North America Theodore Roosevelt, President (1901-09) of the United States of America

[Bomberboyokay]

AS TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S STATUE FALLS, LET’S REMEMBER HOW TRULY DARK HIS HISTORY WAS

Jon Schwarz

June 23 2020, 3:57 a.m.

NEW YORK CITY’S American Museum of Natural History announced Sunday that it will remove its famous statue of President Teddy Roosevelt from its sidewalk entrance.

The museum’s president emphasized that the decision was made based on the statue’s “hierarchical composition” — Roosevelt is on horseback, flanked by an African man and a Native American man on foot — rather than the simple fact that it portrayed Roosevelt. The museum, co-founded by Roosevelt’s father, will keep Roosevelt’s name on its Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda, and Theodore Roosevelt Park.

This suggests that Americans still have not faced the extraordinarily dark side of Roosevelt’s history.

Roosevelt was born in 1858 to a wealthy New York City family. When his father died while Roosevelt was attending Harvard, he inherited the equivalent of about $3 million today. While in his twenties, Roosevelt invested a significant percentage of this money in the cattle business out west. This led him to spend large amounts of time in Montana and the Dakotas in the years just before they became states in 1889.

During this period, Roosevelt developed an attitude toward Native Americans that can fairly be described as genocidal. In an 1886 speech in New York, he declared:

I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.

That same year Roosevelt published a book in which he wrote that “the so-called Chivington or Sandy [sic] Creek Massacre, in spite of certain most objectionable details, was on the whole as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

The Sand Creek massacre had occurred 22 years previously in the Colorado Territory, wiping out a village of over 100 Cheyenne and Arapaho people. It was in every way comparable to the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War. Nelson A. Miles, an officer who eventually became the Army’s top general, wrote in his memoirs that it was “perhaps the foulest and most unjustifiable crime in the annals of America.”

The assault was led by Col. John Chivington, who famously said, “I have come to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Soldiers later reported that after killing men, women, and children, they mutilated their bodies for trophies. One lieutenant stated in a congressional investigation that “I heard that the privates of White Antelope had been cut off to make a tobacco bag out of.”

In a subsequent book, “The Winning of the West,” Roosevelt explained that U.S. actions toward American Indians were part of the larger, noble endeavor of European colonialism:

All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes. … Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands. …

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages. … American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people.

It is no exaggeration to call this Hitlerian. And while it’s extremely unpopular to say so, Nazism was not just rhetorically similar to European colonialism, it was an outgrowth of it and its logical culmination.

In a 1928 speech, Adolf Hitler was already speaking approvingly of how Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” In 1941, Hitler told confidants of his plans to “Europeanize” Russia. It wasn’t just Germans who would do this, he said, but Scandinavians and Americans, “all those who have a feeling for Europe.” The most important thing was to “look upon the natives as Redskins.”

What this means for the innumerable celebrations of Roosevelt across the U.S. is up to us. But if we proceed honestly, we will face a reckoning with something even more monumental than the history of America.

Let’s Remember How Dark Teddy Roosevelt’s History Was

As Teddy Roosevelt’s statue falls, let’s remember how truly dark his history was.

theintercept.com

 

[Caesar]

Teddy Roosevelt had some pretty unpleasant ideas, but any article claiming that Nazism is an outgrowth of European colonialism is begging to be dismissed as poorly-researched and agenda-driven. Who wrote this drivel?

 

[Bomberboyokay]

Jon Schwarz

 

[Reynolds Number]

There's a main road in Taipei named after him. I'm interested in finding out why.

 

[Caesar]

There's a main road in Taipei named after him. I'm interested in finding out why.

Sure it isn’t named after FDR? He was a great supporter of the Republic of China.

 

[medusala]

Teddy Roosevelt had some pretty unpleasant ideas, but any article claiming that Nazism is an outgrowth of European colonialism is begging to be dismissed as poorly-researched and agenda-driven. Who wrote this drivel?

Before joining First Look Media, Jon Schwarz worked for Michael Moore’s Dog Eat Dog Films and was a research producer for Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story.”

 

[Reynolds Number]

Sure it isn’t named after FDR? He was a great supporter of the Republic of China.

Yes it was. You seem to know your history better than most on here.

 

[Partridge]

Teddy Roosevelt had some pretty unpleasant ideas, but any article claiming that Nazism is an outgrowth of European colonialism is begging to be dismissed as poorly-researched and agenda-driven. Who wrote this drivel?

Yes. Let's ignore the mountain of legitimate achievements he had and focus on a viewpoint that would not have been remotely unusual in that era (he was still way more progressive than say Woodrow Wilson).

