Roosevelt, Taft, And Wilson Debate The Presidency

The presidency didn’t become powerful by accident. We trace today’s executive-branch arguments back to an early-20th-century clash between three outsized figures and three competing theories of American constitutional government: Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. If you’ve ever heard a president claim “a mandate” to act, or watched an administration push the limits of executive power, the roots of that logic are sitting right here in the Progressive Era.

We start with Wilson the scholar, who calls the founders’ checks and balances an outdated machine and argues modern government should be more coordinated and more efficient. That path leads straight into the rise of the administrative state, where professional bureaucrats and expert management do more governing while voters act mainly as reviewers of results. From there we pivot to Taft’s constitutional restraint: the president can be energetic, but only when authority can be fairly traced to a specific constitutional grant or congressional statute. Policy leadership belongs primarily to Congress, and “public interest” is not a magic phrase that creates new powers.

Then comes Roosevelt’s stewardship presidency, the most familiar to modern ears. He frames the president as the steward of the whole people, free to act unless the Constitution clearly says no, with elections and public opinion as the main check. We stress-test that claim against Federalist 70, Hamilton’s idea of “energy in the executive,” and Lincoln’s most aggressive actions, drawing out Taft’s insistence on the wartime versus peacetime distinction. By the end, you’ll have a clearer map for reading modern fights over executive orders, separation of powers, and constitutional limits.

If this helped you see current politics with sharper eyes, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who loves American history, and leave us a review. Which vision do you think actually runs the presidency today?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Welcome back to Civics in here. I'm really excited to talk about this topic because we're not just talking about one person. We're talking about three different presidents with Dr. Sean Beyenberg. So, Dr. Beyenberg, today we're talking about Little Wilson, my favorite, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft, who I think might replace Roosevelt, but we will see. They all had different takes. Well, I'm a little still mad at Taft for what he did to the state of Arizona during our statehood. But again, I can look past that, maybe. So all three of these presidents had different takes on what the powers of the president were. What do you got for me on this? Because not that you have to convince me of Taft, but I'm just I'm exploring maybe a different favorite president to study.

