Circa1865

The man who Mencken referred to as “Roosevelt the First,” sent sixteen aging white-painted battleships on an around the world cruise in 1907 for little more than a boost in his administration’s prestige and a reelection ploy. Mark Twain wrote in his essay “The President as Advertiser” that “The excursion will make a great noise and this will satisfy Mr. Roosevelt.” Admiral Robley D. Evans mentioned below was a longtime navy man, and wounded in the Northern attack on Fort Fisher in January 1865.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Roosevelt’s American Religion of Supremacy

“A voyage around the world was Theodore Roosevelt’s own idea. “I determined on the move without consulting the Cabinet precisely as I took Panama without consulting the Cabinet.” The idea had come to him in 1905, when Russia’s long cruise ended in disaster. For two years he shaped his plans secretly . . . By 1907, several excuses were available.

Roosevelt’s standard explanation . . . was that the Navy needed practice in navigation, communication, coal consumption, crew stamina and fleet maneuvering. Navy professionals had trouble hiding their contempt for such reasoning [and obviously] the fleet could practice better in home waters, free from diplomatic diversions. Even Rear Admiral Evans, who was to command the excursion, later admitted that he never understood its purpose.

Roosevelt’s adversaries criticized his “other motives.” The voyage was timed to influence the election of 1908. It was a scheme to make Congress so proud that it might vote a dozen or so new battleships. The President was “in” with steel tycoons who wanted a new boom in shipbuilding. A foreign adventure would take people’s minds off their own troubles in the depression which had begun in 1907.

America’s new apprehension [toward the Japanese after defeating Russia] was noticeable at the Portsmouth Conference in 1905 when Roosevelt blocked Japan’s demands for a cash indemnity from Russia. This inspired anti-American demonstrations in Tokyo, repeated on a larger scale in 1906 after San Francisco announced that Japanese children could no longer attend regular public schools.

Jingoes prodded Roosevelt with hundreds of letter. A Chicagoan wrote: “We must send the fleet and sink them. Show no mercy, teach tm a lesson that will inform them of our power and majesty . . . Seize Korea, Formosa and Manchuria . . . the idea is to overwhelm them with our power suddenly.”

California papers . . . saved their best insults for Japan. They were joined by the yellow press, which mounted an assault upon public sanity just as it had done a decade in the war against Spain. Books about the “Yellow Peril,” “the Japanese menace,” and “the coming struggle” were popular in 1907. In May and June the New York Times and Collier’s Weekly published serials which described the future fighting around the Philippines and Hawaii.

The French press called Roosevelt a demagogue, imperialist and militaristic megalomaniac. The old American of freedom, democracy and peace was no more, having given away to violence, chauvinism, and the religion of supremacy.

Roosevelt muzzled the Navy. On threat of court-martial, officers could not criticize the cruise no matter how they scorned it as a waste of time. They were warned not to belittle the battleships, no matter how many improvements they thought the ships needed. The President also gave careful attention to the selection of the men who would tell the story to the public. Only “acceptable” correspondents were allowed to make the cruise. Everything must be “subject to censorship,” Roosevelt warned Admiral Evans.

All sixteen battleships had entered Hampton Roads by December 12 and anchored in neat rows near the spot where, on a night forty-five years before, a wooden United States Navy had awaited almost certain destruction by a crude iron ancestor known as the [CSS Virginia].

Riding at anchor, the battleships looked powerful as well as beautiful. The fleet was” one huge bluff . . . of little service in battle.” The appearance of such discordant notes brought bursts of indignation from the patriotic majority. A critic was a traitor, a saboteur, planting a kind of bomb that could destroy a quest for glory.”

(The Great White Fleet, Its Voyage Around the World, 1907-1909, Robert A. Hart, Little, Brown and Company, pp. 23-24; 31-32; 40-43; 52)

The following are excerpts from a Gov. Thomas E. Dewey speech delivered in April 1950 regarding how a sectional political party in this country is “a menace to responsible government.” He viewed the Democrat party as a liberal and radical party, with policies similar to Lenin’s.  Ironically, he denounces sectional parties as a menace with no legitimate role in a free society, though his own party originated as such in 1854.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Gov. Thomas E. Dewey on Big Government, Circa 1950

“Big Government: New Trend in US” Lecture on Political Science by Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York.

“Although the United States is the youngest of the great nations, ours is one of the oldest free republics on earth. Its durability has persisted in the face of wars and the inevitable frailty of human beings who conduct government. Our political history has been the history of a two-party system in action. From the early days of the republic our basic political arrangement has been the same — one party in power and one party in opposition.

The Democratic party would be the liberal to radical party. The Republican party would be the conservative to reactionary party.

Now is there a legitimate role for third parties in this country? The answer depends on whether the third party is national in character with intellectual breadth and a broad base of popular support, or whether it is narrowly local in nature.

Such sectional or local parties are, basically, only splinter movements. They have proved to be a menace to responsible government here, just as they have to responsible governments elsewhere. I see no legitimate place for hem in a free system such as ours.

