Liars by Glenn Beck Page B

, the public in both America and Britain had been gripped by a fear of oceanic sailing. The waters of the North Atlantic, which were the most transited in the world—and arguably the most dangerous—claimed hundreds of lives each year. A young woman named Eleanor Roosevelt herself was on the White Star Line steamship Britannic when it nearly sank after colliding with another ship. Dozens of men who had boarded a lifeboat before realizing that the ship was not actually sinking sheepishly returned to the scornful eyes of passengers and crew.
    In the twelve years leading up to the sailing of the Titanic , there was at least one major maritime disaster per year, with more than six thousand passengers lost at sea. While the fear of oceanic travel among the public hadn’t quite reached the level of a clinical phobia yet (thalassophobia, fear of the sea, however, is a real clinical disorder), the general mood in the United States and in Europe was that transoceanic sailing was, in fact, a dangerous proposition. The White Star Line was so anxious to allay public fear of ocean crossings that the Titanic was built and marketed as “unsinkable” as early as 1909, two full years before its steel hull ever touched water.
    The marketing campaign worked brilliantly. The Titanic ’s maiden voyage sold out in mere days, and White Star had bookings as far out as a year in advance. The Titanic and White Star Line’s “unsinkable” campaign provided relief, giving the public an antidote to the fear that had been building with the stories of so many lives lost to the waves.
    At long last, the public had hope.
    That hope was quickly dashed when an iceberg ripped through the “unsinkable” vessel. News of the Titanic ’s tragedy flashed across a horrified world, although one famed historian could not resist dark-humor parallels to another, larger tragedy about to befall America. Henry Adams, who had booked passage on the doomed liner’s return voyage to Europe, wrote a longtime female friend, “I do not know whether Taft or the Titanic is likely to bethe furthest-reaching disaster.”
    Incumbent Republican President William Howard Taft faced the fight of his life against both Theodore Roosevelt, his old friend and immediate predecessor, and that year’s Democratic nominee, former Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson. Both Roosevelt and Wilson ran as passionate progressives—a term that had entered the lexicon thanks to Democrat William Jennings Bryan and was later adopted by Republican Roosevelt during his “trust-busting” presidency.
    Teddy Roosevelt was the first chief executive to endorse a federal income tax and a national health-insurance program. He also waged war against big business, and he almost single-handedly transformed the presidency from its nineteenth-century practice of quietly administrating government, taking its lead from Congress, to making it the center of all power in the nation’s capital.
    In 1910, Roosevelt declared, “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 powerfulmen, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” He also said that the government “should permit [their fortunes] to be gained only so long asthe gaining represents benefit to the community.”
    This was a Republican essentially saying that private wealth is only allowable to the extent that it benefits the greater good. Roosevelt also argued that accumulated property is “subject to thegeneral right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He advocated concentrating power in the presidency to make this system work. “This New Nationalism,” he said, “regards the executive poweras the steward of the public welfare.”
    By 1912, Roosevelt