Wilson Against Checks And Balances

Taft’s Strict View Of Power

Roosevelt’s Stewardship Presidency

SPEAKER_01 1:43

So this is actually one of my favorite sections when I teach this in my constitution class and most of our intro-American government classes. We'd often will do this sort of Taft Roosevelt Wilson discussion. So this directly it's Taft and Roosevelt sort of in debate. In fact, they start writing books and speeches, making digs at one another. But Wilson's also a part of the conversation. So you enjoy the personal stuff. This is not quite the uh housewives of the cabinet with uh with uh Calhoun and Jackson, but it's it's kind of per it gets kind of personal. So this is obviously a period when there is some interest. This is again the kind of progressive era. There is an interest among some in expanding federal power, but also potentially in rethinking not just federal versus state power, but also the separation of powers. I'll actually start with Wilson in a sense. So Wilson basically writes, he's a constitutional law professor, he's a Princeton professor. And we talked about how he ends up as president because he gets mad about the building. No. Woodrow Wilson, maybe I should save this one for another podcast, but I'll just get it. I can't, maybe I'll just say it twice. I love it too much. So Wilson gets becomes president of Princeton, and he wants to build a grad school there. And so have you ever seen any of the propaganda materials from Princeton? They always have this one pretty tower on there that's like their iconic image. Like Stanford has the same thing, like the Hoover Tower. Yes. So there's this pretty gothic tower, and they have a big debate. Do we put the tower in the center of campus or do we put it like half a mile away? And Wilson, who's president of Princeton, wants it in the center of campus. And Grover Cleveland, who is retired to New Jersey and lives in Princeton. In fact, you can go see his grave, his graves in Princeton. He has all the alumni and the board behind him. And so they convince, they end up basically beating Wilson. And so the tower is like a half a mile away. And Wilson throws a thing. And according to some folks, this is part of what makes him say that he's going to go into state politics. I guess he decides that's less cutthroat than academic politics. The the political pundit George Will, who doesn't like Woodrow Wilson very much, has this really funny line where he says effectively that where to put that tower was like the worst decision of American history because otherwise Wilson would have just stayed and wrecked Princeton instead of from Will's perspective going and wrecking the country as governor and then president. But Wilson is a scholar who is well known for being critical of the traditional separation of powers. He thinks it's obsolete. He gives speeches basically saying, look, the founders were very faithful to Montesquieu. So my colleague Paul Caris, who loves Montesquieu, like is probably triggered by Wilson. But Wilson has this vision where he says, look, the Constitution is this convoluted scheme of checks and balances. President is balanced against Congress, Congress against the president, both against the court. So Montesquieu has basically created this system where government checks each other. And so he says, this is Newton. This is like physics. This is like a clock. And Wilson says, modernity is basically things working together. And he says, really, we shouldn't think about this as Newton. We should think of this as Darwin. Darwin is evolution, it's forward, but it also is coordinated in the sense that your arm is working with your eye instead of the two of them potentially like counteracting each other. And so Wilson calls for a rethinking of the separation of powers. Originally, he wants to have a stronger Congress. Later on, especially once he's president, he wants to have a stronger presidency. But he doesn't like this idea of separation of powers. He wants it to be closer to the British system where by the time the monarch falls away, right, the prime minister is the executive, but it's merged, basically, right? So Wilson wants, Wilson doesn't like the idea of checks and balances. He wants efficiency on behalf of what he thinks of as like a unified people. So he's assuming there's a lot more homogeneity than the founders certainly are assuming. So that's part of his piece. And the other part is that Wilson says that we should have more and more governance done by professional bureaucrats. And so he writes a very famous essay where he says, look, the best, the best operating government in the world is Prussia. And then he says, I know, I know, it's kind of authoritarian and we don't want that part. But they make the trains run on time, basically. He doesn't use that exact phrase, but it's effectively they understand the science of administration. They're real professionals. And so he says, the problem is that in America, we sort of let the masses like make decisions and they are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish. And so we need to have basically professionals making more and more decisions with the people sort of, as he says, like authoritative critics. So leave the people to sort of say, yeah, you're doing a good or a bad job. But the people themselves and their representatives who are not professionals should have fewer and fewer, uh less less political discretion, basically. And so he's calling for what will later get called the administrative state, right? That more decisions should be made by professionals, less of it by either the people directly or even their sort of chosen representatives. So he's critiquing that the sort of old school Montesquieu Madison system of power divided and distributed. I'll come back to Wilson at the end, though. William Howard Taft basically will defend the orthodox constitutional position, which is that the president should not be the primary part of government. It's supposed to be Congress. And Taft will say effectively that the president can exercise no power which cannot be fairly and reasonably traced to a specific grant of power or justly implied within such a grant of power, either in statute or the Constitution. There's no free-floating, he says, residuum of power to act in the public interest. And he says this would be dangerous. The president would say that he's universal providence and can set all things right. So what he has in mind is Theodore Roosevelt, when he's president, kind of gestures at it and then writes it much more explicitly after he's president, arguing that we should have think of the president as the steward of the whole people and authorized to act for the public good unless the constitution says no. So, in a sense, Roosevelt calls for inverting the traditional understanding of presidential power, in which the president is basically an implementing force for Congress or the Constitution. Roosevelt wants to invert that and say, show me where I can't act. So this has implications for both national power and separation of powers. And Roosevelt writes a book in 1912, uh in 1913, after he's lost the presidency in 1912. And I think that's one I'm I'm going to try to convince you we should do a 1912-only uh election podcast on all the characters and the interplay and the tiers and the buttons largely because Tafton friends basically are willing to throw an election to Wilson to keep Roosevelt out of power. So Roosevelt, when he's bitter, basically writes a book with his constitutional theory, and he says, in effect, there's two ways to understand the presidency. There's the Andrew Jackson Abraham Lincoln way, which tactically is the most popular Democratic president and the most popular Republican president, which is active presidents, and that's me. And then there's the version of he says Buchanan Taft presidents, which are basically just sitting around waiting and doing nothing. And he says, effectively, like, my my friend William Howard Taft, bless him. He's just like James Buchanan. He's no better. And Taft is not very pleased by this. And then Roosevelt goes on to say, and this is how I was president. And he goes through a list of case studies. And I always point this out to my students. He says, look, I this is how I governed as president. I did all these kinds of things. And he says, I, for example, had the presidency really strongly fight against California having anti-Japanese laws. And Taft says, you don't need the stewardship for that. The president has the authority to enforce treaties, and we have a treaty saying California can't do that with the Japanese. He wants to say, I deployed forces to put down an insurrection in the state. Well, yes, when asked by the governor, which Article 4 specifically authorizes. So Taft, reading between the Taft has some places where he says, Roosevelt like talks of big game about all this cool stuff he would have done or did do, but the stuff he did do, it's either constitutionally allowed or the stuff he says he would have done, he wouldn't have done that. And the I wish I remember the exact language, but Taft has a funny line that basically says, there were people in the room who would have kept that from happening, meaning, like, all the rest of Roosevelt's friends in the cabinet and I, like, we would have made sure the grown-ups were in charge. And so he can say whatever he wants. And because he's partly aggrieved that he's been called James Buchanan, but he then wants to say, like, look, I'm not just saying the president should sit around and do nothing, uh, which is what Taft, you know, Roosevelt wants to say. Taft, as we talked about before, is more aggressive as a trustbuster. Taft thinks there are, in fact, places the Constitution gives the president to act. But he just basically says, like, the president isn't effectively a king except when the Bill of Rights checks him, which is kind of what Roosevelt is gesturing at. So you see these three really striking different understandings of presidential power, sort of, you know, they're musing about them. Roosevelt sort of tips at this in the early 1900s. Wilson's been writing about it for a while, but really the 1912 presidential election is in some sense kind of about these issues. Should the presidency be more powerful than Congress? Should the presidency basically be unlimited to act unless the Constitution has said no? Or should the presidency be a strong institution, but still fundamentally one that is an implementing force? So Taft defends the orthodox position. Roosevelt gestures towards sort of like dictator is the wrong sense, but basically like elected and then can do whatever he wants. And that the elections are the check for Roosevelt. Dictator doesn't mean he's marching people around like authoritarian, but the elections are the primary check, not the constitution. And Wilson wants to sort of interpret the constitution flexibly. He doesn't use the phrase living constitutionalism, but the the if you can piece that together from like a couple words that he has all spread out over a section to basically have the bureaucracy really do the work. So Roosevelt wants a strong president, Wilson a strong bureaucracy, and Taft a strong constitution.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

