Theodore Roosevelt . . . The Man With Muck Rake Still Lives

In a time where the nation seems more divided than in the Civil War, there is more of a need to go back to history . . . for those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it . . . and in the words of David Mc Cullough, the host of The American Experience . . .those who do not know history, are not only ignorant, but disrespectful and rude.

For some reason, I was drawn to a speech that was done by an American original, Theodore Roosevelt did over a century ago about The Man With The Muck Rake . . . and somehow, this speech, over a century ago seems to fit this modern situation.

Now it's very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor and everywhere else, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake, and there are times and places where the service is the most needed of all services that can be performed. But the person who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of their feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.

There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon an evil person, whether politician, business person or whoever, every evil practice whether in politics, business or social life. Every writer or speaker should be hailed, every person who on the platform or in a book, magazine, newspaper or other media, with merciless severity make such attack, provided always that in turn remembers that the attack is of use if it is absolutely truthful.

The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his or her mendacity take the form of slander he or she maybe worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest person, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad person with untruth.

An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does no goo, but very great harm. The soul of the scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest person is assailed or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.

Now it is easy to twist out of shape what has been said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and of it is slurred over in repetition, not difficult really to misunderstand it. Some persons die sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing; and both the interested individuals who need whitewashing and those who practice mudslinging like to encourage such confusion of ideas.

One of the chief counts against those who make indiscriminate assault upon people in business or in public life is that they invite a reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in favor of the unscrupulous scoundrel who really ought to be exposed, who ought, if possible, to be put in the penitentiary.

Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction; unfortunately, the reaction instead of taking the form of punishment of those guilty of the excess, is apt to take the form either of punishment of the unoffending or of giving immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, book or other mass media, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able people of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any place.

Let me say that this plea is not for immunity to, but for the most unsparing exposure of, the politician who betrays trust, of the business person who makes or spends fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort to hunt every such person out of the position he or she has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down the criminal but remember that even in the case of crime, if it is attacked in sensational, livid and untruthful fashion, the attack may do more damage to the public mind than the cure itself.

It is because there should be no rest in the endless war against the forces of evil that the war be conducted with sanity as well as with resolution. Those with muck rakes are often indispensable to the well being of society; but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and look upward to the celestrial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things above and round about them; and if they gradually grow to feel that the world is nothing but muck, their power if usefulness is gone.

If the whole picture is painted black there remains no hue whereby to single out those for distinction from others. Such painting finally induces a kind of moral color blindness; and people affected by it come to the conclusion that no one is really black and no one is really white, but they are all gray.

In other words, they neither believe in the truth of the attack, nor in the honesty of the person who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of the accusation as of the offense; it becomes well nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath against wrongdoing or to euthusiasm for what is right; and such a mental attitude in the public gives hope to every knave, and is the despair of honest people. To assail the great and admitted evils of our political and industrial life with such crude and sweeping generalizations as to include decent people in the general condemnation means the searing of the public conscience.

There results a general attitude either of cynical belief and indifference to public corruption or else of a distrustful inability to discriminate between the good and the bad. Either attitude is fraught with untold damage to the country as a whole.

The fool who has not sense to discriminate between what is good and what is bad is well nigh as dangerous as the man who does discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is nothing more distressing to every good American, than the hard scoffing spirit which treats the allegations of dishonesty in a public person as a cause for laughter.

Such laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it denotes not merely the vacant mind, but the heart in which high emotions have been choked before they could grow to fruition. There is any amount of good in the world, and there never was a time when loftier and more disinterested work for the betterment of mankind was being done than now. The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love, courage and honesty, generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and timid, no less than a wicked thing, to blink the fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it is even worse to fail to take into account the strength of the forces that tell for good.

Hysterical sensational is the poorest weapon wherewith to fight for lasting righteousness. The people who with stern sobriety and truth assail the many evils of our time, whether in the public press, in magazines, books and other media are the leaders and allies of all engaged in the work for social and political betterment. But if they give good reason for distrust of what they say, if they chill the ardor of those who demand truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray the good cause and play into the hands of the very people against whom they are nominally at war.

