Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. Hope you’ll join us here every Saturday. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
While looking up interesting Caribbean history dates for Nov. 9, I discovered this:
On this day in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, became the first chief executive to travel abroad while in office.
Accompanied by his wife, Roosevelt embarked for Panama from the Chesapeake Bay aboard the U.S.S. Louisiana.
Before his four-day visit to the newly established Central American nation, Roosevelt stopped off in Puerto Rico. He returned to the continental United States on Nov. 26.
Roosevelt’s visit came three years after the United States gave military support to the Panamanians, who had revolted against Colombian rule. At the time, Roosevelt sent the battleship Nashville and a detachment of marines to support the rebels.
After the revolution, U.S. engineers accelerated work on the project—a huge undertaking that connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Roosevelt visited several sites where construction was already well under way.
I’ve written about the canal in the past.
Roosevelt was often depicted in cartoons wielding his “big stick” and pushing his U.S. foreign policy agenda, often through the power of the U.S. Navy.
This is from Granger’s Political Cartoon Archive on a widely circulated editorial cartoon:
In a political cartoon from 1904 titled "The Big Stick in the Caribbean Sea," artist William Allen Rogers illustrates President Theodore Roosevelt's promotion of the Monroe Doctrine. The cartoon shows a U.S. naval flotilla moving from one Caribbean port to another, symbolizing Roosevelt's enforcement of the doctrine. The image captures the dynamic and assertive foreign policy approach known as "Big Stick Diplomacy."
Here’s the cartoon:
President Donald Trump is currently toying with waging war on Venezuela by continuing to bomb boats. And people have noticed a similarity between these practices and Roosevelt:
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Reviving U.S. imperialism's 'Big Stick,' Trump tries to beat Latin America into submission. Defying Trump and preserving sovereignty in the region is going to require unity—much more of it than has been seen so far.
#news #politics
peoplesworld.org/article/revi...
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— People's World (@peoplesworld1924.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 3:10 PM
People’s World made this comparison:
One of the most prominent figures in the early days of 20th century imperialism was President Theodore Roosevelt. Under his rule, the United States subjugated the Panama Canal Zone, occupied Cuba, invaded the Dominican Republic, and pursued an almost endless list of other acts of intimidation.
The president’s favorite saying, “Speak softly but carry a big stick and you will go far,” gave the name to the “Big Stick” policy. And Washington’s right to impose order abroad, which he defended, gave rise to the U.S. government’s image of itself as the “world’s policeman.”
Trump, who has assumed his second term as president, is a kind of reincarnation of Roosevelt. Without bothering with equivocations about democracy and freedom, he openly declares U.S. dominance. The new administration has demonstrated the seriousness of its intentions using the example of Latin America.
Roosevelt has been lauded for his conservationism—at least that’s what I remember being taught in high school history class. But I wasn’t taught this:
Roosevelt hardly saw all Black Americans as equals.
“As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites,” he confided to a friend in a 1906 letter.
Ten years later, he told Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that “the great majority of Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for the suffrage” and that giving them voting rights could “reduce parts of the South to the level of Haiti.”
Roosevelt also believed that Black men made poor soldiers.
“Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go as far as they were led by white officers,” he wrote.
As for Native Americans, Roosevelt’s considerable time spent ranching in the Dakota Territory only hardened his mindset toward them, years before he became president.
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian,” he said in 1886, “but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.”
Here’s an excerpt from Roosevelt’s letter to eugenicist Charles Davenport:
You say that these people are not themselves responsible, that it is "society" that is responsible. I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celebates [sic] or have no children or only one or two.
Many Roosevelt historians have excused his failings by stating that he was a “man of his times,” which I have problems with.
Jennifer Rainey Marquez conducted this interview for Georgia State University:
Many people today have a limited understanding of the eugenics movement. Can you talk about its legal significance?
I’m a legal historian, and my focus has been trying to excavate and explicate the laws that were passed that relied on eugenic ideology. There are the sterilization laws, like the one highlighted in Buck v. Bell. There are the so-called racial integrity laws, which prohibited interracial marriage. There were also immigration laws. In 1924, the same year that the Virginia statute allowing sterilization was enacted, there was a national law that prohibited immigration by large groups of people from Eastern and Southern Europe.
As president, he favored the removal of many Native Americans from their ancestral territories, including approximately 86 million acres of tribal land transferred to the national forest system. Roosevelt’s signature achievements of environmental conservation and the establishment of national parks came at the expense of the people who had stewarded the land for centuries. Roosevelt also supported policies of assimilation for indigenous Americans to become integrated into the broader American society. These policies, over time, contributed to the decimation of Native culture and communities.
Roosevelt’s attitudes toward race also had a direct impact on his foreign policy as president, says Cullinane: “Because he believed that white Anglo-Saxons had reached the pinnacle of social achievement, he thought they were in a position to teach the other peoples of the world who had failed to reach such heights. The United States would help tutor and uplift the Western Hemisphere.”
That worldview formed the foundation of Roosevelt’s vocal support of American imperialism, and in the White House he presided over an expanding overseas empire that included territories won in the Spanish-American War including Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba and the Philippines. His Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, also known famously as his “big stick” foreign policy, laid the foundation for a more interventionist policy in Latin America. He also extended American influence in the region by fomenting a rebellion in Panama that resulted in American construction of the Panama Canal.
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.”
Trump is clearly not a carbon copy of Roosevelt, but his policies and racist, imperialist ambitions and policies are very similar. What do you think?
