Shamelessly recycling one of my old soc.history.what-if posts:
***
Edmund Morris's recent *Theodore Agonistes: The Last Years of President
Theodore Roosevelt* offers an interesting re-evaluation of TR's much-
maligned final term in office (1921 until his death during a trip to
Alaska in 1923).
These years have too often been seen as a rather sad anticlimax to
Roosevelt's career. For one thing, there has been far too much attention
given to the oil-lease scandals. Granted, TR made a misjudgment in
appointing Albert Fall Secretary of the Interior. But a misjudgment is
all it was, and a rather understandable one, too, in view of Fall's being
a fellow Rough Rider. (I think that was the crucial factor--I doubt that
any other president would have appointed Fall.) There is no indication
that TR himself was involved in the scandals, and as Morris points out,
the actual terms of the leases were quite favorable to the United States.
Morris also points out that for every Fall, TR appointed several very able
cabinet officers, such as Elihu Root as Secretary of State and Herbert
Hoover as Secretary of Commerce. He also notes some of Roosevelt's
constructive acocmplishments, such as creation of the Bureau of the Budget
(previously, each department simply submitted its projected expenses
without reference to an overall plan), a reduction of wartime taxes
(though he did not carry tax reduction as far as conservatives wanted),
the conclusion of separate peace treaties with the Central Powers, etc. It
is true that TR's refusal to pardon Eugene Debs and other political
prisoners looks mean-spirited today, but realistically what president
would have dared to free them at that time? And of course pacifists
accuse TR of "sabotaging" plans for a world disarmament conference, but
when that conference was finally held under President Root, its
accomplishments turned out to be merely temporary and may even have harmed
the US by lulling it into a false sense of security. Furthermore, TR was
not nearly as hostile to labor or lax in antitrust enforcement as Root or
Coolidge would be.
One important point Morris makes is that TR's nomination in 1920 was by no
means inevitable. Despite his years of vehement attacks on Wilson, his
gradual turning away from radical reform in social pollicy, etc., some of
the GOP's Old Guard would never forgive him for splitting the party in
1912. In the end he got the nomination only through an unlikely deal with
Pennsylvania's TR-hating boss Boies Penrose to get Penrose's man Philander
Knox as TR's running mate. (Penrose thought that TR would not live very
long; what he did not realize was that Knox's life would be even shorter.)
Any thoughts about who the GOP would be likely to nominate if TR had died
in, say, 1919? This would mean both no President Root from 1923-5 (btw I
have toyed with a TL featuring one or even two full terms for Root, but
this is almost ASB territory; at the age of 79 in 1924 Root was not going
to run) and probably no President Coolidge from 1925 to 1933. (Of course,
"what if the 1924 GOP convention had chosen someone other than Governor
Coolidge" is another interesting question--Coolidge was after all
something of a surprise choice. Maybe Secretary of Commerce Hoover could
have been chosen instead, though still viewed with suspicion by some of
the Old Guard.)
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/RoQvNCApzN0/DqCrcNsqpsMJ
***
One way I would modify that post today: It now seems to me less likely that TR would appoint Hoover to a high position, for reasons I indicate at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...over-in-a-tr-adminstration-after-1920.314820/