In 1895, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge wrote a book entitled Hero Tales From American History. Roosevelt was serving in Washington, DC as Civil Service Commissioner. Lodge, who was one of Roosevelt’s most devoted friends, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives standing for his Boston, Massachusetts district. It was Edith Roosevelt, Theodore’s wife, who hatched the idea for the two of them to write this book together. The purpose of the book, as Lodge and Roosevelt wrote in their dedication of the book to Edith, was “to tell in simple fashion the story of some Americans who showed that they knew how to live and how to die.”[1] The book remains an inspiring collection of essays on the meaning of patriotic virtue. It still should be read by all Americans today, especially young people.
1. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, Hero Tales From American History, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Edition, vol. 10 (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), xxiii.
Roosevelt wrote the first essay in Hero Tales on George Washington. In the first paragraph of the essay, Roosevelt said Washington “is worthy [of] the study and the remembrance of all men, and to Americans he is at once a great glory of their past and an inspiration and an assurance to their future.”[2]
2. Lodge and Roosevelt, Hero Tales, 3.
What Roosevelt wrote in praise of Washington could appropriately be written of Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Roosevelt has been relegated to the ranks of the cancelled in recent years. On January 19, 2022, the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, which had stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City since 1940, was removed. The statue was taken down “because its composition suggested a racial hierarchy,” as a plaque established in place of the statue now reads. But Roosevelt’s legacy, and his call for the right kind of Patriotism, are ironically one of the main virtues our country needs in this generation. Virtuous patriotism is an expression of neighbor-love, and it is the very basis of a free society.
In Honor of Roosevelt
The removal of the statue is an example of how many Americans have lost the ability to think historically. Thinking historically requires that we hold two competing realities in tension—the reality of human sin on the one hand, and the reality of human dignity on the other. Theodore Roosevelt was not perfect; at the same time, Theodore Roosevelt was a figure of great dignity in American history. It is possible to celebrate his dignity and his contributions to American nationhood—even with a statue—while simultaneously telling the truth in historical context about his defects. Alas, as it relates to our history, we as a society are losing the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Roosevelt was a product of his day, just as we in the present are products of our day. In the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, patriotism was dearly valued. Roosevelt talked and wrote about American patriotism all the time. He embodied American patriotism. For example, Theodore Roosevelt is the only American president to have been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor (for valor on the battlefield in the Spanish American War). He was the first of four presidents to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War). He is thus the only American president to have received both prizes. Of all Americans deserving to be remembered rather than cancelled, sanity would suggest that it be Theodore Roosevelt.
What a change has come over Americans since Roosevelt died on a cold January morning at his home at Sagamore Hill in 1919. A WSJ/NORC poll taken in 1998, and again in 2023, found that seventy percent of Americans thought patriotism was very important.[3] Twenty-five years later, only thirty-eight percent thought so. There are probably many explanations for this decline, but one of them has to be that many Americans have drunk deeply from the woke ideology that advocates for historical iconoclasm such as was visited upon the Roosevelt statue in New York.
3. Aaron Zitner, “America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It,” The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2023.
Intense, Fervid, and Virtuous Americanism
The palpable decline of patriotism in America brings to mind an April 1894 essay Roosevelt wrote for The Forum magazine. The essay is entitled—in pure Rooseveltian form— “True Americanism.” Roosevelt provided, in about 5,000 words, a clear vision of that which he believed patriotism consisted in his time. Despite the fact that the essay is nestled within the world of 1894, and also given that we may debate some of the positions he took in his essay, we in the present can benefit from paying attention to Roosevelt’s perspective. We certainly need all the help we can get in learning how to be patriots, and taking our past seriously starts with listening to what the people of the past had to say.
Roosevelt began by acknowledging that patriotism is an easy concept to abuse for selfish purposes. Love of country has always served as a cloak for anti-human ideology and action taught and taken by dishonest and base persons, both then and now. The fact that patriotism can be abused does not make the idea into a vice. Roosevelt wrote that “the man shows little wisdom and a low sense of duty who fails to see that love of country is one of the elemental virtues, even though scoundrels play upon it for their own selfish ends.”[4] The fact of there being persons of base character out there who wrap real injustice in the American flag does not render patriotic devotion essentially unjust. That fact actually proves the larger point of the uprightness of patriotism—the transgression against the ideal demonstrates the virtue of the ideal, not the vice of it.
4. Theodore Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Edition, vol. 13 (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 13.
