Theodore Roosevelt's Fraudulent Military Record

History books and biographies regale their gullible readers about the heroic charge up San Juan Hill by the Rough Riders led by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, but the truth is that Roosevelt's war record is a tawdry lie.
 

Wikipedia quotes Roosevelt thusly

'"On the day of the big fight I had to ask my men to do a deed that European military writers consider utterly impossible of performance, that is, to attack over open ground an unshaken infantry armed with the best modern repeating rifles behind a formidable system of entrenchments. The only way to get them to do it in the way it had to be done was to lead them myself."'

This story is even more preposterous than those told by Commander McBragg in the 1960s cartoon shorts interwoven with episodes of Underdog. The above quote by Roosevelt is more of his blustery pompous flatulence for which he became famous and delusional.

 

One of the near contemporaneous accounts of Roosevelt's exploits comes from a man who knew the 10 presidents from Andrew Johnson to Woodrow Wilson. A lawyer by trade and politician of necessity, Richard Franklin Pettigrew wrote his thoughts of the presidents - all of whom he met personally - in his memoirs toward the end of his life.

 

Of these 10 presidents, Pettigrew made the following observation:

These ten presidents were not brainy men. They were not men of robust character. They were pliable men, safe men, conservative men. Many of them were usable men who served faithfully the business interests that stood behind them.

While Roosevelt was no murderer in the sense that Lyndon Johnson or either George Bush was, he was still a dishonest character on numerous occasions, and a golden boy of the exploitative and rapacious robber barons of the Gilded Age. Neither Pettigrew, nor Professor Giddings of Columbia University who knew Roosevelt since boyhood, was impressed with Roosevelt either intellectually or morally.

 

One example of Roosevelt's mendacity was his sworn denial that he was a citizen of New York in order to escape inheritance taxes, claiming instead that he was a citizen of Washington, DC. However, shortly thereafter, he was running for the governorship of New York as a New York citizen. So not only was Roosevelt a tax cheat, he was a liar. Taxes are only for the little people.

 

Pettigrew's most important contribution comes from his rendition of Roosevelt's trip to Cuba as an opportunist looking to polish his resume for the presidency in the Spanish American War. While Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt enlisted as a lieutenant colonel, along with a doctor, Leonard Wood, into the regiment to later be known as the Rough Riders.

 

Neither of these men had a lick of military experience, yet both were determined to create military names for themselves. Landing east of Santiago, Cuba, and having abandoned its horses in Florida, the regiment made its way by foot toward San Juan Hill 10 miles away. Before reaching its target, the regiment was ambushed at El Caney and in risk of annihilation except for an unnamed colonel of a black regiment who rescued Wood and Roosevelt from certain defeat.

 

The 2 regiments then made their way to Kettle Hill, in the vicinity of San Juan, to engage the Spanish. While the unnamed colonel and his regiment took Kettle Hill, Roosevelt, now commander of the regiment upon Wood's promotion to Brigade commander, bivouacked on his hinder quarters far from the front lines. It was the black regiment which took San Juan Hill. The only thing Roosevelt took was a dump.

 

After San Juan Hill was captured by the black regiment, Wood and Roosevelt charged up Kettle Hill to find absolutely nothing but an empty kettle used for evaporating sugar cane.

 

However, none of this is recorded in Roosevelt's account of the war, History of the Spanish War. Instead Pettigrew said,

[he] says that he charged up San Juan Hill and found the trenches full of dead Spaniards with little holes in their foreheads and that two Spaniards jumped up and ran away and that he missed one of them but killed the other with a shot in the back from his revolver.

Yet Pettigrew stated that he consulted the Department of War records which attributed no role to Wood or Roosevelt in the taking of San Juan Hill because it was the black brigade which achieved the victory. He also refers the reader to Colonel Bacon who published the results of a hundred  affidavits by veterans of San Juan Hill, all of whom stated that Roosevelt was not there or anywhere else in the war except at El Caney where his unit was nearly decimated. 

