Too many conservatives today, with no understanding of his overall socio-political views, mistakenly assume that Franklin Roosevelt’s cousin Teddy Rosevelt was a conservative, because of his foreign policy guideline: speak softly and carry a big stick.
For a more comprehensive depiction of reality, read Ronald J. Pestritto’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Theodore Roosevelt Was No Conservative:
There’s a reason he left the GOP to lead the Progressive Party.
As I wrote in Teddy Roosevelt: Progressive President:
In the political sphere, Progressivism is a synonym for socialism, and for our sect called liberalism. Socialism necessitates collectivized power at the highest levels of the political state, leaving open a pathway to totalitarianism. Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to march along that pathway…
Looking longingly at the scientific and academic excellence achieved under Otto von Bismarck’s German Empire, Croly said that America needed a strong man who would take the bull by the horns, undeterred by the Constitution, and simply impose socialistic collectivism as Bismarck had done when he instituted the world’s first welfare state in 1881…
Teddy Roosevelt, and later to some extent Woodrow Wilson, were the answers to academic intellectuals’ prayers.
A damn-the-Constitution activist, Teddy Roosevelt became President after William McKinley’s assassination by social-justice anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901. Without pre-approval from Congress, for example, Teddy committed the nation to the cost of building the Panama Canal and started a civil war in Central America to obtain territorial rights. When asked where in the Constitution he found authority for these actions, Roosevelt said that he knew what the situation required and simply did it, whether Congress would concur or not. The Constitution, of course, requires that the Senate advise and consent on treaty matters and reserves to Congress the exclusive right to authorize expenditures of Federal funds.
In the Bismarckian mould, Teddy Roosevelt was a President prepared to take the bull by the horns and overthrow the entrenched ideas of Jeffersonian individuality that stood in the way of intellectuals’ conception of social justice and progress.
While he was not a devout believer in the religion of socialism, the effect of Teddy Roosevelt’s terms in office was to promote the liberal-socialist cause. Like all college-educated persons of that era, Roosevelt had been thoroughly exposed to the secular and materialistic doctrine of socialism, first as a Harvard undergraduate, then in public life. In his defense, it may be said that he confronted an America that was fundamentally different in the economic sphere from the America of 1776.
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