00:00:59.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most Powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:07.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:58.000And the angle of this, Charlie, is that everyone knows Roosevelt, what he looked like, and he's on Mount Rushmore and he's on Stamps.
00:02:07.000And we know the caricature and things he did, all his tremendous accomplishments.
00:02:11.000But as a lifelong Roosevelt addict, I was realizing that the essence of the man, what his personality was like, and what he was, why he appealed to people and how he could be so persuasive, that's being lost to the public.
00:02:28.000So I gleaned about 500 quotations, impressions, reports, diary entries, all that.
00:02:38.000From people who knew him and encountered him, or maybe just met him once or saw him in a crowd.
00:03:40.000The police department was very corrupt then.
00:03:44.000And he came in and enforced the closing laws.
00:03:49.000And among the colorful things he did, he would go out after a full day of work at the police office, the commissioner's office, and he would roam the streets at night looking for policemen on the beat to see if they were doing their job or asleep or taking bribes, you know, like that.
00:04:10.000So the press loved him and the public loved him and the crooks didn't.
00:04:14.000And it just added to his growing reputation at that time.
00:04:19.000So here's a question that I'm curious about.
00:04:22.000What books, thinkers, authors, or philosophies were the most significant contributors to Teddy Roosevelt's worldview?
00:04:29.000You know, they call him a populist, a nationalist, but in his own words, what informed his politics?
00:04:43.000You know, he went to Harvard and he wrote, he made history, but he wrote history books.
00:04:48.000But he was informed by a couple things.
00:04:51.000And I will say, besides his heroes and the figures in history and his morality and such, a lot was his father.
00:05:00.000And a lot of the books about him have not really explored the influence of his father.
00:05:07.000You know, he was a blue blood, he came from New York aristocracy.
00:05:12.000And his father was a philanthropist at that point and a do gooder and such.
00:05:19.000But his father was a reformer and he favored reform.
00:05:23.000He was never in politics, Charlie, but at the end of his life, President Hayes asked Roosevelt's father, Theodore Sr., and by the way, if I can say this, the Roosevelt we're talking about did not like to be called Teddy.
00:05:41.000And he once said that, he, matter of fact, he often said that anyone who called him Teddy didn't know him.
00:05:50.000So in my books, I'm careful to call him Theodore.
00:05:54.000But his father, Theodore, was nominated to be collector of the customs office in New York City by President Hayes because it was a cesspool of corruption and he knew that the famous philanthropist Theodore Roosevelt would be incorruptible and could run it honestly, and he would have.
00:06:17.000But one of the New York senators, it was under his skin that he wasn't consulted on this, and he also saw it as a source of bribery and such.
00:06:27.000He opposed the Republican president and a Republican nominee and fought him like crazy in the Senate and persuaded the Senate to reject the nomination.
00:06:39.000And for a period of several weeks, it was in the news and it was dirty, Roosevelt's father was besmirched.
00:07:38.000And we know from his writings that he always was affected by that and kept his father's ideal in his mind.
00:07:45.000So when he went into politics, he was incorruptible.
00:07:50.000He fought in the 1884 convention, 26 years old, but was a major figure in that convention, trying to defeat the nominee who was a famous crook, Blaine.
00:08:02.000And then, whether it was in the Civil Service Commission or the police commissioner office, as you ask, and then as President, it was really, he kept his father's example before him.
00:08:15.000So a lot of the influence on him was his morality, his Christianity, his ideals, his heroes in history.
00:08:25.000But really, I think he tried to live up to his father's ideals.
00:08:29.000And it was a very important thing in his life and not sufficiently recognized, I think.
00:08:36.000The book is The Most Interesting American by Rick Marshall.
00:08:40.000You know, some parallels that we're seeing.
00:08:43.000Potentially, that election of 1912 sticks out, third party, upset.
00:08:51.000And I'm sure Rick wrote extensively about that.
00:08:54.000I'm just genuinely curious what Theodore, former President Roosevelt, was thinking at the time, because based on my recollection of reading history and biographies, he was angry at William Howard Taft.
00:09:11.000I will say this, and I think you would agree, Rick, he lived a full life.
00:09:15.000Theodore Roosevelt, he lived a full life in every possible way, from winning a peace prize for ending the Ruscio Japanese conflict to his, what do they call it, the Roughnecks in Cuba?
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00:10:40.000So, Rick, tell us we're going to kind of jump around Theodore's life here.
00:10:44.000But the one that I want to talk about is the election of 1912.
00:10:46.000Talk about the events that led to that and the historical significance.
00:10:50.000I'm so grateful you're asking about that because a couple terms come up in relation to that populism, progressivism, and they had different meanings then than they do now.
00:11:02.000But when he ran in 1912, you know, he had promised that he would, he pledged that after his resounding victory in 1904, that he wouldn't run again, but he meant consecutively.
00:11:15.000He didn't plan to run in 1912, but Taft, who he handpicked, Really betrayed his policies.
00:11:25.000He carried some out on a slab, and he betrayed Roosevelt in other ways, largely forgotten by history.
00:11:33.000For instance, his environmental policies, Alaska was pretty much off the boards, and Taft let the Guggenheim Syndicate go in, lumber interests and such, and really have a chance to rape the whole state.
00:11:50.000And Roosevelt considered that a betrayal and things like that.
