Theodore Roosevelt: Myopic Hero

In political discourse, Theodore Roosevelt typically evokes bipartisan fondness. Recent biographers tend to magnify picturesque elements of Roosevelt’s persona, often by either presenting him as the epitome of American masculinity or as the benevolent idealist with a paternalistic sense of noblesse oblige. For instance, H.W. Brands characterizes Roosevelt as “the last romantic”, contending that this concept emerged from Roosevelt’s belief that “physical bravery was the highest virtue and war the ultimate test of bravery”. It seems as though rhetoricians, searching for historical precedents of national honor and greatness, seized Roosevelt as the example of frail, asthmatic boy turned righteous hero. Given that Roosevelt was such a paradoxical

Free-market ideologues had to disregard his domestic policy implementations, where to a certain extent he validated the concerns of commonwealth against wealth, conserved wilderness from predatory developers and withdrew Washington from the bondage of Wall Street. However, Roosevelt’s foreign policy faultlessly corresponded with the conservative agenda. Obliged by myopic imperial enthusiasm and a lust for action, he subverted the diplomatic environment with militaristic rapidity throughout his career, from his advocacy of war with Spain in 1898 and American intervention in World War I and his critical appraisal of Woodrow Wilson’s peaceable agenda at the Paris Peace Conference. Perhaps the most fundamental example of Roosevelt’s imperialist foreign policy was his establishment of the Roosevelt Corollary, prompted by the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902-03 and the construction of the Panama Canal. The corollary fostered a strategic American asset, and culpability by extension, in the Western Hemisphere, thus, warranting Roosevelt to legitimize America’s hegemony in the region.
The magnanimity surrounding Theodore Roosevelt was in part due to his mastery of populist rhetoric and public charm, as Roosevelt quickly tapped into the widespread fervor for reform. His administration pursued conservation and widely publicized antitrust cases against large companies such as Northern Securities and the Swift Beef Trust; however, with the establishment of the Roosevelt Corollary the administration was a major participant in the emergence of U.S.