CHAPTER 5. THE MUCK RAKE
Theodore Roosevelt, Address on the Cornerstone Laying for the Cannon Building (1906)
Keywords: character, corruption, cleaning up, cynicism, lies, progress
Strategy: Corruption and Character - Talk about Honesty - Looking Up

Quote
“In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the man with the muck rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.

In Pilgrim’s Progress the man with the muck rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.

Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.
There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.

The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.

An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character does no good, but very great harm. The soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an honest man is assailed, or even when a scoundrel is untruthfully assailed.

Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand it, and if it is slurred over in repetition not difficult really to misunderstand it. Some persons are sincerely incapable of understanding that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the endorsement of whitewashing; and both the interested individuals who need whitewashing and those others who practice mud slinging like to encourage such confusion of ideas."

ANALYSIS
If Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would take one look at the corruption scandals that have plagued the Republican Party in recent years and say, “This is exactly what I cautioned you against!” Even though the speech was delivered on the pretext of drumming up support for expanding the amount of office space in Washington, D.C., Roosevelt’s famous “man with the muck rake” address is a take-no-prisoners warning on the threat that corruption posed to the American national character. And no president framed the concept of corruption with more clarity and power than Teddy Roosevelt. The “muck rake” speech was his attempt to redefine in the public’s mind the significance of corruption and to reframe the entire political debate so that it would move forward under the broad banner of progress.

But what was the problem with corruption in the first place? In Roosevelt’s time, the national debate defined corruption in material terms. In fact, we all know Teddy Roosevelt as the father of the “Square Deal,” a proponent of stronger antitrust laws, and the great enforcer of controls on the increasingly powerful, turn-of-the-century industrial corporation. As President, he issued forty-four lawsuits against major corporations, passed measures reining in the virtually unlimited power of the railroad companies, and forced Congress to pass basic legislation requiring the labeling of food. Despite all the material controls that Roosevelt created and enforced, he believed that corruption was first and foremost a spiritual threat to the character of the nation.

The significance of the “muck rake” speech lay in Roosevelt’s ability to rip “corruption” from the unspoken materialist logic that had defined it up to that point in American political rhetoric and to redefine it in terms of national character. He achieved this remarkable feat by drawing on a well-known passage from The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), a classic of moral literature written by John Bunyan. Quoting classic literature is not something that we now associate with presidential speeches, but Roosevelt used the “filth on the floor” frame from Bunyan to reframe the idea of “corruption” in spiritual terms.

Often, a President will invoke a frame by using a particularly resonant metaphor that helps people understand an otherwise abstract idea. That is what Roosevelt did with the image of the man with the muck rake. When we read that passage, we see how “filth on the floor” becomes a metaphor for corruption. Even though corruption is in fact a complex series of business and political actions that needs to be controlled and stopped by innovative legislation and enforcement, Roosevelt talked about corruption as if it were simple “filth on the floor” that could be raked up. What an incredibly powerful idea. But that was just the beginning of Roosevelt’s frame.

Once his audience heard him talk about “corruption” as “filth on the floor,” their instinct would have been to advocate “raking” it all up—a logical extension of the frame. But Roosevelt warned them that "the Man with the Muck Rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing."

Roosevelt was seeking to do far more than enlist the public to use every means at their disposal—the press, the law, business practices—to rid the political and corporate system of corruption; he was trying to inspire the public to end corruption through the virtues of honesty and truth. Roosevelt understood that a system beset with corruption was bound to infect the national character with a generalized attitude of cynicism that would undermine any attempts at reform, and he was concerned about an America so totally focused on cleaning up corruption that it saw corruption in everything. Even good projects, good business practices and good politicians would be tainted by the never-ending quest to get rid of corruption, to the point where people would lie to indict a thief. A corrupt system, in Roosevelt’s view, gave rise to a national character than had no faith or trust in the very institutions it sought to reclaim. And this distrust was even worse for the long-term health of American character than the crimes being prosecuted. We can think of it this way: once we set about cleaning the “filth on the floor,” the filth gets on everything. So, if the goal is ultimately to have a clean system, how do we do it?

The answer Roosevelt provided was elegant and visionary: Look up! In the “filth on the floor” frame, the great moral focus guiding the cleaning up of corruption are the great ideas of truth and honesty, which Roosevelt saw as the spiritual and ethical purpose of American character, "We appreciate that the things of the body are important, but we appreciate also that the things of the soul are immeasurably more important. The foundation stone of national life is, and ever must be, the high individual character of the average citizen."

The image of national life having a “foundation stone” made of the “high individual character of the average citizen” is itself built on the logic of the “filth on the floor” frame. We clean the floor not to remain mired in muck, but to clear away the residue of immorality and untruth from the “foundation stone” of American national life.

And if Roosevelt’s audience was listening closely that day, they would have noticed that he began his speech with a call to construct new buildings for an expanded national capital in Washington, D.C., and ended by tying the architectural concept of a “foundation stone” to the idea of national character itself. Tackling corruption without being drawn into an endless obsession with evil, Roosevelt was telling us, will allow us to focus on the lofty task of building a new and glorious capital city as a living monument to American national character. For that very reason, the “muck rake” is the one speech that every Washington, D.C. lobbyist should be forced to read.

