Barack Obama has started his fight for a second term as President of the United States. Part of his strategy is to paint the contemporary Republican Party as an extremist departure from its historical roots. In December 2011 he gave a speech in which he allied himself with the older, gentler Republican tradition of Progressivism – the political movement that dominated America in the early 20th century. Obama invoked the memory of President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt (‘the Republican son of a wealthy family’) who believed that: ‘Our country means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy … of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.’
At first glance Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919) is a brilliant weapon to use against the Republicans because his track record as a social reformer reflects poorly on his party’s recent drift to the right. As president from 1901 to 1909 Roosevelt curbed the power of big corporations and signed legislation that improved the quality of food and medicine. Moreover the progressive label ascribed to Roosevelt is an attractive one for Obama to adopt (or at least it is better than the socialist tag he is so often given). ‘Progressive’ conjures up images of privileged but benign reformers motivated more by noblesse oblige than class warfare.
But Obama’s appropriation of Roosevelt’s record repeats a classic politician’s mistake of trying to fit the past to suit the present. This effort invariably distorts both.Roosevelt’s policies were motivated by Victorian prejudices that we would find uncomfortable today. He saw life as a struggle between the courageous and the weak – different personality types that he often categorised by race. White people of European descent were like gods; the rest were lesser breeds without the law. Roosevelt once said of Native Americans: ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’ To him Native Americans were a degenerate impediment to settlement of the American West; they deserved their near-extinction. So too did whites who threatened the prosperity of their race. Roosevelt wrote in 1914: ‘Criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.’
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