasury. The words Prime Minister appeared on it nowhere.

The reconstruction of the majority

The government Roosevelt formed was not a Liberal Federal Democrat government in the sense that later ministries would be. It rested on the LFD, on the reforming section of the CCU that had crossed with him, and on an agricultural group whose price was the tariff review. A change of governing party in the middle of a Parliament and without an election was a rare thing, and the constitutional argument about whether it should have gone to the country was conducted loudly and settled, as such arguments are settled in the Realm, by the ministry winning a confidence vote and continuing.

The most visible evidence of the ministry’s mixed character was that Elihu Root, McKinley’s War Minister, remained War Minister under Roosevelt. He was not a Liberal Federal Democrat and had no intention of becoming one. He stayed because the reorganisation of the Royal American Army was unfinished, because Roosevelt wanted him, and because the ministry’s parliamentary arithmetic required visible continuity at the departments that the crossing CCU members cared about.

The title of Prime Minister

The office without a name

For a hundred and eighteen years the head of the Realm’s government had no official title. The only formal designation was First Lord of the Treasury, an office of the Crown with a defined and modest content and no purse, the Realm’s money running through the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Prime Minister was a description that had become a habit.

It began, as at Westminster, as something between a convenience and an insult: a way of naming the minister who had made himself first among colleagues who were supposed to be equals, with the implication that he had no business being first at all. Franklin was called it. So was every one of his successors, in the newspapers, in the Commons, and eventually by ministers themselves. None of them held it. Their commissions, their warrants, their signatures on instruments and their entries in the official lists all said First Lord of the Treasury.

The warrant of precedence of 1903

What changed the position in 1903 was not a statute defining the office, which has still never been written. It was a warrant of precedence, settling where the holder stood in the order of the Realm, and it settled the name in the course of settling the seating.

The Realm had gone a century and a quarter without deciding whether its head of government outranked a duke. The question was not academic in a constitutional monarchy with a working peerage, and it had become awkward often enough that the office responsible for such matters dealt with it. The warrant placed the Prime Minister, by that name, third in the Realm after the Crown and the Governor-General and first of the political nation, and it took precedence over every provincial Premier and polity head of government. The name has been official since.

That the warrant issued in the year Roosevelt took office is a coincidence of timing rather than an act of his government. The question had been under consideration before McKinley resigned, and the warrant was not a political measure. Roosevelt was simply the man in the office when the protocol question was answered, and he became in consequence the first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America to whom the title formally belonged. He appears to have found the whole business funny, and remarked that the most powerful office in the constitution had acquired its legal existence not from any definition of its powers but from an administrative decision about where its holder sat at dinner.

What the warrant did not change

The warrant changed the title and nothing else, and in particular it did not change the paperwork.

In every technical instrument the holder is still First Lord of the Treasury and is not the Prime Minister. The commission from Government House appoints a First Lord. The warrant of appointment, the instruments the holder signs, the Treasury minutes, the salary provision, the entries in the official lists and the formal correspondence of the departments all use that name and no other. A document that says Prime Minister is either addressed to the public or is not a technical document. The two names have run in parallel ever since.

The distinction is not antiquarian and constitutional lawyers reach for it whenever the premiership’s limits are in question. First Lord of the Treasury is an office of the Crown with a defined and modest content. Prime Minister is a style attached to a person who happens to hold it while commanding the Commons. A ministry wishing to claim some new authority for the premiership would have to find that authority in the powers of a Treasury lord, which is where the search normally ends. Roosevelt, who tested the boundaries of the office more energetically than any predecessor since Lincoln, never once argued that the 1903 warrant had given him anything, and the argument was not available to him.

The citizen premier

The refusal of honours

Roosevelt declined every peerage offered to him and every Crown honour, in office and after it. He left the premiership in 1911 as plain Mr. Roosevelt and died in 1919 with no title, no order and no post-nominal letters of the Realm’s gift.

The refusals were not a single dramatic act but a standing position maintained for sixteen years. He declined elevation on leaving office, which was the customary moment. He declined the orders that a government normally accepts on behalf of its head. He declined the honours that were pressed on him after the ministry, when they could no longer be represented as payment. Ernest III made no difficulty over any of it, treating the honours of the American Crown as instruments of that realm’s political culture rather than as personal favours that could be refused only at a cost.

The contrast the Realm draws is with Abraham Lincoln, who left office as Duke of Springfield, and the contrast is not a criticism of Lincoln. It marks a change in what the Realm’s political class thought a head of government was. Roosevelt’s position was that a Prime Minister answers to the people who can remove him and not to the Crown that commissions him, and that accepting the Crown’s gift on leaving office confused the two relationships in a way that a citizen ought to avoid. He said so plainly and often, and he had a showman’s understanding of how much a refusal is worth as a public act.

Manners and not powers

The distinction that matters here is one the Realm’s writers insist upon, because the citizen-premier tradition is regularly misdescribed as a constitutional programme and has never been one.

Roosevelt declined honours. He did not propose to abolish them. His ministry brought forward no measure touching the honours system, the prerogative or the reserve powers of the Crown, and neither has any Liberal Federal Democrat ministry in the century since. The party has no constitutional position on the monarchy and has never had one. It is, with the Left and Solidarity Bloc and the Labour and Social Democratic Party, one of three parties with nothing to say about the Crown, and the only one of the three whose silence is a matter of manners rather than of priorities.

The consistency of this is easily missed because Roosevelt was so combative about everything else. He fought the trusts, the railways, the packers, the party organisations and a good part of his own coalition. He did not fight the Crown, did not want to, and worked with Ernest III on the largest single achievement of his ministry. A man who spent eight years asserting that private power must show its warrant made no equivalent demand of the Crown, and the reason is that he did not think the Crown was exercising power. He thought it was holding something in trust, which is the proposition the parks settlement rests on.

Criticism and the tradition

The tradition Roosevelt founded was continued by Woodrow Wilson, by Calvin Coolidge from the other party, and by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it remains the Liberal Federal Democrats’ most quoted inheritance. Later premiers have taken the Order of Merit of America while declining peerages and the Order of the Charter, which is the modern compromise.

The criticism has been made from the left since the beginning and is not easily answered. A refusal is a gesture. It costs the man who makes it nothing but a title, it leaves the honours system untouched, and it may make the system easier to defend by giving it a public example of a person who could have entered it and did not. The party’s own critics observe that a century of declining honours has left the honours exactly where they were, and that the LFD’s silence on the Crown has been convenient as well as principled.

The defence offered is that a party which refuses honours from principle has said what it needs to say, and that legislating about the Crown would be the constitutional adventure the Realm’s practice discourages. The argument has not been settled and is not treated as settled. It surfaces in the party at intervals, usually when a Liberal premier is out of office and the question costs nothing.

