askchapo

'cause in our national mythos he's basically styled as a gentleman adventurer sort. his whole bag is "overcame a sickly childhood and grew up into a badass tough guy who was also president, wowzers!"

He's a saint of american civil religion, even had his head carved in the holy quadrinity at Rushmore.

As vice president, he put together his own army unit that was like the Avengers in 1898 or something. It was made up of, like, famous college athletes, glee club singers, old west outlaws, Texas rangers, and Native Americans. So, that's kind of nuts and people really ate it up. (The whole Spanish-American war was like that. There was another army unit that was commanded by an elderly Southern politician who'd been a Confederate officer, and in one battle, he had a fit of quasi-dementia where he shouted "Come on, boys! We got the damned Yankees on the run!" Stuff like that was fun to Americans at the time and for a long time afterwards.)

He also busted up monopolies as president. He was also instrumental in establishing the US as an Imperial power.

Classic Teddy:

In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt concluded his Lincoln Day Dinner speech with the proclamation that “race purity must be maintained.”13 By 1906 he blatantly equated the falling birth rate among native-born whites with the impending threat of “race suicide.” In his State of the Union message that year Roosevelt admonished the well-born white women who engaged in “willful sterility—the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.”14 These comments were made during a period of accelerating racist ideology and of great waves of race riots and lynchings on the domestic scene. Moreover, President Roosevelt himself was attempting to muster support for the U.S. seizure of the Philippines, the country’s most recent imperialist venture.

From Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class

Remember when Teddy Roosevelt was part of the le manly epic bacon internet culture for a while?

Well, he basically is the idealized USAan

Loved shooting animals, got college kids drunk to force them into his special big boy army unit and took a bullet to the chest without dying

He built the regulatory state, which was unquestionably good. Capital had become so concentrated and the government so thoroughly captured that it was in dire need of reform. Through his outsized personality and blue blood background Teddy Roosevelt was in a unique position to break the logjam and put badly needed constraints on capital in a government that was otherwise ossified.

He was also a genocidal freak. So in that sense he appeals to many different sensibilities.

Honestly we could use a second coming of the first half of Teddy right about now, the situation is set up very similarly. Minus the genocidal part ofc but then whether you can have one without the other is a meaningful point of debate. Imagine Trump but instead of concentrating power further in capital he flows it in the other direction, back to the state. Trump has the rizz but his policies are just the total opposite of what we need, so he's like the anti teddy Roosevelt, just careening us off a cliff at full speed in a way few other politicians would be able to accomplish. Hence the JDPON DON memes lol.

There are moments in us history when individuals are able to subsume competing factions through sheer force of personality to effect transformative change. Teddy Roosevelt was one such figure, as was Washington, Jackson, FDR, Lincoln. Most of these guys are just riding along on the current but a few of them embody the moment.

Highly recommend hell of presidents btw.

Real answer: he was a big asshole who got things done and said good words and occasionally did good deeds regarding the common people and he was so long ago most people don't know the intricacies and can just kinda go with a vibe check, plus he predates the modern party identities so he can be whatever their imagination needs

Joke answer: because he was a big porkchop of a man with a bushy mustache but the tiny glasses made it funny, kinda like the tall man in the tiny car scene from the Simpsons

Dead wife syndrome

He did a lot of wildly different things in a way that you can't really pin him on a modern political compass, so everyone from libs to conservatives are able to find something worth liking about him, thus exalting him further.

He was nicer to Native Americans than other presidents of the time. He argued for racial purity and was against interracial marriage. He greatly expanded the national parks and public land. He colonised the Philippines. He worked with unionists and regulated capital, threatened to nationalize coal if the striking miners' demands weren't met, and introduced the concept of "workers compensation" for injuries. He shot animals for fun. He argued for conserving natural resources. He sent most of the US Navy uninvited all over the world just to flex/intimidate. He did an imperialism in Central America.

He was a racist maniac hell bent on expanding the US empire, but believed that at least the subjects of the Imperial Core should at least benefit from the imperialism like the bourgeoisie already do.

Trust busting, Food and Drug Administration, and national parks. I think this whole bull moose party thing titillates the libertarians and Yang folks, especially because it's far back in history enough to be more mythologized than the Reform party and such

He was the first Redditor to touch grass

Americans love a good nepo-baby come-up story

Only good thing I know him for is the National Parks system was made during his presidency.

we dont collectively idolize anyone anymore

Lots of credit being given to Teddy here without mention that many of the New Deal reforms were actually given as concessions to a well organized and highly active labor force. Unions won these reforms through their sweat and blood. A tale as old as time.

Is every good thing Teddy did the results of this? No, but a hell of a lot of it was the spoils of class war won by labor struggles. This was literally the golden age of the US labor movement, workers were striking constantly and in new and creative ways. They were usurping the power of capitalists and the bourgeoise US government to an extent never seen before or since (with the exception of the Black Panthers perhaps). Much of the organizing was led by socialists, which is why they leaned hard on the unions to get rid of socialists with McCarthyism and the red scare 1.0. WWII weakened the US labor movement a bit in terms of manpower and coercion via nationalism, but by no means did this slow their roll. If I remember correctly, there were even more strikes during the war than the years between WWI and WWII. If you think the fight for universal healthcare is relatively recent, it's because you haven't learned about US labor history. Workers were fighting for this from at least the early 1900s. I mention this because it was an eye-opening moment for me the first time I heard it mentioned casually when talking about strikes in the 1920s and 1930s.

USians idolize this war criminal due to successful historical revisionism, making it look like he was just a "great man", a good ol' boy with stereotypically hypermasculine behaviors that made some good reforms out of the kindness of his heart and the strength of his moral character. Every story you read about this man is dripping with this mythos. He was no exceptional, he was practical in the sense that he saw that concessions were needed to appear the labor movement, but would he have come to these reforms and made the changes without all of this pressure? I doubt it.

Idealism and massive propaganda efforts poisoning the US education system are largely to blame. Those in the US aren't taught this shit in school and the books that cover this topic in detail aren't known by most. Sorry, I'd like to drop the names of them, but I don't own these books and would need to do some digging to find them again. Our local workers alliance covers this in their labor history presentations each year and has copies they lend out, which was my first exposure to them.

Racism.

I love Gore Vidal’s essay on TR: An American Sissy I think he gives some good analysis of why Americans like (the idea of) the guy.

Comrade Ocean, you know what has to be done.