The Puritan Spirit and the Regulation of Corporations

We cannot as the nation be too profoundly grateful for the fact that the Puritan has stamped his influence so deeply on our national life. We need have but scant patience with the men who now rail at the Puritan's faults. They were evident, of course, for it is equality of strong natures that their failures, like their virtues, should stand out in bold relief; but there is nothing easier than to belittle the great men of the past by dwelling only on the points where they come short of the universally recognized standards of the present. Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell, and the work they have to do. The Puritan's task was to conquer a continent; not merely to overrun it, but to settle it, to till it, to build upon it a high industrial and social life; and, while engaged in the rough work of taming the shaggy wilderness, at that very time also to lay deep the immoveable foundations of our whole American system of civil, political, and religious liberty achieved through the orderly process of law. This was the work allotted to him to do; this is the work he did; and only a master spirit among man could have done it.

We have traveled far since his day. That liberty of conscience which he demanded for himself, we now realize must be as freely accorded to others as it is resolutely insisted upon for ourselves. The splendid qualities which he left his children, we other Americans who are not of Puritan blood also claimed as our heritage. You, sons of the Puritans, and we, who are descended from races whom the Puritans would have deemed alien -- we are all Americans together. We all feel the same pride in the genesis, in the history, of our people; and therefore this shrine of Puritanism is one at which we all gathered to pay homage, no matter from what country our ancestors sprang.

We have gained some things that the Puritans had not -- we of this generation, we of the 20th century, here in this great Republic; but we are also in danger of losing certain things which the Puritan had and which we can by no matter of means afford to lose. We have gained a joy of living which he had not, and which it is a good thing for every people to have and to develop. Let us see to it that we do not lose what is more importance still; that we do not lose the Puritan's iron sense of duty, his unbending, unflinching will to do the right as it was given him to see the right. It is a good thing that life should gained in sweetness, but only provided that it does not lose in strength. Ease and rest and pleasure are good things, but only if they come as the reward of work well done, of a good fight well won, of strong effort resolutely made and crowned by high achievement. The life of mere pleasure, of mere effortless ease, is as ignoble for a nation as for an individual. The man is but a poor father who teaches his sons that ease and pleasure should be their chief objects in life; the woman who is a mere petted toy, incapable of serious purpose, shrinking from effort and duty, is more pitiable than the veriest overworked drudge. So he is but a poor leader of the people, but a poor national adviser, who seeks to make the nation in anyway subordinate effort to ease, who would teach the people not to prize as the greatest blessing the chance to do any work, no matter how hard, if it becomes their duty to do it. To the sons of the Puritans it is almost needless to say that the lesson above all others which Puritanism can teach this nation is the all importance of the resolute performance of duty. If we are men we will past by with contemptuous disdain alike the advisers who would seek to lead us into the paths of ignoble ease and those who would teach us to admire successful wrong-doing. Our ideas should be high, and yet they should be capable of achievement in practical fashion; and we are as little to be excused if we permit our ideas to be tainted with what is sordid and mean and base, as if we allow our power of achievement to atrophy and become either incapable of effort or capable only of such a fantastic effort as to accomplish nothing of permanent good. The true doctrine to preach to this nation, as to the individuals composing this nation, is not the life of ease, but the life of effort. If it were in my power to promise the people of this land anything, I would not promised them pleasure. I would promised them that stern happiness which comes from the sense of having done in practical fashion a difficult work which was worth doing.

The Puritan owed his extraordinary success in subduing this continent and making it the foundations for a social life of ordered liberty primarily to the fact that he combined in a very remarkable degree both the power of individual initiative, of individual self-help, and a power of acting in combination with his fellows; and furthermore he joined to a high heart that shrewd common sense that saves a man from the besetting sins of the visionary and the doctrinaire. He was stout-hearted and hard-headed. He had lofty purposes, but he had practical good sense, too. He could hold his own in the rough workaday world without clamorous insistence upon being helped by others, and yet he could combined with others whenever it became necessary to do the job which could not be as well done by any one man individually.

