Home is the Bull Moose
He always wanted the Republicans to be a party that was competitive morally for the common people. He had a determination to offer the common man a ‘square deal’. His Bull Moose party platform was a much more aggressive stance than he had ever taken as president or previous for progressive social policy. Most, if not all, were later introduced and passed by Democrats in the future. He commented that he sympathized more with Woodrow Wilson’s policy than Taft’s in the end. Early on in politics he had decided to push for the right idea even if it meant something more socialist rather than the traditional republican stance of laizzes faire. It would take a real expert on TDR and today’s issues to know how he would feel about the programs being pushed today. A writer from a book from 2002 wrote that if he was alive today, ‘he would slit his wrists’.
I would like to research and write more about the issue of republican principles being a good thing when they are lived up to. Which was his goal.
He always wanted the Republicans to be a party that was competitive morally for the common people. He had a determination to offer the common man a ‘square deal’. His Bull Moose party platform was a much more aggressive stance than he had ever taken as president or previous for progressive social policy. Most, if not all, were later introduced and passed by Democrats in the future. He commented that he sympathized more with Woodrow Wilson’s policy than Taft’s in the end. Early on in politics he had decided to push for the right idea even if it meant something more socialist rather than the traditional republican stance of laizzes faire. It would take a real expert on TDR and today’s issues to know how he would feel about the programs being pushed today. A writer from a book from 2002 wrote that if he was alive today, ‘he would slit his wrists’.
I would like to research and write more about the issue of republican principles being a good thing when they are lived up to. Which was his goal.
Before Ayn Rand and Adolf Hitler there was the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. This new noble line had a heir named Theodore Roosevelt Jr. TDR’s prodigy was William Howard Taft. TDR refuses to run for a third term. Instead he campaigns successfully to get Taft elected. After his trip to Africa he is ill at ease with the tree he planted. He curses it for not producing figs and the tree dies.
The bull moose party was formed by Teddie as a progressive third party with him as candidate to combat the machine politics of the two party system. Former President William H. Taft led the Republicans while Woodrow Wilson was at the helm for the Democrats. In an election Teddy nearly won, the fallout was his running took votes from Taft and left the gate open for Wilson’s Democratic victory.
It was a big deal in the Roosevelt family to not be the kind of privileged people who only did things to show off how privileged they were. The Dad was a child at heart and consistently was active with business, charitable efforts and his family. Like all of the children, Theodore Roosevelt loved his Father, being with him and being loved by him.
Theodore liked best going on adventures with his Dad. His Father was impressed with his sons ability and he trusted his son. Once when Theodore Roosevelt was away on a trip he remembers his childhood friend Edith Carow and he said it, “stirred up in me homesickness and longing for the past which will come again never, a lack never”.
Asthma plagued Teedie’s development. He seemed unable to shake the strange ailment until his ranching days in North Dakota. Amidst a most happy childhood, surrounded by a loving Father, mother, siblings and select friends like Edith Carow, he was plunged into the depths of despair and anguish physically, mentally and spiritually by these attacks. When his Father dies he turns to his new wife and when his new wife and mother died on the same day he turns inward and goes west.
His 2nd marriage to Edith Carow, his success in politics, his children and his failure in politics all seem to come from a different individual than the developing TDR he was in his youth. He is true to a secret plan that he hatched with his Father. He follows the plan to a T.
Roosevelt begins his political life as a Republican reformer and recruits the able William Howard Taft to be his Vice President. TDR meets ‘muckrakers’ who want to do the same good things as that Teddie wants to do and it creates the ‘progressive movement’. Roosevelt becomes a Republican Progressive and comes to see Taft as a ‘machine Republican’. Finally Roosevelt, after being a successful Republican president, cements his status as a folk hero by leaving the Republican Party after failing to wrench the nomination from Taft and becomes simply a Progressive, who is fit as a Bull Moose. Thus fulfilling his Father's charge, “You must build your body”.
Teddy is known today not for his failure to win a third term as president under his self-made Bull Moose progressive party, the closest a third party has ever come to winning, or his act of snubbing the Republican Party when they did not give him the nomination for his third term but rather he lives on in the cult of personality. His toothy grin, large mustache and spectacles seem to still have life in 2019. He made conservation and fitness an American tradition. The morality that his father told him to always put first even before health and studies is certainly his biggest contribution to American politics. Each culture has its own idea of morals and TDR gave America the Western cowboy kind, “if given the choice between peace, justice and righteousness, I choose justice and righteousness.”
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The bully pulpit : Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the golden age of journalism. 2013. Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, New York.
McCullough, David. Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt. 1981. Simon & Schuster, Inc. New York, New York.
