first of all, Redman, I was skimming through the old thread about Powell and I realized something. I realized that I had simply thrown you into a category simply because of what you had written. I realized I sounded just like US=GG. I apologize. I do not know your views and should give you the benefit of the doubt. Okay, enough bullshittin’.
Back to Teddy Roosevelt which is the freshest on my mind.
let’s begin with some of Roosevelt’s more illustrious beliefs. When the US did not annex Hawaii in 1893 after some Americans, namely the Dole family; Roosevelt called this hesitancy “a crime against white civilization.” And he told the Naval War College: “All the great materful races have been fighting races… No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.” Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and nations he considered inferior. As a matter of fact, when a mob lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the US should offer the Italian gov’t some renumeration, but he privately wrote his sister that he thought it was a good thing and he told her he had said as much at a dinner with “various dago diplomats…all wrought up with lynching.” William James, the philosopher, a contemporary of Roosevelt said about Teddy that he “gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of higher life…” Roosevelt’s talk of expansionism was not just a matter of manliness and heroism; he was conscious of “our trade relations with China.” This was important in shaping our policy toward Hawaii, the Philippines, and all of Asia. Now let’s talk about some of his business ideas. Anyone ever hear of Mother Jones. She organized textile workers and miners, as well as their wives and children; which sometimes amounted to the same thing. Anyways, In the spring of 1903, she organized the marching of some 284,000 children through New Jersey and New York and down through Oyster Bay in order to see Pres Roosevelt. Guess what he did??? Turned them down flat! The pres also turned a blind eye to weekly lynchings in the south which were on the rise, even though this was the progressive period. Hell murderous roits even occured which were never once curbed by the gov’t. In some ways it was the Progressive period in that it was the start of the age of reform; but it was a reluctant reform aimed at quieting the popular risings, not making fundamental changes. It was actually the time of “political capitalism” where businessmen took firmer control of the political system because the private economy was not sufficient to forestall the protests from below. Roosevelt made a name for himself as a trust buster right (even though Taft, a conservative launched more suits than did Roosevelt.)? It must have been pretty damn hard for Roosevlet considering that in 1904, two of J.P. Morgan’s men were in fact advisors to the President. Elbert Gary, chairman of U.S. Steel, and George Perkins. They cooperated with Roosevelt and any investigation by the Bureau of Corporations in return for a guarantee of their companies’ legality. (sounds familiar doesn’t it, especially nowadays). But the list goes on… men like Hanna, Robert Bacon, George W. Perkins, Elihu Root, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, and James Stillman all made up the presidents advisors. As a matter of fact, in a letter to his brother in law (a wall street exec. no less), Roosevelt wrote “I intend to be most conservative, but in the interests of the corporations themselvesand above all in the interests of the country.” Roosevelt supported the regulatory Hepburn Act because he feared something worse. He wrote to henry Cabot Lodge that the railroad lobbyists who opposed the bill were wrong: " I think they are very shortsighted not to understand that to beat it means to increase the movement for gov’t ownership of the railroads." His actions against the trusts was to induce them to accept gov’t regulation, in order to prevent destruction. He prosceuted the Morgan railroad monopoly in the Northern Securities case, considering it a victory; but it hardly changed anything, and although the Sherman Act provided for criminal penalties there was no prosecution of the men who planned the monopoly-Morgan, Harriman, and Hill. And this is just one example.
Oh, and Redman, I don’t know who I like as president, I really don’t think we have had a “good one” maybe each has offered something, but isn’t that the point? When I criticized each of these presidents (which I am not done yet) that was held up as practically infallible; and made mere humans of them I felt like I was about to be crucified. Fuck that. Just because some US hero maybe isn’t so heroic.