Not only is patriotism not compromised by scoundrels and demagogues, patriots do not close their eyes to the imperfections of Americans past or present. Patriots are realistic, they love and accept their country as it is before seeking to change it. Roosevelt said it this way: “We must neither surrender ourselves to foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism.”[5] Upon adopting realism as a starting point to solving problems, we deal with them informed by “an intense and fervid Americanism.”[6]
5. Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” 15.
6. Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” 15.
A phrase like “intense and fervid Americanism” will doubtless jolt the sensibilities of many twenty-first century Americans. Phrases like that sound fascist, racist, violent, and sentimental in all the wrong ways. Roosevelt’s phrase has none of the vicious implications we may suspect. Roosevelt’s “intense and fervid Americanism” referred to the “lofty ideal of the founders” as well as the “responsibility implied in the very name of American.”[7] The national founders were dedicated to a federal union of states which had the preservation of the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity as their purpose. Liberty always carries with it responsibility on the part of those who enjoy it—the responsibility to exercise liberty under just law, as well as the responsibility of handing unsullied liberty down to rising generations that they may also enjoy its benefits and duties. Intense and fervid Americanism entails love of ordered liberty and devotion to its preservation and stewardship. Americanism is made for man, not man for Americanism.
7. Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” 15.
Patriotism as a Passing Phase?
Roosevelt was concerned about Americans who simply left their patriotism behind like a childhood fantasy. It is worth quoting him at length:
There are philosophers who assure us that, in the future, patriotism will be regarded not as a virtue at all, but merely as a mental stage in the journey toward a state of feeling when our patriotism will include the whole human race and all the world. This may be so; but the age of which these philosophers speak is still several aeons distant. . . . It may be, that in ages so remote that we cannot now understand any of the feelings of those who will dwell in them, patriotism will no longer be regarded as a virtue, exactly as it may be that in those remote ages people will look down upon and disregard monogamic marriage; but as things now are and have been for two or three thousand years past, and are likely to be for two or three thousand years to come, the words “home” and “country” mean a great deal.[8]
8. Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” 16–17.
The ominous feature of Roosevelt’s perspective here is how closely the scene he imagines comes to the reality of 2020s America. Americans since 1998 have slowly left their patriotism behind. It is no coincidence that with the falling off of patriotic devotion, Americans have also abandoned faith. Sixty-two percent of citizens polled in 1998 considered religion to be very important, but in 2023, only thirty-nine percent thought the same.[9] Do you notice how the statistics for one’s view of the importance of patriotism (70% in 1998, 38% in 2023) and the importance of religion (62% in 1998, 39% in 2023) correlate? Love for country entails love of neighbor, and if Christianity—the dominant religion of the United States—casts a clear vision for neighbor-love, then its abandonment would logically entail an abandonment of patriotism. This is precisely what has happened over the past twenty-five years. It turns out that rightly ordered love for God and country actually is necessary for a free society.
9. Zitner, “America Pulls Back,” March 27, 2023.
Roosevelt analogized the weakening of patriotism to the weakening of the family. He could hardly imagine a day when marriage as defined in terms of one man and one woman for life would go the way of the passenger pigeon. And yet, here we are. The violence our culture has done to the family since 1970 has immediate ramifications for the health of our body politic, particularly with regard to our commitment to our national ideals, traditions, places, and most importantly, our people.
Something Roosevelt wrote in 1894 remains true today: “in spite of all our faults and shortcomings, no other land offers such glorious possibilities to the man able to take advantage of them, as does ours.”[10] Why else would millions of people all over the world aspire to become American? Why do they not aspire to become Russian, or Italian, or Brazilian? I intend no shade towards Russians, Italians, or Brazilians—but the fact is that since our national founding, America has been a beacon of hope to generations of people seeking a freer and more prosperous life for themselves and for their children like no other nation has in the history of the world.
10. Roosevelt, “True Americanism,” 18.
But if patriotic devotion continues to wane in America, then America will lose the best traditions of its exceptionalism. It will become less free, less prosperous, less a source of hope, and less worthy of sacrifice. It will be just another name on a drop-down list of countries to select when setting up a credit card account. Is that what we want? Is that really what our forefathers sacrificed so much to hand down to us? Is such a fate worthy of great men like Theodore Roosevelt? Do we honor our ancestors who stewarded the American tradition of freedom for our benefit when we shrug off patriotism in the name of having become stylish and sophisticated “citizens of the world”?
Conclusion
Roosevelt closed his essay with an appeal on behalf of patriotism. With intense and fervid devotion to our country, let us heed his words: “Above all we must stand shoulder to shoulder, not asking as to the ancestry or creed of our comrades, but only demanding that they be in very truth Americans, and that we all work together, heart, hand, and head, for the honor and the greatness of our common country.”[11]
