Who Was Teddy Roosevelt?

Buckle up, folks, for a wild ride through the life and times of America's most boisterous president, Theodore 'Teddy' Roosevelt! Forget the stuffy history books – we're diving headfirst into the life of this larger-than-life character, complete with charging rhinos, political brawls, and enough stories to make your head spin.

We'll explore Teddy's audacious adventures: from his days as a sickly kid to his transformation into a rugged outdoorsman, complete with bear hunting escapades and a penchant for wielding a big stick (literally!). We'll unpack his presidency, a whirlwind of trust-busting, conservation, and, of course, that time he mediated a peace treaty while wearing his pajamas.

Teddy Roosevelt was more than a politician, he was a bad ass...perhaps the most bad ass politician the United States has ever known. Whether you want to know more about his days as a rough rider, or you want to know how many acres of national parks he gave us, this episode of Dirt Nap City will tame the wild man who was the 26th president of the United States.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:07

Hey, Alex, how you doing? Man, hey, Kelly, Happy New Year. Man, Happy New Year to you, 2025 and we don't have flying cars. I know isn't that, isn't that something? Would you have thought in 1980 that 2025 would be so similar. Yeah. I mean, I was still, I was still expecting CD ROMs to be around, or were they even around in 1980 I guess I was still expecting photo Mac to be here. But, right, yeah, it's not, yeah, it is. It's so it's so similar, but so different. You know, it seems like there are these things that have come along that have really, really changed and revolutionized things everybody's talking about AI right now. Of course, you and I use it for several parts of this show, and have talked about it before, but it's maybe, it's just because it's been so incremental. Maybe if you took somebody from 1980 and brought them to 2025 it would feel very, vastly different. Oh yeah, I'm sure. I mean, just phones for one how much they've changed everything. But maybe in five years, we'll be doing an episode on what was AI. I hope so. I sure hope so. Well, today I'm going back to the meat and potatoes, the bread and butter. You know, the kind of stuff we love. This is going to be an episode about an interesting a dead person, Adam, that's, that's more than bread and butter, that's, that's like, probably ribs and apples. Oh, I get, I see what you did there? No, I want to talk about somebody that was actually born in 1858, and died in 1919, okay, an American, an American. All of a sudden, I'm picturing a handlebar mustache. Oh, you know, I had a feeling that no matter what clues I gave you were going to guess this pretty quickly. Let me I didn't guess it, but just that time period immediately gives me a handlebar mustache and maybe a ride on one of those bicycles with a penny farther, yeah, farther, which, by the way, I'm going to do on a dead end someday. I swear that's going to happen. Yeah, I really want to do that, but we've talked about him several times tangentially, yeah, well, well, this guy is very tangential for us. He's been mentioned a few times. He's been mentioned he was a sickly child. Drove an ambulance in World War One. No, he didn't really, but he was a sickly child, and he did advocate. Well, he grew up with asthma, and his parents were kind of scared by it. He was in Manhattan, he was he was from a well to do family, and his family actually traveled and gave him a good worldliness. And he saw a doctor that told him he should actually lead a strenuous life, and that would help make him stronger. Hmm. Okay, so some who was he known for his strength, not his strength, but just his general manliness. Like he's probably one of the most manly guys, you know, aside from Evil Knievel and Andre the Giant. He's, he's right up there. And his manliness, his bravery, his, you know, he did things like he climbed the Matterhorn. He he was, he raised cattle and rode horses out in Dakotas. Was he a politician? Yes, yes. He was, was he Teddy Roosevelt? He was Theodore Roosevelt Jr, also known as TR, also known as Colonel Roosevelt, also known as the colonel, but known as Teddy. To his demise. He did not like the name Teddy. So did I call him Teddy just now? Yeah, I apologize. He's dead. He doesn't care. So no handlebar mustache, but nonetheless a very iconic bushy mustache. Yeah, you're right. It wasn't handlebar but it was, it was of the age, and these glasses were very much of the age, and his general look and mannerisms were very much of the age. Yeah, very macho, manly, badass, kind of legendary figure, yeah, well, interestingly, you say the word macho, I don't actually think that was his vibe. He was kind of an intellectual. He was very worldly. He was very well, you know, well spoken, and he wrote and read. So I don't know if Macho is the right word, but I think he he really tried to push himself physically because he had experienced this asthma and, you know, such a sickly childhood, and it seemed to actually do him good. It pushed him into the, you know, sort of the fake it till you make it thing physically. But I consider myself a macho intellectualist, so they're not mutually exclusive. Wasn't that a song in the 70s by the Village People? Macho intellectualist? First Alex has to be one. Well, he was born to Martha Stewart Bullock, Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart Bullock and Theodore Roosevelt senior in Manhattan. He had an older sister named Anna, who they called BAMMY, and he had a younger brother named Elliot, and he had a younger sister named Corinne, but he was fairly, you know, debilitated with asthma as a child and a little bit later in his life. You know, he was born in 1858 when he was like 11 or 12, he went on some family trips to Europe and to Egypt, and that really kind of made him a lot more interested in the globe as a as a whole, you know, I think most Americans, I think most Americans today, don't even have a passport, right? Less than 50% have a passport, yeah, I'm sure. I think probably more now that you need one to go to Canada and Mexico, yeah. Then there used to be, I think it used to be in the 20% so well, he, he was a he was a well traveled person. He actually was picked on as a as a kid, some boys had bullied him, and he decided he was going to get into boxing. So he actually became a boxer. He still boxed when he was mayor of New York. As a matter of fact, I think another constant, a recurring theme on this show is people get bullied and then they become notable icons. Yeah, I think that's what happened to us. So, you know, keep getting bullied out there, or maybe keep bullying, you know, if you want to make somebody strong and important in world, but bullies themselves, I don't think ever end up on this show. No, no, they don't. They don't. They just they're these, these boys who bullied him, who turned him into a boxer and a wrestler, and he actually took lessons in judo. They actually did him a favor, right? He became who he was. He was also, interestingly, though, very interested in animals and zoology and conservationism. As a matter of fact, when he was about, I don't know, nine years old, he saw a dead seal. No, he was seven. I just see this in my notes. He was seven. He saw a dead seal at a market, and he negotiated to get the seals head, and then he took that head and he learned how to do taxidermy, and he taxidermied the seals head, and he started catching killing or finding dead animal carcasses and making a