Harry Targ
“Purdue President Emeritus Mitch Daniels
received the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal at the 105th annual
meeting of the Theodore Roosevelt Association in Indianapolis on Oct. 19”.(Tom
Schott, Purdue News, October 30, 2024)
I assume the Theodore Roosevelt Association and former Purdue University President are not aware of the complicated performance of Theodore Roosevelt as a president of the United States and leading politician, during the era of United States expanding empire.
Within a few years of the U.S. colonization of Cuba
and the Philippines, President Theodore Roosevelt elaborated on the U.S. world
mission. He spoke of the necessity of promoting peace and justice in the world:
a project that required adequate military capabilities both for “securing
respect for itself and of doing good to others.” To those who claim that the
United States seeks material advantage in its activist policy toward the
countries of the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt responded that such claims were
untrue. The U.S., he said, is motivated by altruism: “All that this country
desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous.
Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty
friendship.”
Cuba was an example, he said: “If every country washed
by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization
which with the aid of the Platt Amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left
the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly
and brilliantly showing, all questions of interference by the Nation with their
affairs would be at an end.”
He assured Latin Americans in this address to Congress
in 1904 that if “….if they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they
may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and
helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort….”
(“Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” President’s Annual Message to
Congress, December 6, 1904).
During a presentation in Norway in 1910 Roosevelt
praised the U.S. for leaving Cuba as promised after the war to return
only temporarily because of “a disaster…a revolution” such
that “we were obliged to land troops again.”
The President proudly declared: “And before I left the
Presidency Cuba resumed its career as a separate republic, holding its head
erect as a sovereign state among the other nations of the earth. All that our
people want is just exactly what the Cuban people themselves want—that is, a
continuance of order within the island, and peace and prosperity, so that there
shall be no shadow of an excuse for any outside intervention.” (“the Colonial
Policy of the United States,” An Address Delivered at Christiania, Norway,
May 5, 1910).
Earlier on January 18, 1909, to the Methodist Episcopal
Church (“The Expansion of the White Races”) Roosevelt applauded the increasing
presence--he estimated 100 million people—of “European races” throughout the
world. The indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere have been assimilated
with their “intruders” with the end result “that the Indian population of
America is larger today than it was when Columbus discovered the continent and stands on a far higher plane of happiness and efficiency.”
And to highlight the missionary message Roosevelt
added: “Of course the best that can happen to any people that has not already a
high civilization of its own is to assimilate and profit by American or
European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity, without submitting
to alien control; but such control, in spite of all its defects, is in a very
large number of cases the prerequisite condition to the moral and material
advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth.”
