There is no limit to the greatness of the future before America, before our beloved land. But we can realize it only if we are Americans, if we are nationalists, with all the fervor of our hearts and all the wisdom of our brains. We can serve the world at all only if we serve America first and best.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1918
Theodore Roosevelt’s nationalist vision merits special consideration. He saw himself as executor of Lincoln’s political project. TR traced the lineage of nation-building from Washington and Hamilton, through Lincoln, into the early twentieth century. The historical and institutional arrangements that were renovated at the turn of the twentieth century reach into our own time. We can learn from what Roosevelt’s generation did, and how they did it.
Roosevelt’s nationalism was full-throated, offered without reservation or apology. He viewed the term “nationalist” as a point of pride and honor. Intending disrespect, he dismissed his rival Woodrow Wilson as “not a nationalist.”
TR proposed a positive, universal, forward-looking nationalism. It would extend and deepen our animating ideals of liberty, equality, and identity, finding expression in a revised political settlement.
Roosevelt was a practicing politician and a serious historian, not merely a prophet or an academic observer. He strove to ascertain and achieve “realizable ideals.” The process was avowedly experimental and improvisational.
The New Nationalism
Roosevelt distilled a lifetime of thought and action in his seminal “New Nationalism” address, delivered in Osawatomie, Kansas, on Wednesday, August 31, 1910. This piece provided an analytical structure to his many pronouncements relating to the topic. It offers a template for our own task of national reconstruction.
TR was speaking as a former president. He had departed the White House the year before. The venue, Osawatomie, was central to Roosevelt’s message. It was recognizable to Americans as the site, in the autumn of 1859, of abolitionist John Brown’s raid against pro-slavery forces. “Bloody Kansas,” riven by disagreement over the extent and future of slavery, prefigured the imminent Civil War.
Roosevelt suggested that the challenges of the new twentieth century should be comprehended as a comparable moment of reckoning:
There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first, when it was formed, and then, again, when it was perpetuated; and in the second of these great crises—in the time of stress which culminated in the Civil War.
Addressing wizened, uniformed veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic in the audience, TR declared:
Not only did you justify your generation, but you justified the wisdom of Washington and Washington’s colleagues. If this Republic has been founded by them only to be split asunder into fragments when the strain came, then the judgment of the world would have been that Washington’s work was not worth doing. It was you who crowned Washington’s work, as you carried to achievement the high purpose of Abraham Lincoln.
TR envisaged a new nationalism, a third founding. This time, it would be forged without the clarifying chaos and destruction of war.
Roosevelt’s vision of a new nationalism comprises the following elements:
—Universality. Roosevelt’s nationalism is far from seeking a “splendid isolation.” He robustly declared: “The history of America is now the central feature of the history of the world.” As a result, TR said, “I believe in nationalism as the absolute prerequisite to internationalism.”
—Serve America to Serve the World. TR said, “The first essential here in the United States is that we shall be one nation…the American nation.” He saw this as a precondition of larger service to the world: “We can help humanity at large very much to the extent that we are national—in the proper sense, not in the chauvinistic sense—that we are devoted to our own country first.”
Roosevelt is stating something so blindingly obvious that it may be easy to overlook: American nationalism is built on the bedrock of the national community and its constitutional structure. Thus it was that Lincoln, in saving the Union, was able to sequester and eliminate the institution of slavery and begin the process of bringing former slaves into citizenship. Had the nation not remained intact, the abolitionist vision would have remained a pipedream.
Along with Wilson and others of the time, Roosevelt used the term “America first.” John Philip Souza composed a patriotic march of the same name. In later decades, this reference would become highly charged.
The controversy arises from the America First Committee. This was a non-partisan organization, founded in 1940, seeking to keep the US out of the European war that began with the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. Its supporters included many prominent figures, as well as young people, such as future presidents Kennedy and Ford. It also emerged as a magnet for a motley group of disreputable influences, ranging from Communists to fascists and many who were sympathetic to such tendencies. Charles Lindbergh, theretofore beloved as the hero of the Spirit of St. Louis, tarnished the group with his insouciance toward the Third Reich and the contagion of antisemitism.
President Franklin Roosevelt recognized the threat the group posed. He methodically marginalized it as “isolationist” as he sought to prepare a reluctant nation for war amid the European and Asian aggression of the mid- and late-1930s. Upon the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the America First Committee disbanded.
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson passed from the scene well before the subsequent evolution of the phraseology of putting America first. They were not arguing for selfishness, or vain attempts to avoid the challenges of the wider world. In their recitation, “America First” did not mean “America Only” or “America Alone.” That was as implausible at the turn of the twentieth century as it is in our time. They were expressing an applied patriotism. Citizens should keep their obligations to the nation—and to other Americans—front of mind.
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