What would Theodore Roosevelt think? (Off topic)

Greetings!

Politics are definitely off-topic for this musician-oriented blog. But, since I'm writing, I've decided to make an exception! Actually, this post deals more with our culture than our political landscape. I found it enlightening and I thought it was worthy of a place on this blog because we're all impacted by the changes in our culture.

The title of the article is "TR - Where RU?" and the writer, Rick Marschall examines our political and cultural climate in the light of more than a few quotes from Theodore Roosevelt. I believe we need to recapture a moral consciousness in our country. It seems that we would do well to learn from the wisdom of this great American, Theodore Roosevelt.

TR - Where RU?
By Rick Marschall

Oct 27: the sesquicentennial of Theodore Roosevelt's birth. Many things changed in America during TR's lifetime: he was born 150 years ago, just before the Civil War commenced, and died just after World War I ended. When he became president, the Wright Brothers had not yet flown their fragile craft; in the War to End All Wars, TR's youngest son Quentin was killed in an aerial dogfight over the French battlefields.

It is a tired cliché, though no less true for it, that the changes that have occurred over 150 years have been astonishing, perhaps without parallel in history. My friend Wade Mainer, the country music pioneer, is approaching his 102nd birthday, and he finds more people asking him about the days before radio and TV (or rural electricity) than about his musical influence on American folk arts.

Somehow people gravitate toward the tangible aspects of life when they wonder about changes - the comforts, the appliances and conveniences, the gadgets. Perhaps it is harder to grasp (and certainly more troubling to process the implications of) intellectual, spiritual, and sociological changes. Wade, born in 1907, grew up in a very different America than we know.

To a greater extent, Theodore Roosevelt might scarcely recognize the America of 150 years since his birth. To the extent he would recognize it, he would grieve - and likely be incensed by - the nation we have become.

If TR had not been a US president, he would yet be prominent in American history for any of a number of achievements. He was a first-rank historian; several of his works remain the standard works in their fields. He was a world-class naturalist, a specialist in obscure areas like bird calls and protective coloration; he discovered species and collected specimens for the American Museum of Natural History, where a wing is now dedicated to him, and charted an unknown river in Brazil under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. He was an authentic cowboy during the short-lived period when there were real cowboys in a real Wild West. He rode ranges for days at a time, herding cattle, and once tracked and captured a trio of horse thieves. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy before the Spanish-American War, he ordered the Pacific Fleet to Manila, thus setting up the greatest naval victory in American hi story; when war was declared he volunteered and led his regiment, the Rough Riders, up San Juan Hill in the most colorful battle of that short but decisive war. Criticized as a warmonger, he was extremely proud of the fact that none one bullet was fired in conflict during his presidency... and he was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As a hunter he pursued game for sport, food, skins, and study; as an outdoorsman he advocated for the environment, and as president set aside millions and millions of acres of wondrous parklands for protection and posterity.

But TR was president, one of our best. If he was not the greatest president, the reason might be that there were no major crises during his tenure, and that might be due to his own foresight and leadership. Yet he possibly was the greatest man who served as president. "The Most Interesting American" was one of many descriptions showered on Theodore Roosevelt, but he likely would have said there was no greater compliment than simply to be called an American.

TR has become, with Lincoln, the favorite president to name as a favorite: JFK, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and McCain all hailed Theodore Roosevelt as a role-model. Remarkable: across the aisle, across the spectrum, across the years. Yet despite the praise heaped upon him, TR would scorn most aspects of American society today and, possibly, scorn today's leadership class and their policies.

On this 150th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt's birth I will let this assertion stand against not the cartoons and photographs in our history books, nor the dates and honors in his biography. TR's forceful words - always carefully composed, and colorfully clear - are the best records of his core beliefs. They serve as advice to an America that is changed indeed from the one he left us - a measure, surely, of changes: changes made and changes needed.

An overlooked aspect of Theodore Roosevelt is his spiritual side and the essential component, he believed, of America's well-being:

"We are the citizens of a mighty Republic consecrated to the service of God above, through the service of man on this earth. We are the heirs of a great heritage bequeathed to us by statesmen who saw with the eyes of seer and prophet. We must not prove false to the memories of the nation's past.... Let us care, as is right, for the things of the body; but let us show even more that we care for the things of the soul."

One of TR's scores of books was titled Fear God and Take Your Own Part; another was Foes of Our Own Household, its title taken from Matthew 10:36. He is credited with creating the term Muckraker, describing corruption-watchdogs; yet he was quoting Bunyan's Christian classic, The Pilgrim's Progress, portraying the man with the muck-rake as one who cynically looks down in the mire rather than raising his eyes to the positive and encouraging truths. It is fair to say that if, in TR's day, a foreign power would have threatened to outlaw religious expression in America, or ban Bibles and prayers in public places, TR would have mobilized the Rough Riders again to do battle against such outrages. I posit that today, he would seethe no less against a handful of brigands in judge's robes who are systematically imposing thought-control and denying free speech and the exercise of religion in our land.

"We've got to watch out for those who offer to be crooked on our behalf."

