Teddy Roosevelt was by no means a perfect man. Hewas over-enthusiastically macho, he loved the concept of war as a way to improve national fiber, and he had many of the "quaint" concepts of race that a wealthy white man of the late 19th Century would be expected to have.
But he was a great man in very many ways, dedicated to his causes, in particular binding the country up into one, bridging over the divides between immigrant and religious groups, and, in particular, responding to the economic disruption, speculation, monopolies, and plutocracy of the Gilded Age.
Today, of course, he'd be branded a radical, somewhere to the left of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Saunders, and the idea of putting his face on Mount Rushmore would be inconceivable for any number of reasons, Left and (mostly) Right
Here are some passages from a speech Roosevelt gave during the 1912 presidential campaign, when he was running as an independent on the "Bull Moose" ticket. TR's progressive tendencies were in full bloom. The words he wrote were as true then as they are today.
'So long as governmental power existed exclusively for the king and not at all for the people, then the history of liberty was a history of the limitation of governmental power. But now the governmental power rests in the people, and the kings who enjoy privilege are the kings of the financial and industrial world; and what they clamor for is the limitation of governmental power, and what the people sorely need is the extension of governmental power.'
(h/t +George Wiman)
Bully.