whole natural history museum in his house interesting. You ever done any taxidermy in your life. I never have, but I do remember, before I moved to Sugar Land, I lived in a little town called Huffman in northeast Houston, and it was pretty it was pretty country out there. And I remember being in fifth grade or sixth grade, and one of the kids in my class was taking taxidermy lessons, like going to taxidermy school in sixth grade. It's a lost art really. Well, I don't know that it's lost. I think there's still a lot of people that do it, and Huffman especially, yeah, yeah. Huffman, I mean, but, but it's, it's pretty amazing what they what they can do with these animals. But he he was actually homeschooled, so he didn't have a chance to go to taxidermy school. His his mother never taught him that, but after being homeschooled, he ended up going to Harvard. And his father said, I thought this was a great quote from his father, take care of your morals, first, your health, next, and finally your studies. Hmm, yeah. I like, I like that order, yeah, wrong with that. He was going to study natural science, but then his father died two years after he started at Harvard, leaving him a lot of money, $60,000 which was about almost $1.9 million today. But he he he could have lived on that. He could have just coasted, but he decided instead to write a book while he was at Harvard called the naval war of 1812 he was very into Navy history. He was very into military history. Studied that like crazy. And actually, that naval war of 1812 book is still studied today by kidding, military strategist, yeah, a lot of people don't know he had several published books. We'll talk about it's amazing. That's another thing that's kind of a constant in the show, is that people doing things at a young age. Yeah, already hitting hitting their stride at 1617, years old. Yeah, 1878 he was 20 years old, and when this book came out, he, I think he did graduate from Harvard, came back to New York and started attending Republican meetings at a place called Morton Hall. His father had been a big Republican, and he kind of followed in his footsteps. Now, the parties were very different back then. I. We won't get into all that, but let's just say that you know, what you think of as a Republican today isn't necessarily what it was back then. And same thing with Democrats. But he would go to these Republican meetings. He ended up meeting a woman named Alice Hathaway Lee, and he married her in 1880 and that's you know, when he climbed the Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps was during his honeymoon. So could you imagine on your honeymoon if you had said, Hey, honey, I'm gonna go climb one of the most difficult mountain climbing adventures without you. You stay here and, you know, spa day or whatever they did back then. Have you ever seen a picture of the Matterhorn? I think so, yeah, it's pretty much just like a straight up charity kind of thing, sure? Yeah, it's not, there's no, there's no gentle slope about it. And I just kind of looked up, you know, in today's world, it's still considered one of the most difficult climbs you can do. Probably can't be home by dinner. No, no. I think, I think it must have been a long honeymoon, or else he spent most of the time doing the little selfish. Yeah, maybe so, maybe so, in 1881 he won an election to the New York State Assembly, and that's kind of where he discovered that he liked fighting corruption. So you know, you know this about him, that he was a big reformer, yeah, I guess, because there's so many Roosevelts that are famous, maybe it's hard to keep up with which one was which and who did what, but Teddy Roosevelt was really into reform. He actually kind of ticked a lot of people off because of that, but we'll get into that in a minute. In 1884 he he and Alice, his wife had a daughter, also named Alice. And unfortunately, two days later, his wife died from kidney failure, which had been she had had a sort of kidney problem that was masked by the birth or by her pregnancy, and she was only 22 years old. And the same day his mother died of typhoid fever. My goodness, yeah, not from Mary, though. Let's hope not. Let's hope nominee, she was in New York for a while, and if you haven't listened to the Typhoid Mary episode, you might want to check that out to learn how perhaps she had something to do with the day. Maybe just pause this right now. Go listen to the entirety of Typhoid Mary, and then yeah, or we could just insert it. We could just insert that episode. You make your decision on whether or not Alice Roosevelt got typhoid from Typhoid Mary. What was that? It was that was actually his mother that that got it? Martha Stewart, her so many Alice's. I, yeah, all right, yeah. So his mother got typhoid. His wife died from kidney died from kidney failure in childbirth. So now he's like a single dad. He's not even a mom to help out. Well, that's where, that's where his sister BAMMY came in and took, actually took his daughter, took care of his daughter for the first three years of her life. I mean, he was a mess, right? His his wife and mother had died. His father had died not too long before that. He kind of used that grief, I guess, to focus on his work. And he started looking, you know, he had been elected to the State Assembly, and he started looking at ways to investigate, prosecute and stop corruption. And that was a thing, you know, one of the things back then was the party system, the boss, the bosses, you know, the party bosses, all of that stuff was starting to take shape, or was in the midst of going on. And one of the things he really did at that time was he went after the mayor's office. You know, as part of the state assembly, he said this, the mayor had too much power. Well, this world's first, sir, yeah, yeah. I guess he listened to his father. He he was, he was liked by many, disliked by a lot of other people, but he was getting noticed, and one of the biggest things he did was at the Republican National Convention. The same year that his mother and and wife died, he gave a speech and supported an African American named John Lynch to be the chair of the Convention, which was Wow, kind of unheard of back then. Yeah. What year would that have been? 1884 Wow, yeah, that's amazing. And I think that that earned him, obviously, the ire of some people and the respect of others, but you know, he was choosing his sides. And he also, during the presidential election of 1884 he was not a big fan of this guy named Blaine, who was the Republican, the Republican nominee. Well, he he made it known that he didn't like Blaine either. Was another Republican that he liked. I forgot the other guy's name, but there was a different Republican that he liked. But then there was this group of Republicans called the mug once. I ever heard of these guys? I thought they were part of the British invasion. No, they were actually part of Harry Potter. Yeah, yeah. It could be either one. Couldn't it could be either one. There were that'd be a great game show, British Invasion, band or Harry Potter, spell or political party, or political party? Well, the mugwumps were a group of Republicans who were very opposed. They were they were extreme reformist restream, extremely against political corruption, and they felt like this guy, Blaine, was under the hands or the thumb of the political machine. So they flipped over and supported Grover Cleveland, who was a Democrat, but Teddy saw that as political suicide and wouldn't do it. So rather than supporting Grover Cleveland, he actually just gave speeches