roosevelt on socialists

1900

“While campaigning for McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt said in a private conversation, ‘The sentiment now animating a large proportion of our people can only be suppressed as the Commune was suppressed, by taking ten or a dozen of their leaders out, standing them against a wall and shooting them dead. I believe it will come to that. These leaders are plotting a social revolution and the subversion of the American Republic.’”

TR was referring to the Socialist Party of America and their presidential candidate, Eugene Debs.
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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/134272708​

TR on parade down Market Street.

Great-grandpa, Edward F. Leonard, was a San Francisco police officer. It is very likely he was posted on Market because the family home at 120 Church Street was close and is still there.

He had two daughters and a son. I am a descendant of the middle child, a daughter. Six feet he stood and went on duty shortly after 5:12am when the 1906 Earthquake rolled him out of bed.

He wouldn’t recognize the city today for the criminals on the loose and the techies who are aloof, un-neighborly, and clannish and the politicians who are traitors to their country, but I am gone.