TR on nationhood

On March 4, 1905, three years after succeeding to the presidency on the death of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt began his only elected term in office. In this first paragraph of TR’s brief inaugural address (he deliberately kept it short to counteract his “wild man” image), he speaks of America, not as an abstract idea, not as a mission to democratize the world, not as a collection of institutions and principles, but as a people, a people living our common life on this continent, a continent that Providence bestowed on us free of the curse of endless conflict with other peoples (or “races” as TR puts it in the language of his time). It is this sense of ourselves as a people, humbly grateful for the gifts God has given us, that we have lost, and it is the reason we now find ourselves lacking the will to defend our nation from the incursions of alien peoples who will destroy everything we have and everything we are.

Roosevelt said:

My fellow-citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver of Good who has blessed us with the conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the success which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding realization of all which life has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours; and a fixed determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can thrive best, alike as regards the things of the body and the things of the soul.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Good quote from him. But … his progressive and interventionist attitudes prefigured Wilson’s and he is perhaps the man most responsible (entirely unintentionally) for softening up America for the Latin American influx. Along with Hearst, he was the noisiest jingo behind the utterly unnecessary Spanish-American War, which he used relentlessly for his own self-aggrandizement. Commenting on TR’s The Rough Riders, Finley Peter Dunne found it so self-centered that he had his Mr. Dooley say of it “if I was him I’d call th’book “Alone in Cuba.”

Among our wonderful and superfluous acquisitions in 1898 was Puerto Rico, which has been on the American welfare teat ever since. Within 50 years of TR’s triumph, millions of Puerto Ricans moved, perfectly legally (!), to his hometown. The precedent for mass Latin American immigration into the United States was set. Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, South Americans, more Puerto Ricans … (need I go on?) have been exploiting it ever since. Later his strenuous agitating for U.S. entry to the Great War—again of doubtful value to the United States, valor notwithstanding—would contribute to his own early death, and be rewarded by the death of his son Quentin, who was practically a human sacrifice as a barely trained fighter pilot over the Western Front.

TR was brave, intelligent, incredibly hard-working and, despite his family’s wealth, largely a self-made man. He deserves great credit for his conservation work. His precocious history of the Naval War of 1812 is still the standard reference, and a good read. Unlike so many more recent winners, he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize he won for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War with the Portsmouth Treaty. Still, he was a heedless bull in a china shop in many ways. When I was in my teens and then as a Marine Second Lieutenant I had TR up on a very high pedestal: The Greatest American. No longer; we still haven’t equaled Washington. TR was a patriot, but no conservative. HRS

LA replies:

I don’t disagree with any of Mr. Sutherland’s points, but they are irrelevant to the quote that I posted. So often people seem to have the notion that if you approvingly quote someone, you are implicitly endorsing everything about that person, and so they feel it necessary to “set you straight” and tell you everything bad about him. I quoted that particular passage from TR’s inaugural address because it said something worthwhile. Period.

Let me add that if we can approvingly quote, without fear of contradiction and correction, only those persons whom we approve in all respects, we could never quote anyone. We could not approvingly (or even neutrally) quote, for example, Nietzsche, or Shaw, or Wilde, or Ayn Rand.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 19, 2006 08:05 AM | Send