Teddy Roosevelt

T.R. is one of the most fascinating presidents, to be certain. While he didn’t make my top 3, for variety of reasons, he’s fun as hell to talk about.

• He projected the alpha-male image. For example, T.R. would play sports, any sort of sport. He would always make sure that the press would capture pictures of him playing those sports. The one exception to this policy was tennis. T.R. loved to play tennis, but would never be photographed doing so as it was considered an “effeminate” sport. After all, tennis wasn’t like football; it was the “sport of kings” – as in, those effeminate kings across the ocean that wouldn’t know a real man if they were bitten by one.
• T.R. put American interests first, in terms of foreign policy, and didn’t make any bones about it. Whether it was war in the Philippines or the Panama canal, T.R. acted in what he believed to be the United States’ best interest.
• T.R.’s Bull Moose party was one full of dedication and devotion. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was the theme song for their convention in 1912. He believed what he believed, and he wasn’t afraid to say why.

Here’s what I don’t like about T.R.:

• He advocated for a larger Federal Government, as evidenced by the National Forest land grabs.
• He believed government ought to get involved in the relationship between capital and labor.
• He pushed through a great number of anti-business and anti-capitalist “reforms.”
• He saw the Federal Government as a solution to the problems of humanity. While the application of this idea tended to be more along the lines of regulation rather than social programs, the basic idea itself is wrong.
• He was kind of a crappy father. I know this was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but he really sort of left his kids in the lurch many times. Granted, they didn’t seem to complain much after the fact, but I still think he could have done things differently.

Whatever you think of T.R., you have to respect the man. He was larger than life, and his footprint is left indelibly on our nation.

Miscellaneous quotes attributed to T.R. (and none of them confirmed!):

• A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
• A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.
• Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
• Don’t hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit softly.



• I am a part of everything that I have read.
• I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.
• I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate; and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.
• I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.
• If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.
• No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
• Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
• The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his own weight.
• There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

Tagged as: Gilded Age, Progressive Era, Spanish-American War, Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt