Did Roosevelt's Racism Cause WWII?

That was the argument made in a U.S. bestseller in 2009 written by a WWII historian whose father had raised the US flag on Iwo Jima. And the Roosevelt he had in mind was Teddy, not Franklin.

Needless to say, although countless people will say it quite angrily in my Email inbox in response to this article, you cannot simply blame an event on actions that occurred years before. A war is started by the people who start that war, in that instant, and there is no way for them to wiggle out of that responsibility. But, as everyone is eager to recognize when the context is more comfortable, all actions have consequences, and those consequences have further consequences. (As a warning that may further temper the vitriol, I would like to point out that Teddy was not a Democrat.)

When the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket won the White House campaigning on a platform of humanitarian war and benevolent overseas empire, and William Jennings Bryan's opposition to all imperialism did not carry the day, that event had consequences. And actions that Roosevelt took in his later career, legal and illegal, public and secret, had devastating consequences.



That Teddy Roosevelt, along with McKinley (see magazine cover), Taft, and much of the country were racists is not exactly news. Teddy Roosevelt supported the slaughter of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, Cubans, Filipinos, and Asians and Central Americans of nearly every variety. He believed only whites capable of self-rule (which was bad news for the Cubans when their U.S. liberators discovered them to be black). He created a display of Filipinos for the St. Louis World's Fair depicting them as savages who could be tamed by white men. He invented the notion of illegal immigration by blocking the entry of Chinese, who -- darn them -- were just not as lazy or unhealthy as white workers.

But we tend to think of racism as a secondary defect. Someone is first and foremost a politician or a lawyer or a fireman or a novelist and only secondarily a racist. Roosevelt, we imagine, was driven by personal interest, family relationships, economic influences, and so forth, and his actions were only to some degree, large or small, influenced by racism. This appears to be wrong. The major guiding force in Teddy Roosevelt's life seems to have been the advancement of the Aryan race over all other races. His machismo and his playing dress-up in Brooks Brothers designed uniforms was racial machismo; he was promoting himself as a model for the advancement of the world's most superior race.

The Aryans had supposedly come from the Middle East to Germany and from there to England in the form of the Anglo-Saxons. America's Manifest Destiny was understood by many from the beginning as global in scope. The Anglo-Saxons had come west to the New World, would move west to the Pacific (slaughtering/benefitting anyone in the way) and proceed west through the Pacific and Asia (slaughtering/benefitting anyone in the way) until coming full-circle to the birthplace of the race near an area that Washington still very much wants to conquer, a nation whose name derives from Aryan: Iran.

The same race theories maintained that the process of warmaking and conquering was necessary for the health of the race. When the Aryans had reached the Pacific, the mission had to continue, not just to fulfill a prophecy or to open markets or to win elections, but so that the race might not degenerate in the dangerous luxury of peace. General Arthur MacArthur, whose son Douglas would later effectively rule Japan, start a war in Korea, and do his best to get World War III going, was himself -- for a time -- the benevolent ruler of the Philippines, and explained to a U.S. Senate committee:

"Many thousands of years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary basis of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere. As to why the United States was in the Philippines , the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific -- that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race."

Incidentally, more Filipinos died in the first day of fighting off their American benefactors than Americans would die storming the beaches at Normandy. American soldiers in the Philippines sang a pleasant little song about waterboarding Filipinos. Here's a verse:

"Oh pump it in him till he swells like a toy balloon.
The fool pretends that liberty is not a precious boon.
But we'll contrive to make him see the beauty of it soon.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom."

In a 1910 lecture at Oxford, Teddy Roosevelt argued that recent white gains might be more temporary than those of the past, because modern Anglo-Saxons had allowed captive races to (partially) survive, whereas "all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent . . . the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples." Roosevelt praised this as "ethnic conquest" and it seems to have been his driving force.