The Square Deal

The doctrine

The Square Deal is the name Roosevelt gave to the proposition that the great industrial combinations, the people who worked in them and the public who depended on both were each entitled to a fair hearing from a government that would hold the balance visibly. It was not a programme when he first used the phrase and it became one.

He was not against industry, against wealth or against scale. He said repeatedly that national productive capacity was a good, that large enterprises were often more efficient than small ones, and that the Realm’s prosperity depended on both. What he objected to was the combination that had grown large enough to answer to nobody: the concern that set prices, wages and terms behind a patriotic banner while treating the public as a resource rather than a constituency.

The doctrine’s distinctive move was procedural rather than economic. Roosevelt’s remedy for a dispute between capital and labour was almost never to decide it. It was to compel both parties into a forum where the facts could be established and published, on the theory that most industrial conflicts were sustained by the ability of the stronger party to refuse to be examined. This is a Liberal Federal Democrat instinct rather than a socialist one, and it is why the Square Deal produced inspectorates, commissions, published findings and arbitration machinery rather than public ownership.

The anthracite arbitration

The measure of the doctrine was the anthracite coal dispute, which Roosevelt inherited as an unresolved wound of the McKinley years and which reached crisis in the first winter of his ministry.

The mine operators refused to recognise the union, refused to arbitrate and refused to meet the men, on the ground that a combination of owners was a legitimate business arrangement and a combination of workers was a conspiracy. The coal supply of the eastern cities failed as winter came on. Schools and hospitals began to close.

Roosevelt summoned both sides to Charter House. The meeting was constitutionally novel, since the Realm’s government had no statutory power to compel either party, and the ministry’s law officers advised that it had none. Roosevelt held the meeting anyway, and when the operators refused arbitration he let it be known that the government was preparing to take the mines into public operation under emergency authority for the duration of the shortage. The threat was almost certainly beyond his lawful power. It was also believed, because he was the kind of man who might do it, and the operators accepted a commission of inquiry within days.

The commission’s award gave the men a wage increase and shorter hours and gave the operators the non-recognition of the union that they had asked for. Neither side regarded it as a victory. Roosevelt regarded it as the point of the exercise, and the arbitration machinery it produced became the ordinary method for the Realm’s great industrial disputes for the next forty years.

Food, drugs and inspection

The consumer legislation of the ministry followed the pattern of the police board: establish the facts to a standard that cannot be argued with, publish them, and let the public do the rest.

The measures reached the statute book after the publication of an investigation into the packing houses of the Commonwealth of Illinois that the ministry had commissioned, resisted publishing, and then published in full when the industry’s representatives disputed it. The Act that followed created a federal inspectorate with right of entry, imposed standards on meat sold across polity lines, and required the labelling of drugs and prepared foods. A companion measure prohibited the interstate carriage of adulterated and misbranded articles.

The industry’s opposition collapsed in a matter of weeks for a reason Roosevelt had anticipated and the industry had not. The Realm’s packers exported, and the export market had begun to refuse the Realm’s meat. Inspection, which the packers had resisted as a burden, became a certificate they wanted, and the largest concerns were supporting the measure by the time it passed. Roosevelt drew the general lesson and repeated it for the rest of his life: regulation is most easily carried when the regulated discover that they need the regulator’s signature.

Hours, safety and the limits

The ministry legislated on the hours of railway operating staff, on employers’ liability for injury in federal employment and in undertakings crossing polity lines, on child labour in federal jurisdiction, and on the safety of the couplings, brakes and signals whose failure was killing railwaymen at a rate the companies had treated as a cost of business.

The limits of all of it were constitutional and Roosevelt knew them exactly. The American Rights Act of 1866 bound federal authority alone and did not bind the polities, and would not bind them until 1962. The Charter’s grant of power over commerce among the polities was the ministry’s only general instrument for reaching conditions inside a factory, and the courts of the period read it narrowly and struck down a federal child-labour provision on exactly that ground.

The consequence is that the Square Deal is a body of law about railways, meat, drugs, federal employment and interstate carriage, and is very largely silent about the mill, the mine and the sweatshop within a single polity. Roosevelt’s answer was that he legislated where he could and argued where he could not, which is true and is also the shape of the record. The industrial polities did not follow, and the conditions in them were substantially unchanged when he left office.

Trusts and the regulation of combination

Power must show its warrant

Roosevelt’s case against the trusts was constitutional before it was economic, and he made it in the Realm’s own vocabulary.

The settled doctrine of the United Kingdom of America is that power must show its warrant. It is the proposition that makes a monarch reign without governing, a ministry answerable to a chamber that can end it in an afternoon, and a constable able to state the authority under which he acts. Roosevelt’s contribution was to extend the proposition beyond public office. A private combination that could set the price of oil, the freight rate on a harvest or the wage in a district was exercising power over the lives of millions, and power in the Realm is accountable by definition, whatever the instrument that created it.

The argument was effective because it did not require anybody to become a socialist. A Realm that had spent a century and a quarter asking public officers to state their warrant found it difficult to explain why a railway president should not be asked the same question. The CCU’s resistance was therefore conducted almost entirely on the ground of property and contract rather than on the ground that concentrated private power was legitimate, and Roosevelt won the framing before he won a case.

Railways and rates

The railways were the ministry’s principal target and its principal achievement, because the railway was the point at which private power touched every polity in the Realm at once.

The ministry’s first measure prohibited the rebate: the secret preferential rate by which a carrier gave a large shipper a price that a small one could not obtain, which was the mechanism by which several of the great industrial combinations had been assembled in the first place. The second and larger measure gave the federal commerce commission power to fix a maximum rate on complaint, to inspect the carriers’ accounts, and to require a uniform system of accounting so that the accounts meant something.

The rate power was the hardest-fought measure of the ministry and passed in a weakened form after a long struggle in the House of Lords, with the courts left a broad power of review that they used. Roosevelt took the weakened version, said publicly that he would rather have the principle established than the argument won, and returned to the subject in the following Parliament.

The prosecutions and the courts

The ministry’s prosecutions were fewer than the reputation suggests and were selected for their demonstrative value. Roosevelt’s law officers proceeded against a railway holding company assembled to end competition between two northern trunk lines, against the oil combination, against the tobacco combination, and against the packers, and the government won more of these than it lost.

Roosevelt’s own position distinguished between combination and abuse, and he stated it in terms that satisfied nobody. He held that size was not itself an offence, that the efficient large concern was a national asset, and that the test was conduct: whether a combination had been assembled to serve the public or to escape it. His critics on the left said this gave the government a discretion to bless the combinations it liked, which it did. His critics on the right said it substituted a minister’s judgement for a rule of law, which it also did. The Realm’s competition law has been arguing about the same distinction ever since.

