Word: roosevelts
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Over the past century, half a dozen Presidents have tried to radically transform American strategy. At the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt sought to adapt U.S. foreign policy to match the nation's new position in world politics. But while he persuaded Congress to back his efforts to bolster U.S. hegemony in the western hemisphere, he failed to overcome long-standing suspicions of balance-of-power politics in Congress and among the U.S. public. As a result, his transformation proved untenable. Woodrow Wilson came to office focused on domestic issues but ultimately intervened in World War I, leading...
Among Presidents with transformational ambitions, lasting success was limited to the team of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Roosevelt used the opportunity provided by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to commit the U.S. to multilateralism. In the words of Yale historian John Gaddis, Roosevelt expanded American hegemony by scrapping both isolation and unilateralism: "He never neglected, as Wilson did, the need to keep proclaimed interests from extending beyond actual capabilities." He linked Wilsonian ideals to a realist vision, combining the attractive power of his Four Freedoms with the idea of four policemen (later five, with the addition...
...Criticized as an "executive lynching," and a "despotic usurpation of power," the decision was widely unpopular among blacks and Northern whites. Even Roosevelt's ally Washington, who as a rule never spoke publicly against the president, opposed him. "Brownsville was an unforgettable shock. It erased any illusions about Roosevelt's benevolence created by the dinner at the White House," noted historian Louis Harlan in his 1983 biography of Washington. Roosevelt chafed at accusations that he dismissed the men because they were black and insisted that his decision was based solely on his "convictions." The Richmond Planet, a black newspaper, observed...
...Five years later, Roosevelt was involved in another racially charged incident, and in this one his behavior offered less to admire. On Aug. 13, 1906, a dozen or so gunmen went on a 10-minute shooting spree in the small town of Brownsville, Texas. They left a saloon bartender dead and a police officer seriously injured. Townspeople reported that the attackers were soldiers from the all-black 25th Infantry Regiment, who had been stationed just a few weeks earlier at nearby Fort Brown. Tensions between the soldiers and the white citizenry had been brewing since the day the troops arrived...
...which was the real Roosevelt: the man who sat down to dinner with Washington or the one who ordered the hasty discharge of the soldiers? Historians would say both. The boisterous, cocksure President was a man of strong convictions on many things. But on questions of race, he spent a lifetime feeling...