“Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.” -Vice-President Thomas Marshall

On January 6th, 1919, Col. Theodore Roosevelt died. It’s now been one hundred years since that most colorful of American Presidents, one of the few whose lives were larger than the office he held, went to his reward.

How things have changed since his day! His vigorous Americanism would today be decried as racist (despite the fact that Roosevelt insisted that all were Americans), while his ‘square deal’ would probably be derided as socialist (despite his loathing of socialism). No one would care for his strident moralism or idealistic goals. Roosevelt today would be a political pariah, unable to fit in either party. Though, to be fair, he wasn’t far from being so in his own day either. He was a rare breed even in his time.

Meanwhile, I’m quite sure T.R. would have been appalled at the state of the country today, and would consider all sides of the political spectrum criminally delinquent. He’d probably run a Bull Moose campaign in 2020, advocating moral and legal reform and effectively a total tear-down of the present government.

If only.