Teddy Roosevelt framed civilizing missions as destroying savagery to create consumption

Evidence

Compare this with Teddy Roosevelt’s speech on the eve of his election to the Presidency in 1901: … It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains… and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself. Exactly as it is the duty of a civilized power to scrupulously respect the rights of weaker civilized powers… so it is its duty to put down savagery and barbarism. (Beale, 1956:32,34) … This speech, which perhaps marks the apex of imperialism and the beginning of the USA’s serious appropriation of the concept as a policy, confirms the effortless way in which the ideology of imperialism, with its huge contradiction of nurture and exploitation, transfers into the twentieth century global economy. For destroying savagery and barbarism means creating consumption, and this is achieved by creating what Adam Smith calls desire: I come to desire the pleasure of desire itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3417

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the ‘civilizing mission’ ideology; also to the author’s interest in empire as economic policy masked as cultural uplift. — connects to: Roosevelt reframed market competition as jungle law and embraced state paternalism. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 164
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone interested in Roosevelt’s rhetoric or the intellectual lineage of American interventionism.