Teddy Roosevelt And "The New Nationalism"

Think Teddy Roosevelt and what comes to your mind?

Sagamore Hill? San Juan Hill? Yellowstone Park? The White House?

Try Osawatomie, Kansas.

If that name doesn’t ring a bell to you, here’s a little hint. Think John Brown, the fire-eating abolitionist.

Osawatomie Brown, they nicknamed him. Why? Because Osawatomie was the home base of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who engaged in violent rebellion against slavery.

It seems that the New England-born Brown witnessed his son shot and the town of Osawatomie burned to the ground in August 1856 by proslavery forces, during the period when the Kansas territory was at the vortex of national forces gripped in a desperate battle over whether it would be a free or a slave state.

I'll be headed to Osawatomie this summer too. Not just to feel the pulse of the place or to figuratively stand over John Brown's Body. But because of Teddy Roosevelt.

You see, it was to Osawatomie Kansas that Teddy Roosevelt came on Aug 31, 1910, a year after the conclusion of his presidency.

Osawatomie made the news last last year, of course, because President Obama chose it as a place with that historic resonance he was looking for to announce his own statements on American economic policy.

Roosevelt went there for a similar reason --  to deliver a speech, later called the "New Nationalism Address," to give a speech on historically symbolic turf. A speech which is now seen as one of the most important enunciations of progressive ideals in our nation’s history.

It was not TR’s first or last visit to Kansas. The hero of San Juan Hill and former Governor of New York showed up during a campaign visit in 1903, when he was running for Vice President. His “Ride Across Kansas’ was a whistlestop tour, it seems, but it attracted national attention for the adulation he received. “The applause was spontaneous and loud, and it appeared to come from people of all degrees of politics,’ noted the New York Times that year. “It was not so much for Roosevelt as a candidate for Vice President, but for ‘Teddy,’ the Rough Rider and the man.”

By 1910, Roosevelt had already served as President, fiught his political battles, taken on the Wall Street Trusts, and left office.

America's Rough Rider, recently retired, went on a safari to Africa, returned home to New York, and contemplated the political landscape before him.

Teddy Roosevelt was not done speaking out on the issues facing America.

"My proper task," wrote Roosevelt as he prepared the speech he was to give at the dedication of the John Brown Park, "is clearly to announce myself on the vital questions of the day, to set the standards so that it can be seen, and take a position that cannot be misunderstood.”

Among its tenets: Social responsibility of the wealthy. A progressive income tax. A graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes. Transparency in corporate enterprise.

Government supervision of capitalism. Judges that rule for human welfare over property interests. Reining in of ‘state’s rights’ demagogues, in favor of a Hamiltonian concept of federal power.

And a legislature that represents all the people -- not special interests, who ‘twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.’

Roosevelt used the park dedication to attack the ideals of "state's right" demagogues, as he called them. He was interested in a Hamiltonian concept of appropriate use of federal power to protect the rights of individuals against those who would subvert them for personal or corporate gain.

When it came to the relationship between workers and owners, Roosevelt envisioned a balance between labor and capital.

    "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed,. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a Communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln's. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now, let the working man hear his side. "Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.... Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world."

What Roosevelt decried was an imbalance. “Ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism,” intoned Roosevelt before 30,000 listeners on the hot August plains of Kansas.

Sound familiar? It should. Roosevelt was a kind of a front man for the 1910 equivalent of the OWS crowd, engaged “with many of the same issues that confront us now, notably the power of finance and the dangers of concentrated economic power,” wrote the Washington Post in 2011.

President Obama's speech at Osawatomie, delivered in Dec 2011, was of the same ilk -- and powerful enough for the New York Times to declare it "the most potent blow the president has struck against the economic theory at the core of every Republican presidential candidacy and dear to the party’s leaders in Congress. The notion that the market will take care of all problems if taxes are kept low and regulations are minimized may look great on a bumper sticker, but, he said: “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” Not before the Great Depression, not in the ’80s, and not in the last decade."

