# "A small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men" [[Theodore Roosevelt]]'s diagnosis of concentrated wealth as a *political* problem rather than merely an economic one — the argument that great fortunes matter because of what their holders do with power, not because of what they own. > [!quote] Theodore Roosevelt, New Nationalism speech, Osawatomie, Kansas, August 31, 1910 > "The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise." ## Provenance The passage comes from the **New Nationalism speech**, delivered at Osawatomie, Kansas on **August 31, 1910** at the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park — **after** Roosevelt left the presidency, and as the opening statement of his return to politics that would culminate in the 1912 Bull Moose campaign. It is the mature, systematized version of the argument, not a document of the trust-busting years themselves. Printed in **Theodore Roosevelt, *The New Nationalism* (The Outlook Company, New York, 1910)**. Some online transcriptions render the final clause as "power which *is* not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise," dropping the "it"; the vault uses the standard published reading. That distinction matters because Heather Cox Richardson's **July 6, 2026** letter deploys the quote while narrating the 1901–02 [[Northern Securities]] era — it reads there as a contemporaneous statement of the young president's motive. The sentiment is continuous with what Roosevelt was doing in 1902; the words are from 1910. The vault keeps both facts on the record rather than smoothing the seam. ## The Argument Roosevelt's construction is precise and worth reading closely: - The cause is **regulatory absence** — "the absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint" — not the mere existence of wealth. The fortunes are an output of a rules vacuum. - The object of the wealthy class is **"to hold and increase their power,"** not to consume. Money is instrumental. - The remedy is structural: **"change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power."** Not confiscation, not moral suasion — alter the rules that let power compound. - The standard is the **general welfare**: power "which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise." Public interest, not private desert, decides how much concentration is tolerable. This is the same premise that produced the [[Square Deal]] — level the field rather than the outcomes — stated at its most explicit. ## Why It Matters for the KB The passage is the cleanest Progressive-Era statement of a claim the vault documents across a century: that concentrated private wealth converts into political power, and that this conversion, left unregulated, is self-reinforcing. Roosevelt's "small class" is the direct ancestor of the donor networks, super PACs, and dark-money infrastructure the KB maps — and his framing anticipates the modern analytic move of treating billionaire political spending as an institutional problem rather than a set of individual choices. Read alongside [[Theodore Roosevelt - malefactors of great wealth]] (1907), the two receipts bracket Roosevelt's position: the 1907 speech names the *conduct* — capital deliberately engineering financial stress to discipline the government — while the 1910 passage names the *structure* that makes such conduct possible. The 1902 [[Philander Knox - we want to stop it]] exchange is what the structural argument looks like in practice at the moment of enforcement. ## See Also - [[Theodore Roosevelt]] — the speaker - [[Theodore Roosevelt - malefactors of great wealth]] — the 1907 companion receipt, naming the conduct - [[Philander Knox - we want to stop it]] — the 1902 enforcement moment - [[Square Deal]] — the program built on this premise - [[Northern Securities]] — the case HCR's letter pairs the quote with - [[Oligarchy]] — the condition the passage describes - [[Dark Money]] — the modern infrastructure of the same conversion