this podcast is about one of the formative men in TR’s life, long before trips to Asia or the Presidency. it was extremely well done and is well worth your listen.

I for one hope they’ll be more TR coverage here, not less.

“As I began writing The Imperial Cruise, I realized that the Theodore Roosevelt most of us know is a character that Teddy had created and historians have accepted and passed on. As a best selling author from his early years, he had long experience in projecting imagery for public consumption. With his Ranchman and Rough Rider poses in photo studios, he created his own legend. In his diplomatic white vest. the warmonger masqueraded as a man of peace. Even his private correspondence to his children – called posterity letters – were self consciously written to enhance the historical legacy. After studying his life for twenty-seven years, the author Kathleen Dalton wrote in Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, “[t]thrown off the trail by their hero’s careful presentation of himself, too many writers have accepted at face value his explanation of his own behavior.

“Many books on Theodore Roosevelt mention his biases but often employ obscure coded phrases and euphemisms. Probably the best-known biography of is the Pulitzer Prize-honored The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. In his acknowledgments, Morris praises one author and one book:

‘To Carleton Putnam, a man I have never met I express gratitude and admiration for his Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years (Scribners, 1958), an essential source for students of Theodore Roosevelt’s youth. It is a tragedy of American biography that this grave, neglected masterpiece was never followed by other volumes.’

Carleton Putnam wrote another book, entitled Race and Reason: A Yankee View. The book’s genesis was Putnam’s letter to President Dwight Eisenhower protesting the recent integration of America’s public schools. Putnam lectured Eisenhower that the Black man was three thousand years behind the White man and that it was dangerous to allow the races to mix. Putnam told Eisenhower to heed the wisdom of a past president.

‘As Theodore Roosevelt wrote…..Teutonic and English blood is the source of American greatness: Our American Republic, with all its faults is, together with England, the fine flower of centuries of self-discipline and experience in free government by the English speaking branch of the white race.’”

I agree 100%. You put that very well.

TR was also rather ignorant and unfair towards the Native Americans in many respects; like many presidents before him, and some since. He surely had some qualities of leadership and personal resolve that I admire but I would never call him my role model.

I don’t know that TR held the most objectionable views on race of any of Presidents, but his are certainly among the worst – and its a history which is largely unremembered and unreported.

It may very well have been that TR “believed that all races could, through their hard work, attain an equal level with whites” but that very attitude, that whites were naturally superior and that other races could learn and strive to be as good helps make Bradley’s point, in my opinion. Take that attitude and transplant it to foreign policy and its not surprise that TR looked so favorably on Japan, leaving the Japanese with the notion that they had a “Japanese Monroe Doctrine” that legitimized their imperial expansion in Asia. Bradley believed this attitude led indirectly to the war on the Pacific.

I acknowledge that Bradley’s book had a strong impact on me because it is a history that I was never taught and I went to some pretty good high schools and universities. Further much of what he recounts is dramatically sad. The Secretary of War William Howard Taft, the leader of the 1905 cruise, touring the allegedly pacified Philippines kept encountering brave civilian Filipinos who petitioned him for their country’s independence to which Taft essentially replied maybe, but not for at least 150 years when Filipinos could govern themselves. Imagine being on the receiving end of a comment like that, from an occupying power no less.

So I am really conflicted on TR. I find the general impression of him among Americans to be significantly sanitized and I find it difficult to reconcile how the US behaved in, for example, The Philippines with a president whose image we want or deserves to be on Mount Rushmore.