It is fitting but also somewhat sobering that both Roosevelt and Obama chose to speak out on the issue of economic justice in a park dedicated to John Brown, who stood against the forces of slavery in America with such violence that he was tried, convicted and sentenced to execution for treason because of his actions.

John Brown put his body on the line. Unflinchingly.  But before they could hang him, he declared this.  

    Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment,” said Brown after the verdict. “I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done - as I have always freely admitted I have done - in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”

Roosevelt wasn't hung. But he was derided by many in his day for his progressivism -- in fact he was called a socialist, a charge he dismissed as being ’a slander to socialists.’ And most of the principles he enunciated eventually saw the light of day as the 20th century unfolded.

While there are many who would argue that, in the 21st century, Roosevelt’s ideas are facing their most severe challenge in 100 years, they remain one of the clearest enunciations of progressive principles to be found.

A footnote: it seems his 1910 visit to Osawatomie Kansas to celebrate the John Brown was not his last to the “Sunflower State.”  He did return one last time -- in 1916, to rally Kansans for the war effort.

According to the New York Times, 100,000 people thronged the streets of Kansas City to see Roosevelt. It was a triumphant return, marred only by someone hurling an open jack knife at the beloved American hero.

The assailant, according to the newspaper account, was “a tall, slender man dressed in brown, who had apparently been drinking.” 

 The butt end of the knife, we’re told, hit the arm of one of Roosevelt’s secretaries harmlessly, clattered to the ground, and was picked up by an American Legionnaire who, “closing it carefully, handed it to a nearby policeman.”

“Col Roosevelt first heard of the incident when he was having luncheon at the Muelenbach Hotel as the guest of the Commercial Club,” noted the Times reporter. “He put it aside with a laugh.”

On Robert Burns And Occupy Wall Street:

For honest poverty...a man's a man for a' that
                                  Robert Burns, 1800

It’s only a couple of years since Scotland -- and the English speaking world -- celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns.

It's an event that's been marked by the great and the small for much of the quarter millennium since the author of Auld Lang Syne made his splashdown on this planet; and for a man whose writing was described by no less than Walt Whitman as possessing "...the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew’d flavor of the Scotch vernacular."  

2012 has been no exception. Google Robert Burns Celebration 2012 and you’ll quickly find events peripheral to his Jan 25 birthday from West Virginia to Missouri, and from Arizona to lower Manhattan. The Robert Burns Club in Melbourne Australia has been celebrating Burns since 1845. Burns suppers are held in South Africa, Hong Kong, Russia and Canada, complete with pipers and frequently with a ‘haggis processional.‘

It's doubtful there'll be much haggis parading going on this year at the Walt Whitman Birthplace in Huntington NY. But in its own fashion the Whitman Birthplace Association will get into the act, hosting the current ’Writing Fellow’ at the Robert Burns Center in Dumfries, Scotland, as part of its ‘Walking With Whitman’ reading series.

That would be Rab Wilson, born in the Ayrshire mining village of New Cumnock and a man who burst on the scene with his rendering in Scots of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 2004.

Wilson is scheduled to appear at the Birthplace on March 31, for an evening of readings in the second year of a series that will include the likes of Martin Espada, Quincey Troupe, Peter Balakian and Emily XYZ. The series kicks of Sat Feb 4, 7 p.m., when NYC performance poetry sensation Nathan Pearson appears with Nassau County Poet Laureate Linda Opyr.

If Wilson’s 2011 appearance in the US is any indication, he’ll be reading with a remarkably engaging Scots accent; possibly from the likes of such American literary luminaries as Jack Kerouac and Whitman himself; and no doubt, from Burns, a figure described in the 1870s by Henry Ward Beecher as ’a true poet, made not by the schools…he burst out, and almost from the soil. He came as a flower comes in the Spring.”

Here’s Rab Wilson on his own original poetry, ‘maistly written in Scots, tho ah write a when things in Standaurt Englis as weel. It is inspired bi ma ain personal view o whit it is like tae leeve in Scotland in the 21st Century…(and) the hale range o whit haes inspired Scots makars syne fir a thossan year or mair!’

