Teddy Roosevelt’s Warning to Time Magazine

Not wanting to go the way of its former print rival, Newsweek, it is no surprise that Time magazine is looking for ways to generate buzz. Thus the provocative current cover story: “The Child Free Life: When Having It All Means Not Having Children.” I read the article while on vacation. Vacation with my family—including seven grandchildren, ironic, huh?

I immediately remembered reading something Theodore Roosevelt said, directly on point, in a famous speech more than a century ago—on April 23, 1910. I am aware that most American conservatives find little in the political ideas by Theodore Roosevelt worth salvaging, much less translating into present day policy. But he nailed it that day, not only by giving us his famous quote about “The Man in the Arena,” but also with something he said about “child free living.” It was part of a major address delivered at The University of Paris (The Sorbonne) titled “Citizenship In A Republic.”

Roosevelt left the White House in 1909 and was at the pinnacle of his renown a year later when he toured Europe. One journalist wrote at the time, “When he appears, the windows shake for three miles around. He has the gift, nay the genius of being sensational.” TR addressed a massive audience in the school’s grand amphitheater. The crowd included academicians, “ministers in court dress, army and navy officers in full uniform, nine hundred students,” and another 2,000 “ticket holders.”

The former president was introduced that day as “the greatest voice of the New World.” And hiding in the shadows of his remembered-as-the-man-in-the-arena-speech is a long since forgotten rhetorical rebuke to the ideas promoted in the current issue of Time:

Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and women shall be father and mother of healthy children so that the [human] race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.

That’s right. Theodore Roosevelt told the French that they needed to keep having babies.

At the time of Roosevelt’s speech, France was a major world power. Today—not so much. There is enough blame for such decline in global influence to go around, but the increased secularism of Europe, with its penchant for socialized everything, has certainly played a role.

Now more than 100 years later, there is an even greater threat to their cherished way of life. If only the French today would rediscover Teddy’s advice and reverse the birthrate trend—they might have a fighting chance. But such is the mindset of secularism, it is all about self and “fulfillment.” Issues of family, not to mention progeny are secondary, if thought about at all. Marriage is deferred—even eschewed. Children are planned—or better, planned around. And over time the birth rate in Europe has fallen far short of what is needed to keep up with the various demands of the future. In other words, the nations are aging. There are fewer children, yet more grandparents—a trend that will continue and accelerate.

It takes a fertility rate of 2.1 births per woman to keep a nation’s population stable. The United States is drifting away from that. Canada has a rate of 1.48 and Europe as a whole weighs in at 1.38. What this means is that the money will run out, with not enough wage-earners at the bottom to support an older generation’s “entitlements.”

But even beyond that, the situation in France also reminds us of the opportunistic threat of Islamism. It is just a matter of time before critical mass is reached and formerly great bastions of democratic republicanism morph into caliphates. In the United Kingdom the Muslim population is growing 10 times faster than the rest of society. In fact, all across Western Europe it’s the same. The cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam are on track to have Muslim majority populations in a decade or two. A T-shirt that can be seen on occasion in Stockholm reads: “2030—Then We Take Over.”

A few years ago, Britain’s chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, decried Europe’s falling birthrate, blaming it on “a culture of consumerism and instant gratification.” “Europe is dying,” he said, “we are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.”

The Rabbi was right, and so was Teddy.

Harding Dies–Coolidge Takes Charge

[My article appears at TOWNHALL.COM today]

Ninety years ago today, on August 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding died at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, California. It was sudden, shocking, and has been fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since. His wife, Florence—described derisively by some as “The Duchess”—didn’t allow an autopsy, so we’ll never know exactly what caused the demise of the 29^th President of the United States.  It might have been congestive heart failure, or food poisoning, or even something more sinister.

President Harding’s Funeral

Seen in retrospect, through the prism of the scandals associated with his White House tenure, Harding is usually ranked well toward the bottom of the list of presidents.  In reality, he was a very popular and effective leader. But he was cursed with cronies—men who ensured that his name would forever be associated with political corruption. What is sometimes forgotten about Harding is that he also had some effective public servants on his team, men such as Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover, and above all, Vice President Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Harding.

Historians tend to bunch the three Republican presidents of the 1920s – Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover – together in a way suggesting they were identical triplets separated at birth.  But there were many differences – some subtle, some not so much.

Herbert Hoover, all of his speechifying about “individualism” notwithstanding, was not the fiscal conservative many today make him out to be. Mr. Hoover had a strong interventionist streak in his personality.  So, in many ways, he helped to turn a recession into the Great Depression.  Ironically, when closely examined, Herbert Hoover’s approach to economics had more in common with his successor than it did with the two men preceding him in the White House.  