about how bad the Democratic Party was. He supported the Republican Party and put down the Democratic Party, but wouldn't talk. Wouldn't say anything good about Blaine. Okay, so the mugwumps were mad at him. They were like, Hey, man, that's not cool. You're a reformer. You should be with us. You should, you know, go with the right person. Roosevelt was like, I'm out of here. So he he stopped politics for a little while. He had been to the he had been to the Dakota territory to hunt bison the year before, and he loved it. As a matter of fact, when he got out there, a lot of people looked at him and thought he was just this little, little man with glasses and kind of punchy and pale and didn't know, didn't really know what was going on. And by the time he left, he was, he was respected as a cowboy because he grew the mustache. Yes, that's the key, if you ever go, if you ever go to Yellowstone, or, you know, if you want to be one of the one of the cowboys out there. No, he actually said of cowboys. He said a cowboy possesses few of the emasculated milk and water moralities admired by the pseudo philanthropists, but does, but he does possess, to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation that was his take on cowboys. And of course, the Dakotas weren't states yet. No Dakota territory, yeah, yeah. So during that time, after the death of his wife and and mother, and after, you know, he kind of got this rebuke from the mugwumps in in the Republican Party, because he wouldn't switch over to the Democrats to support their candidate, etc, etc. He started going back and forth between New York and Dakota territories. He actually built a ranch called Elkhorn ranch in North Dakota, or what is now North Dakota, and he learned how to ride western style. Because I think a lot of these guys could ride because they were gentlemen, but they didn't know how to ride western style. It's a little different. What does western style? Does that mean without a saddle? No, that's bareback. Western style is different than an English style. I think most people in the cities road an English saddle and a Western saddle has the saddle horn because it's used for working cattle and things like that. It's a different kind of saddle, a different style of writing. Western is more more, I guess, efficient, but not as showy as he is writing English. But he also learned how to rope. He learned how to hunt. He learned about things like having to do with the ecology of the land, like over grazing. He actually organized the ranchers to help to help address problems of over over grazing. He formed what was called the Boone and Crockett club. You can imagine who that was named after. Their goal was to conserve large games, animals and their habitats. And he became the deputy sheriff of Billings County, North Dakota, at one point, even even hunted down some criminals with posses. Yeah, it sounds like the life, yeah, yeah. Totally different than than Manhattan. But in 1886 1887 he lost his herd of cattle to because he wanted to be a cattle rancher. He lost them to weather, severe weather wiped out all his cattle, so he turned he returned to New York, and basically he felt like North Dakota or the Dakota's territories, had helped him overcome the label that people saw him as an ineffective intellectual like he could back it up with toughness, yeah, and I'm sure it changes your perspective just on how big the country is, or how big it could be, and, yeah, what's all out there conservation. I mean, I'm sure it changes a man. I think it did. And I think Upon returning, he was reinvigorated, and he was actually asked to run for mayor of New York City. I. Which he did, but he lost. You know, he was a little still, a little bit of an unknown at that point, not not as well known as the other candidates. But after that, he spent a little time writing his second book called Winning the West. And this was a four volume set about the tracking of the Western tracking westward of Americans, basically. And I actually Googled it and looked for it to buy an original printing of this, which sold out when it was first printed. Is like, I don't know, $3,500 for four books. So you bought it. Yeah, happy birthday. So in 1988 he was appointed by President Harrison to the Civil Service Commission, and he actually served there for seven years. And this was another place where he was able to put reforms in place. He kind of fought against the spoil system. He demanded civil service laws, and really tried to make things better for workers. Tried to make things better for consumers. And the newspapers described him as irrepressible, belligerent and enthusiastic, hmm, which I guess is what you would want. He's just doing his job. He was doing his job, and he he had a little bit of friction with President Harrison, but President Harrison actually backed him up like he was like, yeah, yeah. I realize he's a bull in a china shop, but you know he's going the distance. Well, with all of that said, he his next move after he finished on the Civil Service Commission was to become police commissioner of New York. Now, again, lots of corruption going on back then, and he was the perfect man for that, because he didn't care. He wanted to just radically reform the police force. He had regular inspections of firearms. He had physical exams of the police officers to make sure they were up to snuff. He recruited people based on their qualifications, not on their political affiliation. He established the idea of meritorious service medals. He had telephones installed in station houses that didn't exist before him. Technology, yeah, he's so he's kind of conservationist, but also tech guy, yeah, and a reformer. One of the things that he would do is he would walk the police beats at night and early in the morning to make sure that the policemen were actually there on duty. He knew where they were supposed to be, and he would walk around to see if he were there. And He also fought against bars and establishments being open on Sunday. You know, remember that from the prohibition blue laws? Yep, he was, he was a, he was an advocate of the blue laws, not for any moral thing. It was just, it was law. And he was trying to, yeah, rules are rules. Man, yeah. Well, then after he was New York City Police Commissioner, he became secretary, oh, I'm sorry, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, like Dwight Schrute, Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy, I think the job is a little more important. He actually though had a lot of say, because the actual Secretary of the Navy was kind of in poor health, and so he left a lot of the decisions to Roosevelt. Remember I told you earlier he had written this book about the war of 1812 and the US Navy, and it still read there, well, Roosevelt actually got more and more involved in the Navy and had a huge buildup of naval strength. He made sure that the US built up battleships, and eventually we became second only to England during during Roosevelt's later, during his presidency, we were second, we were second only to England in naval strength, which, if you think about, like the Spanish Armada, and, you know, France and all these other countries that have been around a lot longer. We we really built it up. Yeah, we built it up. We, you know, like it was like pumping iron for him. He also believed that there were certain regions like the Caribbean and Cuba, where we needed more defense, and that there were some hostile, possible host, hostile countries in there, like Spain. And so he, he really wanted Cuba to be neutral