As for Robert Burns, Wilson calls him “a poet for all seasons. He had this star quality and he had charisma. One of the greatest things we have globally is Robert Burns.”

There are marked points of similarity between Whitman and Burns. Both rose from humble origins as the sons of economically marginal rural men to become not only their nation’s greatest poet but an ambassador for the nation’s cultural heritage. As a transcendentalist, Whitman wrote of America first, but with a universality that had him saluting, in one direction, the cosmos…and in the other, the minutest workings of his molecular soul.

As for Burns, he wrote of all things Scots, and at age 25, when the first edition of his poems was published, he achieved international renown. By the time of his death 12 years later, he was recognized by many as the voice of his nation.

Whitman himself had high praise for Robert Burns, in part because of his enunciation of Romantic era notion of the dignity and value of the common, vernacular voice. “He is very close to the earth. He pick’d up his best words and tunes directly from the Scotch home-singers,“ wrote Whitman in November Boughs (1888).

“I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in their blood. (How clear it is to me that the common soil has always been, and is now, thickly strewn with just such gems.)”
   
Whitman’s assessment was no mere literary jacket cover blurb. A decade earlier the hugely influential Henry Ward Beecher was singing Burns’ praises, in a birthday celebration for the poet in Williamsburgh.

“When Burns was alive, if you had been called upon to ask the men who were the judges of men, what man in all England and Scotland would continue to be celebrated through the scores and hundreds of years, I think his name would have been mentioned last upon the list," wrote Beecher. "They may be remembered by the archaeologist, but the peasant and the man who received their affections…is universal, and wherever there are men with hearts and susceptibilities Robert Burns‘ name is precious today.”

Beecher, a clergyman who cast a monumental shadow across the 19th century as a social reformer, abolitionist and public speaker, was not averse to singing the praises of other literary figures of the Romantic Era -- he called Lord Byron, for example, 'A Greek god...the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.'

But his praise for Burns was unreserved.

So too, by and large, was that of America's Good Gray Poet. Why? “His brightest hit is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor’d like wild fruits or berries,” gushes Whitman before catching his breath. “Even the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) … are not only in consonance with the underlying spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew’d flavor of the Scotch vernacular.”

There's more of course -- Burns was a man who helped define many of the literary tenets of the Romantic Era beyond use of the vernacular, including a fierce insistence on celebrating the dignity of the individual. His straightforward assertion that a man in honest poverty is 'a man for all that,' is sung annually at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, and a message as relevent as that resounding on the streets of America as the OWS movement speaks out against the arrogance of the elite who would 'blame the victim,' demonizing those who have not benefited from a rigged system for the narrow distribution of a nation's wealth.

Is there for honest poverty
that hangs his head, an' a' that
The coward slave, we pass him by
We dare be poor for a' that...

a man's a man for a' that
for a' that an' a' that
...the honest man, though e'er sae poor
Is king o' men for a' that.

With words like to burn in the hearts of the outsourced and the economically disenfranchised, it'd be little surprise if people today agreed with Beecher, who called Burns a benefactor to society. “He is the true benefactor who touches the inner man,' wrote Beecher. "This is the position to which must be assigned, for all time, Robert Burns.”

'For all time' is quite a long time. And a generous appraisal, perhaps, even for the man who famously wrote in his 'To A Mouse,' that it was better to be a 'wee timrous beastie' touched only by the present, instead of a man who must 'backward cast my e'e/on prospects drear/An' forward, tho I canna see/I guess and fear.'

But in appraising Scotland's premier poet's legacy, one need only be like Burns' mouse, touched by the present, and look at what's happening today on the streets of America.

And at the Walt Whitman Birthplace. That should be enough to declare that, from Wall Street to the little town of Huntington NY, the the future wasn't something Robert Burns need have feared much at all, 'for a' that.'