Oh, I don’t know. He was an advocate of whispering and fancied broken-off tree bits. What’s so badass about that?
Ever seen Walking Tall (original, not the remake)?
Yeah, but Washington’s were made of wood (yes, Martha coined the term “woody”).
You might point out that Roosevelt had been a weak, sickly, asthmatic child, and worked very hard to overcome it all.
You may have already seen it—heck, it may be where you got the idea from—but in case you haven’t, the Essential Text is The 5 Most Badass Presidents of All-Time.
I encourage you to watch Arsenic and Old Lace. Teddy’s performance is the best part of that movie.
Myself, I’ve always been struck by the fact his wife and mother both died on the same day – and on Valentine’s Day to boot! That was the whole impetus for his journey out West, to reflect and evaluate.
Go to Cracked.com.
Click on “Articles” and if it has to do with the presidency, chances are he will be in it, and they LOVE him over there.
It’s also very funny and sarcastic…might not be SFSC(safe for school children) but the info is true nonetheless.
Then there is this episode in the Badlands from 1884 (Let’s see, that would have made him about 26 at the time).
[QUOTE=Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 1913]
I was out after lost horses . . . It was late in the evening when I reached the place [Nolan’s Hotel, Mingusville, Montana]. I heard one or two shots in the bar-room as I came up, and I disliked going in. But there was nowhere else to go, and it was a cold night. Inside the room were several men, who, including the bartender, were wearing the kind of smile worn by men who are making believe to like what they don’t like. A shabby individual in a broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two or three holes in its face.
. . . As soon as he saw me he hailed me as “Four Eyes”, in reference to my spectacles, and said, “Four Eyes is going to treat.” I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language . . . In response to his reiterated command that I set up the drinks, I said, “Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,” and rose, looking past him.
As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting him with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands, or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head . . . I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in the shed.
[/QUOTE]
Dude was definitely badass.
Roosevelt wrote that he believed he had an encounter with Bigfoot in Idaho, in his book, The Wilderness Hunter.
Double-posting to say scratch that, he wrote about someone else’s encounter, but he seems to have believed the story.
According to the Ken Burns series about our national parks, when Teddy was a young man he heard that the bison were being hunted to extinction, so he travelled west to shoot one before they were all gone, lol!
I can’t really deny TR’s objective badassery, but I am hoping you will remember to include the more controversial aspects of his character, such as his imperialism and all the years he spent messing with Latin America. The U.S. has a long, long history of assisting and implementing government overthrows in Latin America order to support its own interests, and what happened in Panama would be a great example of this trend. On the other hand, you could talk about how he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House despite widespread criticism–IMHO that’s true badassery.
Ah, here’s one I remember. As president, Teddy wanted to sail the Navy around the world in a display of might, but Congress only approved half the funding needed. So Teddy sailed had the Navy sail halfway around the world, then told Congress if they wanted it back, they’d best cough up the funds. Which they did, unhappily. 