We shouldn’t be surprised that President George W. Bush’s Svengali, Karl Rove, is an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. TR is hot these days. He made the cover of Time magazine, heralding a series of hagiographic articles, including Rove’s, that make him out to be the first modern American president. In Time’s view, that means he saw the country’s potential for big intrusive government at home and abroad — the first Imperial New Dealer.

Sheldon Richman - 7/8/2006

A great American, to be sure. No one he is so Beloved.

Robert Higgs - 7/8/2006

If Walter Karp's account in THE POLITICS OF WAR (1979) be credited, McKinley was just as bad, but shrewder, because he pursued equally bad policies without appearing to be a lunatic.

Of course, Roosevelt has always had a huge following in this country precisely because of his abominable features. The typical American retains his admiration of the locker-room bully in high school, who gloried in shoving around smaller and weaker boys and laughing at them for their inability to defend themselves against his gratuitous assaults.

Even mainstream historians describe TR as little short of a madman. In THE SEARCH FOR ORDER (1967), Robert Weibe writes: Roosevelt was a "man of unlovely traits who relished killing human beings, nursed harsh personal prejudices, and juggled facts to enhance his fame.... Behind the flashing teeth and flailing arms lay a keen-edged intelligence and an insatiable ambition for power within the framework of popular acclaim" (p. 189). Ample documentation of TR's bloodthirst and his other "unlovely traits" appears in Robert Morris's revealing book THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1979). See esp pp. 632-61, and p. 850, fn. 119, which describe his participation in the fighting in Cuba.