On Big Government Lenin has said that socialized medicine is the “keystone of the arch” of communism. Socialized medicine today is a major part of the President’s legislative program.

In the same way last year, Mr. Truman called for power to use federal funds to build factories which would compete with privately-owned factories. It is fundamental that no citizen can successfully compete against his government . . .

Why has Big Government made such a successful appeal to our people these last 17 years? I think it is because many millions of Americans have been persuaded that Big Government is the alternative to depression and insecurity. The offer of Big Government today is to protect its people against the hazards of life. Its method, for the present, is to socialize incomes through taxation and to socialize risks. Government which pretends to take the risks out of life is fraudulent. All it does is remove the rewards.

And if the final result is total leisure in the form of continuous paid unemployment, the result will not be a richer life but a national last illness. Big Government, like dictatorships, can continue only by growing larger and larger. It can never retrench without admitting failure. It feeds on the gradual obliteration of State and local governments as elements of sovereignty and tends to transform them into districts and prefectures.

By adsorbing more than half of all the taxing power of the nation, Big Government now deprives the State and local governments of the capacity to support the programs they should conduct. In place of their own taxing powers, it offers them in exchange the counterfeit currency of federal subsidy.”

(“Big Government: New Trend in US,” Lecture on Political Science by Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York, April 1950)

The 1968 observation of presidential candidate George Wallace regarding the differences between the Republican and Democrat parties appears accurate, as both had similar policies to attract the same voters. The GOP leadership chose a man in 1952 with no known conservative principles over Robert A. Taft, a man with extensive and proven conservative principles. The liberal Rockefeller wing of the GOP acted in 1959 to thwart conservative Barry Goldwater’s candidacy and did everything to re-elect LBJ 1964.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Nixon’s Treaty of Fifth Avenue

“When the Republicans met in Chicago the next week, Richard Nixon had an even safer lock on the presidential nomination than Kennedy’s before the Democrats met. Anticipating Nixon’s nomination, [John F.] Kennedy had gone out of his way to attack [Eisenhower’s] Vice President as a young man whose ideas nevertheless belonged to the days of William McKinley, and as one who, unlike Lincoln, had shown “charity toward none and malice toward all.”

The closest thing to a serious challenge to Nixon’s claims on the nomination had come from Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, who did nothing to discourage efforts to boom him for the Presidency in 1959. Visits with Republican leaders around the country, however, had convinced him that he had no chance against Nixon, and at the end of the year he withdrew from the race. Shortly thereafter Nixon announced his candidacy.

Rockefeller, though no longer seeking the nomination, was determined to influence the GOP platform. As critical as any Democrat of [Eisenhower] administration military policy, the New York governor strongly echoed the 1958 Rockefeller Brothers Fund report on national security, especially the recommendations for a mandatory national fallout shelter program, for accelerated ICBM development, and for bigger conventional forces.

Early in June he angered Eisenhower when, right after breakfasting with the President at the White House, he told newsmen that “our position in the world is dramatically weaker today than fifteen years ago . . . our national defense needs great strengthening.” He also urged Nixon to make known his views on all issues before, not after the convention.

Rockefeller was obviously in a position to make things difficult for Nixon if he wanted to. Two days before the Chicago convention was to open, the Vice President and the governor had a dramatic secret conference at Rockefeller’s personal residence in Manhattan. As a result of what the press dubbed the “treaty of Fifth Avenue,” Nixon agreed that the party platform then being drafted in Chicago should have stronger sections on both defense and civil rights.

Thus the platform, while mostly praising the policies of the Eisenhower administration, did call for faster development and deployment of missiles, and committed the GOP to a program of action in the field of civil rights while was fully as far-reaching as what the Democrats had promised.

Yet despite their radically contrasting backgrounds, personalities and political styles, in assumptions and outlook Kennedy and Nixon were not far apart. Both men were fundamentally cold warriors, dedicated to protecting national interests . . . Both were “internationalists,” strong advocates of the collective security orientation of American foreign policy since 1939.

Both wished to couple the continuing buildup of American armaments with a more ambitious program of nonmilitary aid in response to what Nixon termed “the revolution of peaceful peoples’ aspirations” in Asia, Africa, and South America. Both Nixon and Kennedy accepted the basic premises of the welfare state, although Kennedy favored a greater degree of federal intervention to foster economic growth and expand economic opportunity.

Finally, both believed in a powerful Presidency, dominant in domestic affairs and unchallenged in the making and execution of foreign policy.

The election was so close that, according to some estimates, a shift of no more than 12,000 votes in five States would have produced a different result. But Kennedy, by narrowly winning such populous States as New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Texas, managed to squeeze through. In a record popular vote of nearly 69 million, Kennedy’s margin of victory was less than 118,000, or about a quarter of a percentage point. Kennedy’s big majorities in the largest Norther cities, with their great numbers of Catholics and blacks, won him the Presidency.

(Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952-1961, Charles C. Alexander, Indiana University Press, 1975, pp. 274-279)