rlmorel:
"But is a challenge for most of us to rethink certain people, but over the last 30 years, I have had to do just that with Theodore Roosevelt.
I view him quite differently now than I did as recently as the Nineties." Obviously, like every other human being in history, Teddy Roosevelt was a man of his times, and so shaped and limited by them.
I think it's far too easy to do as ProgressingAmerica does, on learning the true details of history, to condemn anyone from any historical period for not living up to our own highest standards of what is right & wrong -- or even just Right and Left wing.
So I think that Teddy Roosevelt does not deserve unjust criticism and that he far more closely resembles other Republicans, from Eisenhower to Reagan and Donald Trump than he does any Democrats like Wilson, FDR, LBJ or any others from today.
Don’t get me wrong-I agree completely with the abhorrence and rejection of judging people who lived centuries ago by the standards of today, with some exceptions, mostly along things you might find in the Ten Commandments.
I believe in judging people by their times, not by today’s standards. My views on T. Roosevelt have changed, not because of changing values, but my own changing knowledge of various issues as I age, such as economics or Constitutional issues. Until I began to learn more about T. Roosevelt, I was at the complete mercy of what I had been taught and what culture deigned to show me.
So I changed in my knowledge base, and that changed my views.
Related to this, I did not make any comments on the eugenics observation, because a lot of people believed in eugenics back then, for good or bad, and won’t pillory them on that unless they show themselves to be absolute racists in specific writing. It is pretty obvious that a lot of people looked at eugenics back then along the same lines they would have viewed livestock.
They lose sight of the fact that humans are humans, not livestock, and you can’t just put down or butcher and eat the ones who don’t live up to your standards.
However, I absolutely do not have any issue judging people on economic policies they embarked on, since there were people then who knew well the effects of government meddling in business, and Theodore Roosevelt took that to a new level, so I have not hesitated to judge him on those things. And his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, I judge far more harshly in that respect. Plus, we are feeling the effects of their actions to this very day.
I do reserve the observation that situations in certain economic pathways may have been untrod back then and thus new ground. But that is not a foreground application of the criticism.