Take Up Your Pen: Unilateral Presidential Directives in American Politics

Chapter 6. Unilateral Presidential Directives from Roosevelt to Roosevelt: Taft through FDR

chapter six ................. Unilateral Presidential Directives from Roosevelt to Roosevelt: Taft through FDR The president is at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit. —Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (1908) In the event the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act. The President has powers. —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message to Congress (1942) This chapter examines the evolution of the presidential use of unilateral directives from the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency through that of his fifth cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This thirty-six-year period constituted a crucial phase in the development of these important presidential tools, as it marked the entrenchment of TR’s novel uses of such directives , both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, there is a large increase in the use of executive orders that begins shortly after Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration and ends shortly after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. TR issued almost as many executive orders as all of his predecessors combined , but FDR issued executive orders at a greater rate than any president before or since. And qualitatively, unilateral presidential directives were used for increasingly important and controversial purposes. TR was not an aberration; rather, his practice of frequently issuing unilateral presidential directives stuck and became the new norm. TR’s successors generally continued to use unilateral directives in great numbers and for controversial From Roosevelt to Roosevelt 153 purposes, including presidents who rejected his Progressivism and his views about stewardship and ostensibly adhered to a more limited view of presidential power and authority, like William Taft and the three Republican administrations that followed Woodrow Wilson. Insofar as TR’s new understanding of executive power became entrenched in this period, TR’s actions may perhaps be seen as part of a broader Progressive view that did not fully triumph until FDR. In order to discern exactly how TR’s examples influenced later presidents in the early twentieth century, it may be useful to make a distinction among his six successors in terms of ideology, specifically Progressives and conservatives. As we will see, the similarities among all of these presidents’ uses of unilateral directives are more striking than their ideological and partisan differences might suggest: proactive Progressives and reserved Republicans alike used unilateral directives in much the same way as TR did. Regardless of their political priorities or their views about the propriety of presidential action, TR’s heirs all found great utility in unilateral presidential directives. Progressives The regular use of unilateral presidential directives for important and controversial matters began under TR, but it grew substantially under the later Progressives Woodrow Wilson and FDR, both of whom relied upon executive orders and proclamations to enhance the role of government and to fight World Wars I and II. Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson issued over eighteen hundred executive orders during his presidency, a frequency that was 50 percent higher than that of TR.1 His use of unilateral presidential directives not only reflected the issues of his time but also his views about the presidency and its place in government and society. Wilson wrote extensively about the presidency before ascending to the office, and his views changed over time. His 1879 essay in International Review proposed introducing cabinet-style government in the United States. However, Wilson soon despaired of reforming the nation’s 154 Chapter 6 constitutional structure to switch to cabinet government and began to consider whether the extant constitutional framework might just be reinterpreted instead. In The State (1889, 1897), Wilson claimed that many of the limits on governmental powers were ‘‘merely matters of custom, principle, or prejudice and could always be changed at the will of the people.’’ Wilson wrote that ‘‘government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.’’2 TR’s actions caused Wilson to change how he thought about the presidency . As Wilson said, ‘‘Whatever else we may think or say about Theodore Roosevelt, we must admit he was an aggressive leader.’’3 Wilson saw TR’s presidency as having established an active leadership role for the chief executive , and Wilson sought to build upon that precedent.4 Wilson developed his new, more robust view of the presidency in Constitutional Government in the United States, which he published in 1908, two years before he went from academia to...