header by Emerson Taymor, 2005
1. The Colonial Era: 1607-1763
2. The Revolutionary Era: 1763-1789
3. The Early National Period: 1789-1824
4. Jacksonian America: 1824-1848
5. Antebellum America: 1848-1860
6. The Civil War Era: 1861-1877
9. The Twenties
10. Depression and New Deal: 1929-1939
14. The Sixties
Theodore Roosevelt, speech, 2/12/12
I believe in pure democracy. With Lincoln, I hold that “this country,
with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.” Whenever
they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their
constitutional right of amending it. We Progressives believe that the people
have the right, the power, and the duty to protect themselves and their
own welfare; that human rights are supreme over all other rights; that
wealth should be the servant, not the master, of the people….We test
the worth of all men and measures by asking how they contribute to the
welfare of the men, women, and children of whom this nation is composed.
We are engaged in one of the great battles of the age-long contest waged
against privilege on behalf of the common welfare. We hold it a prime duty
of the people to free our government from the control of money in politics.
For this purpose we advocate, not as ends in themselves, but as weapons
in the hands of the people, all governmental devices which will make the
representatives of the people more easily and certainly responsible to
the people’s will….The ends of good government in our democracy
are to secure by genuine popular rule a high average of moral and material
well-being among our citizens. It has been well said that in the past we
have paid attention only to the accumulation of prosperity, and that from
henceforth we must pay equal attention to the proper distribution of prosperity.
This is true. The only prosperity worth having is that which affects the
mass of the people….But it behooves us to remember that there is
no use in devising methods for the proper distribution of prosperity unless
the prosperity is there to distribute. I hold it to be our duty to see
that the wage-worker, the small producer, the ordinary consumer, shall
get their fair share of the benefit of business prosperity. But it either
is or ought to be evident to every one that business has to prosper before
anybody can get any benefit from it. Therefore I hold that he is the real
Progressive, that he is the genuine champion of the people, who endeavors
to shape the policy alike of the nation and of the several states so as
to encourage legitimate and honest business at the same time that he wars
against all crookedness and injustice and tyranny in the business world.
What is needed is, first, the recognition that modern business conditions
have come to stay, in so far at least as these conditions mean that business
must be done in larger units, and then the cool-headed and resolute determination
to introduce an effective method of regulating big corporations so as to
help legitimate business as an incident to thoroughly and completely safeguarding
the interests of the people as a whole.