Joe Mathews’ editorial about how Michael Bloomberg is Teddy Roosevelt and Arnold Schwarzenegger is Hiram Johnson would be a lot more interesting if Roosevelt and Johnson had actually won the 1912 election. They didn’t. Woodrow Wilson won. And before long we were being led by a virulent racist imbued with ideological grandeur, and we found ourselves involved in the most pointless and bloody war in the history of mankind. And, no that war did not make the world safe for democracy. Quite the opposite, as France and England would discover not long thereafter.
And while mentioned in Mathews piece, Arnold is ineligible to be president or vice-president of the United States of America. So what is the point of this fantasy?
history. Thus, for example, Teddy Roosevelt becomes both a champion of the unitary Presidency fiction, AND a model for imperialism as the wonderful Spreading of Democracy (and health care) through the world.
Never mind that TR did his part to contribute to the global tensions that helped grease the skids to two world wars…if we thought about that TOO much, we might have second thoughts about latterday gunboat diplomacy.
it’s not even rewriting history since history of that era has been written wrong from the start.
Roosevelt is a very complicated historical figure, mixing many of the best and worst traits of the American character. But he was not someone that simply rose above the partisan bickering of his day.
And in so far as he even tried, it only got him shot.
“Roosevelt is a very complicated historical figure, mixing many of the best and worst traits of the American character. “
He really did have some shining qualities, but he had some awful ones too. I think it says something pretty dark about both American history and American historians that he is apparently typically rated in the top five American presidents.
It’s the not the historians fault. Look at the competition.
And I’m just basing this on something I read at wikipedia. But look at the way Carter is rated low by historians – on par with Ford!! Historians generally seem to value the strong executive over the wise executive. If that’s true, I think they deserve blame for that.
(assuming that his progressive tendencies and his imperialist tendencies can be considered a wash), the one quality that I would guess makes him stand out relative to most other presidents is his willingness to have strong and willful alternative views in his cabinet. He was, it strikes me, like Lincoln, that way. I’m thinking particularly of Elihu Root, who seems to have strongly opposed TR’s imperialism (which is not to say that Root didn’t have his own, corporatist, imperialist tendencies, as I understand him).
what a disaster it is to have a president who turns the Cabinet into an echo chamber.