Theodore Roosevelt – a model or a monster?

by Andrew Brons.  

Mr. Milliband, junior, second generation Marxist descendant, through his father Ralph Milliband and Mr. Obama, second generation Kenyan, have stepped into difficult waters. They have both embraced Theodore Roosevelt as their mentor. They have borrowed his opposition to any free market that would allow monopolies to flourish and his belief that the state must sometimes intervene to ensure that the market really was free. If you expect me to sneer at their stated concerns, as distinct from the honesty of their concerns, you will be disappointed. Government intervention in a private enterprise economy is essential.

However, there are those who would delve more deeply into the recesses of the Rooseveltian mind in order to embarrass Messieurs Milliband and Obama. I shall do the former but without the latter motive. Am I going soft? No but I should like to dwell on what the older Roosevelt said, rather than on a dishonest attempt to connect that with either Mr. Milliband or Mr. Obama.

Somebody calling himself Tim Stanley wrote an article in the Daily Torygraph, (January 20 2014) quoting Roosevelt’s ideas on race and ethnicity. Mr. Stanley, if that be his name, described Roosevelt as ‘a bigot’ and having ‘the prejudices common to the nineteenth century’. Perhaps Mr. Stanley has other bigotries and other prejudices, under other names. Certainly his article would not have been out of place in a journal of the left.

However, we must examine the pronouncements of the former President and judge them case by case, avoiding the hate speech terms like bigot or racist used by Mr. Stanley and his sub-editors, which are designed to prevent people from exercising independent judgment.

The tragedy is that most modern columnists do not have that freedom of choice.

Roosevelt’s views on the subject fell into two neat categories: his factual pronouncements about the evidence of racial difference; and value pronouncements as to how we should describe other peoples and behave towards them. We might find that we agree with much of the former, while rejecting much, though not all, of the latter.

Roosevelt’s description of  white people as ‘the forward race’ was clearly justified in his day, if only by reference to achievement and was not unnecessarily demeaning to other peoples. That was before IQ tests showed the average intelligence of races to be different –  interestingly whites rate rather less than Orientals. Perhaps range of IQ is more important than arithmetic mean.

Those who are offended by concepts such a forward race  and more so by his depiction of others as backward races should remember that he saw the role of this forward race to be to raise the living standards of everybody, including those of the peoples he saw as backward. The offended might grudgingly see his descriptive solecisms being mitigated by his prescriptive altruism – or they might not!

His reference to Africans does not bear repetition. His description of those that he would have called ‘American Indians’ was quite unnecessarily offensive, even in his day. His remark about, “the only good Indians” could be seen as a recipe for genocide. In fact, it was used as a justification for their ethnic cleansing from their traditional lands to make way for new white settlements, developments and national parks.

His tinkering with what later would later be called eugenics showed him to be ahead of his time, although the eugenics can is full of  worms – the sensible intertwined with the sinister.

It is a concern that families of the feckless, irresponsible and criminal of the indigenous population and – quite separately the families of migrants – are larger than those of the indigenous, struggling would-be home owners who need two salaries to realise their dreams. Dysfunctional demographic change can be effected by developments innocent, and indeed beneficial, in themselves: the desire for home ownership; gender equality; and the welfare state to name a few. That is not to mention the unvoted for  immigration policies that have brought Africa and South Asia to our shores.

So what can we learn from Theodore Roosevelt? He was clearly a thinking man’s President who understood the need for  practical policies to have ideological roots. He was a man of some original ideas and some traditional ideas that have been discarded without justification. He was also a man who used language unnecessarily to offend and he referred to other ethnicities as though they were beings to be treated as we pleased, without regard to their wishes and interests.

Perhaps, the lesson we should learn before all others is that seeking gurus whose ideas we are prepared to accept, without thinking, is lazy man’s politics. Read the ideas of anybody and everybody but, in the end, use your own judgment.

Today, those formerly described as American Indians are called Native Americans and you might expect me to reject those words without qualification. I do not. They should be entitled to the description Native American just as soon as we are granted  the status of Native Britons or Native Europeans or both.