or independent from Spain. He didn't like the fact that Spain was was taking hold there. So in 1898 there was an explosion aboard a ship docked in the harbor of Havana, the US the USS Maine, it exploded. They in, you know, in hindsight, it said it was probably an accident. It was probably caused by a boiler room or something like that. But the American government immediately blamed Spain. They said, this is Spanish. This is Spain's fault. You guys blew up our ship. And so they tried to for a little while. McKinley. Three, the President tried to have a diplomatic solution, but Roosevelt was kind of gunning for war. He wanted to kick Spain's butt and get them out of there, out of Cuba at that time. So I don't know how much you know about the Spanish American War. Not much. 98 Yeah, I really thought what you just said, Well, yeah, this ship was blown up. War was declared on Spain, and mostly to get them out of out of our the Western Hemisphere, you know, to get them out of our area. Well, he resigned as the assistant secretary to the Navy, and he actually volunteered a guy with, along with a guy named Colonel Leonard Wood, who was a regular army guy, to start a cavalry regiment. And you know what their nickname became, the Rough Riders. The Rough Riders, that's right, he was begged by his wife and his family not to, not to do this. He had never been in combat before. He'd never been in the military. Was a good he was a good horseback rider. He's a good shot. You know, he could fire a gun, and you know, he was a rough, rough and tough guy. But he had never done this. So apparently, it was pretty common during the Spanish American War for these volunteer organizations to come together and fight alongside what they called the army regulars. You know, people, just regular army people. They trained in San Antonio, Texas, and after several weeks of training, they took a ship down to Cuba. And what's interesting about this group of people, the Rough Riders, they were not only, not only ex military people. Some of them were Ivy League educated people. Some of them were Native Americans. You know, they had native Native Americans in the group. They had former soldiers. They had athletes that he had been friends with, you know, boxers and football players that that Roosevelt had known that joined he and this guy, Leonard Wood, put an ad out asking for volunteers, and they got too many volunteers, almost like Shackleton when he was going to the south. Sure. Yeah, yeah, that's everyone wanted to be a part of the Rough Riders and the and the nice thing was, well, first of all, they didn't call themselves that. That was something that was bestowed upon them by the by the press, but what a great name, right? There could have been a lot worse names. So did you know that there's a minor league baseball team in Frisco, Texas, just north of Dallas, and they are called The Frisco Rough Riders, and their logo is Teddy Roosevelt with a cowboy hat and like a bandana scarf. Oh, nice with the glasses and the mustache, and that's their logo. That's very cool. It's very cool. It's like an F with Teddy Roosevelt's face on it. Nice. Well, so they ended up going down into into Cuba, and they had several charges, and actually they didn't have a lot of horses, so Roosevelt was one of the only people that got to ride a horse. A lot of these men were on foot, but, oh, as I was saying before, it was a very diverse group of people, racially and, you know, from economic backgrounds. But according to the information and the biographies and such about Roosevelt, they really had a a very open relationship with all these folks. Like it was one of these things where they all bonded and they were all on a common mission. They were Americans first, and whatever else they were second. So that was kind of cool. They had a lot of success by taking on this battle at kettle Hill was one of them. And there was also a battle known as San Juan heights, and they were able to force the Spanish to retreat from those positions. They were pretty strategic positions on the island. So did all the battles of the Spanish American War take place in Cuba? That's a great question. I don't think anywhere in the US, because I don't think Spain, I don't think Spain ever attacked mainland us, and I don't think we ever attacked mainland Spain. That wouldn't really make sense. I think it was about the the islands down there that Spain had a hold of and that we wanted a hold of, yeah, be like us taking over Majorca, right? The US takes over Majorca, and they are like, no, no, no, no, that's our that's our vacation spot. So digging in the Spanish American War didn't take place in Spain or America, right? Well, that's what it was against that were, those were the contenders. Well, that the battles were, you know, they were, they were intense. And there was a lot that, you know, I don't want to just gloss over. Gloss over it. And by the way, I'm going to tell everybody I should have said this at the onset. Teddy Roosevelt, there's a lot to cover, and so I'm trying to go through things quickly, but I'm going to leave some things out, I'm sure. Let's just know, you know this, these are the highlights. Let's just say that about every episode that we. Every day we we should have a disclaimer. Yeah, we only have a few minutes here, guys. We're not trying to get give you everything you need. We're gonna wet your appetite so you want to go and learn more, that's good. W, H, E, t sure. Yeah, wet, yeah. So I also was lectured by Alex about not going too long on this before we started, before the tape starts rolling, Alex gives me all the all the rules. He says, Don't call me out for lecturing you by the in the episode, by the way, whatever you do. And Kelly says, Hey, man, Joe Rogan goes three hours. Why can't we go three hours? Right? So after Roosevelt had this battle at San Juan heights. You know this? This lasted for a period of time. I think it went from July to August. He was there for two months or so. He called it the greatest day of his life that that battle. And he wanted to be called Colonel Roosevelt or the colonel, or even Theodore, but he did not like the name Teddy. And I think you know how he got the name. Do you? Do you want to give your your idea of how he got it, and I can tell you if there's anything I see differently as far as what I learned, I don't know how I mean, I thought just Teddy was a nickname for Theodore. Oh, the note, no, okay, I'm, I'm actually talking about the teddy bear. Yeah, I'm talking about how the teddy bear came to be named Teddy. Oh, I assumed that was after Teddy Roosevelt. It is. And it was probably because the original, this is my guess. I think original teddy bears used to have glasses, and people thought that that was because Teddy Roosevelt had glasses. But I'm bet, I'm betting that your research has shown that teddy bears existed before Teddy Roosevelt. And My take is because teddy bears don't have mustaches, they couldn't be have anything to do with and they're not alive. They're not real, no. So actually, much of that did I get? Right? None of it. None of it. So the name originated from a incident. It was the teddy bear came after Teddy Roosevelt. So teddy bears came after Teddy Roosevelt. They were because of him. He had gone in 1902 to Mississippi. He was invited by the governor to go on a hunting trip. They were going to hunt for bears, American black bears. And they were part of a large group of hunters who were all competing, you know, whoever got the biggest animal would win. I guess it's what they did back then. And so