These were the qualities which enabled him to do his work, they are the very qualities which we must show in doing our own work today. There is no use in our coming here to pay homage to the men who founded this nation unless we first of all come in the spirit of trying to do our work today as they did their work in the yesterdays that have vanished. The problems shift from generation to generation, but the spirit in which they must be approached, if they are to be successfully solved remains the same. The Puritan tamed wilderness, and built up a free government on the stump-dotted clearings amid the primeval forest. His descendants must try to shape the life of a complex industrial civilization by new devices, and new methods, so as to achieve in the end the same results of justice and fair dealing toward all. He cast aside nothing old merely for the sake of innovation, yet he did not hesitate to adopt anything new that would serve his purpose. When he planted his commonwealths on this rugged post he faced wholly new conditions and he had to devise new methods of meeting them. So we are today are faced with wholly new conditions in our social and industrial life. We should certainly not adopt any new scheme for grappling with them merely because it is new and untried; but we cannot afford to shrink from grappling with them because they can only be grappled with by some new scheme.

The Puritan was no Laodicean, no laissez-faire theorists. When he saw conduct which was in violation of his rights -- of the rights of man, the rights of God, as he understood them -- he attempted to regulate such conduct with instant, unquestioning promptness and effectiveness. If there was no other way to secure conformity with the rule of right, then he smote down the transgressor with the iron of his wrath. The spirit of the Puritan was a spirit which never shrink from regulation of conduct if such regulation was necessary for the public weal; and this is the spirit which we must show today whenever it is necessary.

The utterly changed conditions of our national life necessitate changes in certain of our laws, of our governmental methods. In dealing with any totally new set of conditions there must at the outset be hesitation and experiment. Such has been our experience in dealing with the enormous concentration of capital employed in interstate business. Not only the legislatures but the courts and the people need gradually to be educated so that they may see what the real wrongs are and what the real remedies. Almost every big business concern is engaged in interstate commerce, and such a concern must not be allowed by a dexterous shifting of position, as has been too often the case in the past, to escape thereby all responsibility either to State or nation. The American people became firmly convinced of the need of control over these great aggregations of capital, especially where they had a monopolistic tendency, before they became quite clear as to the proper way of achieving the control. Through their representatives in Congress they tried two remedies, which were to a large degree, at least as interpreted by the courts, contradictory. On the one hand under the antitrust law the effort was made to prohibit all combination, whether it was or was not hurtful or beneficial to the public. On the other hand, through the interstate commerce law a beginning was made in exercising such supervision and control over other combinations as to prevent their doing anything harmful to the body politics. The first law, the so-called Sherman law, has filled a useful place, for it bridges over the transition period until the American people shall definitely make up its mind that it will exercise over the great corporations that the thoroughgoing and radical control which it is certain ultimately to find necessary. The principle of the Sherman law, so far as it prohibits combinations which, whether because of their extent or of their character, are harmful to the public, must always be preserved. Ultimately, and I hope with reasonable speed, the National Government must pass laws which, while increasing the supervisory and regulatory power of the government, will also permit such useful combinations as are made with absolute openness and as the representatives of the government may previously approved. But it will not be possible to permit such combinations save as the second stage in a course of proceedings of which the first stage must be the exercise of a far more complete control by the National Government.

In dealing with those who stand against the antitrust and interstate commerce laws the Department of Justice has to encounter many and great difficulties. Often men who have been guilty of violating these laws have really acted in criminal fashion, and if possible should be proceeded against criminally; and therefore it is advisable that there should be up a clause in these laws providing for such criminal action and for punishment by imprisonment as well as by fine. But, as it is well known, in a criminal action the law is strictly construed in favor of the defendant, and in our country, at least, both judge and jury are far more inclined to consider his rights then they are the interests of the general public; while in addition it always true that a man's general practices may be so bad that a civil action will lie when it may not be possible to convict him of any one criminal act. There are unfortunately a certain number of our fellow countrymen who seem to accept that unless the man can be proven guilty of some particular crime he shall be counted a good citizen, no matter how infamous the life he has led, no matter how pernicious his doctrines or his practices. This is the view announced from time to time with clamorous insistence, now by a group of predatory capitalists, now by a group of sinister anarchistic leaders and agitators, whenever a special champion of either class, no matter how evil his general life, is acquitted of one specific crime. Such a view is wicked whether applied to capitalists or labor leader, to rich man or poor man. (And, by the way, I take this opportunity of stating that all I have said in the past as to desirable and undesirable citizens remains true, and I stand by it.)

