The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of the fundamental truths concerning the solar system.-- Theodore Roosevelt, in a critical review of H.S. Chamberlain's racist tome The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Between that and his attitude towards corporations, he would poll somewhere between Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman in the current GOP race.
... TR drops an amusing footnote:
Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer; I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it to be grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent Greek literature under the unmeaning title of "classic."
And don't forget that, in 1912, he ran on a platform calling for universal health care, pointing out that the USA was the only industrialized country without it.
ReplyDeleteBut, he was a Progressive then, not a Republican. And the mainstream of the Republicans despised him then, just as they would now.