On Teddy Roosevelt, His Family, Racial Views and About His Attempted Assassination
Perhaps it is useful to look at this history, it diverted my attention if nothing else
MY FATHER BEING A STRONG LINCOLN REPUBLICAN
My thoughts have been glancing like a cue ball these last few days,
Yes I’m as confused and apprehensive as everyone else is.
For today I took a look at Teddy Roosevelt and his assassination attempt,
As living in North Dakota for some time I know Roosevelt is legendary,
Today I’m commenting on this man a little bit, as my interest is piqued,
How Roosevelt might had felt about the Civil War is of interest,
Evermore attention of his considerations of race seem interesting,
Regardless he was an American whose life may have bearing today.
Because our politics is so divisive today similar to back then it seems,
Each one of us now wondering about what we should actually do,
In our honest criticisms of Trump, we seem more measured now,
Now I think Trump is still going to lose, let me say that plainly,
Given his obvious homicidal intentions against our sacred democracy.
And Roosevelt’s father was a Lincoln Republican; an extinct species now.
So it seems that we are in some sort of political vertigo right now,
Trump’s religious appeal to the far right has only accelerated,
Nothing realistically will save us if Trump is re-elected once again,
Of these times, we hope it’s only a bump in the road, but we don’t know,
Nothing might help us out, the karmic equalizer may reign,
Government oppression may be soon upon us all, we don’t know.
Lincoln was a one time only phenomenon a historian has said,
Indeed perhaps our luck might statistically be gone now,
No amount of experts may be able to counteract the fascism pull,
Conservative is still what they will say they are; it’s only false,
Of their extremism we seem not to get through to them at all,
Liberal democracy seems to be greatly misunderstood and vilified,
Nothing will perhaps change so many minds which could be enlightened.
Republicans of the Lincoln sort are incredibly hard to imagine,
Even though modern day GOP people think they are the same,
Perhaps Roosevelt may had been the very last of this breed,
Understand that Roosevelt was an open white supremist too,
Because we deal in men not gods, we can only hope for not a Orcus,*
Lincoln was a one time anomaly; let’s not expect for him,
Indeed Trump just picked JD Vance for VP - he seems craven enough,
Certainly we don’t want the US to crash and burn; but so what,
Authoritarianism hasn’t been tried yet, perhaps we are due,
Nothing will change the fact that Trump is a malignant narcissist.
*Orcus - The ruler of the underworld who tormented evildoers in the afterlife. The name "Orcus" may refer to the malicious and punishing side of the god.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (October 27, 1858 – January 6, 1919), often referred to as Teddy or T. R., was an American politician, soldier, conservationist, naturalist, and writer who served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909. He previously was involved in New York politics, including serving as the state's 33rd governor for two years. He was the vice president under President William McKinley for six months in 1901, assuming the presidency after McKinley's assassination. As president, Roosevelt emerged as a leader of the Republican Party and became a driving force for anti-trust and Progressive policies.
I wished to present some interesting information on Teddy Roosevelt’s childhood, of his mother and her family. I find in Roosevelt’s autobiography some interesting facts about this American. I went into some detail about an English Prime Minister of the time around the Civil War as Roosevelt mentions him in a derogatory light. Two of Roosevelt’s Confederate uncles are explored as well as a work of fiction mentioned by him. I found all of this rather interesting to learn, perhaps you will agree.
MY FATHER BEING A STRONG LINCOLN REPUBLICAN
Theodore Roosevelt Autobiography
My mother, Martha Bulloch, was a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman, a delightful companion and beloved by everybody. She was entirely "unreconstructed" to the day of her death. Her mother, my grandmother, one of the dearest of old ladies, lived with us, and was distinctly overindulgent to us children, being quite unable to harden her heart towards us even when the occasion demanded it. Towards the close of the Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a partial but alert understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views about that conflict, my father being a strong Lincoln Republican; and once, when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor for the success of the Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers before my mother in the evening. She was not only a most devoted mother, but was also blessed with a strong sense of humor, and she was too much amused to punish me; but I was warned not to repeat the offense, under penalty of my father's being informed—he being the dispenser of serious punishment. Morning prayers were with my father. We used to stand at the foot of the stairs, and when father came down we called out, "I speak for you and the cubby-hole too!" There were three of us young children, and we used to sit with father on the sofa while he conducted morning prayers. The place between father and the arm of the sofa we called the "cubby-hole." The child who got that place we regarded as especially favored both in comfort and somehow or other in rank and title. The two who were left to sit on the much wider expanse of sofa on the other side of father were outsiders for the time being.
