William Howard Taft Quotes
The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.
Schoultz, Lars. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America. Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 152.
The American concepts of democracy and human rights have been resented when U. S. policy advocated other nation’s adhering to them.
Nantucket was the center of the New England whaling fleet which at the time plied the Earth’s oceans and influenced non Western People the world over. It was a type of cultural imperialism although the whalers sized or claimed anyone’s land or controlled any nation’s trade.
He was referring to land where there were people already living. People included Indians and Mexicans. He was one of the few American Presidents who were not enthusiasts for Manifest Destiny and expansionism of America.
This quotation illustrated the extreme right wing viewpoint of some military leaders, even when the policy was only to enforce a “no fly zone” that had been agreed to by Iraq and the coalition forces. While Looney’s wing would use military force to take Middle East oil, that policy was completely contrary to the Clinton Democratic administration’s position at the time and the Bush Republican administration’s position that followed.
In that year Republican President William McKinley reversed Cleveland’s policy against expansionism at the expense of independent peoples. He staved off annexation while he was president because of his views as early as 1893. See {643147}.
In 1844 the United States had designs on the Oregon territory north of the Columbia River which was claimed by England as being a part of Canada. American politicians were split with the administration leaning towards yielding America's claim. Others urged a strategy which was later emulated by Israel in its settlements of occupied territory.
William Howard Taft was the 27th president of the United States (1909–1913) and the tenth Chief Justice of the United States (1921–1930), the only person to have held both offices. Taft was elected president in 1908, the chosen successor of Theodore Roosevelt, but was defeated for reelection by Woodrow Wilson in 1912 after Roosevelt split the Republican vote by running as a third-party candidate. In 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice, a position he held until a month before his death.