So when you're talking about this, like I often hear that when the president is elected, they have a mandate. Is this kind of where this, I mean, where this comes from? Because I've heard that through many administrations, right? Like I have a mandate, so I can do what I need to do to faithfully execute, you know, the office of the presidency.

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Yeah. I mean, as we talked about before, Jackson gestures toward that when he's back in the 1830s. But Roosevelt and then Wilson are really the two that push this. That they they sort of have the idea that the presidency is a nationalized institution chosen by the people to implement a particular policy or vision. Whereas, again, Taft understands it not to be just again hanging around sitting on, you know, sitting there waiting for instructions, um, but that it's the presidency is not fundamentally a policy-making institution. So, yeah, Roosevelt starts that, and then Wilson will push it through with a theory called the plebiscite presidency. Plebiscite meaning the people have all voted and like endorsed what I want to do. So ironically, Wilson later on will adopt a lot of Roosevelt's theories and vision, which leads to many of which amusingly then has some of Roosevelt's people jump ship to Wilson, and Roosevelt's all agreed. He feels personally offended, like, you betrayed me. He's like, why? He stole your ideas. Like, we want the ideas, not you, man. So, like the new republic, the journal, ends up jumping ship to Wilson. But Roosevelt and Wilson, I think most sort of scholars of presidential development will say, really is where you get the aggressive claims. We have a national media now, so we can have a that can claim a mandate. Again, it's not totally new, but it really gets reinforced in this period. That's absolutely right.