The judicial record of the period is the standing qualification on the whole achievement. The courts of the era were unsympathetic to federal regulation, read the commerce power narrowly, and reversed or narrowed a good deal of what Parliament passed. Root’s private counsel to Roosevelt was consistently that a reform depending on the Prime Minister’s momentum would not survive judicial review, and that agencies needed defined duties, investigators needed lawful access, regulated parties needed notice and reasons, and Parliament needed accounts. The advice improved the durability of the ministry’s regulation. It also, as its critics noted at the time and since, slowed matters until the balance of power had shifted further toward the concentrations being regulated.

Conservation and the Royal American Parks System

Conservation before the ministry

The Realm had been setting land aside for sixty years before Roosevelt took office and had never decided what it was doing. The Hot Springs reservation in the State of Arkansas dates from 1832, Yosemite received a federal grant for preservation and public recreation in 1864, Yellowstone became a National Park in 1872, and Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake and Wind Cave followed between 1890 and 1903.

Each had been created by its own instrument, for its own reasons, on its own terms. Some were held by the federal government, some by a polity, some under arrangements nobody had examined since the grant. There was no common purpose, no common trustee, no common administration and no protection against a future Parliament simply selling the land. Timber, mining, water and railway interests understood this perfectly well and legislated accordingly.

Roosevelt’s conservation politics were formed in the Dakotas and were the oldest sincerity he had. They also carried the assumptions of his period without apology. He regarded unregulated cutting, mining, speculation and the destruction of game as failures of government. He also assumed that national administration by qualified officials was the answer, gave limited weight to Indigenous government, and gave none at all to the proposition that the people already living on a landscape had a claim to decide its future.

The King’s proposition

The Crown’s part in the settlement was constitutional and was not operational. Ernest III did not devise a park, direct a boundary or issue anything against advice, and could not have done any of those things.

What he supplied was the form. Roosevelt’s difficulty was that any protection his government created could be undone by the next government, and that the land in question was worth a great deal of money to people who could be relied upon to keep asking. The King’s proposition, arrived at in the audiences of 1904 and 1905, was that protected land ought not to belong to the ministry of the day at all: that it should be held by the Crown in right of America as trustee, with the inhabitants of the Realm across time as beneficiaries, including those not yet born, so that neither King nor government could realise its value for an unrelated purpose. He offered to place lawful Crown funds into an endowment if Parliament would establish a permanent trust.

The arrangement imposed duties on the Crown rather than granting the King an estate, and it is important to be exact about this, because the language of royal parks invites the opposite reading. The Crown does not own the parks. It holds them, and cannot spend them. Ernest III is credited with supplying the language of permanence in which the principle was cast, and the Realm has generally treated the settlement as the clearest thing he did in a reign of deliberate self-effacement.

The Royal Parks Trust Act 1906

The Royal Parks Trust Act received assent on 8 June 1906. It is the founding instrument of the Royal American Parks System.

The Act created a register containing the existing National Parks and specified federal reservations, and placed them under a common constitutional trust. Each retained its own earlier legal date: Yellowstone remained an 1872 park and Mount Rainier an 1899 park, and the trust date recorded the addition of a common obligation rather than a refounding. Registration did not cure a defective title and did not settle an Indigenous claim; it gave the central office a basis for audit and required future transactions to acknowledge the trust. The Act created a small central office and an advisory register but not the professional service, which came ten years later under the Royal Parks Service Act of 25 August 1916, also carried by a ministry acting under Ernest III.

Mesa Verde entered the system as a National Park later in June 1906, and its archaeological purpose established at the outset that the trust covered human history and not only scenery.

Monuments, the endowment and the Grand Canyon

The 1906 Act also created the National Monument power, under which Cabinet could recommend and the Crown proclaim protection for a place whose scientific, historic, archaeological or ecological resources required prompt action. The power was reviewable for statutory purpose, evidence, boundaries and procedural fairness, and Parliament retained authority to convert a monument into a National Park, alter its purposes or withhold its money. It was the instrument Roosevelt used most, because it was fast.

The initial endowment combined Ernest III’s lawful personal gift with a matching parliamentary appropriation. The capital was invested separately from the annual budget so that essential preservation could continue when appropriations fluctuated. The endowment did not give the Crown any power to direct spending, and its trustees were subject to statutory audit. Contemporary political argument overstated the royal gift in order to claim that the parks cost the taxpayer little; the accounts show that roads, rangers, scientific work and land acquisition depended on public money from the beginning.

The Grand Canyon, in the March of Arizona, was proclaimed a National Monument in 1908 under the reviewed proclamation power and became a National Park in 1919. Mining, grazing and local development interests challenged the breadth of the reservation. Indigenous communities with continuing religious, subsistence and political relationships to the canyon received no equivalent institutional hearing, and the record of the proclamation shows that none was sought. Its later description as the system’s flagship is customary and carries no statutory priority: Yellowstone is older, and the founding Acts name no first park.

What the trust cost and to whom

The founding settlement was supported across several parties and did not end the argument about land, and the article of the parks system does not pretend that it did.

The word wilderness concealed occupation. Officials described land as uninhabited after the people living on it had been removed, confined or rendered legally invisible, and early publicity separated celebrated scenery from the wars, treaties, forced removals and allotment policies that had produced access to it. Polities lost tax revenue and resisted federal boundaries. Rural communities feared restrictions on grazing, hunting and roads and were sometimes right. Indigenous nations were excluded from areas that had continuing importance to them and were not consulted about the exclusion. Early management at Mesa Verde treated Ancestral Puebloan material as a national collection detached from living descendant communities, and excavation and museum practice removed objects and remains. Shared custody, nation-directed access and preservation in place emerged very much later.

The trust made disposal difficult and did not settle how protected land should be governed. That combination, durable protection secured through concentrated authority, is treated by later reformers as both the institutional strength of the system and the source of most of its injustices, and it is a fair summary of Roosevelt’s conservation politics generally.

The panic of 1907

The Free Banking Era

The Realm had no central bank in 1907 and had killed two. Parliament chartered a central monetary institution in 1791 and again in 1816, and destroyed each of them, in 1811 and in the 1830s, on the respectable ground that such an institution concentrates too much power in too few hands. The agricultural and frontier polities that carried those votes understood that an institution seated in the eastern commercial cities would be run by people who understood eastern commercial conditions, and they were not wrong.

What followed was seventy years of free banking: hundreds of separate note issues, polity-level supervision of wildly varying quality, no lender of last resort, and no mechanism for converting sound assets into cash when depositors wanted cash. The panics of 1857, 1873, 1893 and 1907 each followed the same shape, each destroyed savings and employment, and each demonstrated that there was nobody whose job it was to stop them.

