Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Challenge to the Constitution

A lecture by Jean M. Yarbrough, Gary M. Pendy Professor of Social Sciences, Bowdoin College

Yarbrough argues that TR’s early historical studies—inspired by Darwinian biology and Hegelian political thought—treated westward expansion from an evolutionary and developmental perspective that placed race and conquest at the center of the narrative, while relegating individual rights and consent of the governed to the sidelines.

Through careful examination of TR’s political thought, Yarbrough’s work on Roosevelt sheds new light on his place in the American political tradition, while enhancing our understanding of the roots of progressivism and its transformation of the founders’ Constitution.