"after he would have no longer been up for re-election - a classic scheme that progressives do."
Even if Roosevelt's policies would've been less popular, he would've done them anyways. Progressives always try to do things when people aren't looking, or change the label, or something else that in effect re-packages the content. Do it on a friday evening, or on the day before/day after Thanksgiving day. Bring in friendly journalists so that they report it a certain way. Any/all of these are fair game and they're not new. They're just more common now.
For progressives, progressivism is always first. Nothing comes before the faith.
As for "safe", yes, I did have a little bit of that in mind, but mostly I'm looking at his ideology. That, and TR was a bold guy. He wouldn't have thought much about "safe", so I wouldn't factor that in too much. This is a question of ideology. Progressive ideology. You do know that TR promised not to run for a third term, correct?
Who knows if TR could have won his third term consecutively - that's a lesser of a question than is why did he make the promise not to in the first place? 100 years ago, the progressives didn't have what they have today - most Americans still knew about the Founders, the actual truth, there hadn't been widespread disinformation at the time. It took their historians and universities a century to put all of this propaganda in place.
His making that specific promise was an acknowledgment of what the people had expected up until that time from a president.
So he boxed himself in(boxed himself out of?) from there ever being any electoral accountability? So what? The end result is the same. Once he won his second term and that was going to be the end of it? It was pedal to the metal, balls to the wall. He's the man of action, he's going to do anything that he wants. That Constitution is not going to stand in TR's way. It's going to be all statism, all Constitution shredding, all the time. And it was. The end result is the same.
I didn’t leave that off because it was irrelevant.
By the time Roosevelt had promised to not run again, he had already racked up hundreds of executive orders.
The position you posit is that he felt free to issue the orders knowing he would never have to face the voters again.
That is just factually false.
The issue of his progressive policies or politics just don’t enter into the falseness of the narrative.
Roosevelt issued those Executive Orders because he was POPULAR, not because he was free from a future election.
In fact, when he came back in 1912, he jumped back into the Republican primary and won 9 of the last 10 primaries. At the convention, backroom deals prevented Roosevelt delegates from being seated even from States he had won during the primaries.
Roosevelt was wildly popular with the country, and after being cheated out of the nomination, formed his own party and ran.
For the only time in our history, a sitting President came in third place and took only two States in the election. Even after four years of safari and adventure, Roosevelt was more popular than Taft.
If the Republican bosses had allowed Roosevelt to seat his delegates at the convention, he would have won the nomination and the Presidency. Wilson would never have won the White House.
And in that case, as Roosevelt would have been in is second full term, he would have continued to use Executive Orders.
Therefore, he wasn’t using them in his second term because “he would have no longer been up for re-election”, he was using them because he had the support of the people and was bypassing Congress.
The base premise of your article is wrong.