SPEAKER_00 14:56

What would which president more closely aligns then with the ideas in Federalist 70 and Alexander Hamilton's, you know, kind of claim to energy in the presidency?

Which Vision Matches Today

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Right. So this is where this is where uh Taft also gets kind of mad at Lincoln, or excuse me, at Roosevelt. So Roosevelt wants to basically say, yeah, the president's supposed to be energetic, see Federalist 70 and see Lincoln, right? Because Lincoln did all these crazy things. And Taft will counter that and say, yes, but the thing the most aggressive actions that Lincoln took are suspending habeas corpus and the Emancipation Proclamation, which are both wartime measures limited to basically battlefields. So, in a sense, what Roosevelt tries to do is to say the stuff that a president can potentially do in wartime with the kind of foreign policy peace powers, we can use that in general domestic policy, in general domestic, so peacetime domestic politics. And so Taft wants to say no, the Constitution very clearly has a distinction between peacetime and wartime. Roosevelt wants to ignore that. And I think, I certainly think that Taft is on stronger grounds in saying that Lincoln is closer to Taft. I mean, we we did several podcasts literally on like how specific Lincoln is in trying to justify, well, under this piece of the Constitution, I can do this. Here's my legal argument. Roosevelt wants to just basically say Lincoln, active president, Federalist 70, energy with executive, executive with energy. I am an active president, I have energy, QED, therefore I'm the same. Whereas, as we talked about with Federalist 70, the whole argument for the executive having energy is that it's a distinctly executive institution, right? I mean, they go through and say, you actually don't want the policy making to be fast and decisive. You want Congress to be slow, right? So this is why this is why I think our Federalist 71 might have been the longest one I did, where I was like, I keep beating the drum. Like, you can't just take energy in the executive and say, and therefore the president can do whatever he wants, Kiwi D, which is kind of the move Roosevelt wants to make. No, the Federalist designs the executive to have energy because it's supposed to be doing a particular set of things, which is not what Roosevelt wants to do, which is like, I looked at a problem, I saw a problem, I identified how to fix the problem, I therefore acted. Like that's not executive as understood by the Federalist. So I don't think, despite the sort of punchy language that Roosevelt uses, he is in fact either Federalist 70 faithful or Lincoln faithful if you think that the peacetime-wartime distinction is a real thing, which I think the Constitution does envision that. So now you can make a case perhaps to say modernity is complicated. You could make Wilson's case to say modernity is compliment complicated. We shouldn't have the separation. We'd be better if we were Britain, basically. We didn't have strong separation of powers. That's a sort of policy design trade-off question. I don't think it's consistent with the architecture of the Constitution. I mean, well, there's a reason Wilson says, yeah, we basically have to throw Montesquieu overboard to make this work. If you'd said that in 1787, you get precisely zero ratifications, 1789, you get precisely zero ratifications. Now, the of course, then the question that I always ask my students is which of these three visions of the presidency most closely reflects the actual practice of the presidency today? And here I think it's clear that our practice does not reflect Taft. You know, I I will I won't name names. You can pick folks from both parties in recent years without too much difficulty, who basically have a I'm gonna do it, you try and stop me attitude, which is basically the core of Roosevelt's. Like you had to show me why I can't do it rather than that I can. And that's fundamentally an inversion from Federalist 70, from from again, Lincoln, I think, from the Constitution. So I think Taft is certainly correct. You know, and and the other thing that's worth noting about Taft, Taft is basically moderately progressive on his policy views. He's a constitutional conservative in the sense that he's like, well, let's follow the Federalist 70, let's follow, you know, let's let's follow the constitutional architecture. But he doesn't think there's any problem with that with policy views. If Congress wants to write me a statute that says aggressive antitrust, that's we're dealing with interstate commerce, like I can do that. That doesn't mean I have to sit on my hands and let you know plutocrats dominate the country or whatever, you know, you would say. So again, hopefully I'll make the case that uh Taft is wildly underappreciated because he's very, very, I think, constitutionally faithful, but also a very subtle thinker. And and I think he's also a little less I think he's a little less willing to bend the facts in his portrayals than Roosevelt is. I mean we talked another case, another one about the podcasts about the Lochner case. Nobody cares about the Lochner case. Roosevelt makes it this big deal, and he sort of invents it as this bogeyman. Nobody cares about it. And it's not like being used to lay waste to the entirety of the American regulatory state. And that's basically what Roosevelt wants to do because he's just he's mad about it because they s they used a similar doctrine at the state court to strike down his first bill when he's a state legislator. He he he's a he's a man who keeps grudges and holds, who holds grudges and lets them keep going.

