Given my understanding of local political culture, the people I saw last Saturday afternoon were not the people I would have expected to see at a speech by a Republican in an election year.
The speaker wasn’t anyone running for office this year, though. He was Theodore Roosevelt, 26th president of the United States, as portrayed by Clay Jenkinson, a humanities scholar better known for his impersonation of Thomas Jefferson. Clay also impersonates physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and explorers Meriwether Lewis and John Wesley Powell.
Like many presidents from Ulysses S. Grant through Harry S. Truman, in the days when candidates traveled by rail and the trains stopped in Salida, the real Theodore Roosevelt spoke here.
On May 8, 1905, he told a crowd he was enjoying his three-week vacation (mostly a hunting trip) in Colorado. He was pleased “to see the care you are taking with our schools in the education of the children,” and he praised Civil War vets who were “able to preserve the Union.”
As you can tell, that was well before the Republican Party had turned into the Southern party. Roosevelt was well-liked in Colorado. In 1904, he was the only Republican to carry the state between Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and Warren G. Harding in 1920. In the other elections, either a Democrat or a Populist won Colorado’s electoral votes.
There are other reasons, aside from opposing secession and supporting education, that Theodore Roosevelt would not fit well into the modern Republican Party. For instance, the current GOP rails against restoring higher income-tax rates as the party denounces the inheritance tax (known as the “death tax” in Republican dialect).
And here’s Roosevelt: “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. Therefore, 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, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.”
Corporate spending in elections? Our Supreme Court may approve, but Roosevelt observed “there can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor easy task, but it can be done.”
Further, “the existing concentration of vast wealth under a corporate system, unguarded and uncontrolled by the Nation, has placed in the hands of a few men enormous, secret, irresponsible power over the daily life of the citizen — a power insufferable in a free Government and certain of abuse.”
Many modern Republicans take issue with unemployment compensation, Social Security and health-care reform. Roosevelt called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use.”
Roosevelt became president in 1901 following the assassination of William McKinley. He had been a reform governor of New York, where the party bosses wanted to get him out of the way — so they put him up for vice president. Running on his own in 1904, Roosevelt won in a landslide.
But he was not without his critics. The Republican speaker of the House, Joseph Cannon, observed that Roosevelt had “no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.”
The same might be said of many presidents, alas. But it still seems sad that they don’t make Republicans like Roosevelt anymore.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
