To the editor:

In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt swept to victory in Republican primaries. But party bosses controlling the nomination wanted no more championing of merit over party patronage; or helping coal miners against owners; or saving national parks from foresting and mining interests; or eating dinner with a Black man in the White House; or creating national health and safety standards; or breaking up monopolies. And America, they declared, needed neither an internationalist nor a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

The best-known man in the world, TR, had vast prestige among world leaders, including England’s king, Russia’s czar, and was on a first name basis with Germany’s kaiser. He beat the bosses’ choice, William Howard Taft, but the Bull Moose/Republican split handed the election to Woodrow Wilson, who would coin “America First” and was a virulent racist into the bargain.

Had TR been in the White House in August 1914, there’s a good chance World War I would not have happened. And if not avoided altogether, TR would have brought the U.S. in early, in 1914 or 1915, ending the war much earlier, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the cataclysms that descended upon Eastern Europe following the Russian Revolution and the Middle East following the Ottoman collapse.

If I had a larger word budget, I’d detail the tragedy of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and the serial failures of America First isolationism leading up to World War II. But you get the point.

The stain of our shameful treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in our White House will not be quickly or easily sponged away.

William Skepnek,

Lawrence