For starters:

• Helping to mediate the end of the Russian-Japan war (and win the Nobel Peace Prize)
• Siding with unions versus business in the coal strike in 1902
• Broke up the trusts controlling big business
• Passed the Food and Safety act
• Founded the National Parks
• Passed the first Worker's Compensation laws

One other bit of trivia: First President to invite a black man to dine at the White House? T.R.Roosevelt.

 

[ChampRevesby]

 

[JackFlash]

Theodore Roosevelt : He was a cattle rancher, a deputy sheriff, an explorer, a police commissioner, the assistant Secretary of the Navy, ( giving the Spanish Armada a one-way all-expenses-paid trip to the bottom of the ocean) he was Governor of New York, and a war hero. Most people already know of the Rough Riders and their historic charge up San Juan Hill, but few know that, since their horses had to be left behind, the Riders made this charge entirely on foot. Nothing could stop foot stompin' Teddy!

It wasn't just his war record or the fact that he knew several different ways to kill you that made Roosevelt such a violent man. Roosevelt kept a Bear, a Lion, a Coyote and a Hyena named Bill at the White House as pets. This bloke wasn't taking any chances on anyone crazy enough to jump the fence! 3 US Presidents had been assassinated in the previous 36 years before he took over in 1901! Shortly after ascending to the Presidency, Roosevelt spoke of a trans-isthmian canal in Panama in a speech to Congress. Europeans had dreamed of a Central American canal as early as the 16th century, Teddy thought it was a good idea too!

On October 14, 1912, while arriving at a campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ( he wanted to run again as a third party candidate, Taft was the republican President) Roosevelt was shot from seven feet away by a madman and, instead of treating the wound, delivered his campaign speech with the bleeding, undressed bullet hole in his chest! It was only after the speech ended that he went to the hospital to get the bullet removed. Roosevelt was no fan of Woodrow Wilson either having angrily denounced the foreign policy of the President during the 1st World War.

Teddy Roosevelt suffered from Athsma and severe nearsightedness. He spoke French and German fluently, studied in Europe, wrote numerous literary works and got his degree on scholarship from Harvard University. After his death, a notable politician remarked, "Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight".

And to think Joe Biden doesn't know what day it is!

 

[Spearman]

Theodore Roosevelt : He was a cattle rancher, a deputy sheriff, an explorer, a police commissioner, the assistant Secretary of the Navy, ( giving the Spanish Armada a one-way all-expenses-paid trip to the bottom of the ocean) he was Governor of New York, and a war hero. Most people already know of the Rough Riders and their historic charge up San Juan Hill, but few know that, since their horses had to be left behind, the Riders made this charge entirely on foot. Nothing could stop foot stompin' Teddy!

It wasn't just his war record or the fact that he knew several different ways to kill you that made Roosevelt such a violent man. Roosevelt kept a Bear, a Lion, a Coyote and a Hyena named Bill at the White House as pets. This bloke wasn't taking any chances on anyone crazy enough to jump the fence! 3 US Presidents had been assassinated in the previous 36 years before he took over in 1901! Shortly after ascending to the Presidency, Roosevelt spoke of a trans-isthmian canal in Panama in a speech to Congress. Europeans had dreamed of a Central American canal as early as the 16th century, Teddy thought it was a good idea too!

On October 14, 1912, while arriving at a campaign event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ( he wanted to run again as a third party candidate, Taft was the republican President) Roosevelt was shot from seven feet away by a madman and, instead of treating the wound, delivered his campaign speech with the bleeding, undressed bullet hole in his chest! It was only after the speech ended that he went to the hospital to get the bullet removed. Roosevelt was no fan of Woodrow Wilson either having angrily denounced the foreign policy of the President during the 1st World War.

Teddy Roosevelt suffered from Athsma and severe nearsightedness. He spoke French and German fluently, studied in Europe, wrote numerous literary works and got his degree on scholarship from Harvard University. After his death, a notable politician remarked, "Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake there would have been a fight".

And to think Joe Biden doesn't know what day it is!

yep back when men were men

basically he was a guy who had trouble finding his niche in life

 

[Freo Big Fella]

Yes. Let's ignore the mountain of legitimate achievements he had and focus on a viewpoint that would not have been remotely unusual in that era (he was still way more progressive than say Woodrow Wilson).

For starters:

• Helping to mediate the end of the Russian-Japan war (and win the Nobel Peace Prize)
• Siding with unions versus business in the coal strike in 1902
• Broke up the trusts controlling big business
• Passed the Food and Safety act
• Founded the National Parks
• Passed the first Worker's Compensation laws

One other bit of trivia: First President to invite a black man to dine at the White House? T.R.Roosevelt.

This - if we're going by a ratio of abhorrent beliefs to genuine achievements, Roosevelt comes out far ahead of Wilson, in particular.

America (and probably the world) looks immensely different without his trust-busting efforts in particular.