 

So like the criminal George Bush, Jr, Teddy Roosevelt invented a fake military history for himself in order to deceive the nation about his great military acumen. Roosevelt belongs in the Hall of Shame and Liars. He is all American scum.

Reference
Wikipedia contributors. "Theodore Roosevelt." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 Jan. 2015. Web. 22 Jan. 2015.

Richard Franklin Pettigrew, Imperial Washington,  Charles H Kerr & Company Cooperative, Chicago, October 1, 1922

Copyright 2015 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

Who Sunk The USS Maine?

American nationalists stoked the flames of foreign adventurism and empire in the late 19th century through the sensational yellow journalism alleging to document the evils of Spain on the backyard island of Cuba. These flames soon engulfed the island when the USS Maine sank amidst an explosion on February 15, 1898. Many investigations followed over the years which sought to identify the perpetrator but those efforts failed to find a culprit. We believe that the most likely culprit is the fox guarding the chicken coup.

The splendid little war which followed the sinking of the Maine launched the USA on an imperial adventure which continues to this day. Leading Americans wished to see the country take its place among the great powers lest she lose advantages to European states. If war were required to bring the fruits of empire then let it be done and done quickly.

A causus belli requires convincing proof. Thus an investigation into the sinking of the Maine was quickly launched under the direction of Captain William T. Sampson whose investigation concluded, without the advice of outside experts, that the Maine sunk from a mine explosion which in turn triggered an explosion in the ship's magazines. The commission failed to assign responsibility although that was but a detail to Theodore Roosevelt who resigned his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to lead the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill.

In 1911, after excavating and extensively documenting the remains of the Maine, a court of inquiry headed by Rear Admiral Charles E. Vreeland examined the site before the Maine was sent to its final repose. Its findings corroborated much of the Sampson inquest but noted that a smaller explosive was used to cause the damage.

Still not satisfied with the findings of earlier courts of inquiry the US Navy commissioned Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1976 to investigate the explosion after which his commission concluded that an internal fire in the coal room caused by spontaneous combustion ignited the magazines in a conflagration.

Not to be outdone, the National Geographic conducted its own investigation in 1999 after which it concluded that both internal coal room fires and external explosion conspired to sink the Maine.

Foreign commentators have viewed the sinking in less sympathetic terms among whose ranks include many who believe that the United States or US nationals deliberately sunk its battleship as a pretext for war with Spain. Enter Captain Jorge Navarro Custin, a Cuban naval historian who defected from Cuba in 1961 to the United States, who has published a book offering a more original thesis implicating US industrialists and Cubans.

The logic ot the collaboration rests upon mutually beneficial politics which provided the Cubans a benefactor who could deliver them from Spain and the United States a convenient pretext to declare war on colonial power. He further details the work of Frederico Blume, born in Denmark, who worked his way to Peru in service to the country in its wars against Chile. His specialty was naval explosives.

Blume is credited with inventing wave, battery, and clock activated mines which attached to ships. The explosive power of the devices was not great but it was sufficient for sinking ships among whose first targets were Chilean naval vessels. The designs for the explosives were sent to New York through the mediation of Cuban patriots where they were fabricated into working mines and then sent to Cuba where Cuban revolutionaries worked with the Americans to sink the Maine. The Cubans sunk other Spanish ships with these devices including the gunboat Relámpago.

The explanation makes the most sense of those offered to date. The exploding coal theory has been debunked sufficiently elsewhere that it has no credibility as an explanation of the sinking of the Maine. The two earliest inquiries each concluded that external explosions caused the destruction. Custin has now extended those findings by attaching to the Maine event names and a web of connections from Peru to America to Cuba. And what a tangled web it is.

When considered with the heated rhetoric of the times, when the Hearst and Pulitzer papers were inciting agitation and war against Spain, the story of Custin fits very nicely with the political maneuvering of Roosevelt and other jingoists of the day who fought McKinley in his preferences to avoid war.

References:
Apuntes Históricos Sobre la Historia de Cuba - Volumen I
CUBA: The Spanish American War - the sinking of the "Maine"