A fine Republican sentiment

From Theodore Roosevelt’s speech at the dedication of the new House Office Building on April 14, 1906, as quoted by Edmond Morris in Theodore Rex at 442: 

It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business. . . .  No amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them.  As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we should ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount, either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon the death of any individual—a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual.

It's hard to imagine any President since Lyndon Johnson endorsing this idea. Oddly, this part of Roosevelt's speech was hardly noticed at the time because it seemed almost mild in the context of a very strong progressive movement led by William Jennings Bryan, Robert M. LaFollette, et al., the great media attention to the evil doings of corporate America (remember the muckrakers), and the perceived control that the uber-capitalists of the time had over State and federal governments.