On September 30, 1913, the New York Times Attacked Theodore Roosevelt's Plan for "Super-Socialism"

On September 30, 1913, at a moment when American attention was focused on the revolutionary monetary reform then under debate in Congress, the New York Times astounded and diverted its public by a bitter attack on a former president of the United States. The former president was Theodore Roosevelt who had, the year before, broken away from the Republican Party to run as the Progressive Party (Bull Moose) candidate for president. He had been defeated by Woodrow Wilson, but he had been a powerful candidate who had attracted the greater part of Republican Party votes, and his views on public questions still commanded a large following among the electorate.

What had aroused the mortal apprehensions of the Times' editors was an article in the Century Magazine in which Roosevelt had outlined his proposals for a reorganization of government and society. The editorial attacked his blueprint as "super-socialism." Without going so far as to charge Roosevelt with being a Marxist--this was before the Russian Revolution, but Marxism was even then anathema on these shores--it declared that he would in effect bring a Marxian redistribution of wealth in a "simpler and easier way."

"He leaves," the editorial went on to say, "the mines, the factories, the railroads, the banks--all the instruments of production and exchange--in the hands of their individual owners, but of the profits of their operations he takes whatever share the people at any given time may choose to appropriate to the common use. The people are going to say, We care not who owns and milks the cow, so long as we get our fill of the milk and cream. Marx left socialism in its infancy, a doctrine that stumbled and sprawled under the weight of its own inconsistencies. Mr. Roosevelt's doctrine is of no such complexity. It has all the simplicity of theft and much of its impudence. The means employed are admirably adapted to the end sought, and if the system can be made to work at all, it will go on forever." 

The means by which Roosevelt would achieve these ends, the Times explained, drawing from the Century article, would be by a monolithic one-party political system, along with an indefinite expansion of government powers and functions. ("It will be necessary," the Times quoted Roosevelt as saying, "to invoke the use of governmental power to a degree hitherto unknown in this country, and, in the interest of democracy, to apply principles which the purely individualistic democracy of a century ago would not have recognized as democratic.") Roosevelt would also abolish competition. ("The business world must change from a competitive to a cooperative basis.") He would remove the restraints of an independent judiciary. ("the people themselves should . . . decide for themselves . . . what laws are to be placed upon the statute books, and what construction is to be placed upon the Constitution. . . .") He would confiscate the great fortunes (by a "heavily progressive inheritance tax" and a "heavily graded income tax.")

--Elgin Groseclose, preface to America's Money Machine: The Story of the Federal Reserve (Westport, CT: Arlington House Publishers, 1980), ix-x.