Roosevelt was not different in this regard from many of his contemporaries. He is to be singled out only because he was a vice president and president who advanced this agenda. This meant death and suffering for millions of people, but what does that have to do with starting World War II decades after the man here accused had been dead?

This is the central argument, among many others, in James Bradley's "The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War." In 1614 Japan had cut itself off from the West, resulting in centuries of peace and prosperity and the blossoming of Japanese art and culture. In 1853 the U.S. Navy had forced Japan open to U.S. merchants, missionaries, and militarism. The Japanese studied the Americans' racism and adopted a strategy to deal with it. They sought to westernize themselves and present themselves as a separate race superior to the rest of the Asians. They became honorary Aryans. Lacking a single god or a god of conquest, they invented a divine emperor borrowing heavily from Christian tradition. They dressed and dined like Americans and sent their students to study in the United States. The Japanese were often referred to in the United States as the "Yankees of the Far East." In 1872 the U.S. military began training the Japanese in how to conquer other nations, with an eye on Taiwan.

Charles LeGendre, an American general training the Japanese in the ways of war, proposed that they adopt a Monroe Doctrine for Asia, that is a policy of dominating Asia in the way that the United States dominated its hemisphere. Japan established a Bureau of Savage Affairs and invented new words like koronii (colony). Talk in Japan began to focus on the responsibility of the Japanese to civilize the savages. In 1873, Japan invaded Taiwan with U.S. military advisors. And Korea was next.

Korea and Japan had known nothing but peace for centuries. When the Japanese arrived with U.S. ships, wearing U.S. clothing, talking about their divine emperor, and proposing a treaty of "friendship," the Koreans thought the Japanese had lost their minds, and told them to get lost, knowing that China was there at Korea's back. But the Japanese talked China into allowing Korea to sign the treaty, without explaining to either the Chinese or Koreans what the treaty meant in its English translation. In 1894 Japan declared war on China, a war in which U.S. weapons carried the day. China gave up Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, paid a large indemnity, declared Korea independent, and gave Japan the same commercial rights in China that the U.S. and European nations had. Japan was triumphant, until China persuaded Russia, France, and Germany to oppose Japanese ownership of Liaodong. Japan gave it up and Russia grabbed it. Japan felt betrayed by white Christians, and not for the last time.

In 1904, Roosevelt was very pleased with a Japanese surprise attack on Russian ships. As the Japanese again waged war on Asia as honorary Aryans, Roosevelt secretly and unconstitutionally cut deals with them, approving of a Monroe Doctrine for Japan in Asia. Bradley observes:

"If Congress had been aware of the president's alliances, perhaps a senator would have challenged Roosevelt to think through the consequences of the United States' carving out a chunk of Asia for Japan to nibble on. Perhaps a congressman might have inspired Roosevelt to imagine a Japan that later would chafe at Teddy's leash."

Or just maybe, ever so barely conceivably, Congress would have acted as more than a royal court and altered U.S. policy. But Teddy wrote to his son Kermit, whose own son Kermit Jr. would indeed later conquer Iran by overthrowing its democratically elected president -- talk about actions that had lasting disastrous consequences! Teddy wrote to Kermit Sr.,

"I have of course concealed from everyone -- literally everyone -- the fact that I acted in the first place on Japan's suggestion . . . . I have kept the secret very successfully, and my dealings with the Japanese in particular have been known to no one."

Here Teddy was explaining that his moderation of peace negotiations between Japan and Russia had all been previously worked out in secret with Japan . . . or almost all.

Roosevelt handed Korea over to Japan, betraying the Korean people, and yet managed to enrage the Japanese. He backed Russia's refusal to pay Japan a dime following their war, betraying and outraging the Japanese people. He then refused to go public with his support of the Japanese Monroe Doctrine, betraying a promise he'd made to Japan's representative in the United States.

