Roosevelt New Nationalism Roosevelt\'s New

Roosevelt New Nationalism

Roosevelt's New Nationalism: Then and Today

Following a bloody civil war and a gradual economic recovery, the United States would enter industrialization with stability and strong leadership. Thus, beginning its first period of sheer expansionism, particularly given the vast stretches of land which lay before it in the west, the United States would take on the 19th century with a newly aggressive outward orientation which bespoke its origins as a colony of the similarly oriented British Kingdom.

Outward expansion would begin earnest and in permanency with the words and actions of President Roosevelt, who during a speech in 1910, would put forth a statement on America's role and responsibility to the world that very much resonates with American leaders today.

Much as America's new brand of imperialism gravitated outward from the policies of Theodore Roosevelt, so too would this be the case with a brand of New Nationalism, which the powerful central leader coined in the speech. This would correlate philosophically with the actuality of New Imperialism, which assumed as its rationale that which Nationalism posited. Particularly, it was argued that the United States had achieved constitutionally, ideologically and economically, the superior way of life for the future of nations. Through the premise of a strong central government and a sweeping global authority, it was argued that the United States was in the unique position to help elevate the 'third world.' Particularly, this ideology would be fueled by the premise that industry and business leaders were to be seen as the self-regulating powers of the future, with the government taking responsibility primarily to simply protect laborers, women and children from the overbearing authority of corporate power. In its disposition toward corporate deregulation as a path to realizing international American greatness, this would help to set in motion many of the cultural shifts that have forged the cross-section of industrialists and nationalists constituting the modern Republican Party.

By philosophical premise, President Theodore Roosevelt would pursue an aggresive mode of global diplomacy, distinguished by his concerted support for the occupation and dominance of lands such as Mexico and the Philippines. Roosevelt's strategy of occupation philosophically presupposed an import to democracy as noted by his 'New Nationalism' speech in 1910. Here, he pronounced that it ought rightly to be nothing less than the purpose of America's being in existence and honoring the claims of the Constitution to incite others to recognize the value of democracy. As Roosevelt argued, "Our country -- this great Republic -- means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the Implicit to the assumptions of Roosevelt's New Nationalism would be such American assumptions as Caucasian racial superiority, Christian moral denomination and western patriarchy. Such is to say that assumptions of cultural superiority and ethnocentrism that would be inherent to Roosevelt's perspective would also have a heavy bearing on future leaders. Indeed, close correlation may be found in the rhetoric which drives Roosevelt's grand sense of American entitlement and that evident in such hawkish modern leaders as President George W. Bush. The messianic message relating freedom, democracy and god which Bush pronounces at politically driven opportunity, echoes historical trends in American military endeavors which presume to be endorsed by God and the good philosophical grounding of the Constitution. It is in this context that military nationalism as endorsed by Roosevelt and Bush's imperialism coincide, relying upon the notion of occupation in order to impose American ideals upon other nations. We can see that Roosevelt's doctrine would be central to forging an American identity in the world which proceeds from a sense of governmental and ideological superiority.