My aunt Anna, my mother's sister, lived with us. She was as devoted to us children as was my mother herself, and we were equally devoted to her in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and my mother used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on the Georgia plantations; of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the long-tailed driving horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the riding horses, one of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic exaltation during the Mexican War; and of the queer goings-on in the Negro quarters. She knew all the "Br'er Rabbit" stories, and I was brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in Harper's, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a genius arose who in "Uncle Remus" made the stories immortal.
My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch* and Irvine Bulloch, came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that time exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a dear old retired sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly sense of that phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived, a veritable Colonel Newcome.** He was an Admiral in the Confederate navy, and was the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel Alabama. My uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the Alabama, and fired the last gun discharged from her batteries in the fight with the Kearsarge. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after the war.
My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference to the Union forces, and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire fairness and generosity. But in English politics he promptly became a Tory of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could admire, but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone.*** The only occasions on which I ever shook his faith in me were when I would venture meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous falsehoods about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My uncle was one of the best men I have ever known, and when I have sometimes been tempted to wonder how good people can believe of me the unjust and impossible things they do believe, I have consoled myself by thinking of Uncle Jimmy Bulloch's perfectly sincere conviction that Gladstone was a man of quite exceptional and nameless infamy in both public and private life.
*James Dunwoody Bulloch (June 25, 1823 – January 7, 1901) was the Confederacy's chief foreign agent in Great Britain during the American Civil War. Based in Liverpool, he operated blockade runners and commerce raiders that provided the Confederacy with its only source of hard currency. Bulloch arranged for the purchase by British merchants of Confederate cotton, as well as the dispatch of armaments and other war supplies to the South. He also oversaw the construction and purchase of several ships designed at ruining Northern shipping during the Civil War, including CSS Florida, CSS Alabama, CSS Stonewall, and CSS Shenandoah. Due to him being a Confederate secret agent, Bulloch was not included in the general amnesty that came after the Civil War and therefore decided to stay in Liverpool, becoming the director of the Liverpool Nautical College and the Orphan Boys Asylum. Bulloch's half-brother Irvine Bulloch was a Confederate naval officer and his half-sister Martha Roosevelt was the mother of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and paternal grandmother of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
**Colonel Newcome, a major character in The Newcomes, an 1855 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. The Newcomers: Perhaps one of the novel's greatest strengths is that it contains hundreds of references to the popular and educated culture of the time and thus gives a better idea than most contemporary novels of what it was like to live in England then— almost a miniature education in the Victorian era. Thackeray mentions poets, painters, novelists (some of the characters are reading Oliver Twist), politics, and other people, events and things both familiar and obscure to the 21st-century reader—and does so in a natural way that enhances the story. There are also plenty of Latin, French, Italian and ancient Greek phrases—all untranslated. Colonel Newcome came to be an emblem of virtue for a period, often referred to at the turn of the 20th century. For example, in his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt described his uncle, James Dunwoody Bulloch, as "a veritable Colonel Newcome".
***William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS ( 29 December 1809 – 19 May 1898) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for 12 years, spread over four non-consecutive terms (the most of any British prime minister) beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. He also was Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, for over 12 years. Apart from 1845 to 1847, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1832 to 1895 and represented a total of five constituencies.
