| | 
Bully! (or, How Teddy Roosevelt Killed the Elephant)
Summer, when I was a child named Ted, I thought as a child. Then I grew up and learned what a bad precedent my namesake Theodore Roosevelt was. As you can see from below, TR virtually invented "Big Government."
I have copied and condensed the following without ellipsis directly from wikipedia. The bracketed comments are mine.
Roosevelt asked Congress to curb the power of trusts "within reasonable limits." They did not act but Roosevelt did, issuing 44 lawsuits against major corporations; he was called the "trust-buster".
Roosevelt believed: "The Government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways. Such supervision is the only alternative to an increase of the present evils on the one hand or a still more radical policy on the other."
His biggest success was the Hepburn Act of 1906. The Act gave the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) the power to replace existing rates with "just-and-reasonable" maximum rates, with the ICC to define what was just and reasonable. The act made ICC orders binding; that is, the railroads had to either obey or contest the ICC orders in federal court.
In response to public clamor (and Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle), Roosevelt pushed Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, as well as the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
Roosevelt set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres (785,000 km˛). In 1907, with Congress about to block him, [because he was acting by fiat, not law] Roosevelt hurried to designate 16 million acres (65,000 km˛) of new national forests.
The 1906 passage of the Antiquities Act gave him a tool for creating national monuments by presidential proclamation, without requiring Congressional approval for each monument on an item-by-item basis. Roosevelt, however, applied a typically broad interpretation to the Act, and the first national monument he proclaimed, Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, was preserved for reasons tied more to geology than archaeology.
Roosevelt's conservationism caused him to forbid having a Christmas tree in the White House. He was reportedly upset when he found a small tree his son had been hiding.
Despite the ad hoc [unconstitutional] nature of the force deployed by Roosevelt in the Phillipines, the Army was able to end the insurgency by 1902.
According to the treaty, in 1902, the U.S. was to buy out the equipment and excavations from France, which had been attempting to build a canal since 1881. While the Colombian negotiating team had signed the treaty, ratification by the Colombian Senate became problematic. Roosevelt decided in 1903 to support Panamanian separation from Colombia. On November 3, the Republic of Panama was created, with its constitution written in advance by the United States.
Roosevelt dramatically increased the size of the navy, forming the Great White Fleet, which toured the world in 1907 to impress the Japanese. When the fleet sailed into Yokohama, Japan, the Japanese went to extraordinary lengths to show that their country desired peace with the US. Thousands of Japanese school children waved American flags, purchased by the government, as they greeted the Navy brass coming ashore. Roosevelt said to the officers of the Fleet, "Other nations may do what you have done, but they'll have to follow you." This parting act of grand strategy by Roosevelt greatly expanded the respect for, as well as the role of, the United States in the international arena. However, the visit of the fleet to Tokyo also encouraged Japanese militarists. They had always argued for an even more aggressive Japanese naval expansion program, and the recent show of force convinced enough of their countrymen they were right. In a real sense, this set in motion the chain of events leading to the U.S. and Japan confronting each other 30 years later.
Roosevelt took Cabinet members and friends on long, fast-paced hikes, boxed in the state rooms of the White House, romped with his children, and read voraciously. In 1908, he was permanently blinded in his left eye during one of his boxing bouts, but this injury was kept from the public at the time.
During his presidency, Roosevelt tried to advance the cause of simplified spelling. He forced the federal government to adopt the system, sending an order to the Public Printer to use the system in all public federal documents. The order was obeyed, and among the documents thus printed was the President's special message regarding the Panama Canal. The reform annoyed the public, forcing him to rescind the order. [The Constitution gives the President the power to rewrite the English language by directive?]
Roosevelt's oldest daughter, Alice said of him that he always wanted to be "the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.
Roosevelt and Edith also had the entire White House renovated and restored to the federal style, tearing out the Victorian furnishings and details (including Tiffany windows) that had been installed over the previous three decades.
In 1902, in response to the assassination of President William McKinley on September 6, 1901, Roosevelt became the first president to be under constant Secret Service protection. [Okay, but Praetorian Guard anyone, if not Clinton's future Pimps?]
All told, Roosevelt and his companions killed or trapped over 11,397 animals. Although the safari was conducted in the name of science, interaction with renowned professional hunters and land owning families made the safari as much a political and social event, as a hunting excursion.
Roosevelt wrote a detailed account of the adventure in the book "African Game Trails", where he describes the excitement of the chase, the people he met, and the flora and fauna he collected in the name of science. [Caesar too wrote a history.]
The night of the 1904 election, after his victory was clear, Roosevelt promised not to run again in 1908. He later regretted that promise, as it compelled him to leave the White House at the age of only fifty, at the height of his popularity. [Roosevelt was the first President to try to stand for three terms. Compare this to Julius Caesar's self-aggrandizement.] Roosevelt certified William Howard Taft to be a genuine "progressive" in 1908, when Roosevelt pushed through the nomination of his Secretary of War for the Presidency. Taft had a different progressivism, one that stressed the rule of law [!] and preferred that judges rather than administrators or politicians make the basic decisions about fairness.
When Roosevelt realized that lowering the tariff would risk severe tensions inside the Republican Party—pitting producers (manufacturers and farmers) against merchants and consumers—he stopped talking about the issue. Unlike Roosevelt, Taft never attacked business or businessmen in his rhetoric. The left wing of the Republican Party began agitating against Taft. Roosevelt split the party in 1912, allowing Wilson, our worst president of the 20th Century save Carter, to win.]
On January 16, 2001, President Bill Clinton awarded Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor posthumously for his charge up San Juan Hill, Cuba, during the Spanish-American War. [And for preparing the secret service for him?]
Overall, historians credit Roosevelt for changing the nation's political system by permanently placing the presidency at center stage and making character as important as the issues. [I.e., charisma more important than principle.] His notable accomplishments include trust-busting and conservationism. However, he has been criticized for his interventionist and imperialist approach to nations he considered "uncivilized". Even so, history and legend have been kind to him. [Just as Caesar and Napoleon are admired today.]
His friend, historian Henry Adams, proclaimed, "Roosevelt, more than any other living man ....showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter — the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God — he was pure act."
Roosevelt was played by Robin Williams in the box office hit Night at the Museum (2006) and its upcoming sequel. [That says it all.]
I will grant that Roosevelt was a mixed bag. But he was absolutely not a conservative, nor was he a (small case) rule-of-law republican. He governed by directive. He was a bully in person and in government. He was a militarist for the "grandeur" of it. He is perhaps the closest we have had to a fascist as president.
|
|
