The Real Roosevelt.(1907)

From the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Seen Through American Eyes.

There is not a more pliant tool of the robber classes on earth to-day than Roosevelt. He has made a great splurge about the trusts, probably with their knowledge and consent. The trusts know that it is necessary to do something to fool the people again, and so the various fake laws have been enacted, not one of which will in any manner interfere with the robbing process. None of these laws will be of any benefit to labor or enable the toiler to get a job without begging for it. They are enacted for the sole purpose of fooling the people into the belief that Roosevelt is the friend of the workers.

Every outrage perpetrated upon the toilers since Roosevelt has been President, has had his hearty approval and the perpetrators have been rewarded by Roosevelt with office and emoluments. He looked on while 500 American citizens were dragged from their homes at night and deported from their State without the least shadow of law or authority, and their families left to starve. He has appointed to office some of the vilest criminals of the country, and made a man member of his Cabinet who confessed that he had violated the interstate law every day for ten years, he is the sworn enemy of union labor, having destroyed every vestige of unionism in the government service and has made the government printing office an open shop.

In the pretended “reform” laws passed by the late session of Congress at Roosevelt’s suggestion, every provision of the law will be for the benefit of the trusts, and will in no way help the people to ward off robbery and oppression. In the meat inspection law, the government pays enough every year to build the finest kind of sanitary packing houses to kill and pack all the meat of the country. This is a gracious gift of the people’s money of three millions per year to the Beef Trust, and yet some people actually believe that the law was enacted for the people.

The same is true with the rate bill. Every provision is for the further enrichment of the railways, and not a single provision that will in any way curb the greed of the Railway Trust or make charges reasonable. The clause giving the federal courts the right of review absolutely abrogates any benefit that otherwise might have accrued to the people. No shipper, unless he be a millionaire, could afford to institute proceedings to regulate rates, and then it would take a lifetime to carry the case through the various courts. The railways got all they wanted in the law, the right to review for their tools whose seats were bought for them upon the federal bench. Every man appointed to the federal bench in the past twenty years has been so appointed at the dictates of the corporations. These men are there to serve their masters, and the people need look for no relief from them.

A good specimen of these corporation tools is given in ex-Senator Quarles of Washington. This villain was repudiated by the overwhelming condemnation of the people of his own State, and, immediately after he is appointed by Roosevelt to the Circuit Court of the same State, there to have in his hands the lives, liberty and property of the same men and women who had set upon him the seal of their condemnation. And this is “Teddy, the Trust Buster.”

What a h—l of a defender the people have in the White House.

About the choicest claim, however, of Mr. Lewis, is that Roosevelt was boosted into the White House “against black-flag money.” For whom was the half-million of insurance money stolen from the widows and orphans of the great life insurance companies ? Every dollar of it spent for Roovevelt’s election. If he was not elected by “black-flag” money, then no President ever was.

The Interstate Commerce law formerly had imprisonment as one of the penalties of its violation. When evidence began to be produced of the flagrant violation of this law by the railways, at the head of whom was Paul Morton, a member of the Cabinet, Steve Elkins introduced a bill repealing the imprisonment clause. The bill passed both houses of Congress and ROOSEVELT SIGNED IT. Rebating is the most dastardly of crimes. It is the crime by which Rockefeller has made his millions, from the sweat and blood of the people, and Roosevelt deliberately conspired to repeal the only penalty fort this crime which the robbers care a fig for.

—Deadwood Lantern