Theodore Roosevelt - Environmental Activist, Warrior, Governor, Military Leader, U.S. President (1858–1919)[/caption]"The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful." - Theodore Roosevelt
He was a devout follower of eugenics, the belief that there are superior and inferior strains of humankind, and that it is best to filter out the inferior brand in order to foster the development of mankind. “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.... Some day, we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type,” he said.
In 1914 Teddy Roosevelt said that, “criminals should be sterilized and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them.” Roosevelt once referred to Africans as, “ape-like naked savages, who…prey on creatures not much wilder or lower than themselves.” In a 1905 statement he asserted that Caucasians were “the forward race” destined to raise “the backward race[s]” through “industrial efficiency, political capacity and domestic morality.” Whites, he felt, needed to reproduce in abundance or else risk “race suicide.” Blacks were not his only targets. He had this to say about American Indians: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the 10th.”
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A young theodore roosevelt in hunting gear[/caption]
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