President Cleveland had more vetoes than any other President except FDR, and accomplished his total in two terms, not Franklin Roosevelt's three-plus. Most of the vetoes concerned bills which included large amounts of what he considered wasteful spending that benefited individuals or small groups, and not the public as a whole.
President Cleveland was not perfect. A man of his times, he did not believe that the Federal government had any business becoming involved in pensions or other forms of support for Civil War veterans, their widows, or their children. He was definitely no friend of the poor immigrants who were streaming into Ellis Island, and he ordered Federal troops against those striking against the Pullman Company in Chicago, one of the seminal events of the American labor movement.
They would have to wait for Theodore Roosevelt.
President Theodore Roosevelt was one of our greatest Presidents. If the Twentieth Century was the American Century, then Theodore and his cousin Franklin were the Presidents most responsible for that greatness. Ronald Reagan was the President most responsible for its destruction, permitting the gutting of America's manufacturing base, and undercutting the stability of the American economy by shifting the tax burden to the middle class and tripling our National Debt during his term in office.
Theodore Roosevelt was an atypical Republican (one observer stated he was a Democrat at heart), even for his time, and nobody's fool. He saw many of the problems that plagued our country then, and he put forth his solutions in a clear and forthright manner. Many of those self-same problems have returned to haunt our country, and many of TR's solutions are still worth trying today.
On October 12, 1915, Roosevelt spoke before the Knights of Columbus in New York City, expressing an idea about immigrants coming to this country that we would do well to remember today. "The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our object is not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to perform the duties imposed upon them."
President Roosevelt was the first president since Abraham Lincoln who could be described as "pro-labor." When he was running for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912, he stated in a speech at Milwaukee, Wisconsin on October 14th, "It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize."
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the other puppets of the Koch Brothers' and the oligarchs would do well to remember that simple statement of a century ago.
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