by Matt Barr

"A man has got to be an American and nothing else"

In response to a suggestion that something the President was about to undertake might be unconstitutional, Teddy Roosevelt is supposed to have grabbed Congressman James E. Watson by his lapels and screamed, "the Constitution was made for the people and not the people for the Constitution!" Well, when you put it that way.

TR is no hero of libertarians; seizing 84,000 acres per day of his nearly two-term presidency under federal control will do that. True, too, is the perception, enduring for a century, that he was exceedingly authoritarian. "In all his career no one ever heard him make an argument for the rights of the citizen," Mencken noted; "his eloquence was always expended in expounding the duties of the citizen."

Republicans only reluctantly claim him, the conservationism and antipathy toward big business being most distasteful among many dare we call them McCain-esque off-the-reservation qualities. Democrats won't touch him, owing to a muscular foreign policy. Yet he remains, as he was 100 years ago, larger than life. He was a stirring figure, a patriot who saw and loved the country America would become after his death. Someone, now that we're far enough ahead in time where he's no lapel-grabbing threat, to remember and celebrate on Presidents Day.

You will not find a president between the 1860s and 1980s who was guided more unflinchingly by principle. The particular principles in question were complex, and included what might cynically be considered a fudge factor, practicality.

Roosevelt dined at the White House with Booker T. Washington on October 16, 1901, becoming the first president to dine with a black man there. The Memphis Scimitar considered this "the most damnable outrage ever," and that was among the milder reactions from the South. TR never made an effort to defend his actions in public, a public face on his personal reaction of "most contemptuous indifference"; yet he never invited a black man to dinner at the White House again, even with more than seven years remaining in his tenure.

Not for nothing did Roosevelt insist "the first duty of an American citizen, then, is that he shall work in politics; his second duty is that he shall do that work in a practical manner; and his third is that it shall be done in accord with the highest principles."

Which was not to say that kowtowing to public opinion was the way to succeed in public life; TR was no triangulator. "The only public servant who can be trusted honestly to protect the rights of the public against the misdeeds of a corporation," he said, "is that public man who will just as surely protect the corporation itself from wrongful aggression. If a public man is willing to yield to popular clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to rich corporations, it may be set down as certain that if the opportunity comes he will secretly and furtively do wrong to the public in the interest of a corporation."

Nor, of course, was the party line always the straight and narrow. "There is no need of dogmatizing about independence on the one hand or party allegiance on the other," he said. "There are occasions when it may be the highest duty of any man to act outside of parties and against the one with which he has himself been hitherto identified; and there may be many more occasions when his highest duty is to sacrifice some of his own cherished opinions" -- we just lost a bunch of libertarians -- "for the sake of the success of the party which he on the whole believes to be right."

Roosevelt pounded on the door of the world, announcing the arrival of America. One hundred years later, at least if you sensibly ignore the fringe, we're much more reluctant to get involved abroad. Still, Roosevelt's thoughts are relevant today:

The work must be done; we cannot escape our responsibility; and if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of the chance to do the work -- glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to one of the great tasks set modern civilization.... We must demand the highest order of integrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability those public servants who show unfaithfulness to the interests of the nation or inability to rise to the high level of the new demands upon our strength and our resources....

We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our Dower without our own borders.

"We have not any room here for a divided allegiance," TR said. "A man has got to be an American and nothing else... If, however, he does become honestly and in good faith an American, then he is entitled to stand precisely as all other Americans stand, and it is the height of un-Americanism to discriminate against him in any way because of creed or birthplace." If.

Critics at the time and for the next hundred years said that Roosevelt poked and prodded nationalistic passions and fears to advance his own foreign policy adventures. Perhaps other presidents criticized similarly could take inspiration from TR's call to action: "In facing the future and in striving, each according to the measure of his individual capacity, to work out the salvation of our land, we should be neither timid pessimists nor foolish optimists. We should recognize the dangers that exist and that threaten us: we should neither overestimate them nor shrink from them, but steadily fronting them should set to work to overcome and beat them down."

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