TR great-grandson to discuss president's legacy

Official White House portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, by the famed painter John Singer Sargent, who spent most of his life in Europe but came from an old New England family.

To members and friends of the Providence Committee on Foreign Relations (thepcfr.org; pcfremail@gmail.com):

Tweed Roosevelt, president of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and great-grandson of that president, will be our dinner speaker on Wednesday, Nov. 6. He’ll talk about how TR’s foreign policy, which was developed as the U.S. became truly a world power, affected subsequent presidents’ foreign policies.

In 1992, Mr. Roosevelt rafted down the 1,000-mile Rio Roosevelt in Brazil—a river previously explored by his great-grandfather in 1914 in the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition and then called the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt. The former president almost died on that legendary and dangerous trip.

After graduation from Harvard, Mr. Roosevelt served for two years as a VISTA volunteer in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side of New York City and went on to NYC’s Human Resources Administration. He subsequently earned his MBA and then taught for two years at Columbia University. A long career in management consulting and finance culminated in his becoming Chairman of Roosevelt China Investments, which, among other businesses, owns and operates the House of Roosevelt on Shanghai’s Bund.

Over the years, Mr. Roosevelt has done much to further the memory and ideals of Theodore Roosevelt. He has lectured and taught about TR at numerous institutions and schools around the world, including Harvard, Marshall, and Santa Clara Universities, ranging from single lectures to a 20-hour course that involved as guest speakers most of the well-known historians of TR.

He has also lectured on a wide range of other subjects, including conservation and the environment, hunting, politics, literature, history, mathematics, Japanese-American relations, and exploration, and has retraced many of TR’s adventures in the American West, Africa, and the Amazon. He has appeared on numerous television documentaries and radio programs and was awarded the prestigious Telly Award for his public service announcement on presidential log cabins.

Schedule:

6:00 - 6:30 PM: Cocktails

6:30 - 7:30: Dinner (salad, entree, dessert/coffee)

7:30 - 8:30: Speaker Presentation

8:30 - 9:00: Q&A with Speaker.

For information on the PCFR, including on how to join, please see our Web site – thepcfr.org – or email pcfremail@gmail.com or call 401-523-3957

Don Pesci: Twain, TR and imperialism

Mark Twain during TR's administration.

Theodore Roosevelt on Twain – “I wish I could skin Mark Twain alive.”

Twain on Roosevelt – “We have had no President before who was destitute of self-respect for his high office. We have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive-keeper or a bully.”

VERNON, Conn.

Occasionally, columnists back up against a thorny subject much in the way an innocent traveler in the woods backs up against a porcupine. The collision is often painful for both the porcupine and the columnist.

Although the deathless struggle between Twain,  a longtime Connecticut resident, and TR has been known for more than a century, it is rarely mentioned in print. Twain scholars know that Twain and TR were natural enemies on the matter of American imperialism, TR favoring the civilizing benefits of imperialism, always good for the native population and American businesses on the hunt for overseas markets, and Twain opposing it – strenuously.

TR’s animal spirits were aroused by “killing things,” as his political opponents said, and the notion that the American idea should extend beyond its Monroe Doctrine borders to Hawaii, during Twain’s time, still an island paradise controlled by the native population, Cuba and the Philippines, both part of the far-flung Spanish Empire, and wherever else three prominent American expansionists -- Theodore Roosevelt, whose ambitions for personal glory knew no bounds, William Randolph Hearst, a pro-imperialist newspaper owner, and Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge,  a close friend of TR and a shaker and mover in Congress --  though that the United States should extend its reach in the world.

Twain was still in Europe when a diffident President William McKinley, largely at the urging of pro-imperialist, ''civilizing'' forces in the United States, ordered the U.S. Navy into Cuba, there to support rebel groups agitating for democracy and freedom from Spanish rule. We all recall Hearst’s war-whoop: “Remember the Maine; To Hell With Spain.”

The Maine went down in Havana Harbor, a sinking likely caused, it was revealed seventy years after the event, by an internal fire that had ignited explosives aboard the war ship. At the time, Hearst, dollar signs always in his eyes, happily circulated the notion that the Maine had been sunk by the Spanish and said so in many lurid and sensational stories printed in his paper. Roosevelt went off as a colonel to command a regiment in Cuba and later stormed San Juan Hill with his “Rough Riders.” The Philippians, Guam especially, was set free of the Spanish navy. America’s imperial outreach was intended to Christianize and civilize savage nations, open markets to U.S.  goods and announce brashly to the world that, in an era of colonializing powers, the United States had come of age. The imperialists had the stage pretty much to themselves, and then Twain, who at first supported the Cuban adventure because he thought it might help a nation struggling against a colonial power to attain independence, returned home – with a pen dipped in the fires of Hell.

