Recall that TR made the following in Osawatomie, Kansas on
August 31, 1910:
Nothing is more true than that
excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered
by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of
the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates
of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their
claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is
secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who
rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general
right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public
welfare may require it.
The New Nationalism, inspired by Croly, a founder of the
Progressive The New Republic, assisted TR in this speech. TR truly
believed that property rights were no longer there, they were destroyed by his
contention that the community can regulate them, whoever the
"community" is, and for TR it was him and his followers. This was a
decade before Lenin, before Stalin, this was the basis of the election of 1912.
Now a hundred years later we reflect on the same issues as
the case before the Supreme Court in many ways resonates with the philosophy of
TR. Just a thought!
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