Well, in Panama, we basically supported a revolution, playing two countries off against the other, then pretty much screwed them out of the land. Add the poor conditions in the area and the many people who died to created the canal, Roosevelt definitely screwed them.
The Monroe Doctrine said that the US would see any attempt by Europe to interfer in the western hemisphere as a threat. Okay, that makes sense. Roosevelt stood that on its head and said basically that WE, the US reserved the right to interfer in Latin American affairs as we saw fit. In other words, basically, they existed at our convenience.
Didn’t we fight a war with England when they tried to pull that shit with us?
Now, I like Teddy, I think that jingoism aside, he did a lot of good and he’d probably be hugely pissed at the direction the GOP has taken today (and that’s not an insult to Republicans, just that he had some platforms that would be at odds with the modern GOP).
But the Roosevelt Corollary is a pretty damned fucked up view of foreign relations.
Well, I said Reagan because I think his support of third world dictators was absolutely immoral, and Iran-Contra was one the scariest messes of the late 20th century. If he was involved, he should have gone to jail. If he knew about it and didn’t do anything, then he failed to do his job and should have gone to jail. If he didn’t know about it, that’s the worst yet, because it was his goddamn job to know that his staff is carrying out its own secret foreign policy, and as Henry Truman once said, “The buck stops here.” It was his responsibility, and a president out of touch is fucking scary.
Well, I don’t know. Panama did get its independence, which it probably wouldn’t have gotten had we not intervened. And, by our supporting the revolution, it was more or less bloodless, while, if we had done nothing, it almost certainly would have been violent, especially considering that Colombia had just gone through a three year civil war.
That’s not exactly what it said. It said that that we reserved the right to intervene to restore order or guarantee the payment of debts…or, as he put it.
And it’s important to note that, when he said that, the European nations were already doing just that…Venezuela had just been blockaded by a European force and shore bombarded by the Germans because they had defaulted on their debts, and that was just the last of a long series of European intervention in Latin America. So, by stating that, he was letting the world know that, if there was any international policing to do in the Western Hemisphere, we would do it. I don’t think that’s a particularly “fucked up” view of foreign relations. True, we didn’t treat the Latin American countries as our equals, but they weren’t our equals. They were poor, small, weak, and unstable, and they needed a larger, stronger power to protect them both from the outside world and from their own weakness.
When I was 8, my dad got a promotion-transfer to Hazlehurst, Georgia. It’s the county seat of Jeff Davis County. Yes, really. Fortunately, two years later we moved away.
Not only has the county name not changed, this page tells how a bust of Davis was put up near the courthouse, raising money by giving out honorary Confederate titles: http://planttel.net/~zola/jefdavis.html
Read chapter one. All of those quotes are from a series of articles done by a Richmond newspaper- don’t remember the name off the top of my head, but can check the footnotes tonight when I get home.
J. (for John) Edgar Hoover is my nominee as well, but for reasons more ominous yet: For at least three decades (and probably longer), he used his unprecedented information-gathering powers to hold the power of blackmail against the very Presidency of the United States –making him, in theory at least, the single most powerful man in the free world.
In a way, Hoover was an Information Age man in a pre-Information Age world. What he did to America and Americans through misuse of his Bureau surely pales beside what he could have done.
I’d have to agree that he’s near the top, and he beats out the other Confederate era types mentioned so far, if for nothing else then his contributions to the “massacre” at Fort Pillow, where it seems (but there has been some disagreement among historians) he specifically targeted black soldiers to death rather than letting them surrender:
Well, while that’s witty of you, it doesn’t answer my question. What’s wrong with saying, “The US is going to intervene to provide stability and order to unstable or irresponsible governments”? It can have practical problems, as we found in Somalia and Haiti in the '90s, but it’s not some sort of bad or evil sentiment.
Essentially the same problem. When we intervene in a foreign country to “liberate” or “help” its people, sometimes it turns out we’re doing just that with no ulterior motive, as in Haiti or Somalia or Kosovo during the Clinton years; but sometimes it turns out we’re doing it primarily or solely to serve U.S. geopolitical interests and/or U.S. corporations’ business interests, as in Iraq (or on countless occasions in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the 20th Century). And the latter situation sheds American and foreign blood to no good purpose, breeds resentment, and makes us enemies, and deservedly so.
Why is that to “no good purpose”, though? It seems like it’s for a very good purpose…to serve US geopolitical interests and/or US corporations’ business interests. Serving the national interests is the main goal of every nation’s foreign policy, and I don’t see what the problem is with us doing it. So, what’s wrong with that?
I didn’t see this answer anywhere but Sam Walton. While I know he was not necessarily evil person he has done quite a bit of harm to American Business practices. Walmart consistently has destroyed small businesses who can’t compete with them. They have employed slave labor from other countries to make clothing and they have been charged with breaking Employee rights of Americans several times over (i.e. paying less than minimum wage, denying breaks, forcing employees to work past their shift without additional pay, etc.)
Two nominees. #1: Alfred Thayer Mahan. He wrote a tremendously influential book on sea power near the turn of the century (20th) that not only stimulated a naval arms race and movement towards imperialist foreign policy in the U.S., but encouraged foreign leaders like Kaiser Wilhelm to create their own naval buildup, helping to precipitate WWI. #2: Marv Throneberry. He may not have been the worst American, but he likely was the worst American first baseman of all time.
Not The Worst, but definitely up there in the American kakistocray:
Albert Lasker, granddaddy of modern advertising, who was not only crucial in the election of Warren G. Harding (very possibly our worst President), but who, along with Edward Bernays, inventor of the science of public relations, rehabilitated the failing American Tobacco Company in the 1920s by building Lucky Strike into a superbrand. Media scholar Erik Barnouw wrote that Lasker and Bernays “worked as hard as anybody for nationwide cigarette addiction” - most pointedly by selling millions of women on the once unladylike habit.
The incredible influence Lasker and Bernays had on the culture of the day can be understood by the fact that until 1934, the color green was anathema in women’s fashions. It took their soft sell campaign to make it acceptable.
Why did they do it? The green pack was so key to Luckies’ brand image that the company refused to change it.
Not a bad choice and I think he was in fact evil. His business practice is to pay his employees as little as humanly possible, work them as hard as possible (expecting free overtime), provide no benefits and bust any attempts to unionize. He pressed suppliers to offer him their goods at less than what it cost to make them, driving down wages in the manufacturing sector. Slave labor imports did not faze him in the least. Wal-Mart employees without benefits put strain on the health care system. In effect, every responsible corporation in the US subsidizes the parasitic Wal-Mart.
Would you call the US overthrowing a brutal, murderous dictator who slaughters his own people an example of providing “stability”, and a good thing? Would you class a US president who did that as a good American, or a bad one?