Kadner: Class warfare politics nothing new in America

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TEDDY ROOSEVELT

Updated: February 27, 2012 9:53AM

As the president said, “No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered — not gambling in stocks but service rendered.”

To emphasize his point, the president continued: “The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.

“There, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective — a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes.”

The president was not Barack Obama speaking on the state of the union this week, but Theodore Roosevelt speaking more than 100 years ago.

Pundits today talk about class warfare as though it is something new and inherently dangerous. But class warfare has existed throughout this nation’s history.

Roosevelt is generally considered one of our greatest presidents because he embodied so many qualities that we like to think of as American.

He overcame a childhood illness, purchased a cattle ranch in the badlands of Dakota and became a leader of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War. He was a big-game hunter but also a naturalist and conservationist who wrote 26 scholarly books.

He supported unions, broke up corporate trusts and turned on his own political party when he thought it was acting against the interests of the people.

He was a man of contradictions, a flip-flopper some might call him today, who understood better than most the challenges facing this country.

In his famous Square Deal speech, he said: “In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.

“Again and again, the republics of ancient Greece, in those of medieval Italy and medieval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and whenever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the state.

“In the final result, it mattered not one whit whether the movement was in favor of one class or of another.

“The outcome was equally fatal, whether the country fell in the hands of a wealthy oligarchy which exploited the poor or whether it fell under the domination of a turbulent mob which plundered the rich.

“In both cases, there resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and final complete loss of liberty to all citizens — destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for the moment been victorious as well at that which had momentarily been defeated.

“The death-knell of the Republic,” Roosevelt said, “had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interest as opposed to the interest of others.”

Americans in general aren’t very interested in history. Most seem to believe that whatever is happening now is happening for the first time.

On my way to researching what presidents have said about class warfare, I came upon a letter that Franklin Roosevelt wrote to a congressional committee during World War II.

“Discrepancies between low personal incomes and very high personal incomes should be lessened; and I therefore believe that in time of this grave national danger, when all excess income should go to win the war, no American citizen ought to have a net income, after he has paid taxes, of more than $25,000 a year.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s “supertax,” a 100 percent tax on earnings of more than $25,000 a year, didn’t pass Congress.

Imagine the outrage if President Obama today tried to impose such a supertax to rid the country of the terrible threat posed by the growing national debt.

Clashes for control of the government between the very rich and the working poor are inevitable. The debate over financial equality is essential to the health of the nation.

Quoting Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt said there are some respects in which men are obviously not equal.

But Roosevelt insisted that there should be an equality of self-respect and of mutual respect, and at least an approximate equality in the conditions under which a man obtains the chance “to show the stuff that is in him when compared to his fellows.”