Attitude towards slavery
Gladstone's early attitude towards slavery was highly shaped by his father, Sir John Gladstone, one of the largest slave owners in the British Empire. Gladstone wanted gradual rather than immediate emancipation, and proposed that slaves should serve a period of apprenticeship after being freed. They also opposed the international slave trade (which lowered the value of the slaves the father already owned). The antislavery movement demanded the immediate abolition of slavery. Gladstone opposed this and said in 1832 that emancipation should come after moral emancipation through the adoption of education and the inculcation of "honest and industrious habits" among the slaves. Then "with the utmost speed that prudence will permit, we shall arrive at that exceedingly desired consummation, the utter extinction of slavery." In 1831, when the Oxford Union considered a motion in favour of the immediate emancipation of the slaves in the West Indies, Gladstone moved an amendment in favour of gradual manumission along with better protection for the personal and civil rights of the slaves and better provision for their Christian education. His early Parliamentary speeches followed a similar line: in June 1833, Gladstone concluded his speech on the 'slavery question' by declaring that though he had dwelt on "the dark side" of the issue, he looked forward to "a safe and gradual emancipation".
In 1834, when slavery was abolished across the British Empire, the owners were paid full value for the slaves. Gladstone helped his father obtain £106,769 (equivalent to £12,960,000 in 2023) in official reimbursement by the government for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations in the Caribbean.
In later years Gladstone's attitude towards slavery became more critical as his father's influence over his politics diminished. In 1844 Gladstone broke with his father when, as President of the Board of Trade, he advanced proposals to halve duties on foreign sugar not produced by slave labour, in order to "secure the effectual exclusion of slave-grown sugar" and to encourage Brazil and Spain to end slavery. Sir John Gladstone, who opposed any reduction in duties on foreign sugar, wrote a letter to The Times criticizing the measure. Looking back late in life, Gladstone named the abolition of slavery as one of ten great achievements of the previous sixty years where the masses had been right and the upper classes had been wrong.
American Civil War
Shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War Gladstone wrote to his friend the Duchess of Sutherland that "the principle announced by the vice-president of the South...which asserts the superiority of the white man, and therewith founds on it his right to hold the black in slavery, I think that principle detestable, and I am wholly with the opponents of it" but that he felt that the North was wrong to try to restore the Union by military force, which he believed would end in failure. Palmerston's government adopted a position of British neutrality throughout the war while declining to recognise the independence of the Confederacy. In October 1862 Gladstone made a speech in Newcastle in which he said that Jefferson Davis and the other Confederate leaders had "made a nation", that the Confederacy seemed certain to succeed in asserting its independence from the North, and that the time might come when it would be the duty of the European powers to "offer friendly aid in compromising the quarrel." The speech caused consternation on both sides of the Atlantic and led to speculation that Britain might be about to recognise the Confederacy." Gladstone was accused of sympathising with the South, a charge he rejected. Gladstone was forced to clarify in the press that his comments in Newcastle had not been intended to signal a change in Government policy, but to express his belief that the North's efforts to defeat the South would fail, due to the strength of Southern resistance. In a memorandum to the Cabinet later that month Gladstone wrote that, although he believed the Confederacy would probably win the war, it was "seriously tainted by its connection with slavery" and argued that the European powers should use their influence on the South to effect the "mitigation or removal of slavery."
Of Teddy Roosevelt’s actual opinions on race I found an interesting writing in History . Com. One never hears about such actual detail in this man at the outdoor amphitheater in Medora, North Dakota should you happen to give it a look some summer night. It was probably true that Roosevelt at his time may have had an opinion shared by the majority of white Americans.
How Teddy Roosevelt’s Belief in a Racial Hierarchy Shaped His Policies
His conviction that white men of European descent were innately superior informed his actions on matters from national parks to foreign policy.
Theodore Roosevelt, known for his boundless energy and brash, adventurous spirit, possessed one of the biggest personalities of any American president. But, he once said, “It is a quality of strong natures that their failings, like their virtues, should stand out in bold relief.”
That could certainly be said of the 26th president, whose complex legacy includes not just his achievements as a progressive reformer and conservationist who regulated big business and established the national park system. He also believed firmly in the existence of a racial hierarchy, which shaped his attitudes on race relations, land rights, American imperialism and the emerging—and disturbing—science of eugenics.
“The force of race in history occupied a singularly important place in Roosevelt’s broad intellectual outlook,” wrote Thomas G. Dyer in Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. Roosevelt believed fundamentally that American greatness came from its rule by racially superior white men of European descent.
