ZadekpediaTeddy Roosevelt enters The Bob Zadek Show not as a biographical subject but as a period marker: the point at which, in several guests’ telling, American expectations of the federal government changed direction. The episodes span 2010 to 2022 and put Roosevelt to different uses — as the origin of a century of federal problem-solving, as the first twentieth-century campaigner on court packing, and as a usable ancestor for a progressive conservatism. No excerpt discusses his presidency, his elections, or any specific measure he signed.
The expansion of the administrative state
In an October 2010 episode, Reason editor Matt Welch told Bob Zadek that the country’s habit of looking to the federal government to solve any and all perceived problems had gone especially crazy over the previous hundred years, basically beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and spreading since then. Welch described the level of government involvement in people’s lives as scandalous in the 20s and said it doubled or tripled over the following two decades, citing a Department of Agriculture with 100,000 employees and a president discussing steroids in professional baseball in a State of the Union address A Libertarian Plan (2010). Zadek responded that 100,000 employees was probably more than the number of farmers in the country, and proposed that farmers should control the Department of Agriculture rather than the reverse A Libertarian Plan (2010). The exchange frames Roosevelt as the starting point of an escalation rather than as a discrete set of policies.
Court packing and judicial intimidation
Philip Hamburger, a law professor at Columbia Law School and founder and president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, told Zadek in June 2021 that until 1912 the only court packing had been in response to a Civil War. He described Roosevelt as a big, intimidating guy who liked to push people around and who, in defense of administrative power, threatened the courts and the judges — saying he would reconfigure the courts and deprive judicial decisions of their binding effect, and making this a campaign promise Philip Hamburger on Court Packing (2021). Hamburger said Roosevelt campaigned on court packing and that this introduced court packing as a political element in the 20th and 21st century; since 1912, he argued, the progressive party, whether under that name, under Roosevelt, or other Democratic Party since then, has always had court packing in the back of its mind — not because most of its members wanted it, but because they wanted to intimidate the judges, and that has worked Philip Hamburger on Court Packing (2021). Hamburger also noted that the closest thing to successful court packing came around the time of the Civil War, when Congress increased the size of the court under Lincoln and afterwards for fear that Southern sympathizers might dominate it Philip Hamburger on Court Packing (2021).
Progressive conservatism and the Western tradition
F.H. Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University, told Zadek in July 2022 that the word progressive had been adopted by the left, whose self-described progressives he called anti-moderns who want to turn politics into a battle of race against race and ethnic group against ethnic group. Against that, Buckley pointed to what he called an important history of progressivism in the GOP, found in Lincoln’s internal policies, big time in Teddy Roosevelt, and also in Eisenhower, who called himself a progressive and said at one point that the Republican Party must become progressive or it is going to die Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022). Buckley’s argument places Roosevelt inside a Republican lineage rather than outside it.
In a July 2022 follow-up episode, Buckley described the initiative and referendum movement as originating in the West and the 17th Amendment, providing for direct election of senators, as a Western initiative, adding that the Westerners who were the source of American libertarianism favored direct democracy Trumpism After Trump (2022). He said that on corruption, Republicans in the 1890s looked at the money trust and opposed the influence of money in politics, and that it was not bigness that Teddy Roosevelt opposed: Roosevelt said bigness is natural and that the target was the influence of money in politics Trumpism After Trump (2022). Buckley argued this should strike a positive chord with libertarians and Republicans, and that the Republican Party gave away the issue of corruption in politics to the left Trumpism After Trump (2022).
Across episodes
The same question — whether Roosevelt marks a break from constitutional limits or a usable progressive tradition — is argued in more than one episode, and the treatment changes with the guest. Welch in 2010 treats Roosevelt as the beginning of an escalating demand for federal solutions A Libertarian Plan (2010); Hamburger in 2021 treats him as the first to campaign on court packing and to threaten judges in defense of administrative power Philip Hamburger on Court Packing (2021); Buckley in 2022 treats him as an ancestor of a Republican progressive conservatism rooted in Western direct democracy and anti-corruption politics Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022) Trumpism After Trump (2022).