Sincere: Why does Obama channel racist TR?

Why would Barack Obama, our country's first African-American president, wish to associate himself with Theodore Roosevelt?

With great fanfare, President Obama made a speech last week in Osawatomie, Kan., the venue in 1910 where then-ex-President Roosevelt had introduced his theme of a "Square Deal" for Americans. In doing so, Obama attempted to clothe himself in Roosevelt's own reputation as a Progressive thinker and activist political leader.

But how "progressive" was Roosevelt's thinking? Is his positive reputation deserved?

The sad fact is, Theodore Roosevelt was an unabashed racist who celebrated genocide. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner who glorified war and facilitated the Japanese conquest of Korea. He was a eugenicist who thought only fit people (as he, or the government, defined them) should be able to reproduce.

In his book, "Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race," historian Thomas J. Dyer notes, for instance, that in "Roosevelt's view, the pioneers had accomplished a task of great 'race-importance' in killing off the Indians, a weaker and inferior race."

Roosevelt himself wrote, in justifying American imperialism — the conquest of the Philippines, in particular — that the "expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries which should never be lost sight of, especially by those who denounce such expansion on moral grounds. On the whole, the movement has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place."

Justifying an earlier expansion of the United States — the annexation of Texas and other territories formerly belonging to Mexico — Roosevelt said, "it was inevitable, and in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans from their sparsely populated northern provinces." (One of the primary reasons the American settlers in Texas rebelled against Mexico and declared their independence was that Mexico had outlawed slavery.)

In her history of Italian immigrants to the United States in the first half of the 20th century, Nancy Carnevale notes that Roosevelt "was enthralled with the idea of a superior Anglo-Saxon race" and that "racial mixing was objectionable in part because it would lead to a loss of a shared language and thus threaten racial unity."

A reference guide about TR's presidency from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia reports, with regard to Roosevelt's record on civil rights, that "he did little to preserve black suffrage in the South as those states increasingly disenfranchised blacks. He believed that African Americans as a race were inferior to whites, but he thought many black individuals were superior to white individuals and should be able to prove their merit."

Roosevelt was a leading proponent of the pseudoscience of eugenics, the idea of preserving racial purity by preventing interbreeding between people of different ethnic or racial groups.

In a letter to Charles Davenport, Roosevelt wrote:

"Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. ... 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. ... Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens 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."

On another occasion, Roosevelt said that "I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding. ... The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed."

Roosevelt's abhorrent views on race laid the foundation for his saber-rattling and duplicitous foreign policy.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Yet historian James Bradley discovered that TR had made a secret side deal with the Japanese, permitting them to colonize Korea, which began Japan's imperial expansion that eventually led to World War II. Roosevelt rationalized his double dealing because he thought the Japanese were "honorary Aryans."

It is puzzling that otherwise fair-minded people like Obama and his 2008 campaign rival, John McCain, would embrace Theodore Roosevelt as a political leader they wish to emulate. TR was a truly reprehensible character who should be no one's model today.