The U.S. Culture(s) thread

I feel like I should bring up that, for the latest Civilization game (VI), they are using Teddy Roosevelt as the American "iconic" leader instead of their old standby, George Washington.

I'm inclined to agree that Washington is probably a poor choice, since U.S. culture really didn't exist as a distinct entity during his life. There's some argument to be made for Lincoln (who was selectable in IV, where it had multiple possible leaders), but I do think the Bull Moose is iconic enough that it's a fair pick.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

I mean, the thing with both of them is that they're not really famous for their foreign policy, which is extremely core to Civ games (ultimately, Civ is about how civilizations gain power over each other. Domestic policy is usually portrayed more as a means to this end). So, Teddy makes more sense.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Does he refer to ICBMs as his "big stick"?

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Teddy's an interesting choice, as while he's decently well-known within the US, he's not nearly as iconic as Washington (or any of the founding fathers, really) or Lincoln, and I have no idea if he's at all recognizable by non-Americans.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Well, we can always ask the non-U.S. tropers if they've ever owned a teddy bear.

Keep in mind his face is on Mount Rushmore along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, so at the very least people did consider him that iconic at one point. (Mount Rushmore was mainly carved during the 1930s.)

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

I feel like he's bound to be one of the more well-known presidents regardless because of the fact that the teddy bear is named after him.

edit: also, I wasn't aware of this but "speak softly and carry a big stick" was coined by roosevelt as well.

edited 25th May '16 12:12:04 PM by wehrmacht

I first got to know about him thanks to Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.

edited 25th May '16 1:23:12 PM by Quag15

The Big Stick quote is allegedly a proverb from Africa that Roosevelt popularized.

So between Teddy, Washington, and Lincoln, which would you say is a better "face" of the US?

Huh - I also read that Don Rosa book but I am fairly sure I knew Theodore Roosevelt from before.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Right then, so not a lot of non-U.S. people seem to know too much about him. So here's a "quick" version. (Still gonna be a pretty long post.)

Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was a member of the wealthy Roosevelt family. Born with severe asthma, he overcame this through a heavy workout program. Because of this, he basically embraced being as manly as possible, something that would influence the rest of his life. He went to Harvard, then got started as a writer of military history books (yes, really). However, his first wife and mother both died close to each other, prompting him to move out west due to the sorrow and run a ranch.

After a few years, he returned to New York, attempting (and failing) to become mayor of New York City. After he married his second wife, William McKinley then appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He soon resigned, gathered a group of "Rough Riders", and then led them to fight in the Spanish-American War (with mixed results). He then got elected Governor of New York (the state), and proceeded to bust corruption in the city's politics.

Said people in with the corruption then sought to get rid of him, so they managed to arrange him to be McKinley's running mate (aka the Vice President) for the election of 1900. McKinley won...and then was assassinated, making that "damned cowboy" (actual quote) the president.

As President, Teddy Roosevelt immediately began to try and break up large corporations, in what was known as "trust busting". He also began passing bills to regulate food production, the end result of which would lead to the modern FDA. He also established the system of U.S. national parks and the rangers who protect them, citing a need for natural conservation. He was also the first president to hold actual formal press briefings, inviting newspaper reporters into the White House to speak with him on a regular basis.

Internationally, he spearheaded the building of the Panama Canal (this is the one that most non-U.S. people will probably be familiar with) and mediated the Russo-Japanese war, bringing it to a close. (The latter earned him a Nobel Peace Prize.) He also created the "Great White Fleet", a formidable group of Navy warships painted white which sailed around the globe. This was his way of making sure other people knew the U.S. had formidable military power - showing them the "big stick".

Early on his presidency was where teddy bears came from. He was invited on a hunt in Mississippi by the governor of that state. His attendants during the hunt cornered and captured a black bear, tying to a tree. They invited Teddy to shoot the bear, but he refused due to it being unsportsmanlike. He did tell them, however, that the bear needed a Mercy Kill. When word got out, a lot of people parodied this, including a couple of toy makers (one in the U.S., one in Germany), and so teddy bears were born.

After sponsoring his successor William Howard Taft for the presidency, Roosevelt embarked on a trip to Africa. It was a massive hunting expedition - Roosevelt captured and killed thousands of animals, then had their remains preserved and shipped back to the U.S. to be stuffed and mounted. (The Smithsonian helped finance this trip, incidentally.)

However, Taft proved he wasn't quite the same brand of political reformist that Teddy Roosevelt was, so Roosevelt returned and attempted to retake the presidency in 1912, forming his own "Bull Moose" party. The result was a split Republican vote, leading to Woodrow Wilson winning. What didn't help Roosevelt was that someone attempted to assassinate him on the campaign trail. (The bullet he was shot with lodged in his chest, and it was left there for the remainder of his life.)

After the election, he attempted an expedition to the Amazon River, but that went horribly wrong. He got injured in a canoe accident, said injury became infected with malaria, and his health suffered heavily. He would never really recover, even after he returned to the U.S. after the failed expedition. Theodore Roosevelt died a few years later in 1919, at the age of 60.

And there you have it. The story of the manly, charismatic, and energetic Bull Moose.

edited 25th May '16 4:00:51 PM by TotemicHero

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Cracked has taught me a a fair bit about Teddy, it does have a bit of an obsession with him, just hope we get to see him tank a bullet in the game...

advancing the front into TV Tropes

Among some circles Teddy Roosevelt has become the US's memetically badass president. He's The sort you can make Chuck Norris jokes about, only he probably actually did half the things one could joke about.