they're going around. He's got his his entourage with him. Well, his entourage cornered, clubbed and tied a black bear to a tree after it had been chased by the hounds. And this was, by the way, a cub. So it wasn't even a full size bear. It was a it was a bear cub. And when Roosevelt got there, they encouraged him to shoot it. You know, they were going to untie it briefly and let him shoot it so that they could say, oh, he killed a bear. Roosevelt said, Nope, I don't think that's sporting. I think it's unsportsmanlike to kill this bear, or for me to shoot this bear, but we should kill it anyway, because you beat it so badly that it's going to suffer. So they, they ended up killing the bear. But the The Washington Post got a hold of this, and in november of 1902 they published a political cartoon that showed Teddy Roosevelt not killing the bear, basically saying, No, I won't kill the bear. And that led to the idea by this guy named Morris Mick Tom, who saw that cartoon, he owned a shop, and he put a plush bear cub with glasses in the window of his shop and called it Teddy's bear, and sold them. And it caught on with bigger toy manufacturers and eventually became a whole thing. So people did call him Teddy, then they called him Teddy. Yeah, Teddy was not because of teddy bears. He was he was called Teddy, and he didn't. He didn't like that. I don't think he minded teddy bears. I don't think he liked the name Teddy, though. So tell me why the lingerie item the Teddy was named after. You know that never came up, that never came up. I mean, it couldn't have been. I mean, his honeymoon didn't probably involve any teddies. Well, he was out climbing mountains, right? So I'm saying so, I'm saying so he's probably never seen a teddy I don't even know. I don't even know if that's still a thing. We'll have to do some research. But then clear your browser history. After you do that research, you don't think that that Victoria Secret sells Teddy's anymore. You think they call it something else. Is there even still Victoria's Secret? Is that still a thing? Okay, all right. Well, we'll find out. We'll find out, but I have no idea. But that's where the teddy bear. Bear comes from? Was from this incident in Mississippi where he didn't shoot the bear. And that's an awful, graphic story. If a kid asks you, Where does the name teddy bear come from? I would skip that story about well, or maybe just tell him that Roosevelt didn't, didn't shoot the bear himself. But say the word himself after the kids already left, Roosevelt didn't shoot the bear, and then wait, kid walks out of the room. You say himself right? Because it was bad, because it was because it had been clubbed so badly. So he ended up after this, this thing with the Rough Riders, he decided to run for governor of New York, and he wanted to do this in cooperation with the political machine to some degree, because he had to, you know, they in order to get the nomination, he had to, he had to cooperate to some degree. But he, you know, he was a reformer at heart. He ended up winning the governorship of New York by 1% it was that close. And this is where he talked about one of the first times he mentioned the idea of the square deal. So the square deal was mentioned in a few cases, one time where he was negotiating with labor, but he said in this case, the rules were, if he was going to be governor, that he had to have honesty in public affairs. He had to be equitable and his society in New York, people in New York, had to be equitable in the sharing of privileges and responsibility, and he had to subordinate the party, the Republican party to the interests of the people in the state. Wow. Morals first, yeah, we could use some of that. Always. Keep that in mind, folks, if you run for office, Square Deal. He was one of the first people to ever do a press conference, really. Yeah, he did that, both as a as a governor as well as as the president. I guess his electronic media was just starting then. Well, no, it had more to do with he saw the value of letting the press in and tell their story. He wanted to be in the news. He wanted and he also kind of, apparently, there was a time when he was president. This was later he wasn't president for another several years after he was governor, but there was a time when he actually let the press in because they were all standing out on the White House lawn, and he let them come in from the cold, and he actually gave them a room. He said, We'll give you a room, and that's how the modern press room, press briefing room, came to be. That room is very small. Have you ever heard? Have you ever heard or seen that? I have only seen, you know, from from press conferences. It doesn't look that small, but maybe it's smaller than it looks. Yeah, they say it's like Mission Control at NASA that it much smaller. Areas, very tiny. Yeah, I think it's only about 10 chairs across. Oh, wow, that's why it always looks so crowded. Yeah, I just crowded. Well, he did things as governor like he pushed the franchise tax bill. He made sure that companies who were actually doing business in the state, paid taxes to help with the infrastructure that allowed them to do business, you know. And this is kind of getting into some politics here. New York, at the time, was the most populous state in the union, and so he had a lot of responsibility. I mean, if you think about it today, being the governor of New York or California is a lot different than being the governor of Montana or New Mexico, right? Sure, no offense to Montana or New Mexico, but just fewer people. Yeah. He then was asked to run for vice president, to be nominated because vice president Garrett Hobart died and Garret Hobart had been the vice president under McKinley, and when he died, they put Roosevelt on the ticket. He won, he and McKinley won, and he was bored. He actually really hated being vice president because he felt like there wasn't a whole lot to it. He did that for a short period of time, and then on September 6, 1901 McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo New York. And when he was actually, I should say, he was shot in Buffalo New York. He survived. Roosevelt came back to see him. He seemed to be getting better, and then he took a turn for the worse and died. And that made Roosevelt president, wow, his first, his first time in office, wasn't through election. It was well, he was elected as vice president, but he took over for. McKinley, and what year was that? That was in 1901 when he became president in september of 1901 one of the things he did that was pretty innovative for the time I had mentioned earlier about nominating a person of color to the Republican conventions chair. He invited Booker T Washington to the White House. Oh, right, which was pretty radical at the time, and certainly ticked off a lot of people in the segregated south. He ended up he had dinner with Booker T Washington, and that made such a stink among people who you know shouldn't, shouldn't have made a stink, but did, and he decided to stay friendly with Booker T but only in business appointments rather than dinner. I think that's what ticked the southern is off, was that they let a black man sit at the table so but good on good on Teddy Roosevelt for doing that, right, of course, man, and probably way more interesting to have dinner with than any of those. It's probably usually I would, I would agree, just speculating. But he, he became a trust buster. I think we talked a little bit about the Sherman Antitrust Act and how that broke up Standard Oil yeah, see the Rockefeller Rockefeller