Selecting the Subjects, 5
campaign years prior, and patterned his own larger-than-life style on the enthusiasm and persistence of the Roughrider president. What Theodore Roosevelt represents on Mount Rushmore is the extension of the American ideals into the 20th century, as well as the enthusiasm and vitality that the robust president was known for. Theodore Roosevelt completed the Panama Canal and brought the United States away from a previously isolationist stance, actively becoming involved in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. foreign policy statement which declared that the Western Hemisphere was to be kept free from imperial powers of Europe with America as the enforcer of this policy. Roosevelt also extended the interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine by presuming that the United States also had the power to interfere with the internal workings of any Western Hemisphere nation in the interests of stabilizing the region economically. This interpretation is known as the Roosevelt Corrollary to the Monroe Doctrine, and has been widely controversial, seen by some as a justification for American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere while keeping the rest of the world at bay. (wisegeek.com)
Theodore Roosevelt's attitudes toward the Native Americans was uneasy at best, hostile at worst. Theodore Roosevelt once justified the taking of Native lands, expansion into their territories, and wars of extermination were "ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable." (Stannard, 119) Roosevelt also once declared "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth." (Stannard, 119)
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