Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate BiographyThayer, William Roscoe
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography
Thayer, William Roscoe
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
It may be that an entire people may lose for a time its sense of
logic. We have just had the most awful proof that, through a
long-continued and deliberate education for that purpose, the
German people lost its moral sense and set up diabolical
standards in place of those common to all civilized races. We
know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the
influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has lost its
taste for generations together in art, and in poetry. We remember
that the Witchcraft Delusion obsessed our ancestors. It is not
impossible, therefore, that between 194 and 1918 the American
people passed through a stage in which it threw logic to the
winds. This would account at least for its infatuation for
President Wilson, in spite of his undisguised inconsistencies and
appalling blunders. A people who thought logic ally and kept
certain principles steadily before it, could hardly otherwise
have tolerated Mr. Wilson's "too-proud-to-fight" speech, and his
message to Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania, or his
subsequent endeavor to make the Americans think that there was no
choice between the causes for which the Allies and the Teutons
were fighting. Was it not he who said that Europe was war-mad,
and that America had better mind her own business, and look the
other way? Did he not declare that we were forced into war, and
then that we were not? That a President of the United States
should assert or even insinuate these things during the great War
for Humanity -and by Humanity I mean every trait, every advance
which has lifted men above the level of the beast, where they
originated, to the level of the human with its potential ascent
to heights undreamed of--is amazing now: what will it be a
generation hence?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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