The private consortium

The panic of 1907 was the most severe banking crisis since the 1830s and it was arrested by a private consortium.

The leading financiers of the day, acting on their own authority and committing their own capital, assembled the liquidity that stopped the runs, decided which institutions would be saved and which would not, and stabilised the system. They were not appointed, were answerable to nobody and had no obligation to do any of it. Roosevelt’s government had no instrument with which to touch the crisis, and the Treasury’s deposits of public money in the New York institutions were the whole of its contribution.

It worked. That is the part that mattered. The rescue was competent, it was effective, and it ended a crisis that the government could not have ended.

And it frightened the Realm’s political class in a way that the failures had not. A panic that destroys savings is a disaster. A panic stopped by a handful of private men acting out of public spirit is a demonstration that the monetary stability of the United Kingdom of America was, as a matter of fact, a private discretion. The men concerned were public-spirited. They might next time be absent, or interested, or dead. Roosevelt, who had spent four years arguing that private power must show its warrant, had just been rescued by private power that had no warrant at all, and his own account of the episode never resolved the difficulty.

The Royal Commission

The ministry appointed a Royal Commission on the structural weaknesses of free banking. It sat for three years and reported in 1911, in the last months of Roosevelt’s government.

Its report is the founding document of the modern American monetary system and is still read. It established that the banking system had no mechanism for turning sound assets into cash in a panic, that the seasonal agricultural credit cycle produced a predictable annual strain that nothing existed to absorb, that polity-level supervision was of wildly varying quality, and that the note issue of hundreds of separate institutions was an obstacle to trade that no other advanced economy tolerated. It recommended a federal institution with authority to issue notes, act as lender of last resort, supervise banks operating across polity lines and hold primary responsibility for confidence in the pound.

Roosevelt did not legislate on it. The Commission reported in his final year and the Act that created the Royal American Reserve was carried in 1913 by Wilson’s ministry, which is why the central bank is counted among Wilson’s achievements and not among Roosevelt’s. What belongs to Roosevelt is the appointment, the terms of reference and the decision to treat a successful private rescue as a warning rather than a reassurance.

Foreign policy

The naval doctrine

Roosevelt inherited McKinley’s fleet and McKinley’s overseas questions and answered them with a doctrine of assertive, credible strength: that a great power keeps the peace by being unmistakably prepared to break it, and that the Realm, with coasts on two oceans, required a battle line capable of operating on both.

He built. Construction ran through the whole ministry, gunnery standards were raised, squadrons were concentrated rather than distributed for the convenience of ports and their members, and the professional staff work that Root had introduced into the Army was pressed on the Admiralty. Roosevelt argued the case in public constantly, on the principle that a fleet the Realm did not know it had was a fleet that could not deter anybody.

The doctrine had its critics inside his own coalition from the beginning, and their argument was the one the Realm has made about every subsequent expansion: that a capacity built to deter is a capacity available to use, that the distinction between preparedness and provocation is not visible from the other side of an ocean, and that a Prime Minister who enjoyed the fleet as much as this one did was not the ideal judge of when it was needed.

The Panama Canal

The Panama Canal was the ministry’s largest undertaking and the clearest instance of its method.

The Realm secured the isthmus route in circumstances that its own government’s law officers found easier to justify afterwards than in advance. In 1902 Parliament, by a handful of votes, had preferred the Panama route to the Nicaragua route through the United Provinces of Central America, which has never forgotten the vote. The government holding the territory, New Granada, accepted the Realm’s terms and its Senate refused to ratify them; a separatist movement in its fourth state succeeded with a speed that surprised nobody who had watched the Realm’s naval dispositions; and the new state signed a treaty granting the Realm the canal zone within a fortnight of recognition. Roosevelt’s public defence was that he had taken the isthmus and let Parliament debate it afterwards, which was accurate and did not help him.

The engineering was the achievement. The Realm’s sanitary and medical work on yellow fever and malaria made the excavation possible where an earlier attempt had failed, the lock design and the Culebra cut were the largest works then attempted anywhere, and the canal joined the Realm’s two coasts into a single strategic and commercial system in a way that changed the Realm’s position permanently.

The constitutional and diplomatic consequences were left to others. Root’s instinct was to regularise them through documents and durable obligations, and he did a good deal of that work as Governor-General within the limits of his office and rather more of it as a private jurist afterwards. The observation made about that process at the time, and repeated since, is that the capacity of a careful lawyer to tidy a bold action can become part of the method by which boldness escapes accountability. Tidying could reduce arbitrary power after the fact. It could not retroactively create consent.

The Great White Fleet

The Great White Fleet was the round-the-world cruise of the Realm’s battle line, dispatched by Roosevelt in the second half of his ministry and completed shortly before it ended. Sixteen battleships in white peacetime paint sailed from the Atlantic, round South America, across the Pacific with calls in Australasia and Japan, through the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and home.

The purposes were mixed and Roosevelt admitted most of them. The cruise demonstrated that the Realm could move a battle fleet between oceans, which before the canal was a question rather than an assumption. It tested coaling, engineering and endurance under conditions no exercise had produced, and the professional reports that followed drove a decade of design decisions. It was addressed to Japan in particular, at a moment when relations across the Pacific were poor and the Realm’s Pacific holdings were indefensible. And it was addressed to the Realm’s own Parliament, which was asked for the money for the next programme while the fleet was still at sea.

Roosevelt dispatched it in the face of parliamentary objection that the money had not been voted for the purpose, and remarked that the fleet had enough coal to get to the Pacific and that Parliament could decide whether it wanted it back. The Realm has generally treated this as characteristic rather than as constitutional, though the objection was a real one and was not answered.

Mediation and arbitration

The other half of the doctrine, and the half most often forgotten because it is less quotable, was arbitration.

Roosevelt mediated the peace between the Russian Empire and Japan, bringing the delegations to the naval yard at Portsmouth in the Province of New Hampshire in 1905 and holding them there until they signed. The settlement was resented in both capitals, as settlements are, and it ended a war. He arbitrated a boundary dispute in the north, submitted several claims against the Realm to international tribunals, and gave consistent public support to the proposition that disputes between states could be settled by law.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the mediation. He accepted it and gave the money away, and the acceptance is not an exception to the citizen-premier rule: the prize was a foreign body’s recognition of a piece of work and not the Crown’s gift, and the objection Roosevelt made to honours was specifically an objection to being elevated by the institution his government advised. The distinction was noticed at the time and thought a fine one by his opponents.

The Philippines and the Territory

The status

The Philippines were a Territory of the United Kingdom of America throughout Roosevelt’s ministry and until 1946, when Ernest IV elevated the islands into the personal union as a sovereign kingdom. For the whole of Roosevelt’s eight years they were neither an independent state nor a constituent polity of the Realm.

