damned politicians
Why Barack Obama was in Osawatomie, Kansas: to create evocations of a speech by Theodore Roosevelt 100 years ago when announcing a “New Nationalism”.
… Which was a little creepy when Roosevelt did that. But never mind. Roosevelt looms large in American history — he’s figured as someone who did things Obama wants people to think he’s up to doing… and so goes Obama’s 2012 branding.
In a way in which I’ve mused about a fashion assemble in a store in evoking a style from the 1980s that was evoking a style from the 1950s… things don’t repeat in history, but they rhyme:
Roosevelt had been invited to Osawatomie to preside over the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park, near the site where the radical abolitionist and a small band of his followers had skirmished with a much larger pro-slavery force in 1856. Roosevelt, who had been mulling re-entering the political arena after leaving the White House in 1908, agreed. The association with Brown, who had led the 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry that helped to spark the Civil War, would allow Roosevelt to align himself publicly with the insurgents within the GOP and to rebuke the conservative Old Guard establishment.
Much of the contemporary reaction to his “New Nationalism” speech regarded it as channeling the uncompromising spirit of old John Brown. “It is impossible to conceive of a more radical speech, in relation to the interests of wealth, being delivered in this country at the present time by any one outside of the socialist party,” announced the Springfield Republican. Other papers labeled it “communistic” and “anarchistic.”
But Roosevelt did not mean for his speech—the writing of which he largely delegated to an ally, Giddord Pinchot, who held even more extreme views on governmental authority—to be a statement of radical beliefs. He had initially hoped that by championing progressive principles, he could take control of the potentially irresponsible insurgent forces within the GOP and orchestrate a reconciliation with the party’s more conservative wing. In fact, in the address itself, he did not merely define himself as a crusader against special interests; he also signaled his resistance to the excesses of radicalism as well.
His delicate political positioning became clear to those who assembled at the dedication of the John Brown memorial, including a few elderly veterans of the fighting at Osawatomie, expecting to hear something of the abolitionist martyr. In fact, Roosevelt made only a passing reference to Brown in his speech. To many, the omission seemed like a rebuke. As one Kansas editor recalled the event a few years later, with only a slight exaggeration (Roosevelt did invoke Brown twice), the former president “dedicated a monument to John Brown without mentioning…Brown’s name.”
The neglect of Brown was intentional. In the weeks leading up to the speech, Roosevelt’s advisers, specifically Kansas editor William Allen White, had been urging the former president not to forge too close an association with Brown, for fear of taking on his radical taint. As White wrote Roosevelt, he considered Brown “a bloody butcher and a fanatic,” and he used his ambivalence toward Brown to make a larger point about the ineffectiveness of extremism in the cause of reform. Roosevelt responded that he largely agreed with White’s estimation of Brown—and extremists more generally. “At the moment I am endeavoring to prevent the John Browns among the insurgents getting themselves into a position from which the Abraham Lincolns cannot extricate themselves,” he explained.
Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts was to suggest that his party had gone off course from its origins with Lincoln — curiously it’s a difficult fit for Roosevelt — Lincoln gnashed his teeth at John Brown’s activism.
President Obama could have delivered his speech anywhere — the Theodore Roosevelt national historic site in Oyster Bay, N.Y., for example. To link his message with Roosevelt’s was clever and perhaps effective. But to go to Osawatomie and ignore the history that brought Roosevelt there in the first place is disrespectful of, to quote Lincoln again, “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,” and the “work which they who fought here … so nobly advanced.”
Coincidentally, on the same day in nearby Kansas City, Tony Horwitz, author of the wildly popular “Confederates in the Attic,” spoke at Unity Temple to promote his new book “Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.”
“One of the reasons I’m fascinated with Brown,” Horwitz notes, “is how he touches so many hot buttons in our culture. There’s race, violence, religious fundamentalism, the right of individuals to defy their government. All these issues are still with us, and Brown poses questions for which there are no easy answers.”
Historical literacy is at an all-time low in a nation that never needed it more than now. We don’t require our presidents to function as “Historian in Chief.” But the best ones often do and use soaring rhetoric, historical allusion and context to help us better understand the challenges and opportunities we face. To go to Osawatomie and neglect a nod to its history diminishes the point in being there and squanders an opportunity to leverage its meaning as a milestone in America’s epic journey of freedom.