STRATEGY
[Politician] - Corruption and Character
During the presidency of George W. Bush, there have been enough political and corporate corruption scandals to make even Teddy Roosevelt blush. Enron, WorldCom, Jack Abramoff, Tom Delay, Plamegate, Randy Cunningham, Bob Ney, David Safavian, Mark Foley—the list goes on and on. To frame these Republican scandals for the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats spoke about a Republican “culture of corruption.” And in fact, the “culture of corruption” frame was a key factor leading to the sweeping success Democrats enjoyed at both a state and federal level. Looking beyond the individual scandals—and looking ahead to future campaigns—one way to extend the persuasive “culture of corruption” frame could be for progressives to engage the much broader idea of American character.

As Roosevelt’s “filth on the floor” frame defines the issue, the problem with corruption extends far beyond the crimes committed. The danger is that persistent corruption threatens to poison American character with cynicism and blind obsession with material concerns, eliminating interest in “aught that is lofty.” For example, a progressive Democrat in office or on the campaign trail, when talking about the Republican lobbying scandals, could say something along these lines:

Each individual corrupted by a lobbying scandal constitutes a terrible crime and an immoral act. But the crimes alone are not the greatest threat posed by corruption scandals such as this one. The greatest threat is to America’s national character. It is a threat because we have no choice but to confront this corruption, but to do so is to risk dropping our heads in cynicism and contempt for such lofty ideals as service, honesty and representation. Corruption in government, corruption in corporate practices—these are not just crimes, but a cycle that must be broken to protect the ideals that serve as the moral cornerstone of every individual American.

Notice how the “filth on the floor” frame provides a basic logic for linking lobbying reform to a much broader set of national ideals. The message in this potential speech clip is not that the crimes themselves, but that we risk “dropping our heads.” That image draws directly on Roosevelt’s technique of framing the abstract notion of corruption through the actions and gestures of an allegorical character who “cleans up” the floor."

[Activist] - Talk about Honesty
The power of the word “honesty” is a key lesson for progressive activists to take from Roosevelt’s speech. Often, as activists are drawn into the hand-to-hand combat of a campaign’s ground battle, they find themselves tangled up in a “he-said-she-said” shouting match centered around accusations that one campaign “lied” about the actions of another.

In a recent example of this, the progressive activists working on the Ned Lamont campaign in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary were accused by the Joe Lieberman campaign of crashing the Lieberman website on the eve of the primary. (3) In response, the Lamont activists accused the Lieberman team of lying. (4) To this day, even thought it is clear that the Lieberman site crashed for technical reasons and not as a result of dirty tricks, the tit-for-tat argument over who lied to who remained a sore point that inevitably soured some voters on the race.

To take a stronger, more effect approach to this problem, the Lamont team could have framed their responses to this incident in terms of “honesty” rather than “lies.” Here is an example of how that might have sounded:

Honesty is not just a cornerstone of American character, it is the ideal on which this Senate campaign was built. Honest dialogue with the voters of Connecticut. Honest debate of our national policies at home and abroad. Honest work for real change in leadership. We believe the Lieberman website went down on Tuesday night for reasons having only to do with the campaign’s choice of Internet service and the level of web traffic. To suggest otherwise is to question the honesty of this campaign and to put accusations ahead of the ideals of Connecticut voters.

One thing to keep in mind when faced with a scandal of this sort is that the word “lie” draws people’s attention back to the events in question, and tangles them in the argument. The word “honesty,” by contrast, lifts people’s heads “up” to a “lofty ideal” embodied by a progressive candidate. This was Roosevelt’s broader point in the “muck rake” speech: to not allow the important task of facing down corruption to drag us down at the level of character.
To avoid being drawn down and to lead the debate forward, activists can respond to accusations with appeals to “honesty” rather than counter with accusations of lies.

[Citizen] - Looking Up
In everyday conversations about politics, progressive voters often find themselves talking at a different level than Republicans do. Progressives by nature like to talk about “issues” and “policies” even though what draws them to progressive candidates are principles. But sometimes, talking about principles can be a bit too formal for everyday conversation. How often do we find ourselves talking about “peace, commerce and honest friendship” while chatting with a friend at a fast food restaurant?

How, then, can we open up a place in everyday conversation to express a progressive belief in principles? Roosevelt’s speech provides a great answer to this question. We can use the metaphor “looking up” as a road sign in our conversation—a signal to the other person that we have a set of bigger ideas to talk about if they are willing to join us in that discussion.

We use “road signs” all the time in conversation. When we talk on the telephone, for example, we don’t just hang up when we are done with what we have to say. Instead, we put out a road sign, “Well, it was great talking to you,” or “Alright, now.” After we put out one of these road signs, the person at the other end of the line knows that you are ready to end the conversation and that the word “goodbye” followed by a mutual hanging up of phones will come next. (The next time you talk on the phone, try withholding the road sign when you are ready to hang up. The discomfort you feel will tell you how important road signs are in everyday speech).

To draw people into a discussion of principles, it can help greatly to provide them a road sign, and Roosevelt’s phrase “looking up” in his “muck rake” speech provides the perfect conversation starter. For example, imagine you are talking current events or politics with a friend and you want to tell them why you like a progressive candidate. Your friend asks, “What are her positions?” Since you know you like the candidate because of her principles, you might say this to your friend:

The issues are a big part of why I support her as a candidate. But leaving the issues on the floor, let’s look up for a second.

And then pause. “Looking up” in this instance is a road sign to your friend that you are about to talk about something larger, more important—“aught that is lofty.” “Looking up” as a road sign accomplishes two things that are consistent with what Roosevelt achieved in the “muck rake” speech: it distinguishes between material and “lofty” concerns, and it defines politics as a question of individual character. And that is what we want in our conversations with friends. We want them to see, and understand, that the choice to support a progressive candidate is about principle, the cornerstone on which all issues reside.