Politicians who prattle about the Middle Class should make us suspicious. If they are willing to pander to this one class, patronize another (the "lower class"), and denigrate a third (the "upper class"), members of all classes should lock their doors and hide their pennies. Not forgetting that the ruling class of politicians and media elite are all economic upper-classmen anyway, we should heed TR's observation that anyone willing to suppress one group in order to serve yours, is fully capable and congenitally certain to betray you when the next mood suits. Why do no politicians make the promise to exercise justice to ALL classes? Surely that should be the aim of every public servant. TR called it the Square Deal.

"The distinguishing feature of our American government system is the freedom of the individual; it is quite as important to prevent his being oppressed by many men as it is to save him from the tyranny of one."

TR's reforms cast the government in the role of referee on some issues, but never a womb-to-tomb dictator. Perverted by his distant cousin Franklin and distorted by succeeding generations of Marxians and socialists, the policies of Theodore Roosevelt were formulated to allow individuals to rise or fall according to their own merits and a clear playing field. Americans' current sense of entitlement, fostered by liberals and nanny-state commandants, regards private initiative - and personal responsibility - as shameful opinions deserving criminalization. Usually the people who yell the loudest about "knowing their rights" have never read the Constitution. Terms like "fairness," "privacy," "capitalism," and even "democracy" - and the sins committed in their names, like the "right" to abortion on demand, by opportunistic politicians - are not mentioned in the Constitution. America is a Republic, not a Democracy.

"I despise a man who surrenders his conscience to a multitude as much as I do the one who surrenders it to one man."

Politicians do everything for the taxpayers except get off their backs and stop picking their pockets. TR entered politics when a young man to fight corruption; his first battles as a state legislator in Albany were fighting the system and bosses of his own party. Sometimes he voted against "pork" for his own district, and he reached across the aisle (to a reform governor, Democrat Grover Cleveland) to champion clean-politics measures. Through his life was a practical politician, but also a maverick, even leaving his own party when a presidential nomination was stolen from him. (He ran as an independent, the Progressive, or Bull Moose, candidate - the last time a moose was prominently named in a campaign - and finished second... but ahead of the Republican.) He put country first. And his last political battles were against corruption and high-handed Washington tactics, little changed from the beginning of his career, yet worth the fight. There are parallels to at least a couple of today's candidates...

"Without honesty, popular government is a repulsive farce."

TR prided himself on being able to compromise and accomplish great things. But we should be proud to recognize that he was someone who did not compromise with evil, and never sacrificed his integrity. If he were to return to Washington today, the only place he would find integrity is in a dictionary.

"If on this new continent we merely build another country of great but unjustly divided material prosperity, we shall have done nothing; and we shall do as little if we merely set the greed of envy against the greed of arrogance, and thereby destroy the material well-being of each of us."

Generations of a welfare-state mentality has conditioned Americans to believe the government owes them everything, that health care is a right, that housing is a right, that prosperity is a right. Freedom is a gift from God, not a governmental favor. TR was a student of history, not just a maker of history, and knew the consequences of the National Anthem being displaced by cacophonous whines and demands. He would see - and thunder against! - the inevitable results of a society saturated with rampant drug use and pornography; the suppression of religious expression and promotion of homosexuality; where half the marriages end in divorce and half the babies - those, that is, not the victims of infanticide - are born and raised outside a traditional family unit; where illiteracy is growing, not declining; where obesity is as common as the sniffles (remember his book The Strenuous Life?); where there is an indifference to a virtual invasion of illegal aliens; where students are spectacularly illiterate and lag behind scores of other countries in math and science skills. None of these trends are unique in the history of great civilizations - but every single type of these things contributed to decay, despair, and downfall of previous societies. TR believed America was a special place, but not, however, specially immune from the laws of civilization and decay. Ideas have consequences, he knew, and so do policies.

"Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sports the world affords."

This review began with a reminder of TR's spiritual moorings. We can close this birthday celebration with words of his that are more frequently quoted - however just as often ignored, today, to America's shame, and, perhaps, her doom. These were the last words he wrote, delivered to a meeting his death prevented him from addressing:

"There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house; and we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that loyalty is to the American people."

A nation's destiny cannot turn on one election. If it were so in 2008, may God help America, because we elect men and women, not saviors. And properly so: since we have chosen to operate democratically, we get what we deserve. Under Washington and Lincoln and TR, America, with all its imperfections, happily accepted that dictum. Today, despite all our "progress," getting what we deserve should make us anxious in the extreme.

In every election of my lifetime, I have heard people say - first adults around me; then my peers; finally myself - that they suppose they'll vote for the lesser of two evils. Such are the fruits, evidently, of democracy. If we truly believe that both candidates, or both parties, are evil, we should dissent from the system and decide in some way to be aggressive fighters for the right.

In the meantime, however, it is a screaming necessity to appreciate what we used to have in this nation... to examine every aspect of the mess we're in... and to act, somehow in some way, personally and persuasively, to address the situation. We have squandered the gifts of God; we have dishonored the patriots like TR who nurtured and advanced it. May God help us indeed.

One last word from Theodore Roosevelt on this, his birthday, as the national elections draw nigh: "A vote is somewhat like a rifle - its usefulness depends upon the character of the user."

Rick Marschall
Swartz Creek, MI
AmericaCiv@aol.com

May be reprinted and forwarded without permission

This article was originally published in Rare Jewel Magazine and was distributed via email on October 24, 2008. For more information about Rare Jewel Magazine, you may contact their customer service department:

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