Teddy the Rough Rider

... more than a century before the current controversy.

This two reel short focuses on Teddy Roosevelt's public life from 1895 through his presidency, and the fact that he lost a son in WWI. Sidney Blackmer made a cottage industry out of the Roosevelt family, between playing Teddy Roosevelt in several feature films and this short, to costarring in "The President's Mystery", the only film to have a screenplay written by a sitting president - FDR.

This just popped up on Turner Classic Movies one night between films, so I thought I'd give it a go since I'd never seen it. As over the top patriotic as it is, I figured it was made during World War II - they even bothered to film it in Technicolor! - but I was wrong. It was actually made in 1940 and won best two reel short of that year at the Academy Awards. If you look at the records, patriotic shorts began winning that award in 1938 and continued doing so until the middle of WWII. Also, Warner Brothers was unique among the studios for making films either directly or indirectly about the threats overseas at a time when American audiences were still very much anti-war.

The short goes into detail about Teddy's trust busting, and his work against graft in government, since that was something common people just coming out of the Great Depression could understand and appreciate - helping the little guy. But then in the middle, the short is not just a sequence about Roosevelt's place in the Spanish American war, but a speech with him warning other cabinet members, when he was asst. secretary of the Navy, that America needs a strong defense. As the others feel he is exaggerating the threat, word comes in that the Maine has been sunk. The point being that isolationism can rock you into complacency and find you unprepared,, with an obvious comparison to what was going on in Europe at the time.

It's interesting how the short doesn't mention, what is to me, one of Roosevelt's biggest accomplishments - the founding of several national parks and his work in conservation. It also doesn't mention that Roosevelt played Ross Perot to successor Taft's George H.W. Bush, causing a Republican split and allowing Woodrow Wilson to become president. But then they only had 20 minutes!

Although undoubtedly one of our best presidents, Roosevelt would probably get no love from his fellow Republicans today given his very progressive policies. If this short makes you more curious about Teddy Roosevelt, then it probably has done its job.