The Last Patrician (37 page)

Authors: Michael Knox Beran

BOOK: The Last Patrician

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47
.âStimson's attitude toward the New Deal is not easily categorized. Certainly he was committed to the strain of progressive thought out of which the New Deal and the welfare state arose. He was brought into public life by Theodore Roosevelt, he praised Roosevelt's “New Nationalism,” and he supported the paternalist state that the “New Nationalism” envisioned. See Bundy and Stimson,
On Active Service,
p. 22: “Stimson wrote congratulating his friend and leader on the famous Osawatomie speech, the most terrifying of the lot” of “New Nationalism” speeches that TR delivered in 1910. (The Osawatomie speech was the embodiment of the “intensifying paternalistic nationalism” that TR had come to embrace. Hofstadter,
APT,
p. 301. In his blanket denunciation of industrial combinations, Roosevelt made no exception even for those combinations that create efficiency and thereby benefit consumers; he argued that “the way out” lay not in using the antitrust laws to prevent undesirable combinations, but rather in government
“completely controlling”
all industrial combinations “in the interest of the public welfare.” In a subsequent statement Roosevelt elaborated his position and declared that Americans ought to “abandon definitely the
laissez-faire
theory of political economy, and fearlessly champion a system of increased Governmental controlÂ â¦ the only way to meet a billion-dollar corporation is by invoking the protection of a hundred-billion dollar government,” one that was no doubt to be staffed by Enlightened experts possessed of a wisdom vastly superior to that of the marketplace.) In their book Stimson and McGeorge Bundy made it clear that Stimson sympathized not with the populist solutions of Progressive politics (the direct election of Senators, the direct primary contest), but with the paternalist solutions. “The true remedy for American misgovernment,” Stimson believed, “would lie, then, in exactly the opposite direction from that indicated by the advocates of direct democracy. The elected officials must have more power, not less.” Bundy and Stimson,
On Active Service,
p. 58. Stimson believed that Congress should establish “an administrative bureau for the permanent, continuous, and watchful oversight of corporate business engaged in interstate commerce.” Bundy and Stimson,
On Active Service,
p. 47. In his perceptive biography of Stimson, Elting Morison observed that Stimson and his peers, in their quest for a solution to the nation's problems, “turned instinctively to the state.â¦ [T]hey discussed the possibility of enlarging the sphere of government ownership, considered the wisdom of fixing prices by government action and evenÂ â¦ examined tentatively the methods of what they called âcollectivization.' Before the War, none of these procedures was introduced in any systematic way though the power of the central government to regulate the economy was steadily increased.” Morison,
Turmoil and Tradition,
pp. 122, 125.
Â Â Â Â Although he remained a Republican, Stimson had little sympathy for Ogden Mills's harshly antagonistic attitude toward FDR. See Morison,
Turmoil and Tradition,
p. 458. And if Stimson was critical of the heavy-handed approach to regulation embodied in legislation like the Securities Act of 1933, in time he reconciled himself to most of the New Deal policies, reconciled himself even to the TVA, the state-sponsored monopoly that six decades after its creation continues to thwart and bully competitors who seek to bring cheaper power to the South. See John J. Fialka, “New Deal Undone: Using Savvy Tactics, Bristol, Va., Unplugs from a Federal Utility: Town Cuts Its Electric Bill By Standing Up to TVA as Others Watch in Envy,”
The Wall Street Journal,
May 27, 1997, p. A1. Although Stimson initially opposed the TVA, by 1947 he was “prepared to admitâperhaps even to claimâthat which he had denied in 1935, that the principle of TVA, as an adventure in the effective use of national resources, was a direct outgrowth of the position he and other conservationists had taken back in 1912.” Bundy and Stimson,
On Active Service,
pp. 43â44.
Â Â Â Â Stimson's contribution to the national security state and the American empire is less ambiguous than his relation to the New Deal. Although he himself retired from public life prior to the advent of the Cold War, the former governor general of the Philippines groomed many of the leading statesmen of the generation that built and administered the postwar American empire. He was their model, and many of them said that, throughout their public careers, they tried to approach problems the way Colonel Stimson would have approached them. McCloy, Lovett, Forrestal, and McGeorge Bundy were all directly influenced by Stimson's ideas; countless other statesmen were indirectly influenced by them.

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