Roosevelt, Corporations, and Politics

The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of any commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

That’s Theodore Roosevelt, in 1910.

When I complained a couple of months ago about the Occupy movement embracing the anarchist Guy Fawkes masks, I suppose I really should have said that I would have preferred Teddy Roosevelt masks instead.

That would have made a serious statement.