(This is in response to a comment from S. T. Karnick.)

Jim Powell decided to reassess Teddy Roosevelt‘s historical reputation in an article in The Freeman Online.

Past presidents and potential future ones like TR a lot:

Theodore Roosevelt has been known as “the Good Roosevelt,” “the Republican Roosevelt,” and “the conservative Roosevelt,” as distinguished from his fifth cousin Franklin, who’s credited with ushering in modern American big government.

Yet promoters of big government have long recognized TR as one of their own.

Biographer Frank Freidel wrote that “While at Groton [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] first fell under the spell of his remote cousin Theodore Roosevelt. . . . Theodore Roosevelt believed in using to the utmost the constitutional power of the president. . . . This strong use of government was for the most part appealing to Franklin.” During the Great Depression, FDR promoted “a program emphasizing national planning in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt.” Freidel noted that “in words reminiscent of Theodore Roosevelt, FDR declared ‘the duty rests upon the Government to restrict incomes by very high taxes.’”

Historian Eric F. Goldman said that Lyndon Johnson, who simultaneously launched huge domestic entitlement spending programs and escalated the undeclared Vietnam War, admired “the hyperactive White House of Theodore Roosevelt.” LBJ reportedly remarked, “Whenever I pictured Teddy Roosevelt, I saw him running or riding, always moving, his fists clenched, his eyes glaring, speaking out.”

Richard M. Nixon, who dramatically expanded federal regulation of the economy, liked Theodore Roosevelt “because of his great dynamic drive and ability to mobilize a young country.”

In recent years, influential Republicans like Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, and John McCain have gushed with admiration for TR.

What was there about Teddy that would make big government advocates seek to emulate him?

For starters, TR reinterpreted the Constitution to permit a vast expansion of executive power. “Congress, he felt, must obey the president,” noted biographer Henry Pringle.

Then there’s his record of overseas interventionism:

Theodore Roosevelt, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, believed that “we should regard with contempt and loathing the Americans . . . crying on behalf of peace, peace, when there ought not to be peace.” He warned against “the Menace of Peace.” . . . . As president, Roosevelt reversed the traditional U.S. foreign policy of refraining from intervention in the affairs of other nations. Intervention had been the exception, but he began to make it the rule.

For a while he was hot for a war with Canada, and practically seized the land for the future Panama Canal from Colombia.

He also expanded the government’s bureaucracy when it suited him:

. . . despite TR’s reputation as a foe of private monopolies, he approved unfair government practices that squeezed out private dam builders and helped the Bureau of Reclamation gain a dam-building monopoly. The Bureau of Reclamation became a vast federal bureaucracy with some 600 dams and reservoirs in 17 western states.

Teddy showed his lack of discernment by heeding doubtful suggestions from his advisors:

Theodore Roosevelt challenged the prevailing American view that land-use decisions are best made by private individuals who have a stake in improving the value of their property. He throttled the privatization of land that had been going on for more than a century. In 1905 TR transferred millions of acres of government land from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture and established the U. S. Forest Service to manage it.

It’s because he substantially limited privatization that today national forests account for about 20 percent of the land in the 11 westernmost states of the lower 48. Altogether, the federal government controls about a third of the land in the United States.

By federalizing land through the parks system, TR unintentionally did more damage to the environment rather than less.

As for Teddy’s reputation as a “trust-buster”:

. . . Roosevelt demonized businessmen as “malefactors of great wealth,” a phrase later used by his cousin during his anti-business crusades. TR’s attorney general, Philander Knox, filed lawsuits to break up private companies, starting in 1902 with Northern Securities (a railroad holding company). The most famous antitrust lawsuits resulted in the breakup of American Tobacco Company and the Standard Oil Company in 1911, after Roosevelt left office.

But Roosevelt, like his cousin and the current occupant of the White House, chose to ignore economic reality:

. . . for more than two decades output had been expanding and prices had been falling in the American economy—the opposite of what one would expect with a lot of monopolies. Despite Roosevelt’s allegations about railroad monopolies (which were largely built with government subsidies), in the previous half-century railroad mileage in the United States had expanded more than 250-fold to 258,784 miles, and railroad rates were falling. Cheaper railroad rates undermined local monopolies by giving people the choice of buying economically priced goods from far away. Regardless, TR signed the Hepburn and Elkins acts, which strengthened the Interstate Commerce Commission’s power to control competition by regulating railroad rates.

Historian Gabriel Kolko observed, “The dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this [twentieth] century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible competitive trends under control.” (Kolko went on to establish that the progressive “reforms of the early twentieth century were backed by big business as a way to restrain competition and protect market share.”)

Heeding bad advice, being too impulsive for the gravitas of his office, and possibly dwelling in the pockets of anti-free market special interests, Teddy Roosevelt can hardly be regarded as a constitutionalist president.

More details can be found in Jim Powell’s article, “Theodore Roosevelt, Big-Government Man”.