I think TR was perhaps the greatest president of all.
I could go on and on about monopolies, robber barons, horrible working conditions, adulterated food and drugs, etc.
I despise modern progressives more than anyone and have no doubt that TR would feel the same.
Just as Otto Bismarck started social security in Germany to hold off Communism, Roosevelt reformed America before it also exploded into a revolution.
He was the only man to earn the Nobel Peace prize and medal of honor. When I say earned, he really did. He single handedly brokered a peace treaty between Japan and Russia. He led a charge up San Juan Hill or whatever hill they say it was, miraculously escaping death while getting 9 bullet holes in his clothes.
He loved hunting and shooting. He was an expert on all kinds of subjects and wrote many books still considered authoritative.
He loved and was faithful to his first and second wives and was a great Father.
A truly great man.
What do you think TR would think of the modern gun grabbers?
TR and gun grabbers? Who was President when New York’s infamous Sullivan law was passed?
. . . and you can addIt is difficult to improve on that, a century on. The whole speech from which that is excerpted bears a reading.
- From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:
- There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Still and all, TR is definitely a problem. The term “conservative” is not specific enough; what is conservative in one country would be otherwise in another. TR was jingoistic. He did not truly understand the meaning of that until his own son fell in battle; understandably he was never the same after that.