The distinction is not a technicality. A polity of the Realm sends members to the House of Commons, has a Crown representative, governs its own internal affairs and can only be altered with its consent. A Territory has none of that. The Philippines were governed under parliamentary and ministerial authority exercised in New Westminster, by officials appointed there, answerable to a Cabinet sitting there, under estimates voted by a chamber in which no Filipino sat.

They were represented in nothing. There was no Filipino member of the House of Commons, no Filipino peer, no Filipino vote on the estimates that governed the islands, and no institution through which Filipino consent to any of it could be given or withheld. Whatever else is said about the administration of the Territory, and a good deal that is favourable can be said about parts of it, that is the fact from which the assessment has to start.

Government from New Westminster

Civil administration in the islands was conducted first by a commission and then by a Territorial Chancellor, an office William Howard Taft held from 1900 before entering Roosevelt’s Cabinet. Its work was real. Courts were built, schools opened, public health measures carried out against cholera and smallpox, roads and ports constructed, and municipal government established with elected local officers.

All of it was done inside a conquest, and the conquest is the part the Realm’s later writers have insisted on keeping in view. The war against the Philippine republic, which had expected the defeat of Spain to mean its own independence, was fought with methods that included the concentration of rural populations, the destruction of crops and villages, and torture in interrogation. Officers were court-martialled for some of it. The scale of civilian death from violence, displacement, famine and disease has never been established to anyone’s satisfaction and was certainly very large. Roosevelt inherited the campaign in its later phases, declared the insurrection ended in the first year of his ministry, and continued operations in the south for years afterwards against people who had not been consulted about the declaration.

The Realm’s administration of the Territory improved with time in the way that competent administration does, and improvement did not touch the question. Better schools do not constitute consent. The professional pride the Realm took in the islands’ public works, and it took a great deal, was pride in a service delivered to people who could not have asked for it, refused it, or voted out the men delivering it.

Roosevelt’s position

Roosevelt’s own position on the Philippines was that the islands were not ready for self-government, that the Realm had an obligation to prepare them for it, and that the timetable was the Realm’s to set. He said so consistently and appears to have meant it.

He also treated the question as settled in a way that his own domestic doctrine did not permit. The Prime Minister who spent eight years arguing that power must show its warrant did not require the Realm’s power in the Philippines to show one, and his answer when the point was put to him, that a nation which had taken a responsibility could not lay it down at its own convenience, is an answer about the Realm’s honour rather than about the islanders’ consent.

His government’s Philippine policy was a continuation of McKinley’s, made more efficient. The reform premiership and the imperial administration ran side by side for eight years without either altering the other, and the Realm’s historians have declined, on the whole, to let the domestic record be used to excuse the overseas one. The two are the same ministry.

Race, rights and the Indigenous nations

The Rights Act and its federal limit

The American Rights Act of 1866 bound federal authority and did not bind the polities. That limit was the governing fact of the Realm’s racial politics for a further ninety-six years, and it was not altered until 1962.

Its practical effect during Roosevelt’s ministry was that the federal government could be required to treat citizens equally in its own employment, in its own courts, in the forces and in the administration of federal law, and could not reach a polity’s franchise laws, its schools, its transport, its criminal justice or its refusal to prosecute murder. Reconstruction’s federal presence had been withdrawn by 1889. The disfranchisement of Black voters in the southern polities was completed during the McKinley and Roosevelt years by polity constitutional conventions that the Realm’s federal government did not attempt to disturb.

Roosevelt did not attempt to disturb them either. He made no proposal to extend the Rights Act, brought forward no federal measure against lynching, and did not use the reserve of federal criminal jurisdiction that had been employed against John Brown two generations earlier. Racial terror continued throughout his ministry at a rate the Realm recorded and did not act on. Booker T. Washington pressed him privately on whether constitutional caution could protect citizens whom local authorities had abandoned, and Roosevelt pressed back, and the ministry did nothing.

Roosevelt on race

Roosevelt held the racial hierarchies of his class and period and stated them without embarrassment. He wrote and spoke about the advancement of races, the fitness of peoples for self-government, and the duties of what he took to be more advanced nations toward what he took to be less advanced ones. He believed individual merit could be found in any group and that groups were nonetheless ranked. These views were not incidental to his politics; they are the connective tissue between the conservation programme, the imperial administration and the language of national vigour, and they were entirely ordinary among the Realm’s governing class.

He invited Booker T. Washington to dine at Charter House early in the ministry. The southern press reaction was violent and sustained, and Roosevelt, who had not anticipated it, did not repeat the invitation. He continued to appoint individual Black men to federal office and to defend those appointments against polity pressure, which was a real thing to do and cost him support.

Washington’s private criticism of him is the sharpest assessment on the record, and it was made at the time rather than in retrospect. A government comfortable with a Black man at the head of its ceremonial table, Washington observed, could still fail the teacher, the farmer or the worker who lacked his access. Invitations, honours and visible appointments mattered and could not substitute for voting access, fair administration or protection from terror. Routine equality was the harder test, and Roosevelt’s ministry did not attempt it.

Brownsville

In 1906 a shooting affray in a Texas town was attributed to soldiers of a Black battalion of the Royal American Army stationed nearby. The evidence was contested, the local investigation was conducted by people with an interest in the outcome, and no individual was ever identified.

Roosevelt discharged the entire battalion without honour: a hundred and sixty-seven men, including veterans of long service and holders of decorations, dismissed without charge, without trial, without the opportunity to answer and without any finding against any of them personally, on the ground that the men must collectively know who was responsible and had declined to say. Pensions and the right to future federal employment went with the discharge.

It was defended at the time as a disciplinary act within the Prime Minister’s advice to the Crown, and it was lawful in the narrow sense that no court could reach it. It was also the plainest possible breach of the principle on which Roosevelt’s entire domestic reputation rested. Power showed no warrant. Facts were not established, findings were not published, and the men had no forum. He never retracted it and defended it to the end of his life. The Realm reversed the discharges long afterwards, when almost every man affected was dead, and the episode is now the standard answer in the Realm’s schools to the question of what Roosevelt’s principles were worth when the people they protected were Black.

The Indigenous nations

Federal policy toward the Indigenous nations during Roosevelt’s ministry was allotment, land reduction and compulsory education, and his government continued all three.

Allotment broke communally held nations’ land into individual parcels and declared the remainder surplus for sale to settlers, on the stated theory that individual title would produce self-sufficient farmers and the practical result that it transferred enormous acreages out of Indigenous hands. The boarding-school system removed children from their families and communities and forbade them their languages, and the suppression of Indigenous languages through those schools was policy and not accident. Neither programme originated with Roosevelt. Neither was questioned by him.

