1913 newspaper THEODORE ROOSEVELT accuses his NEGR0 BUTLER of THEFT from his Oyster Bay, NY home - inv # 3J-436

Theodore 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.” His racial ideology drew on his readings of leading evolutionary theorists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin.

Roosevelt’s racial philosophy of white superiority dovetailed with his support of the eugenics movement, which advocated selective breeding to engineer a race of people with more “desirable” characteristics, and sterilization of “less desirable” people, such as criminals, people with developmental disabilities—and for some, people of color. “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce,” he wrote in 1913. “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.”

“Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell,” Roosevelt said in a 1907 speech at the dedication of a monument to the Pilgrims. In his era, Roosevelt was hardly alone in his advocacy for racial hierarchies, American imperialism and eugenics, which became the basis of compulsory sterilization laws enacted by more than 30 states. The man who defeated him in the 1912 presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson, shared similar views on race, and prominent figures such as Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller and Winston Churchill supported the eugenics movement.

In the context of his time, “Roosevelt engaged meaningfully with the idea of race. He read and published on leading evolutionary thought," Cullinane says. "That said, there were also more progressive voices in Roosevelt’s day that he dismissed.” 

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