On July 4, the $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened its doors to the public — a public that, according to a letter in a library exhibit, Roosevelt felt was similar to cattle.
In the letter written to Charles Davenport at Cold Spring Harbor in his own hand, he explained that “society has no business permitting degenerates to reproduce their kind.”
Roosevelt wrote in the letter, “We have to refuse to apply human beings the same elementary knowledge every farmer applies to his own stock. And that’s madness.”
“The farmers who let all the increase come from the worst stock would be threatened as fit inmates for an asylum,” he added.
Roosevelt also wrote that the “inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his blood behind him in the world.”
“We have no business permitting the perpetuation of a citizen of the wrong type,” he said.
Like most progressives, Glenn points out that Roosevelt made it clear that he believed in “categories.”
“This fight is about categories,” he says. “It’s about, you know, the collective and not the individual in his own hand to the director of the Carnegie-funded scientific institute. This was not the fringe. This is the cutting edge. This is the settled science that you must pay attention to of the time.”
“Theodore Roosevelt believed in the science and in the expert and in the government strong enough and clever enough to act upon what the experts knew. That’s progressivism all in one letter,” he explains.
“Now, was he great with the national parks? Yeah, he was great on national parks. Was he great on the individual and the man in the arena? Yeah, he was brave. He was funny. He read a book every day. A book every day. He took a bullet in Milwaukee and finished the speech. He set aside 230 million acres. That’s not the argument,” he continues.
“The argument is what he thought the American government was for,” he adds.
Glenn explains that Roosevelt also believed that “property is subject to the community’s right to regulate its use” and that government officials were the “stewards of the public welfare” rather than “servants of the law.”
“In a speech he called a ‘Charter for Democracy,’ he proposed when a court strikes down a progressive statute, the people should be able to vote to overturn the court. Former president of the United States in 1912 proposing a popular recall of judicial decisions. That’s not constitutional. That’s not how it works,” Glenn says.
“Theodore Roosevelt is exactly what we’re seeing. He’s just dressed up in prettier clothes. He’s not a despicable man where Woodrow Wilson is just a despicable man,” he says, adding, “And I don’t think he actually saw what was coming.”
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