episode. For that one, he actually during his presidency, he brought 44 antitrust lawsuits to you know about he enforced 44 antitrust antitrust suits during the presidencies of the three predecessors. That's Benjamin Harris, Grover, Cleveland and William McKinley. They had 18 combined. He did 44 by himself, and they did six each. So you could see he was definitely a trust buster. Yeah, for sure. Not a Ghostbuster. No. He, as I mentioned before, he was part of a labor dispute with the coal miners in in the US 1902 and this was another place where he talked about a square deal. He said my action on labor should always be considered in connection with my action as regards to capital, as regards capital, and both are reductible to my favorite formula, a square a square deal for every man. So he was on the labor side, or he was just trying, trying to negotiate, or he was able to strike a balance. He he said, I mean, that's the point of that quote. Is he saying it's in connection with regards to capital, meaning capital, as in commerce and money. So he's trying to strike a balance between the growth of the nation and the things that need to happen, the labor that needs to be done, the money that needs to be generated, along with the actual workers. And so it's one of those things where it sounds like he was probably hated by both sides, yeah, but I think he saw it as what was the most fair. He was actually the first president to settle a labor dispute. Wow. You know, people that put morals first and their principles First are usually hated by both sides. That's true. That's true. So what they kind of say sometimes is a compromise is, you know, both sides, if both sides are unhappy, then you've got a good compromise, right? Yeah, something like that. Although you and I, you know, we had our time today. We had it set for one thing. There was another time suggested we met in the middle, and here we are, dude, yeah, you're just, I'm I'm like Roosevelt, and you're like McKinley without getting shot, right? He also reformed the US railroads through a thing called the Hepburn Hepburn Act, he was one of the first people to actually look for Pure Food and Drugs. You know, with the eventual FDA that came out of his original Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a lot of people were opposed to it because it was sort of anti business. You know, we didn't want government meddling in the food and drugs. But the book the jungle, which came out in 1906 really galvanized support. Upton Sinclair, you ever read that book? Oh, man, I really think about the book a lot, actually. Oh yeah, that's that's a awful, awful tale of the way things used to be in this country, and I think it changed. I think it changed the world, and influenced Roosevelt to have the guts to put out this Pure Food and Drug Act, which again, the easiest thing to do, because his cronies would be against it, because they, you know, the money comes from these companies, would be not to do it. But he established the United States Forest Service. He signed the creation of five national parks. He signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, where they proclaimed 18 US national monuments. He established bird sanctuaries for 51 Different bird sanctuaries, he established four game preserves and 150 national forests. Wow. You wonder what this country would be like if he hadn't come around, if somebody like him hadn't come around, if there would just be hotels on those spots, and if there wouldn't be national parks, and if there was nobody to champion those areas and kind of keep them preserved, you wonder 100 years later what things would look like, probably, probably not as pristine as they do in a lot of places today. Yeah, and we've certainly screwed a lot of stuff up and over developed in a lot of areas, but at least we have those things that I think are pretty, pretty much established. You know, I think it would take a lot to overturn any of that. I mean, of course, there's political, you know, conversation on both sides about drill, baby, drill, and all that sort of thing, but selling national land, yeah? Well, he was unapologetic about it, and at the end of his tenure, he had 230 million acres that he had preserved that's a lot, you know, small part of the country, but still much better than than, I think, what people had done before that. Of course, it was also, as we modernized and technology got better, and more and more factories and cars and all that sort of thing, it was becoming a bigger problem right before that, maybe there wasn't a need for it as much, yeah, and but we are also, we were also expanding westward into some of those areas that where a lot of those national parks exist now too, a lot of them are in the West. That's right. That's right. Well, he also was involved in a peace negotiation between Japan and Russia, and that conversation won him the Nobel Prize. Essentially, there was some concern from Japan and Russia about annexation of places like, Well, we actually annexed Hawaii right in 1898 and there was a lot of conversation about the Philippines and who should control that? And you know, it was one of those things where Roosevelt was able to successfully negotiate a truce between Japan and Russia, which I think is pretty cool. He also was a major driver behind the Panama Canal. Did you know that that's great, that was all. But you know what it was done in the in the why it was done? National security? Oh, sure, sure. And it was a naval thing. It enabled us to get ships from one ocean to the other much more quickly, which gave us a big advantage. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of concern about the presence of other countries in Latin America at the time, and the US really wanted to make sure that we could have that canal built. Well, it was something where they were looking at putting it through a couple of different places. They were actually talking about Nicaragua at one point. And at the time, Panama was actually part of Columbia. Well, Roosevelt supported some Panamanian rebels, you know, kind of on the down low. I don't know how this was done, but Panama became its own country, because Roosevelt gave them the ability to break away from Colombia, and then that enabled us to build the canal there. Now, so is that not the thinnest part of Central America? I think there were a couple of places that would have worked, but yes, I think it probably it was the optimal place to make the canal. He was the first president to make a trip out of continental US on a diplomatic mission, which is what he did when he went to Panama and Puerto Rico in 1906 and he very much was seen as negotiating that deal with Panama very well, because it it even though we gave them a lot of money and a lot of technology and a lot of things that helped them out, it really established us as a dominant naval force in the Western Hemisphere. Because of that pass through. Otherwise, you got to go all the way around, right? You got to go all the way down and around, yeah, for sure. Well, this was, you know, kind of 1906 1907 he his second term in office was started in 1904 and he didn't have the kind of support in the second term as he'd have in the first term. He was kind of considered a lame duck because he said he wasn't going to run for a third term. I don't think there was a rule or a protocol or an amendment at that time that said he couldn't, but he said, you know, in the interest of not being a dictator, I will not run for a third term. Well, he picked out Taft to be his I think William Howard Taft to be his