His conservation programme compounded the problem in its own way. Protected areas were proclaimed over land with continuing religious, subsistence and political importance to nations that received no institutional hearing in the proclamation, and the early legal language of the system treated unoccupied public land as empty where Indigenous use plainly continued. The Realm’s modern parks administration operates a great deal of the system under binding co-government with Indigenous nations, and it reached that position by conceding, over a century, that the original settlement had been made over the heads of the people with the oldest claim to the ground.

Elections and government formation

The Parliament of 1900

Roosevelt did not come to office through a general election and governed for two years in a Parliament returned under his predecessor’s arrangement.

The Parliament of 1900 had been elected on a Conservative and Crown Union majority. Roosevelt’s ministry rested on the Liberal Federal Democrats, the reforming section of the CCU that crossed with him in 1903, and an agricultural group brought in on the promise of a tariff review. The constitutional propriety of governing on a majority the electorate had not returned was disputed at length, and the answer the Realm gave is the answer it always gives: the ministry commanded the confidence of the House of Commons, which is the only test the constitution supplies, and it demonstrated that confidence in a vote rather than in assurances given privately at Government House.

The arrangement was not comfortable and Roosevelt did not pretend otherwise. The crossing CCU members were reformers on trusts and conservatives on almost everything else, and the ministry’s agricultural support was interested in the tariff and in very little of the rest of the programme. The legislative record of 1903 to 1905 is correspondingly thin beside what followed.

The general elections of 1905 and 1910

Roosevelt went to the country in 1905 on the record of the first two years and was returned with a working majority in his own right, which converted a reconstructed arrangement into a government. The campaign was conducted on the trusts, on the railway rates and on the person of the Prime Minister, and no previous national campaign had been organised around a leader’s name to that extent. The premiership’s critics have been complaining about the personalisation of campaigns ever since, and they usually date it here.

The Parliament elected in 1905 carried the substantial legislation of the ministry: the railway rate power, the food and drug measures, the inspection Acts, the Royal Parks Trust Act and the labour and safety legislation. The government went to the country again in 1910, after the panic and in a harder economic climate, and was returned with a reduced majority that left it dependent on its agricultural group on questions of finance.

The resignation of 1911

Roosevelt resigned the premiership in 1911. He was not defeated at a general election, was not removed by a confidence vote and was not dismissed.

He had held office for eight years, had exhausted the programme the 1910 Parliament would carry, and had concluded that the ministry’s remaining life would be spent managing an arithmetic rather than governing. The party’s coming man was Woodrow Wilson, Premier of the Province of New Jersey, whom Roosevelt regarded as the intellectual successor capable of turning the reform programme into permanent law. When Wilson demonstrated that he could command the confidence of the House of Commons, Roosevelt resigned, and Elihu Root commissioned Wilson in Ernest III’s name immediately. There was no vacancy, no acting ministry and no automatic party succession, because the constitution provides for none of those things either.

The transfer is cited in the Realm’s constitutional writing as the model of an orderly mid-Parliament change of premier within a governing party. It is also cited by Roosevelt’s critics as the moment his self-discipline was greatest and his judgement of his own successor worst, which is a retrospective judgement about the war and is not entirely fair to either man.

Cabinet and administration

The ministry

The Cabinet Roosevelt formed in 1903 was about twenty strong and was mixed by necessity. It contained Liberal Federal Democrats, the crossing CCU reformers whose seats the ministry depended on, and two ministers who had served McKinley and stayed.

Collective responsibility was observed absolutely, as it always has been in the Realm. A minister could argue anything inside the room and had to defend everything outside it, and Roosevelt, who was the loudest man in any room he entered, was scrupulous about protecting ministers who had lost an argument. He dismissed several during the ministry and did it in the ordinary form, on advice to the Governor-General, who did not refuse.

His relations with the Chancellor of the Exchequer were the structural rivalry the office always produces. The Prime Minister’s only formal office is First Lord of the Treasury and it carries no purse; the Realm’s money runs through the Chancellor, and a premier who wants to spend must negotiate for it. Roosevelt wanted to spend on the fleet, the canal, the parks and the inspectorates simultaneously, and the record of the ministry’s estimates is a record of a Prime Minister being told what he could not have.

The War Ministry: Root and Taft

Elihu Root remained War Minister from McKinley’s ministry into Roosevelt’s and completed the reorganisation of the Royal American Army: a general staff, a professional planning structure, defined responsibility, and the separation of administration from command. He left the ministry in 1904 and returned to the law, and in August 1905 Roosevelt advised his commission as Governor-General.

William Howard Taft succeeded him as War Minister and held the office from 1904 to 1908. The portfolio joined defence administration to continuing oversight of the Philippines, Panama, Cuba, procurement and coordination among the services, and Taft’s territorial experience made him an unusually well-prepared administrator of it. He was a civilian minister and not a commander; lawful officers directed operations, and Taft oversaw administration, demanded information, advised Cabinet and bore ministerial responsibility. He left in 1908 and became Chief Justice of the Royal American Supreme Court in 1909.

The friendship between Roosevelt and Taft was warm and consequential and did not end in a rupture. Roosevelt valued Taft’s loyalty, legal intelligence and capacity to convert energetic proposals into workable administration; Taft admired Roosevelt’s public courage and found his impatience exhausting. Their eventual distance came from temperament and diverging institutional lives rather than from any contest between them, and Taft led no campaign against the man who had promoted him.

Method at the centre

Roosevelt’s method was publicity. McKinley had already built the Realm’s first recognisably modern operation of coordinated party messaging, and Roosevelt took the instrument over and turned it on the departments and the combinations rather than on Parliament, using the premiership as a position from which the public could be addressed directly and continuously. He briefed correspondents, gave them a room at Charter House, timed announcements for the Sunday papers, and treated the exposure of a fact as a governing instrument in its own right. He described the office as an unrivalled platform, and the description has been quoted at every subsequent holder who has been accused of governing by broadcast.

Inside the machine he worked as premiers have always worked in the Realm: through Cabinet committees and bilateral meetings with the minister concerned, with the full Cabinet ratifying decisions already taken. The centre remained small. The Realm distrusts a presidential machine and has repeatedly declined to build one, and Roosevelt’s private office was a handful of secretaries.

The permanent civil service was politically neutral, appointed on merit and survived the change of ministry intact, which was the achievement of the reform movement Roosevelt had spent six years serving on the commission. He approved senior appointments rather than choosing them, and did not attempt to change the rule, having spent a decade arguing for it.

The Crown and the Governors-General

Ernest III

Roosevelt’s monarch was Ernest III, who had reigned since 1878 and would reign until 1936, and the relationship is the most successful of the reign.