00:11:55.000And there were other things with the United States Steel Corporation, and Taft implied that Roosevelt to end the panic in 1907.
00:12:06.000Let J.P. Morgan and others pick Roosevelt's pocket or pick Uncle Sam's pocket.
00:12:12.000And Taft was in the cabinet then and he went along with it.
00:12:15.000So Roosevelt just felt personally betrayed and his policies were being betrayed too.
00:14:30.000If people were more inspired by Roosevelt, and that's one reason I do the book that's my third on him and do my speaking and such, is so we'd be inspired and could follow Roosevelt as we should.
00:14:42.000The Most Interesting American is the name of the book.
00:15:02.000I'm very grateful you bring that up because some people on the right, and they're smart guys, Glenn Beck, you know, even Judge Napolitano wrote a book a couple of years ago taking Roosevelt to task, Roosevelt and Wilson.
00:15:18.000And people on the right, and okay, some populists, modern day populists, and a lot of, okay, they don't understand this modern day progressivism, and there was Roosevelt's progressivism.
00:15:30.000And I mentioned in the last segment that Wilson's progressivism has been a straight line to AOC today and the monsters who run the administrative state or are trying to.
00:15:46.000Roosevelt's progressivism was not of that sort.
00:15:52.000And he was, at his core, a nationalist and he was an individualist.
00:16:01.000And his progressivism was what the generation in intervening years called rugged individualism.
00:16:11.000So he wanted the government to play a role, but basically to preserve what individuals could do and what nationalists could do, and not to reject, as Wilson originally wanted, an agrarian vision, Jefferson's American, just small town farmers.
00:17:39.000And he's not only the most interesting American, but he was the most American American.
00:17:47.000So, one thing I don't think Theodore Roosevelt only gets credit for, I mentioned this previously, is that there was a fair amount of economic anxiety that was brewing in the 1890s and 1900s.
00:17:59.000We saw William Jennings Bryan, and he tried his best to capitalize on it politically.
00:18:04.000Russia ignored a lot of this economic anxiety, which is why in 1917, You have the Russian Revolution and Bolsheviks' rise to power because we had one of the most transformational economic transitions ever from the farms to the factories.
00:18:22.000Is it fair to say that Theodore Roosevelt was able to build that bridge successfully, that he was able to calm some of those economic anxieties through prudent government programs while being focused on a strong American middle class?
00:18:36.000That you've actually distilled his programs and his policies.
00:18:46.000And, you know, after he left the presidency, and especially through the teens and then with the Russian Revolution, there was a lot of agitation, and including a lot of his former followers.
00:19:03.000A lot of his followers, through the end of his presidency and through the Bull Moose campaign, really veered toward the left and were very seduced by.
00:19:20.000So a lot of his followers fell in with that, those movements.
00:19:27.000But we need to remember, you know this, but what a lot of people forget is that some of the people who followed him into the Bull Moose campaign, he called immediately afterwards.
00:19:41.000He was grateful for their support, but he called them the lunatic fringe because they went overboard.
00:21:16.000And Harding and Coolidge, Coolidge is not as appreciated as he should be, I think.
00:21:23.000But Roosevelt really was at the bridges, he bridged those two movements and he was able to rein in.
00:21:34.000Sort of like Luther did after the Reformation.
00:21:38.000He had to calm a lot of the reformers at the time, and there was a counter-reformation, but Luther had to remind a lot of the people not to go overboard in smashing stained glass windows and statues and all like that.
00:21:56.000And Roosevelt pretty much had to do the same thing and remind his followers to stay on the straight and narrow.
00:22:02.000So I'm glad you recognize the difference between those who revere Roosevelt and those who.
00:22:09.000Might not, no offense to Glenn Beck, but.
00:22:12.000No, no, and this is not an attack on Glenn.
00:22:31.000But, you know, it's all with qualifications.
00:22:34.000We have to remember that one thing that made him the most interesting American is that, you know, he's.
00:22:40.000Probably the only president we've had who it's plausible that in the first paragraph of his obituary, being president of the U.S. would not necessarily be the first item to check off.
00:22:56.000So he was a historian, he wrote more than 40 books, and he would have been a famous and respected naturalist, natural historian, and a biographer and historian, and all like that.
00:23:11.000Yeah, he was in those currents and he taught and he lectured and he wrote and he was at the whirlwind of history too.
00:23:20.000But he was, let me put it in another context if I might, but with Manifest Destiny, I mean, he saw the broad scope, the broad sweep of history.
00:23:34.000And he saw America's role not just in a racial sense or an ethnic sense or a geographical sense in that way with Manifest Destiny, but he surely saw the sweep of history.
00:23:50.000And when he would talk about social and industrial justice, He was not talking about socialism.
00:23:59.000But he really saw that the government and the state had a role, but he was not that he was ever scared silly about anything, but he did not want the mechanism of government to co opt the ideals of individualism and nationalism that he saw America as embodying.
00:24:23.000It would be remiss on my behalf if we did not talk about just some of the Unbelievably interesting personal stories of Theodore Roosevelt.
00:24:31.000True or not true, he was shot while campaigning and then finished a speech with a bloodstained shirt.
00:24:39.000He was shot at point blank range five feet away, and they wanted to take him to the hospital, of course, and he insisted on going, delivering his speech.
00:24:50.000He had 90 minutes with blood streaming down his shirt, and he finished his speech, and they said, Now you can take me to the hospital.
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