All Daring and Courage
July 21, 2005
There are more spider webs at the Theodore Roosevelt memorial than at any of the other big presidential or war memorial.. and that is the point. The large memorial, which features a larger than life bronze statue of the president energetically raising his hand, is surrounded by nature.. and thus impossible to keep clean. The central stone pavement is open to the unforgiving sun, but encircling the statue is a gravel walkway featuring four large slabs which contain his thoughts on the topics of Nature, Manhood, Youth, and State. The trees, which may have been mere saplings when the monument was built, have now grown to healthy size and provide ample shade. The visitor can actually linger and read.. the memorial welcomes that kind of appreciation.
This president, who took office in 1901 after William McKinley was assassinated, was known for his work to conserve America’s green spaces, and thus to set his memorial on a small uninhabited island in the Potomac was inspired planning. One of the quotations reads:
All Daring and Courage
All Iron Endurance of Misfortune
Make for a Finer and Nobler Type of
Manhood.
So how hypocritical would it have been to set the memorial in some place that did not require a little effort? Yes, it takes a bit of expended energy to walk across the bridge and then follow the trail to his memorial, but one is rewarded by the knowledge that a finer and nobler type of manhood is being instilled.
Theodore Roosevelt would reward study. He was a Republican who supported natural conservation to the hilt. We owe many areas designated originally as “National Monuments”, but then upgraded later to National Parks, to his presidential insistence.. including Joshua Tree Nation Park, one dear to my heart. He is proof that one can be a Republican and pro-environment.. although one might now despair at such a combination. He also made his mark as a president who was willing to break up corporate monopolies. Capitalism was great, but there had to be a level playing field. What was good for corporations was not uncritically assumed to be good for America.
Liberal would be the wrong word for Roosevelt.. a term that really only makes sense in the United States after the Sixties. But he was certainly a progressive, as another quotation makes clear:
A Great Democracy
Has Got to Be Progressive or It Will
Soon Cease Either to Be Great or a Democracy.
Ralph Nader could have said that.. Today’s conservative movement is more apt to erect portraits of a perfect past than to stir us to move forward.
The island was known as Theodore Roosevelt Island even before the building of his memorial; it is marked as such on the map that came with my 1937 WPA guidebook. Today one can walk on the trails through scrappy woodland and over a boardwalk to observe a swamp. There is not much from the outside that breaks into view, as the trees and plants form an effective green barrier. The only clue that a great capital lay nearby came from the airplanes that regularly cut directly above the island on their way to landing at Ronald Reagan Airport. Near the end of my hike I walked out to the water’s edge facing Washington and Georgetown, and through some branches I could just see the Watergate Complex.. where the break-in that led to the downfall of a president occurred.. back about the time I was born. On my way out of the park, crossing the foot bridge, I looked up at the modern office buildings in Rosslyn, and read at the top of one: Northrop-Grumman.. the defense aerospace contractor. So it was not possible to get lost on this progressive island for too long without coming back to the realities of our world.. a bit more than a century since Theodore Roosevelt first took his oath of office.