We have to take this feeling into account when we are debating whether it is possible to get a conviction in a criminal proceeding against some rich trust magnate, many of whose actions are severely to be condemned from the moral and social standpoint, but no one of whose actions seem clearly to establish such technical guilt as will ensure a conviction. As a matter of expediency, in enforcing the law against a great corporation, we have continually to weigh the arguments pro and con as to whether a prosecution can successfully be entered into, and as to whether we can be successful in a criminal action against the chief individuals in the corporation, and if not, whether we can at least be successful in a civil action against the corporation itself. Any effective action on the part of the government is always objected to, as a matter of course, by the wrong-doers, by the beneficiaries of the wrong-doers, and by their champions; and often one of the most effective ways of attacking the action of the government is by objecting to practical action upon the ground that it does not go far enough. One of the favorite devices of those who are really striving to prevent the enforcement of these laws is to clamor for action of such severity that it cannot be undertaken because it will be certain to failed if try. An instance of this is the demand often made for criminal prosecutions where such prosecutions would be certain to fail. We have found by actual experience that a jury which will gladly punish the corporation by fine, for instance, will acquit the individual members of the corporation if we proceed against them criminally because of the very things which the Corporation which they direct and controller has been. In a recent case against the Licorice Trust we indicted and tried the two corporations and their respective presidents. The contracts and other transactions establishing the guilt of the corporations were made through, and so far as they were in writing were signed by, the two presidents. Yet the jury convicted the two corporations and acquitted the two men. Both verdicts could not possibly have been correct; but apparently the average juryman wishes to see trusts broken up, and is quite ready to fine the corporation itself; but it is very reluctant to find the facts "proven beyond the reasonable doubt" when it comes to sending to jail a reputable member of the business community for doing what the business community has unhappily grown to recognize as well-nigh normal in business. Moreover, under the necessary technicalities of criminal proceedings, often the only man who can be reached criminally will be some subordinate who is not the real guilty party at all.

Many men of large wealth have been guilty of conduct which from the moral standpoint is criminal, and their misdeeds are to a peculiar degree reprehensive, because those committing them have no excuse of want, of poverty, of weakness and ignorance to offer as partial atonement. When in addition to moral responsibility these men have a legal responsibility which can be proved so as to impress a judge and jury, then the department will strain every nerve to reach them criminally. Where this is impossible, then it will take whatever action will be the most effective under the actual conditions.

In the last six years we have shown that there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; a purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works inequity when are acting in the interests of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows; and we are strengthening the hands of those who propose fearlessly to defend property against all unjust attacks. No individual, no corporation, obeying the law has anything to hear from this Administration.

During the present trouble with the stock market I have, of course, received countless requests and suggestions, public and private, that I should say or do something to ease the situation. There is a worldwide financial disturbance; it is felt in the bourses of Paris and Berlin; and British consuls are lower than for a generation, and British railroad securities have also depreciated. On the New York Stock Exchange the disturbance has been particularly severe. Most of it I believe to be due to matters not particular to the United States, and most of the remainder to matters wholly unconnected with any governmental action; but it may well be that the determination of the government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waiver) to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of the policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil doing. That they have misled many good people into believing that there should be such reversal of policy is possible. If so I am sorry; but it will not alter my attitude. Once for all let me say that so far as I am concerned, and for the 18 months of my presidency that remain, there will be no change in the policy we have steadily pursued, no let up in the effort to secure the honest observance of the law; for I regard this contest as to determine who shall rule this free country -- the people through their government agents, and a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them particularly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization. I wish there to be no mistake on this point; it is idle to ask me not to prosecute criminals, rich or poor. But I desire no less emphatically to have it understood that we have sanctioned and will sanction no action of the vindictive type, and above all no action which shall inflict great and unmerited suffering upon innocent stockholders or upon the public as a whole. Our purpose is to act with the minimum of harshness compatible with attaining our ends. In the man of great wealth who has earned his wealth honestly and uses it wisely we recognize a good citizen of the best type, worthy of all praise and respect. Business can be done under modern conditions only through corporations, and our purpose is to heartily favor the corporations that do well. The Administration appreciates that liberal but honest profits for legitimate promoting, good salaries, ample salaries, for able and upright management, and generous dividends for capital employed either in founding or continuing wholesome business ventures, are the factors necessary for successful corporate activity and therefore for generally prosperous business conditions. All these are compatible with fair dealing as between man and man and rigid obedience to the law. Our aim is to help every honest man, every honest corporation, and our policy means in its ultimate analysis a healthy and prosperous expansion of the business activities of honest businessmen and honest corporations.

Source: Works, National Edition, 1926, Vol. 16