An Interactive Record · 1901 – 1919
A war on
malefactors
of great wealth.
Twelve years in which a single president sued the trusts, mediated a coal strike, signed the first federal ban on corporate campaign money, and — shot in the chest walking to the podium — finished the speech anyway. Seven more years, out of office, in which he kept naming the invisible government by name, broke a corrupt party boss on the witness stand, and wrote until the week he died.
We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.Progressive Party Convention · Chicago · August 6, 1912
1901 — 1919
In his
own words,
his own deeds.
Click any year above to jump to it. Toggle the theme filters to see the corruption fight, the corporate-power fight, or both together. Every event links to its primary sources — State of the Union messages, speech transcripts, signed statutes, court filings.
The Statute
The Tillman Act of 1907 — the direct product of Roosevelt's 1905 annual message — still bars direct corporate contributions to candidates for federal office. It is the longest-standing campaign finance law in American history, and the one piece of Roosevelt's anti-corruption agenda that remains substantively intact.
The Platform
Nearly every plank of the 1912 Bull Moose platform — women's suffrage, eight-hour day, minimum wage for women, workers' compensation, federal securities regulation, direct election of senators, federal income tax — became law between 1913 and 1965. One plank never did: the ban on independent corporate expenditures.
The Silence
In Osawatomie in 1910, Roosevelt called corporate political expenditures "one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs." President Obama returned to Osawatomie in 2011 to invoke that speech — but omitted the passage on corporate money. In 2010, Citizens United v. FEC had already made the older doctrine unconstitutional.