I’ve always had mixed feelings about Theodore Roosevelt.
In my previous article, I basically argued that the 20th century would have unfolded very differently if William Jennings Bryan had served two terms as president instead of Theodore Roosevelt. The 20th century was a disaster for the West because of World War I, World War II and the Cold War which steadily pushed the United States into the role of a global liberal hegemon and superpower.
The United States played a decisive role in all of these European conflicts. The weight of American material support and military intervention tipped the scales in favor of the Entente and the Allies. The outcome of World War I begat World War II which begat the Cold War and all its Eurasian wars. This was a stunning departure from the 19th century in which Americans had been allergic to getting involved in European wars and in which Great Britain had been America’s most important antagonist.
What changed?
How did America go from focusing on territorial expansion and settlement into sparsely populated contiguous areas – the process of replicating itself from Virginia to Ohio to Missouri to Oregon – to global commercial expansion and dominating non-White countries which we had no intention of ever settling or incorporating into the Union on an equal basis with other states? How did we get to a place where Americans have to worry about dying in imperial wars in places like Afghanistan?
For over 25 years, it was Theodore Roosevelt who was the major influence in American life who persuaded Americans to become more belligerent and imperialistic. TR thought we needed Hawaii. He literally led the charge into Cuba and treated it as a colony as president. He wanted Puerto Ricans to become American citizens. He made the Philippines into an American colony. He projected American power into Latin America to create Panama and transformed much of Central America into Banana Republics. He built up the U.S. Navy to transform the United States into a Great Power, escalated tensions with Imperial Germany and at the end of his life angrily agitated for American intervention into World War I.
William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson continued to travel down the path toward war and imperialism that Theodore Roosevelt had blazed with all of their various interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America before Wilson plunged us into World War I. Theodore Roosevelt stood at the fork in the road begging us to go down it that led to a century of endless wars in Europe and Asia.
There is a lot that I admire about Theodore Roosevelt, but he is one of the top three Jenga blocks in American history that I would remove if I had the power to do so. Stephen Douglas would have unquestionably been a better president than Abraham Lincoln. William Jennings Bryan would have been a better president than Theodore Roosevelt. FDR owed his rise to power to his famous cousin.
I know it has nothing to do with it, but Millennial Woes is back on Odysee with Milleniyule after almost a year.
Yesterday I watched the documentary “Love, Hate and Passion” (1997) about the anal-perverted “writer” Thomas Mann and his masculinized Jewish sham wife. The most hideous, disgusting filth of the most degenerate kind. It seems only logical to me that the Nazis hated this guy. Like a perverted, pubescent lecher, this guy still raves about young men’s asses in a poetry album-like manner at over 70 years of age and calls it “love” [sic]. He fell madly in love with a young waiter, he notes self-pityingly, full of unfulfilled longing for perverted bed games.
What amazes me is that this idiot is supposed to have been “one of the greatest German writers.” Yet the only thing he ever accomplished was to be born to rich parents (descendants of Hanseatic merchants) and marry a super-rich Jewish heiress whose mother was the notorious “feminist” Hedwig Dohm. These people were born with a silver spoon in their mouths and never had to do any work themselves. Similarly, as “exiles” in America, they were treated with preferential treatment and pampered as a kind of pseudo-nobility or wannabe aristocrats, among others by the Jewish fraudster, copyist, and plagiarist Einstein.
His Buddenbrooks is a pompous, dusty family saga set in the Wilhelmine Biedermeier bourgeoisie. To describe this decadent, provincial bullshit as “great literature” is in itself a bottomless lack of taste. Throughout his life, Mann had a “painting” called “The Spring” hanging in his study “for inspiration,” depicting three naked boys. A cultural country like Germany, which counts this among its “greatest writers,” has every reason to be ashamed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann#Sexuality_and_literary_work
I wonder how long before the North United States and the South United states would have co-existed in peace if Stephen Douglas had been President instead of Lincoln?
“Coming today by the statues of Stonewall Jackson, in the city of Lee, I felt what a privilege it is that I, as an American, have in claiming that you yourselves have no more right of kinship in Lee & Jackson than I have.”
-Teddy Roosevelt 10/18/1905
This quote always makes me laugh. In stating he has just as much claim to Lee & Jackson as Southerners do Teddy’s imperialism extended even to Dixie’s heroes XD
The Axis would have lost WWII without American help.
World War 2 was just an aftershock of the Great War
Pastor John Weaver frequently reminds us that “history is God’s Providence fulfilled.” The German theologian Frederick Haberman famously wrote: “History is His Story.” Both men are biblically correct. Whatever happens in the world is ordained by God for His purposes. This was the understanding of our Southern ancestors and it was the teaching of Martin Luther. The decline of Christianity in the west has accompanied the decline of the west. The God who appointed over us Jefferson Davis is the same God who appointed over us the decrepit Joe Biden. But it was for His purpose, not ours, although we have been assured ” that all things work together for good for those who love God, and are the called according to His purposes.” Accepting this is what the Apostle James referred to as “submit yourselves to God. As Stonewall Jackson used to say to his men: “Our responsibility is to do our duty, but the consequences belong to God.” However things turn out, they could have turned out no other way.