Japan had fought two wars victoriously and then been betrayed twice. When no indemnity was paid by Russia, the Japanese burned 13 Christian churches in Tokyo and threw stones at Americans. Roosevelt's daughter, greeted as a celebrity on her previous visit, stopped briefly in Tokyo in September 1905 and remained incognito for her safety. Japan was now an armed and imperial nation with a deep grudge against the United States.

Did that situation guarantee the Pacific war of WWII? Of course not. Either the United States or Japan could have altered its imperialist trajectory. Another generation of neither party doing so is what guaranteed WWII. After which Japan became again, and remains to this day, if not exactly our honorary Aryans of Asia, at least the territory where we base great masses of soldiers and weaponry with which to "civilize" other locations.

David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie" http://warisalie.org

what you neglect to mention is that xenophobia was hardly confined simply to U.S. in that era. The Japanese, the Chinese, Europeans, etc., all practiced it. your claim that Roosevelt was almost solely guided in everything he did by racism is not supported in your essay by a single citation, and such a claim demands evidence. Lord knows, much has been written about the man. Furthermore, your claims that the U.S. is the root cause of Japanese imperialism is mind boggling to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of history.

You know, you are every bit as much of an American exceptionalist as those who believe that the U.S. is greatest force of good in the world, the greatest country on earth, blah, blah blah. It's just for you it's evil is exceptional. It's all a bit more complex than any of that, of course, but zealots never can see beyond their own zealotry.

The Meiji Constitution which declared the Emperor as sacred and inviolable, and fostered the kokutai cult around him, was based on the governmental structures of the Empire of Germany, particularly Prussia.

The Constitutional Study Mission had rejected the U.S. Constitution as "too liberal".

Perhaps there wasn't enough American influence in that case.

This is the sort of thing that tends to give "the left" a bad name. Yes, the USA has certainly been flawed on many occasions but WW2 needs a full and complete explanation, which includes all the facts from the Japanese side.

Well done.

I just finished reading Colonel Roosevelt, the 3rd volume in the masterful biography of Theodore Roosevelt by McCollaugh (sic). TR had many failings but the accusations leveled against him by the OP are, I believe, incorrect in the extreme.

:thumbsup:

This poster's "historical" analyses are superficial and factually void. It's as obviously agenda-driven and detached from reality as those horrible "Politically Incorrect" history books that have become teabagger bestsellers.

which would have happened whether we existed or not. There was just too much buildup on both sides for a peace to last.

And WWI was the direct and obvious cause of WWII.

Although the US did try to argue against (almost entirely without success) the harsh penalties imposed on Germany by the other allies that made a 2nd war all but inevitable.

So what caused wwII? Agriculture. If it hadn't been for that the modern nation state and industrial economy that made such mass killing possible would never have occurred.

Damn you wheat! There is blood on your leaves!

...not being a historian, a lot of this was unfamiliar to me.

Interesting the reactions you are getting, too.

I for one appreciate your contributions. Regardless of whether one believes that Teddy Roosevelt's racism and policies were direct causes of WWII, the facts of what he did and what he and his sons and so many others believed and acted on are worth examination, for they do bear upon the present day.

K&R

writing something like the OP and not providing citations is something that shouldn't happen if the writer expects to be taken seriously.

imperial intentions as well as western eyes on the Pacific rim. While we have a lot of both imperial intentions and racism, and racism does fuel enthuisiam for war in many to most cases, the stew that ended up being World War II had many ingredients. In Germany, Hitler took advantage of the resentment the German people felt, especially towards the French, after War World I and the Treaty of Versailles and the implementation of restrictions on Germany.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles">Treaty Of Versailles

Hitler used it to create the uber nationalist state it became.