Roosevelt Believed Individual Self-Determination Was Possible
Roosevelt maintained that although white men held firm at the top of the social hierarchy, “inferior” races could rise from their lower stations. “Roosevelt believed that individuals could learn positive traits within their lifetime and assumed racial mobility was within human control,” says Michael Patrick Cullinane, a history professor at London’s University of Roehampton and author of Theodore Roosevelt's Ghost: The History and Memory of an American Icon. But Roosevelt didn’t come to those ideas himself. According to Cullinane, his racial ideology drew on his readings of leading evolutionary theorists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin.
Roosevelt “admired individual achievement above all things,” wrote biographer Edmund Morris—which is why he became the first president to invite an African American to dine at the White House when he broke bread with Tuskegee Institution founder Booker T. Washington just weeks after his inauguration. “The only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each Black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have,” Roosevelt wrote of his meeting.
Roosevelt also defended Minnie Cox, the country’s first African American female postmaster, after she was driven out of Indianola, Mississippi, because of the color of her skin. He appointed Black Americans to prominent positions, such as his nomination of Dr. William Crum as customs collector in Charleston, South Carolina, which drew considerable political opposition and this presidential response: “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color.”
He Took a Dimmer View of Racial Groups as a Whole
In spite of those words, though, Roosevelt hardly saw all Black Americans as equals. “As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites,” he confided to a friend in a 1906 letter. Ten years later, he told Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that “the great majority of Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for the suffrage” and that giving them voting rights could “reduce parts of the South to the level of Haiti.”
Roosevelt also believed that Black men made poor soldiers. He denigrated the efforts of the buffalo soldiers who fought alongside his men at San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, falsely claiming that they ran away under fire. “Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go as far as they were led by white officers,” he wrote. In reality, the buffalo soldiers served with distinction, and several men were officially recognized for their bravery. Twenty-six died on the slopes of San Juan Hill.
As for Native Americans, Roosevelt’s considerable time spent ranching in the Dakota Territory only hardened his mindset toward them, years before he became president. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian,” he said in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
Roosevelt viewed Native Americans as impediments to the white settlement of the United States and believed that white frontiersmen had forged a new race—the American race—by “ceaseless strife waged against wild man and wild nature.”
Roosevelt's Views on Race Impacted Both His Domestic and Foreign Policies
As president, he favored the removal of many Native Americans from their ancestral territories, including approximately 86 million acres of tribal land transferred to the national forest system. Roosevelt’s signature achievements of environmental conservation and the establishment of national parks came at the expense of the people who had stewarded the land for centuries. Roosevelt also supported policies of assimilation for indigenous Americans to become integrated into the broader American society. These policies, over time, contributed to the decimation of Native culture and communities.
Roosevelt’s attitudes toward race also had a direct impact on his foreign policy as president, says Cullinane: “Because he believed that white Anglo-Saxons had reached the pinnacle of social achievement, he thought they were in a position to teach the other peoples of the world who had failed to reach such heights. The United States would help tutor and uplift the Western Hemisphere.”
That worldview formed the foundation of Roosevelt’s vocal support of American imperialism, and in the White House he presided over an expanding overseas empire that included territories won in the Spanish-American War including Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba and the Philippines. His Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, also known famously as his “big stick” foreign policy, laid the foundation for a more interventionist policy in Latin America. He also extended American influence in the region by fomenting a rebellion in Panama that resulted in American construction of the Panama Canal.
And his desire to reset racial hierarchies wasn't limited to the Western Hemisphere. “It is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black and yellow aboriginal owners," Roosevelt wrote in his 1889 book The Winning of the West, "and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”
And as for the attempted assassination of Teddy Roosevelt here is an account also from History . Com which might interest you should you not know the story in some detail. Teddy was a pretty tough customer, but wasn’t perhaps all that uncommon in that time of America.
When Teddy Roosevelt Was Shot in 1912, a Speech May Have Saved His Life
A would-be assassin's bullet was slowed by Roosevelt's dense overcoat, steel-reinforced eyeglass case and hefty speech squeezed into his right jacket pocket.
