How Theodore Roosevelt Expanded Power

970 Words4 Pages
What caused the great expansion of government activity, particularly in the Executive Branch…? The growth of the Executive Branch, (mostly the power of the president) accelerated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt pushed to enhance the powers of the office, as no president had done since Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt was an energetic and strong political leader; he brought about a new set of structural factors in the United States, especially the nation’s coming out as a world power and as an industrialized economy. Theodore Roosevelt stood politically as a progressive, and did not move America to large scale corporate capitalism; he in fact tried to do the opposite. He strongly believed that the government had the right to regulate big business to protect the welfare of society. Roosevelt believed that the government should be a trustee for the American people, by controlling and supervising the economy in public interest. Roosevelt altered the government by committing it to providing at least minimal assistance to the poor and unemployed; to protecting the rights of labor unions; to stabilizing the banking system; to building low-income housing; to regulating financial markets; to subsidizing agricultural production; and to doing many other things that had not previously been federal responsibilities. Theodore Roosevelt created what he called, “The Square Deal.” The Square Deal is a domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Essentially this was aimed at helping the middle class citizens and protected business from the extreme demands of organized labor. This deal was supposed to reflect the progressive call to reform the American workplace, initiating welfare legislation and government regulation of industry. One major element of
Open Document