In the years leading up to 1939 and post World War I (of which the Japanese had fought against Germany) an industrial co-operation developed between Japan and Germany. This of course led to what later became the Axis powers of Japan, Germany, and Italy.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese%E2%80%93German_pre%E2%80%93World_War_II_industrial_co-operation">Japanese–German pre–World War II industrial co-operation

the role that the Treaty of Versailles played in triggering WWII is hugely important- far more instrumental in the onset of WWII than Teddy Roosevelt's racism.

countries before World War II, such as the Dutch, the British, us, and others, particularly in China, I do not see that and racism as leading to what became World War II (but it's just my opnion). I do not think there would have been a World War II without the effects of the treaty and Versailles on Germany and the exploitation of it by Hitler.

The Franco-Prussian war of 1870, the Germans defeated the French and marched victorious into Paris. Bismarck imposed a war debt on France of 5 million marks (if memory serves) which he figured they would never be able to repay. Instead they got fired up and paid it off in something like three years (again, if memory serves).

Versailles was sort of payback over that, but also a result of the racism of Clemenceau who hated Germany.

Another difference is that in 1870 the French economy was still intact after the short war, whereas after four years of brutal war and blockades, by 1919 the Germany economy, and country, was in ruins. A fact that made the war debt impossible to repay.

co-operation and integration in Europe and stop the cycle.

historian Max Hastings titled Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45. IIRC from that book, he briefly discusses a Japanese ideological movement that posited that Asians were the "master race," and Japanese the most superior of them all, akin to the absurd Nazi belief that whites were the "master race" with Germans/"Aryans" at that top of that racial heap.

The only thing I came away not being clear on was the extent to which that ideology infected the thinking of Japanese war planners as they set out to conquer their "Greater East Asia Co-prosperity sphere."

My question is, am I correct in assuming that ideology was widespread in the upper tiers of Japanese political and military leadership? And just how akin to the Nazi's fanatical racial beliefs was it, only from the Japanese militarists point of view?

Any light you could shed on those questions would be appreciated.

Again, excellent post.

military. I have read many books and works on the subject years ago when I was younger. I can't recall enough to reproduce what all these works were. My father was a World War II veteran, so I had an interest in it growing up. I wanted to know cause and effect at the time.

why I took an interest in Hasting's book. My sister ran across a set of my grandmother's ration cards from 1944 or something, while she was cleaning out her attic the other day. Fascinating times.

Thanks again for your reply.

They were totally wrong about the ayran/iranian theory, negating all their racism. The origin of "white" people came from the russian steppe, read more at the link.

http://en.wikivisual.com/index.php/Kurgan_hypothesis

No, it did not.

Anyone who reads history is used to idiotic one-subject cause and effect hypothesis. After awhile you become accustomed to the usual crap and spin, and then the rebuttals that defend the point that was attacked without any indication that the attack was considered...I'm comfortable saying that the majority of people of all sorts were racist bastards then, which gets that out of the way. Nobody needed Roosevelt (or the US, for that matter) to show them the way.

It is still interesting to read the account of Roosevelt's private opinions and behind the scenes manipulations, which I hadn't heard much of before.

Claiming Roosevelt started either's even worse.

When people say Roosevelt did this or did that...we all know who they're talking about.

Teddy Roosevelt is Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy was a great man...but nobody would say he was the greatest president of the 20th century.

They were totally at one with their time and place politically. You are quite right that our difficulties now stem from the imperialist and racist policies and attitudes that McKinley and Teddy did much to advance. Woody Wilson really deserves to be mentioned in their company too.

have occurred because of the Russo/Japanese war if Roosevelt had not brokered that peace deal. If the Czar had fallen that much earlier maybe there would have been no WWI or WWII or Cold war. Who knows? It is interesting to think about it and TR obviously had weaknesses as well as strengths. MT has some interesting thoughts on TR but MT did not speak out against TR publicly because TR had done him a huge favor and Twain said that the favor kept its "finger" on his lips when he thought about speaking out about TR publicly.

...when you think like Twain.

"Honor knows no statute of limitations." -Twain

Twain's wife or other family member. Twain seems to have deeply loved his wife and she had serious physical limitations.