| | "Teddy Rooseveldt and Woodrow Wislon, our first two statist presidents"
???
Surely you jest, as I cannot believe that anyone could even know about the various events you mention without also knowing about some of the previous statists in office. I would argue that they were ALL statists, almost by definition, the alternative being anarchist. But even if by "statist" you mean someone who worships the state, or makes the state the thing of primary importance and worth in society, then you have to include at minimum Lincoln, or was he just joking in the Gettysburg Address?
Lincoln was a dictator, and his rational for being a dictator and for staging one of the bloodiest wars in all history, while running roughshod over the Bill of Rights, was to "preserve the union." I.e., the "state." It wasn't enough that the secessionist states were in fact considered by most legal authorities and certainly considered themselves to be independent states. NOooo. They had to be part of the super-state, the "United" States, whose very name implies that they were in fact states in their own right...
Freeing the slaves was an afterthought, only taken as a desperate measure because of major opposition in the North to the horrendously costly war, which was seen correctly by the general public, up to that point, as a simple war over power. The mercantilist North had been stealing the agrarian South blind via restrictive tarrifs that prevented them from freely selling their products abroad. Rather than face bancruptcy and be forced sell out the plantations to the ravening proto-fascists who supported Lincoln financially (and if you think that the southern slave owners were bad, I hesitate to IMAGINE how worse the Northern fascists would have been), the South picked up its marbles and left the game.
Not that I care about such niggling distinctions, as an actual anarchist. But it illustrates the point that it would be hard to find any president of any country who wasn't committed to the survival of the "state" involved over and above any other considerations. The state itself generates the incentives for this kind of dynamic. Everyone is politicized out of self-defense, and state-granted privileges become tit-for-tats as every conceivable group is pitted against every other.
So, you assume that if McKinley were not shot, we would have Nirvana on Earth, maybe Galt's Gulch for the whole U.S. by now? The "Progressives" who were behind TR and Wilson and the Fed and (consequently) the Great Depression, and who lionized Hilter and Mussolini (until they joined forces against Stalin anyway) can be traced in a direct line of intellectual descent and discourse to the Unitarian Utopian Socialists who took over Harvard from the Puritans in the 1820's.
Lincoln was just one phase of a Century+ collectivist statist movement that culminated with FDR, Hitler, Mao, Stalin and Mussolini. Blaming the people who were trying to OPPOSE that movement - the anarchists, among others - truly seems historically ludicrous.
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