Theodore Roosevelt on economic class divisions

During his first two years in office, President Theodore Roosevelt had begun to push back against Big Business. He initiated the suit against the Northern Securities railroad trust, intervened to settle the anthracite coal strike, was openly contemplating banking regulation, and had substantially wrested control of the Republican Party from Mark Hanna. On the other hand, he first encouraged and then disappointed labor unions as he sought to avoid seeming a partisan for labor or managment. On September 7, 1903, in the midst of a periodic stock and credit panic on Wall Street, he philosophized about these divisions at the Labor Day parade in Syracuse, New York. From Edmond Morris, Theodore Rex at 267:

Roosevelt was identifying with Euripides—like himself, an upper-class celebrant of middle-class virtues—as he mused at length on the vulnerability of republics that failed to preserve their social equipoise. Whichever class arose to dominated others—whether high, low, or bourgeois—always made disproportionate claims on the government: [quoting Roosevelt]

Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in those of medieval Italy, and medieval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the state. . . . . There resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty to all citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for the moment been victorious as well as that which had momentarily been defeated. The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

Uniquely, the checks and balances of American democracy worked to prevent any such lodgment. National unity was a moral challenge, rather than an economic one: [Roosevelt again]

The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship lies, not between the man of wealth who acts squarely by his fellow and the man who seeks each day's wages by that day's work, wronging no one. . . . On the contrary, [it] separates the rich man who does well from the rich man who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of bad conduct. This line of cleavage lies at right angles to any arbitrary line of division as that separating one class from another, one locality from another, of a man with a certain degree of property from those of a less degree of property.

A civilized commonwealth, enjoying "the true liberties which can only come through order," depended on square dealing between representatives of capital and labor. Just as the former had accepted a limited degree of public scrutiny, so must the latter face up to their own public duty. In any recession acerbated by strikes and union violence, "the first and severest suffering would come among those of us who are least well of at present."