Theodore Roosevelt, Imperialism and 20th Century America

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Theodore Roosevelt.

In my previous article, I basically argued that the 20th century would have unfolded very differently if William Jennings Bryan had served two terms as president instead of Theodore Roosevelt. The 20th century was a disaster for the West because of World War I, World War II and the Cold War which steadily pushed the United States into the role of a global liberal hegemon and superpower.

The United States played a decisive role in all of these European conflicts. The weight of American material support and military intervention tipped the scales in favor of the Entente and the Allies. The outcome of World War I begat World War II which begat the Cold War and all its Eurasian wars. This was a stunning departure from the 19th century in which Americans had been allergic to getting involved in European wars and in which Great Britain had been America’s most important antagonist.

What changed?

How did America go from focusing on territorial expansion and settlement into sparsely populated contiguous areas – the process of replicating itself from Virginia to Ohio to Missouri to Oregon – to global commercial expansion and dominating non-White countries which we had no intention of ever settling or incorporating into the Union on an equal basis with other states? How did we get to a place where Americans have to worry about dying in imperial wars in places like Afghanistan?

For over 25 years, it was Theodore Roosevelt who was the major influence in American life who persuaded Americans to become more belligerent and imperialistic. TR thought we needed Hawaii. He literally led the charge into Cuba and treated it as a colony as president. He wanted Puerto Ricans to become American citizens. He made the Philippines into an American colony. He projected American power into Latin America to create Panama and transformed much of Central America into Banana Republics. He built up the U.S. Navy to transform the United States into a Great Power, escalated tensions with Imperial Germany and at the end of his life angrily agitated for American intervention into World War I.

William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson continued to travel down the path toward war and imperialism that Theodore Roosevelt had blazed with all of their various interventions in Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America before Wilson plunged us into World War I. Theodore Roosevelt stood at the fork in the road begging us to go down it that led to a century of endless wars in Europe and Asia.

There is a lot that I admire about Theodore Roosevelt, but he is one of the top three Jenga blocks in American history that I would remove if I had the power to do so. Stephen Douglas would have unquestionably been a better president than Abraham Lincoln. William Jennings Bryan would have been a better president than Theodore Roosevelt. FDR owed his rise to power to his famous cousin.