The King exercised no personal government at any point. He did not choose the ministry, direct it, or take a position in public on any measure it carried. His method was the one he applied to nine American heads of government across fifty-eight years: he lent the standing of the Crown to measures once they were law without lending it to the contest over whether they should be, and asked questions in private that ministers were obliged to answer and free to disregard.

What the partnership produced is the conservation settlement, and the reason it could be produced is precisely that neither man was trying to take anything from the other. Roosevelt wanted permanence that a ministry could not supply; Ernest III could supply a trustee that no ministry could remove; and the arrangement gave the King a duty rather than an estate and gave the Prime Minister a monument rather than a power. The Realm regards it as the leading demonstration of what a constitutional monarchy is actually for, which is a claim the Crown itself has never made in those terms.

Booker T. Washington to 1905

Booker T. Washington was Governor-General from 15 February 1897 until 17 August 1905, and commissioned Roosevelt in 1903.

Their audiences were lively and increasingly divided. Both men used a language of work, capacity and public service, and the shared vocabulary concealed different assumptions about power: Roosevelt romanticised exertion and national purpose, and Washington had learned in childhood that labour could be coerced and still praised by the people who benefited from it. Washington admired energy directed against corruption and neglected duty, and worried that personal certainty could move faster than consent, and that intervention justified as temporary could become a governing habit.

He drew the constitutional line exactly where the office required. A strong federal response to rights violations was entirely compatible with responsible government; it simply had to belong to ministers and to Parliament, not to Government House. He used no reserve power in eight years. His restraint was not an argument for federal inaction, and it could be and was used as one by people who preferred delay, and the ministry he restrained himself in front of did nothing about lynching.

Washington retired in 1905 after a long conventional tenure. Roosevelt did not remove him and Ernest III did not recall him.

Elihu Root from 1905

Elihu Root was commissioned on 17 August 1905, on Roosevelt’s advice, and served until 1913.

Root and Roosevelt formed a productive constitutional partnership and not a joint executive, and the distinction has to be made because later memory tends to erase it. Root had no seat in Cabinet, no power to settle disputes among ministers and no policy authority. He did not direct trust regulation, the canal, naval expansion, conservation or the second occupation of Cuba, and he did not co-found the parks system. He performed formal acts on advice, asked in private what authority supported an action, which minister would answer for it, whether the affected governments had been heard, and how a temporary measure would end, and he could not substitute his own judgement once the Prime Minister had declined the warning.

He used no reserve power across two ministries. He observed the silence the office keeps on pending cases, refrained from directing prosecutors, and treated honours and appointments as formal acts requiring responsible advice rather than as opportunities for patronage. When Roosevelt resigned in 1911 he commissioned Wilson without treating eight years of trust as a constitutional claim, which is the point of the office.

The limitation of the arrangement was noticed at the time. Root’s precision could improve a decision without transferring responsibility for it, and it could also leave him publicly associated with decisions whose consequences his private advice had failed to prevent. He remained the Governor-General throughout the second occupation of Cuba and the administration of the Philippines, and the jurist who defended equality among states had helped build the arrangements under which his own Realm supervised, occupied and governed other peoples.

Personal life

Edith, the children and Sagamore Hill

Roosevelt married Edith Kermit Carow in London on 2 December 1886. They had known each other since childhood and the marriage lasted until his death.

Edith Roosevelt ran the household, the family’s finances and a good deal of her husband’s schedule, and was the only person whose judgement of his conduct he consistently accepted. She disliked publicity, protected the children from it with limited success, and is generally credited by the ministry’s officials with the fact that Roosevelt ate and occasionally slept.

There were six children: Alice, the daughter of the first marriage, born in 1884, and Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald and Quentin, born between 1887 and 1897. The younger children were at Charter House during the ministry and were not kept out of sight, and the Realm’s press discovered, to its considerable profit, that a household with small children and a pony in it was more interesting than a Prime Minister. Alice Roosevelt was a public figure in her own right by her late teens and did not conceal her opinion of the arrangement.

The family’s house was Sagamore Hill at Oyster Bay on the north shore of Long Island, in the Province of New York, and it was the working seat of the government for part of every summer of the ministry. Roosevelt also used Blackjacks, the Prime Minister’s country residence near Guthrie in Oklahoma-Sequoyah, more than his predecessors had, on the ground that it was in country worth riding in.

Reading, writing and hunting

Roosevelt read constantly and at speed, in several languages, across history, natural science, poetry and fiction, and appears genuinely to have retained most of it. He read during meals when he could get away with it and in carriages when he could not.

He also wrote continuously, and the volume is difficult to credit in a man holding public office: naval and military history, four volumes on the winning of the west, hunting and ranch books, natural history, biography, essays, and a correspondence running to tens of thousands of letters. The work is uneven and none of it is negligible, and his natural-history writing is still cited.

He hunted throughout his life and did not regard it as being in tension with the conservation programme, because his conservation was managerial rather than preservationist: game was to be sustained so that it could be taken, forests were to be cut on a schedule that permitted them to be cut again, and the enemy was waste rather than use. The distinction was contested during his own ministry by preservationists who wanted landscapes left alone, and the argument between the two positions has run through the parks system ever since.

Faith and health

Roosevelt was a lifelong practising Protestant of the Dutch Reformed tradition, attended regularly, and treated religion as a private discipline that had no business in a Prime Minister’s public argument. He appointed without regard to denomination in a period when that was worth doing, and defended those appointments when they were attacked.

His health was better than his childhood had promised and worse than his public image suggested. He was blind in one eye from a boxing injury sustained in office, a fact concealed for years. He carried a bullet from an assassination attempt made after his ministry. The asthma recurred. The regime of exertion that had made him continued to be applied at an age and a weight when it was no longer sensible, and the expeditions of his later life cost him more than he ever admitted in public.

Later life and death

Elder statesman

Roosevelt left office in 1911 and did not attempt to return to it. He did not split his party, did not organise against Wilson, and did not lead a movement of his own, which surprised people who had assumed that a man who so obviously enjoyed office would tear his own side apart to regain it.

He was, instead, the Realm’s most vigorous elder statesman for eight years: writing, lecturing, campaigning for conservation, quarrelling in print with anybody who invited it, and intervening in public argument with a freedom the premiership had denied him. He supported the parks system against every proposal to open it, and his standing was one of the reasons that the Royal Parks Service Act was carried in 1916 in the middle of a war.

The expeditions

In 1909, immediately after leaving office, Roosevelt went to British East Africa on a collecting expedition for the Realm’s national museum. It lasted the better part of a year, produced several thousand specimens and a great deal of scientific material, and produced a book. It also involved the killing of animals on a scale that his own conservation movement found difficult to defend at the time and finds indefensible now.