This truth should be kept constantly in mind by every free people desiring to preserve the sanity and poise indispensable to the permanent success of self-government. Yet on the other hand, it is vital not to permit the spirit of sanity and self-command to degenerate into mere mental stagnation. Bad though a state of hysterical excitement is, and evil though the results are which come from the violent oscillations such excitement invariably produces yet a sodden acquiescence in evil even worse.

At this moment we are passing through a period of great unrest . . . social, political and industrial unrest.

It is of the utmost importance for out future that this should prove to be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness against life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevitable inequality of conditions, but the unrest of a resolute and eager ambition to secure the betterment of the individual and the nation.

So far as this movement of agitation throughout the country takes the form of a fierce discontent with evil, of a determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry, politics or whatever, the feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a sign of a healthy life.

If on the other hand, it turns into a mere crusade of appetite against appetite, of a contest between the brutal greed of the "have nots" and brutal greed of the "haves" then it has no significance for good, but only for evil. If it seeks to establish a line of cleavage, not along the line which divides good people from bad, but along the other line, running at right angles thereto, which divides those who are well off from those who are less well off, then it will be fraught with immeasurable hard to the body politic.

We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the person of capital than evil in a person of no capital. The wealthy person who exults because there is a failure of justice in the effort to bring some trust magnate to account for the misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse than, the so called labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul class feeling on behalf of some other labor leader, who is implicated in murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and no worse; in each case the accused is entitled to exact justice; and neither case is there need of action by others which can be construed into an expression of sympathy for crime.

It is a prime necessity that if the present unrest is to result in permanent good the emotion shall be translated into action, and that the action shall be marked by honesty, sanity and self restraint. There is mighty little good in a mere spasm of reform. The reform that counts is that which comes through steady, continuous growth; violent emotionalism leads to exhaustion.

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well won and fortunes ill won; between those gained as an incident of performing great services to the community as whole and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law honesty. Of course, no amount of charity in spreading such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.

The first requisite in the public servants who are to deal in this shape with corporations, whether as legislators or as executives, is honesty. This honesty can be no respecter of persons. There can be no such thing as unilateral honesty. The danger is not really from corrupt corporations; it springs from the corruption itself, whether exercised for or against corporations.

The eighth commandment reads, "thou shalt not steal". It does not read, "thou shalt not steal from the rich man". It does not read, "thou shalt not steal from the poor man". It reads simply and plainly, "thou shalt not steal".

No good whatever will come from that warped and mock morality which denounces the misdeeds of people of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their expense; which denounces bribery, but blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with rage if a corporation secures favor by improper methods, and merely leers with hideous mirth if the corporation is itself wronged.

The only public servant who can be trusted honestly to protect the rights of the public against the misdeeds of a corporation is that man or woman who will just as surely protect the corporation itself from wrongful aggression.

If a public individual is willing to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to those of wealth or to rich corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes he or she will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the interest of a corporation.

But in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No honesty will make a public person useful if that person is timid or foolish, if he or she is a hot-headed zealot or an impracticable visionary. As we strive for reform we find that it is not merely the case of a long uphill pull.

On the contrary, there is almost as much of breeching work as of collar work. To depend only on traces means that there will soon be a runaway and an upset.

Those of wealth who today are trying to prevent the regulation and control of their business in the interests of the public by the proper government authorities will not succeed, in checking the progress of the movement. But if they did succeed, they would find that they had sown the wind and would surely reap the whirlwind, for they would ultimately provoke the violent excesses which accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead of by steady and natural growth.

On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire existing order, those who act crookedly, whether because of sinister design or from mere puzzle headedness, those who preach destruction without proposing any substitute for what they intend to destroy, or who propose a substitute which would be far worse than the existing evils . . . all of them are the most dangerous opponents to real reform. If they get their way they will lead people into a deeper pit than any into which they could fall under the present system. If they fail to get their way they will still do incalculable harm by provoking the kind of reaction which in its revolts against the senseless evil of their teaching would enthrone more securely than ever the evils which their misguided followers believe they are attacking.

More important that aught else is the development of the broadest sympathy of person for person. The welfare of the wage worker, the welfare of the farmer, upon these depend the welfare of the entire country; their good is not to be sought in pulling down others; but their good must be the prime object of all our statesmanship.

Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all people, so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which they are made. Spiritually and ethically we must strive to bring about clean living and right thinking. We appreciate that the things of the body are important; but we appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more important.

The foundation stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the average citizen.