Clearly, Roosevelt had buried the lede. The horrified audience in the Milwaukee Auditorium on October 14, 1912, gasped as the former president unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “It takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” the wounded candidate assured them. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bullet-riddled, 50-page speech.
Holding up his prepared remarks, which had two big holes blown through each page, Roosevelt continued. “Fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
Only two days before, the editor-in-chief of The Outlook characterized Roosevelt as “an electric battery of inexhaustible energy,” and for the next 90 minutes, the 53-year-old former president proved it. “I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap,” he claimed.
Few could doubt him. Although his voice weakened and his breath shortened, Roosevelt glared at his nervous aides whenever they begged him to stop speaking or positioned themselves around the podium to catch him if he collapsed. Only with the speech completed did he agree to visit the hospital.
The shooting had occurred just after 8 p.m. as Roosevelt entered his car outside the Gilpatrick Hotel. As he stood up in the open-air automobile and waved his hat with his right hand to the crowd, a flash from a Colt revolver 5 feet away lit up the night. The candidate’s stenographer quickly put the would-be assassin in a half-nelson and grabbed the assailant’s right wrist to prevent him from firing a second shot.
The well-wishing crowd morphed into a bloodthirsty pack, raining blows on the shooter and shouting, “Kill him!” According to an eyewitness, one man was “the coolest and least excited of anyone in the frenzied mob”: Roosevelt.
The man who had been propelled to the Oval Office after an assassin felled President William McKinley bellowed out, “Don’t hurt him. Bring him here. I want to see him.” Roosevelt asked the shooter, “What did you do it for?” With no answer forthcoming, he said, “Oh, what’s the use? Turn him over to the police.”
Although there were no outward signs of blood, the former president reached inside his heavy overcoat and felt a dime-sized bullet hole on the right side of his chest. “He pinked me,” Roosevelt told a party official. He coughed into his hand three times. Not seeing any telltale blood, he determined that the bullet hadn’t penetrated his lungs. An accompanying doctor naturally told the driver to head directly to the hospital, but Colonel Roosevelt gave different marching orders: “You get me to that speech.”
X-rays taken after the campaign event showed the bullet lodged against Roosevelt’s fourth right rib on an upward path to his heart. Fortunately, the projectile had been slowed by his dense overcoat, steel-reinforced eyeglass case and hefty speech squeezed into his inner right jacket pocket.
Roosevelt dictated a telegram to his wife that said he was “in excellent shape” and that the “trivial” wound wasn’t “a particle more serious than one of the injuries any of the boys used continually to be having.”
Even before the shooting, the 1912 presidential campaign had been a raucous one, with the former Republican president challenging his party’s standard-bearer (and his handpicked successor), incumbent William Howard Taft. The political infighting, so fierce that barbed wire concealed by patriotic bunting defended the podium at the Republican Convention, tore the Grand Old Party apart. Roosevelt went rogue and ran under the banner of the Progressive Party, nicknamed the “Bull Moose Party.”
Blasted by political opponents and elements of the press for being a power-hungry traitor willing to break the tradition of two-term presidencies, Roosevelt told the Milwaukee audience that the campaign’s inflamed political rhetoric contributed to the shooting. “It is a very natural thing,” he said, “that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers.”
And I’ll end on my pseudo-sonnet for today. I hope the history was of interest as were the facts about Teddy Roosevelt. I feel I know more about him than the portrayal of him assaulting the San Juan hill which I’ve seen at Medora, North Dakota multiple times.
Ready to Have a Cow
I am exactly not sure what to write now,
So I dredged up some history back when,
Roosevelt had a slug go through his skin,
It was somewhat like Donald Trump in the how,
Can we not say he’s a shoe-in now - somehow,
This presidential race is to my chagrin,
The Fox ‘News’ viewer cannot possibly win.
So many of us - ready to have a cow.
This writing might only appear a filler,
My mental health must be carefully watched,
Lordy we just all hope Biden hasn’t botched,
We would prefer the election not a thriller,
I must say the end of the rope is in site,
Trump pumping his fist saying “fight, fight, fight”.
194th Posting, July 15, 2025.