SPEAKER_00 20:36

So you're saying he's traumatic. That's what I'm hearing, is it? You think that telly Roosevelt is dramatic?

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Yeah, and just one more while I'm defending my boy Taft here. He's got a section. Roosevelt has a section in this book where he calls out Taft for being a wimp because Taft lets, I think he's the interior secretary, get grilled by Congress. And Taft Roosevelt makes it out as this is like, see, Taft's weak. He won't protect his people. Taft is having Ballinger testify to Congress like in order to protect Ballinger, whose reputation is being slandered by Roosevelt's buddy Gifford Pincho, who's running around. And so it's like, yes, if you actually know the the characters and the players here, this looks quite different. Taft is using this to basically defend the defend his cabinet. Like, yes, please go talk to Congress. And like, we have the facts on our side. Later on in the New Deal, again, these are not folks that are particularly pro-T. They who is it? Icky's, I think. Harold Icky's does a study and he says, basically, you know, what Pinchot was slandering Ballinger about is one of the worst things in American history. Pinchot was better at the media, like Roosevelt is. And so he made Taft and Ballinger look bad. But Ballinger's just trying to defend himself. And Taft is trying to give Ballinger a public platform that's not just the media slamming him. But Roosevelt says, yep, there's that Taft guy throwing his people to the wolves again. I would never have done that. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

It's literally like a Bravo series. Like these men are so dramatic and like creating all of these things. But I guess, you know, we you I'm sure listeners have heard the term the bully pulpit. Like Teddy Roosevelt really knew how to use it to his advantage to some point.

Why The Debate Still Shapes Politics

SPEAKER_01 22:34

Yeah, he's he's absolutely utterly brilliantly media savvy. It's just unfortunate in some ways that he's his talent for that is not always faithful to historical record. But He is absolutely a master, a master. Propagandist is the wrong word, but he's absolutely a master of media portrayal and information. So yeah, one of the best. And and one of, again, you're gathering I have sort of, I'll say, mixed views on him, but he is still one of the smartest people who's ever been president. I mean, he wrote history books that you know he ha he has thoughts. He can defend he can defend them. And so yeah, he he's is I do not dispute your characterization of him as one of the most fascinating people in American history. I throw Huey Long up there, too, who I'm looking forward to doing a podcast on. I is one of the most fascinating characters in American history. But yeah. And then the you the it's worth noting in this debate really matters today. What is the scope of presidential power? What is the scope of the what is the relationship of the president to Congress? What is the relation of the president to the Constitution? As you know, steady stream of consolidation of power in the presidency, it goes back to these debates that they had in 1912. And arguably Roosevelt wins. Arguably Roosevelt wins. Oh yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Again, I say it every time, but this is why I love American history. There's there's just so much in it. Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much. And he did mention Huey Long. We will be talking about Huey Long in episode 205, which comes out at the end of April 2026, just in case somebody is listening to this further in advance. So, Dr. Beinberg, thank you so much.