The Blog The Art

Yeah, I did kind of know about that. For example: (NSFW language)

edited 26th May '16 5:55:50 AM by TotemicHero

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

I don't know, I think FDR would make the best US representative in a Civ game considering he is the one president that is the closest to actually living through a game of it.

FDR was in Civ IV (which allows choices between multiple different leaders with different traits), along with Washington and Lincoln. ^note Civ IV is actually the only game in the series I've ever played (not counting the original Colonization), and I never really liked it.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

As a Finn - a nation that remains somewhat obsessed with WWII - I think for us the younger Roosevelt is probably more famous than Teddy, simply because he happened to be President during that particular time. Then again I think more Finns know about Kennedy than either of the Roosevelts.

Everybody knows at least the basics about Lincoln and Washington, just as you'd know the basics about someone like Napoleon or Elizabeth I of England.

I'm a bit more of a history buff than most people, and consider myself pretty familiar with American culture (although British culture is closer to me), so I probably know more about American Presidents than most Finns. That might bias my previous statements a bit.

Generally, I think people would probably think of Obama first if they were asked to name an American President, simply because he's the most recent. Bush and Clinton would also get named pretty soon, for the same reason. The less recent Presidents would probably start with Washington or Lincoln and then include Kennedy, the Roosevelts, and after that I'm guessing it'd spread out quite a lot. (I suspect Wilson and Truman might be remembered because they served during World Wars, and Eisenhower for almost the same reason. Garfield has a cartoon character named after him, so I think he might feature.)

For Civilization I think it'd make most sense to pick either Washington, as one of the founders, or Lincoln for winning the Civil War. I can sort of see why Theodore Roosevelt gets the nod. You'd certainly want to pick someone popular - you wouldn't take Reagan or Nixon, as you'd have a fair number of (especially American) players complaining about that choice. (Well, and obviously they're not that significant, either.)

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

And in the case of Bush, he pretty much ruined European relations with the US.

I'm surprised so many people outside the US remember Washington. I mean he's important in American history to be sure, and we do mention him a lot, but he had little to no impact on world events, nor is their much about him that would make him memorable to people outside the United States.

Edit: Oh and we named our Capital after the guy. That's probably why everyone knows about him

edited 3rd Jun '16 5:49:29 AM by JackOLantern1337

I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.

People outside the US don't tend to know a whole lot about all of your "Founding Fathers", but it would be silly not to know anything about them at all. The one that led the revolution and became your first President would be that one that would seem the most relevant, so that's probably why people are most interested in him.

To the extent that he's taken as a representative of the process by which the United States came to be as an independent political entity, he would be the "founder" of the world's (arguably) only current superpower. By any measure, the US is a hugely influential country at the moment, so everyone should know something about how it got started and how it rose to its current status.

I suppose it's slightly easier to absorb information about how China, India, and Russia became independent, unified states and who their first leaders were, because those events are more recent. Then again, with recent events it's harder to ignore the complexity of a given scenario, so simplifying China to Mao or Russia to Yeltsin is much harder than conflating Washington with the American Revolution. (Also, Mao had more power in China than an American leader has ever had in the US, but that's tangential.)

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

I wouldn't call it that surprising: America has a large amount of cultural influence world-wide, and won't shut up about its first president. Washington has a distinct appearance and appears on US currency. In addition, the American Revolution influenced democratic reforms world-wide, so it makes sense that there'd be some memories of him throughout the world.

edited 3rd Jun '16 8:39:18 AM by Protagonist506

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

To be fair, even most Americans probably don't know that much about Washington beyond the CliffNotes version.

How many people would know that Washington had naturally red hair, which he powdered white? (There's no portrait of that, after all.) Or that he never fathered any children of his own, and may have been sterile? (His wife was a widow, and he helped raise her two children from her first marriage.) Or that his favorite pastimes included playing cards, billiards, and backgammon? (Yes, the first U.S. president could technically be considered a gamer, by the standards of his day.)

That's the problem with cultural and political icons; too many people build them up as icons that it gets forgotten that there's a human being under all of that. The same goes for Roosevelt (either of them), Lincoln, or anyone else. At the same time, though, it's what they choose to pay attention to, versus what people ignore, about these icons that tells us about their culture. Which is why the Civilization question is relevant to this thread.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

This has been talked about before, but now it's tipped the scales: Millenials are moving back home, or just not moving out in the first place.

The link also has some graphs showing data from the US and other countries.

edited 3rd Jun '16 12:39:04 PM by BlueNinja0

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

So the politics thread is all up in US stupidity glorification/satire in US media.

Should probably be talked about here.

I don't think it's glorification so much as it is "We're joking about it, which means it's not really taking hold, and we won't have to do anything else besides it."

It's not praised, it's just not actively fought against either. In general for both statements, of course.

Mocking stupidity in media is a long and time honored tradition. It's not unique to America, it's just noticeable because American media is exported to the rest of the world. It's not being fought against because that's not necessarily the point of the particular media in question.

As for reality TV, well, I don't think that's particularly unique to America either, the audience just has a fascination with what's perceived as bad behavior and the media corps are ready to take advantage of something where they can save on paying actors.

Basically, I don't think "stupidity" is actually being glorified in any case. It's being shown to an audience that's continually willing to watch it.

edited 27th Jun '16 9:13:38 PM by AceofSpades