Not Teddy, Franklin.
He was a Representative, Police Commissioner of NY, Under-Secretary of the Navy, a Colonel in the US Army, Vice President and President before turning 50. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize...oh yeah, and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
What have you done?
I’m reading “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” by Edmund Morris right now.
It’s an amazing book.
TR was a freak. He despised Thomas Jefferson and Jeffersonian government. He much preferred the Alexander Hamilton model.
TR was a major progressive and was a supporter of eugenics.
Fascinating man, but very dangerous in his grandiose thinking.
Teddy Roosevelt was a “progressive era” president (and admirer of Alexander Hamilton) who is credited with being a great environmentalist for having nationalized thousands of acres of land and built dams and other “consevation” projects with taxpayer dollars. But this,too, was a form of Neo-Hamiltonian corporate welfare. Mining, farming, timber, and other interests lobbied for these programs because they would be enriched with “free” dams and irrigation, waterway improvements, cheap, subsidized water (mostly for agriculture), cheap timber land (leased for next to nothing from the government), and cheap access to grazing lands
“I think the President is clearly insane in several ways, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories. I think he longs for a big war wherein he can spectacularly perform as chief general and chief admiral… Mr. Roosevelt is the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off; in his frenzied imagination the great republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for an audience.”
— Mark Twain on Theodore Roosevelt
John McCain said that Teddy Roosevelt was his role model:
“I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold.”
Conservatives come in several varieties. These include the limited-government, Jeffersonian variety; the big-government, militant, national greatness variety; the nanny-state social conservative variety; and the country-club Republican variety.