HOME | DD

RD-DD1843 [2016-12-14 19:50:51 +0000 UTC]

In his time the Republican Party was clearly the party of reform and progress in society (although there had been some corruption scandals in the Gilded Age).  The Democrats were basically strong in the South, and reactionary.  That is, until the 1890s when a moderate and then growing reform movement (spurred on by the Agrarians and the Populists) pushed people like John Peter Altgeld, William Jennings Bryan, and later Woodrow Wilson to embrace Progressivism as much as TR and Robert Lafollette did. But the Democrats still did not reach out towards the African-American community (Wilson, as President, reinstituted segregation in the Civil Service and the military - Wilson was born in Virginia and brought up in the South, but moved North to pursue his educational career leading to the Presidency of Princeton University and the Governorship of New Jersey, but still keeping his racial prejudice).  It was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that Republican indifference to African-American problems and the Great Depression led to the Democrats beginning to realize they should reach out to the African-American community.  I should point out that some African-Americans had been skeptical all along about the Republicans keeping a lock-hold on their voting block up through the 1920s - W.E.B. Dubois, for instance, felt they were taken for granted.  In a sense they were.  TR made a great deal (for awhile, anyway) of having lunch with Booker T. Washington in the White House in 1903.  However, in 1906 he cashiered a regiment of African-American "Buffalo Soldiers" stationed in Texas for not revealing who had been responsible for shooting up the town of Brownsville, where they were stationed at.  He refused to believe they didn't do it.  Modern scholarship has revealed they were telling the truth.  Dubois was one of those highly critical of TR in the "Brownsville affair".  He never admitted he was wrong about it.  A political rival of his in the Republican Party, Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio, was one of the critics, but at a "Gridiron" Dinner in 1907, when Foraker confronted him on the enormous wrong done, TR quoted a line from a popular song of that period, "All C--ns Look Alike to Me!"  In this situation the less attractive side of TR came out.  Since Foraker was a close political associate of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, his viewpoint was dismissed as political opportunism.  Today he's looked at as far more rational and modern on this issue than TR was.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

MadokaKawabata [2016-12-14 00:55:37 +0000 UTC]

Good words from one of my favorite Presidents. A different breed of man and Republican than we have seen in a long time.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

Tsar777 [2016-12-13 20:13:55 +0000 UTC]

I'm afraid that, at the moment, patriotism means to stand against the president-elect - as often and as angrily as possible.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

GalaxyVortex [2016-12-13 15:42:23 +0000 UTC]

That's why I never supported Obama, Clinton or any of them, they were the absolute worst. Trump is talking about fixing things, but I don't trust him either.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0