What is usually missed about Harding, though, is how effective he was on the issue of the economy.  When he assumed the presidency in March of 1921, he inherited a mess.  Woodrow Wilson had expanded the role and size of government dramatically, incurred a $25 billion dollar debt, and cracked down on political opponents – even imprisoning some (socialist activist Eugene V. Debs, etc.). 

In fact, the economic problems in the 1920-1921 Depression were actually worse in many ways than the Great Depression a decade later.  But that downturn didn’t last as long – thankfully.  Warren Harding cut federal spending and lowered taxes.  And in less than two years the number of unemployed in the country fell from 4.9 million to 2.8 million, en route to a rate of 1.8 per cent by 1926 under his successor, Mr. Coolidge.

Oh – and Harding set the political prisoners free, even inviting Debs to the White House.  He was a classier act than many now remember.   

The night Harding died, Coolidge was at his family home in Vermont. The house had no electricity or telephone, so word came to the vice president via messenger. He got up from bed and dressed. Then he knelt beside his bed and prayed, after which he went downstairs where his father, a notary public, administered the presidential oath to him.

By the time Calvin Coolidge became president, the country was on its way to enjoying some great years of prosperity. He was a fiscal conservative who tried his best to stay out of the way.  He knew that the government functioned best as a referee – not as a participant in the economic game – or as a team owner. 

Amity Shlaes has written the definitive biography of the man. It’s called, simply, Coolidge. It came out earlier this year, and I interviewed her on the radio about the book and the man.

After he was elected in his own right the next year, he told the nation in his March 4, 1925 inaugural address:

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves.  I want them to have the rewards of their own industry.  That is the chief meaning of freedom.  Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very distinct curtailment of our liberty.

Then on yet another August 2^nd, this one in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge had breakfast in the White House residence with his wife, Grace, and remarked to her “I have been president four years today.”  It was one of those quick, concise, directly-to-the-point sentences she had been used to hearing since they met in 1905.  It was also something the American people were familiar with, having nicknamed the 30^th president “Silent Cal.”  

He had a 9:00 meeting with reporters in his office that morning.  Before fielding a few questions, he told those gathered: “If the conference will return at 12:00, I may have a further statement to make.”  Curious, but compliant, in those long-since-gone days of semi-civility between presidents and the press, the journalists found their way back at noon. 

An hour or so before that conference encore, Coolidge took a pencil and wrote a message on a piece of paper.  He handed it to his secretary with the instruction to take it to his stenographer and have him make several copies – enough for the newsmen who would be at the 12:00 meeting.  Ever the frugal man, he suggested that the brief statement could be copied several times on the same sheet, thus only using a few sheets of paper.  He told the secretary not to give the note to the stenographer, though, until about 11:50 a.m. 

He really wanted to manage this story.

He asked for the pages to be brought to him uncut and before the reporters were admitted to the office, he took a pair of scissors and cut the paper into smaller slips.  When he was just about ready, he told his secretary: “I am going to hand these out myself; I am going to give them to the newspapermen, without comment, from this side of the desk.  I want you to stand at the door and not permit anyone to leave until each of them has a slip, so that they may have an even chance.”

An “even chance” at a big scoop, that is.

The handwritten note from the president said: “I do not choose to run for president in nineteen twenty-eight.”  Though the now classic Broadway play (made into several film versions), The Front Page, was yet a year away from being published and produced, it comes to mind with the image of dozens of reporters rushing to find telephones. 

Calvin Coolidge could have been re-elected if he had wanted the job for another term.  His anointed successor, Herbert Hoover, won big in 1928, though it is clear that Coolidge was less-than-enthusiastic about the “Great Engineer.”  It is one of those curious “what ifs” of history – would Coolidge have dealt with the coming of the Great Depression better than his successor?

His decision not to run in 1928 – at the height of his popularity – puzzled many.  But Coolidge understood the nature of leadership, and its seductions.  He explained it this way:

It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers.They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness.They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation, which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless or arrogant.

Of course, it can never be proven, but I suspect that had Calvin Coolidge decided to run again in 1928, he might have responded to the initial shockwaves of 1929-1930 differently than Hoover.  And maybe, just maybe, the Great Depression would not have lasted so long.  And maybe, just maybe, people who should know better these days would stop trying the same old failed “interventionist” tactics that never really worked backed then.

At any rate, Mr. Coolidge died suddenly on January 5, 1933, after Hoover had been badly beaten by Franklin Roosevelt.  He did not live to see what a prolonged depression looked like, but I suspect that he would have ventured an opinion or two.

His words would have been brief and directly on point.