successor. That's who he was. Friends. Taft. They he had been Roosevelt Secretary of War, and Taft was kind of a made man. He was fighting against Williams, William Jennings Bryant, who was the Democrat, and Taft ended up winning the election. But then it turned out he wasn't nearly as good of a politician or a negotiator as Roosevelt had been, and really kind of fell out of favor with most of the Republicans, as well as Roosevelt himself. So it was, it was one of those things where he, you know, he thought he could trust Taft to do what he wanted, but he didn't. So after leaving office in 1909 he went on safari, and he did that in under the the sort of umbrella of the Smithsonian. So believe it or not, a lot of the artifacts in the Smithsonian were brought back by expedition from Theodore Roosevelt. So the Smithsonian already existed. The Smithsonian existed. And Andrew Carnegie was behind a lot of the financing of this. He paid for, he paid for this expedition to put all these artifacts into the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Now, they went to East Africa. They traveled to the Congo. They went up the Nile, and they ended up in what's today, Suzanne, Sudan, this group. It was a large group. It was a huge expedition, you know, lots and lots of people. Just take a guess how many specimens they brought back that were either trapped or killed. Just, just give me a number, man, especially a taxidermist like that. Oh, man, they probably brought back. I don't know 100 higher. I don't know 211,400 Wow, 11,400 it seems excessive. Well, you know, it included 1000 large animals, 512 512 big game animals, six rare white rhinos. So maybe like, yeah, like elephants and rhinos and giraffes and everything, all of that, all of that, and also moles and and insects and hippopotamus to bring to the Smithsonian dead. They were salted carcasses and skins when they were sent to Washington. But here's what Roosevelt had to say. Here's what he had to say, let's let's hear what he had to say for himself, I can be condemned only if the existence of the National Museum, the American Museum of History, of Natural History, and all similar zoological institutions are also condemned. Well, he's got a point. I mean, a lot of those have live animals though. Well, I mean, we're talking about museums, not zoos. Well, you said the zoological Well, I think zoological, yeah, that's okay, fair, but showing a dinosaur is different than showing an elephant that was just minding his own business. Yeah? Yeah. I agree. Maybe 11,000 was excessive. But apparently, all of those animals, or a vast majority of them, did end up in some place where people could see them, you know. And okay, did we contribute? You can look at it in one hand. Did he contribute to the extinction of these animals, or did he preserve them for humans to gawk at and and study and study, right? All right. Well, we'll get off that soapbox. Yeah, yeah, complicated man. So he comes back from his Safari, and he he chills out a little bit, but he realizes that Taft has gone in a direction he doesn't like, and he knows, he said, I won't run for a third term, but what he meant was a third consecutive term. So he ends up running for president again. He said, I'm really sorry for Taft. I'm sure he means well, but he means well feebly. He does not know how he is utterly unfit for leadership, and this is a time when we need leadership. So he said, If the people make a draft of me, I shall not decline to serve in 1912 so the people made a draft of him, but the problem was, Taft got the Taft got the Republican nomination, so that wasn't available to him. He was, he was relegated to a third party. Well, he's out, you know, he's gonna split the Republicans. He's gonna do this thing. He's gonna run. And while he was campaigning in Milwaukee, he gets shot by a shopkeeper. This guy shoots a bullet into his chest, penetrates his eyeglass case. Fortunately, he. A folded, 50 page copy of his speech in his jacket, and that's what saved him. This was called progressive cross greater than any individual. Was the name of the speech. Well, good thing, it was 50 pages. Well, it did go into his chest and it but it was slowed down enough that it was actually lodged and Roosevelt, because he had experience with hunting and that sort of thing. He knew that if he wasn't coughing blood, it hadn't reached his lung, and so he knew he could survive after he shot. First of all, he says to the crowd, don't hurt this man, because they were gonna they were gonna murder him right there. They were gonna string him up, but he says, don't hurt this man. Had the police take him away, and then he gets up and gives a 90 minute speech after he's just been shot. That is being a badass. That is the definition of badass, right there. So he finally finishes his speech, he goes to the hospital. Turns out that it lodged in his muscle, and the doctor said, You know what, we're not even going to take this bullet out, because it would do more harm than good to remove the bullet. So he lived with that bullet in his chest the rest of his life. You know, if I get shot before one of these podcast episodes, I probably reschedule. No, if you're coughing up blood, you can reschedule. But if you're not coughing up blood you had to go on. I hope you have a I hope you have an eyeglass case and 50 page notes in your pocket, though. Yeah. So always, there was some, there was some discussion about whether he was fit to run. And the doctor said, or maybe he, no, I know what it was. He said to a reporter, I'm as fit as a bull moose. And that is where they got the name Bull Moose Party, this third party, which was progressive, they had the symbol of the bull moose. And he spent two weeks recuperating, and he ended up running for president, and he got 27% of the vote. Taft got 23% of the vote, so they split the party. Woodrow Wilson got 42% of the vote and won the election. So he decides again, what's he going to do after this? He's going to travel. He goes to Latin America, South America, and he's going to go down there and do a research expedition. They're they're canoeing, they're in they're in boats, and some of the boats had actually broken free, and we're going to smash against some rocks. So what does this guy do? He jumps in the water, tries to save the boat, smashes his leg, ends up getting a flesh wound, nothing major, but guess what? It gets infected. He gets tropical fever, and he is sick as a dog, and to the point where he says to the rest of the rest of the crew that's with him, including his son. His son's name was Kermit, he says, Guys, I'm gonna just kill myself with morphine. You guys, go on. He was ready to do that. He was ready to ingest a bunch of morphine, die and let them continue. But they said no, especially his son. You know, he loved his son. His son loved him, and he didn't. So he got back home, but at that point he had lost, I think he lost like 40 or 50 pounds because of the sickness, and he actually said that he had cut 10 years off of his own life, like he said that to a friend, and it ended up being true. Wow, for the rest of his life, he had a lot of problems with flare ups from that will illness. Well, World War One comes along in 1914 he supported the allies. He wanted to be harsh against Germany. He was very interested in, like, what they were doing submarines. And felt like that was, you know, unfair and unjust because, but because we had a big navy. Obviously, we were able to do some good things in World War Two or not good things. But, you know, win the fight. He got sicker and