AHC: Make Theodore Roosevelt be considered the worst American president.

That's your challenge.

I've always thought that if he became President in 1912 and proceeded to throw the poorly prepared American army into one giant Kasserine Pass (presuming the war still happens) then he's probably finished. Things would improve of course, and with America in from the start the war likely ends earlier, but not before his defeat in 1916. That still wouldn't make him a Johnson or Jackson-level villain, but he'd certainly be viewed as an overly adventurous war monger who led many Americans to their death on the presumption that as the Spanish didn't have Howitzers and Mustard Gas neither would the Germans.

Make historians focus more on his role in the US genocide in the Philippines. Him being remembered as the only president of the US unarguably guilty of genocide would probably torpedo his reputation.

The Red said:

I've always thought that if he became President in 1912 and proceeded to throw the poorly prepared American army into one giant Kasserine Pass (presuming the war still happens) then he's probably finished. Things would improve of course, and with America in from the start the war likely ends earlier, but not before his defeat in 1916. That still wouldn't make him a Johnson or Jackson-level villain, but he'd certainly be viewed as an overly adventurous war monger who led many Americans to their death on the presumption that as the Spanish didn't have Howitzers and Mustard Gas neither would the Germans.

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It also makes the rhetoric of "The World Must be Made Safe for Democracy," impossible to use early on with the Russian Empire (the most unabashedly non-democratic of the major Entente powers) still in the war.

It would certainly be interesting to see how American participation affects the course of the war as a whole. Americans on the Western Front would be even more green and unprepared than they were in 1917, but it also means Germany probably cannot take for granted the strategy of achieving rapid victory in the east and holding the line in the west. The butterflies that that would have on the Russian Empire alone would be very fascinating.

The Red said:

I've always thought that if he became President in 1912 and proceeded to throw the poorly prepared American army into one giant Kasserine Pass (presuming the war still happens) then he's probably finished. Things would improve of course, and with America in from the start the war likely ends earlier, but not before his defeat in 1916. That still wouldn't make him a Johnson or Jackson-level villain, but he'd certainly be viewed as an overly adventurous war monger who led many Americans to their death on the presumption that as the Spanish didn't have Howitzers and Mustard Gas neither would the Germans.

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Yeah, losing WWI would do it. Perhaps we throw in a socialist revolution after the war is lost, to undermine how TR destroyed the Second American Republic.

A lot of people think that TR would have gotten the US into the Great War earlier but I am a bit skeptical about that. As Henry Pringle, biographer of both TR and Taft, once noted: "In 1886, Theodore Roosevelt had hoped for war with Mexico. In 1896, he considered the possibility of sanguinary combat against William Jennings Bryan and his fellow Populists. In 1898, he agitated for war with Spain. In 1911, he volunteered to fight against Mexico. In October, 1914, he said that the United States should uphold the neutrality of Belgium. It will be noted, however, that not one of all these belligerent expressions was voiced between September, 1901 and March, 1909. It was one thing to urge that some other president involve the nation in blood. It was a far different thing to face the responsibility himself." *The Life and Times of William Howard Taft*, p. 296. TR himself wrote--admittedly before the *Lusitania* sinking--"I ask those individuals who think of me as a firebrand to remember that during the seven and a half years I was President not a shot was fired at any soldier of a hostile nation by any American soldier or sailor, and there was not so much as a threat of war. Even when the state of Panama threw off the alien yoke of Colombia and when this nation, acting as was its manifest duty, by recognizing Panama as an independent state stood for the right of the governed to govern themselves on the Isthmus, as well as for justice and humanity, there was not a shot fired by any of our people at any Colombian. The blood recently shed at Vera Cruz, like the unpunished wrongs recently committed on our people in Mexico, had no parallel during my administration..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=_VMyAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA134

Obviously, TR is not going to say America is "too proud to fight." But I don't think he will ask for an immediate declaration of war, either--which I doubt he could get through Congress even after the Lusitania sinking. He will probably put much more emphasis on "preparedness" than Wilson did (Wilson was a late and only a partial convert to that cause), in the hope that building up an American military stronger than that of of OTL in 1914-17--and readier to get to Europe within a reasonable time--will dissuade the Germans from resorting to unrestricted submarine warfare. (Of course, here too he might have some trouble getting Congress to agree.)