TR found that San Juan Hill was easier to storm than Twain who, to his last breath, insisted as a matter of principle, along with John Adams, that while the United States is a friend to democracy everywhere, it is the custodian only of its own.

The Twain-TR struggle continues today under different battle flags. The presence of a resurgent Islam in modern times has changed the calculus somewhat. Among other things, a resurgent Islam is intent upon 1) sweeping Western influence – religious, cultural and legal -- including democracy, from its own sphere of influence, 2) restoring a sphere of influence it held for roughly 1,500 years as an imperial power, and 3) bringing all other faiths and social orders under Islam at the point of a sword.

The contest between a resurgent Islam and a West that has internally surrendered to a superior spiritual force – demographics show that Islam will out-produce the West in the only product that really matters, children, in the not too distant future – places before those of us in the United States who believe Twain got the better of the argument over TR the age old questions: Without a more than equal countervailing force, how does the West preserve itself from destruction?

Can there be a difference between imperialism and intervention? And has there ever been in the history of the world a non-imperialist nation whose mission is the preservation and extension of Western Cvilization?

Don Pesci is a writer (mostly on politics) who lives in Vernon, Conn.

Standing by a vile president is 'morally treasonable'

 "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else."

-- Theodore Roosevelt, in The Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918

Llewellyn King: Habits to develop and monsters to avoid

No one having asked me to give their commencement address this year, I have decided to give it anyway. Here. I have been reading reports of these addresses, mostly given by public figures, some stirring debate, demonstrations and boycott. All in all, the passion is wasted because most of these addresses are not worth the fuss, the fee or the honorary degree. They occupy the unhappy space between a Sunday sermon and a sales meeting. Having exhorted the students to heights of moral rectitude they urge on them a manic menu for striving; of getting to the top of the class of life by making a lot of money and keeping America in front of China, India and, on a good day, Germany.

To read these addresses is to be told that life is a marathon in which most of the participants are from Asia and the United States is on the slippery slope to oblivion, and it missed the starter’s pistol shot.

With fine irony, it is many of those who have made a hash of national policies and foreign adventures who feel the most obliged to urge the bewildered young people of the class of 2014 to sally forth and do great things. I would humbly suggest they sally forth and live their lives: less striving, more living.

My commencement wisdom:

Do not be defined by where you work, but by what you do. Working for the dominant institution in your field may sound swell at a cocktail party, but it is almost guaranteed to be less fun and less invigorating than a lesser institution, which is not inhabited wholly by strivers. Strivers can be very tedious.

The same goes for the institution you are leaving. Worry less about where you studied and more about what you learned.

The best thing I can advise any young person is to have a well-stocked mind. It is a bulwark against adversity, a comfort in disaster, and a place where you can find strength all the days of your life; in success and disaster, in helping to heal a broken heart – and there are going to be broken hearts aplenty in this class, as there have been in all the preceding graduating classes.

Life has stages and it is worth knowing them, without being dictated to by them. In your twenties you will suffer Cupid’s arrow, the ecstasy and pain of love, make your professional mistakes, and begin the intriguing business of finding out who you are.

The thirties are the great decade: The idealism is intact, most of the mistakes are in the past, and you have the enthusiasm and energy to make your move in life. It is a golden decade when everything starts to come into focus.

The forties are for consolidating, watching children grow and deciding what is possible.

From age 50 on, you are in the harvest years. Harvest the rewards of being good at what you do, the respect of your peers, while as ever stocking your mind -- the permanent joy of learning, and especially of learning that you have not taken the human pilgrimage alone.

I have known too many people who do not know the reward and sanctuary of reading. Prodigious readers, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, would read in the five minutes before a meeting, or while waiting for a call to come through. It was the secret life that balanced the public life.

My father was not a lettered man, and reading was not something that came easily for him. As result, he missed the great community that is open to all with the good fortune to know how to read.

Do not fence yourself in — and do not let others do it for you. Do not believe that you have aptitude for this or that on a hunch: Please find out.

I have made a living as a public speaker and broadcaster for many decades. But a lawyer, in a traffic case, once told me that she would not put me on the stand because she felt I was not good at speaking in front of people. The terrifying truth is that I accepted her judgment – and lost the case.

Besides being corralled by false knowledge of ourselves, the other great monster lying in wait for you is rejection. We all dread rejection, not just those who meet it constantly like writers and sales people. Fear of rejection is a great disabler; fight it, you are not unique that way. Treat “no” as the prologue to “yes.”

Good luck.

Llewellyn King, of Washington, D.C. and Rhode Island, is executive producer and co-host of  White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.