In 1913 and 1914 he joined an expedition to descend an unmapped tributary of the Amazon, the river the Brazilian government afterwards renamed for him. It nearly killed him. He suffered a leg injury that became badly infected, contracted malaria, lost a great deal of weight, and asked to be left behind. He was not left behind. He came out of the interior permanently damaged, and the friends who saw him afterwards said that the man who returned was not the man who went.

The war and Quentin

The Realm entered the First Great War in 1916, five years after Roosevelt left office. He asked to raise a volunteer division and lead it, as he had in 1898, and Wilson’s government refused, which was militarily correct and which Roosevelt never forgave.

All four of his sons served. Quentin, the youngest, flew with the Royal American Air Corps and was shot down and killed over France on 14 July 1918, at twenty. Roosevelt continued his public engagements and wrote to the boy’s commanding officer that it was better to have gone as he had gone, and the people close to him were unanimous that the loss finished him. He had spent forty years arguing that men should be sent where he had been willing to go himself, and the argument had been answered.

Death

Roosevelt died in his sleep at Sagamore Hill on 6 January 1919, of a coronary embolism, at sixty. He was buried at Oyster Bay, at his own instruction, without a state funeral.

The Realm mourned him as it has mourned few of its heads of government. He was fifty-two days short of the peace conference at which the ministry he had criticised for three years would attempt to build the international order he had spent his own foreign policy arguing against, and the Realm has never quite decided which of the two men understood the coming century better.

Political positions and historical reputation

The state and the market

Roosevelt’s economics were regulatory rather than distributive, which places him precisely where his party has always been. He did not propose public ownership, did not propose to redistribute wealth, and did not accept the argument that industrial concentration was itself the enemy. He proposed that concentrated economic power should be licensed, inspected, published and answerable, and that the state’s role was to hold a balance in public rather than to take a side in private.

The position has been attacked from both flanks for a century. From the left, that regulating a combination legitimises it, that the Square Deal left the ownership of the industrial economy exactly where it found it, and that the machinery Roosevelt built was captured by the industries it supervised within a generation. From the right, that a minister’s judgement of what constitutes abuse is not a rule of law, and that Roosevelt’s distinction between good and bad combinations gave the executive an arbitrary discretion. Both criticisms are old and neither has been answered.

The constitution

He was a constitutional conservative who used the constitution’s instruments to their limit and did not propose to change any of them.

He never suggested that the premiership needed statutory definition, never claimed that the 1903 warrant had given the office anything, and never argued for a power he could not find in the existing settlement. He accepted the confidence rule absolutely, resigned when he judged that his ministry was finished rather than when he was compelled, and left the honours system, the prerogative and the reserve powers untouched. His view of the Crown was that it held things the political nation could not be trusted with over time, and the parks are the proposition made concrete.

Against that, he tested the boundaries of ministerial power harder than any premier since Lincoln and sometimes went past them. The anthracite threat was almost certainly beyond his lawful authority. The isthmus was taken and explained afterwards. The fleet sailed on money that had not been voted for the purpose. The Brownsville discharges were an act of executive punishment without any finding of fact. He is the Realm’s standing example of the proposition that the constitutional order is not a set of rules but a set of restraints that hold only while the person restrained accepts them.

The reform record

The reform record is generally rated high and has been rated high consistently, which is unusual. The regulation of the railways, the inspection of food and drugs, the arbitration machinery, the safety legislation and the assertion that a private combination is answerable to the public are treated as the foundation of the modern regulatory state of the Realm, and Wilson’s ministry converted a good deal of it into permanent law within a decade.

The standing qualification is that the Square Deal reached the railways, the packers and federal employment and did not reach the mill, the mine and the sweatshop, because the constitutional instruments to reach them did not exist and Roosevelt did not attempt to create them. The Realm’s labour historians observe that the industrial conditions of the polities were changed by the Labour and Social Democratic Party and the unions from 1921, and not by the reform premiership of 1903.

The imperial record

The imperial record is rated poorly and has been rated more poorly with each generation. The Philippines were held as a Territory represented in nothing for the whole of the ministry, Cuba was occupied a second time from 1906 to 1909, the isthmus was taken in circumstances the Realm’s own lawyers found awkward, and the campaign in the southern Philippines continued against people who had never consented to any of the arrangements made about them.

Roosevelt’s defenders point out that he inherited all of it, that his administration of the Territory was more competent and less brutal than what preceded it, and that he genuinely believed in an obligation to prepare the islands for self-government. His critics point out that competence is not consent, that he set the timetable, and that the man who insisted every other form of power should show its warrant made an exception for his own Realm’s. The Register’s practice is not to let the domestic reform record be used to settle the imperial one, on the ground that they were the same ministry acting on the same principles and reaching opposite conclusions about who was entitled to be consulted.

Standing at present

Roosevelt is placed in the upper tier of the Realm’s prime ministers in the surveys and is not placed at the top. The reasons given for the ranking are stable: the parks, the regulatory settlement, the demonstration that the office could be used to break private concentrations of power rather than merely to administer around them, and the citizen-premier refusal that gave the Realm a standing example of a head of government declining elevation.

The reasons given against are equally stable: the Territory, Cuba, Brownsville, the silence on lynching, the allotment of the Indigenous nations’ land, and the general observation that a Prime Minister who so enjoyed being the public’s champion was not always able to distinguish the public’s interest from his own conviction of it. He appears on the A£50 note beside Franklin D. Roosevelt, the only American note carrying two portraits, in a pairing that was contested when it was made and is defended now on the ground that the reform state was begun by a premier of one party and completed by a premier of another, and is nobody’s partisan possession.

Chronology

Offices and succession

He succeeded William McKinley as Prime Minister and was succeeded by Woodrow Wilson. He was commissioned by Booker T. Washington and resigned to Elihu Root.

Trivia

See also

• William McKinley, 17th Prime Minister, whose resignation in 1903 brought Roosevelt to office
• Woodrow Wilson, 19th Prime Minister, the intellectual successor who made the reform programme permanent law
• Ernest III, the King with whom Roosevelt founded the Royal American Parks System
• Booker T. Washington, Governor-General to 1905, who commissioned him
• Elihu Root, his War Minister and then Governor-General from 1905
• William Howard Taft, War Minister from 1904 and later Chief Justice
• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, the office whose title became official in 1903
• Liberal Federal Democrats, the party whose citizen-premier tradition he founded
• Royal American Parks System, the Crown trust created by the Royal Parks Trust Act 1906
• Royal American Reserve, created in 1913 out of the Royal Commission his ministry appointed
• Republic of Cuba, independent under the Platt system and occupied a second time from 1906
• The Salt River Project, the March of Arizona water and power institution whose founding monument, Roosevelt Dam of 1911, is named for him

Categories

People · Prime Ministers · Liberal Federal Democrats · Conservation · The Progressive Era · Twentieth Century