sicker, and in 1919, he was having breathing problems. And apparently his last words were to the family servant, James Amos, and he said, put that light out, James. Or please, put the light out, James. And then he died. And when he died, one of his sons, Archibald, telegraphed his siblings and said, the old lion is dead. Oh, man. How old was he? Let's see that was 1919, and he was born in, he was born in 1858, so doing a little quick math here 1971 see that old be be 42 plus 1961 i. Yeah, 6161 yeah, not, not a very, not a very old dude. You know, there's people that lived, but talking about a big life, right? So, he was Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle, right? Yes, yes, he was Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle, and Franklin Delano was like a distant cousin, yeah, so because they, you know, they were kissing cousins, as we know. But he was so like his, who, who's whose daughter was Eleanor Roosevelt, like his, one of his siblings daughters, yes, I believe so. He obviously big, big presence. And one of the things too, he was often about the strenuous life. Like I said, he really wanted people to push themselves. As a matter of fact, he was very into watching football. And I don't know if you know this, but in the early 1900s football was very violent. People died, people got maimed. People got, you know, and it's, it's, we had this whole controversy in a in a game recently, I won't mention the game, but you know which one I'm talking about, with targeting, whether it was targeting or not. And I remember sitting there with my nephew, my daughter, my son, and my wife, and talking about how, when we were younger, you and I, you know, the host of the show that was just called a good hit, right? I mean, but I'm not, I like, I like the fact that we're trying to be safer. But ironically, this guy who, sort of, you know, didn't like people to be wimps, he wanted them to be have the strenuous life. He did actually encourage the Harvard and Yale football teams and some of the more famous football teams at that time, to talk to their players about playing fair, about playing clean, and to not hurting each other so that they wouldn't have so many violent injuries. Yeah, they were talking people would die during games. I think you said that, but they were talking about banning football back then. Yes, yes. I think there's actually a movie called or a short film, or a Vox or something, because this is how I found this out, called How, how Theodore Roosevelt saved football. So might be something worth watching. He also was famous for the saying, Speak softly and carry a big stick, yeah, which has been translated and spoke all over the place. He's on Mount Rushmore. He's the second one from the right, along with George Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. Lot of people kind of, I think he's not quite as famous as those other three guys, I don't think to the general public, but to me, it seems like just even him, having done the the the parks, you know, being such a big part of the preservation it's sort of fitting for him to be on the side of a mountain, right? I agree, yeah, yeah, for sure. Several warships named after him, stamps, all of those, you know, honors have been bestowed upon him. And what's I'll leave you with this, which I think is pretty cool, he was actually one of the very first presidents, or he was the first president. Maybe he wasn't the first, but one of the first presidents to have their voice recorded, and so you can actually listen to some of his speeches that were recorded and hear his actual voice. Oh, that's cool, yeah. So next time you're clutching your teddy bear late at night and you're camping in a national park, or you're looking at your taxidermy lion, or if you're in Africa and wonder why there's no animals left. Thanks, Teddy. All right. Hope you enjoyed it. Happy 2025 everybody. We're looking forward to an awesome season. The great fundamental issue now, before our people can be taken it is, are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control I believe they are. My aborts, do not I believe in the right of the people. I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will, day in and day out, make sure mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training will make in trying to govern. I believe, again, that the American people are, as a whole, capable of self control and of learning by their mistakes. Our opponents, they lift lawyers to this doctrine, but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham. I am not leading this fight as a matter of esthetic pleasure. I am leading because somebody must lead or else the fight would not be made at all. I prefer to work with moderates, with rational conservatives, provided only that they do in good faith, strive forward towards the lack but when they Falcon turn their backs to the right fit. Mr. Scorners on the piece of reaction that I must pass company with, we the people cannot turn that or a must be steady wise from. It would be well if all people would study the history of the crystal all the woes of France for a century in a warrant had been used to the polygamous splitting into the two camps of unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism. Had free revolutionary France listened to men like Durga and backed them up, all would have gone well, but the beneficiaries of privileged the former reactionaries, the short sighted Ultra conservatives, turned out to go then found that instead of him, they had obtained from his family, they gained 20 years freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of the whirlwind of the Red Terror. And in there turned the unbridled extremists of andera in use of blind reactions, and so with convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alternations of violent radicalism and violence, urbanism, the French people went through misery. God, a shattered soul. May we profit, but the experiences of our brother Republicans across the water and go forward steadily avoiding all wild extremes. They are ultra conservatives. Remember that the rule of the forbids thrown on the revolution. They are would be revolutionaries. Remember that no bourbon was ever such a dangerous enemy of the people under freedom as a professed friend of both rubbish there. There is no danger of a revolution in this country that there is grave, it's content and unrent, and in order to remove them, there is need of all the wisdom and property and peace he gives faith in and service work with humanity. We have in our command, friends, our task as Americans is to strive for social and industrial justice achieved through the genuine rule of this is our end, our purpose, the methods for achieving the end, the merely experience to be finally accepted or rejected, according as actual experience shows that they work well loyal. But in our hearts, we must have this lofty purpose with the strive for it in all earnestness and sincerity for our work. Welcome to them. In order to succeed, we need leaders of inspired idealism leaders to whom are granted great vision, who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true, who can kindle the people that the fire from their own brain. The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument refused until broken and dead, can be cast as I and if he is worthy assault, he will care no more when he is broken and a soldier cares where he is sent, where his life is profit in order. That's a victory in 81 in the long fight for righteousness. The watch world, for all of us, is spending.