If I must choose between righteousness and peace – I choose righteousness.
This quote of 26thPresident Theodore Roosevelt is one of many of his amazing quotes graven on the monoliths of his memorial in Washington, D.C. on Theodore Roosevelt Island. (A hidden gem in D.C. that I encourage anyone to stop and see. It’s a little out of the way, but as worth seeing as any of the monuments along the National Mall.)
This past spring, as we were “quarantined”, I was sitting on my living room floor next to the heater one cold morning trying to warm up. My newest bookshelf is in that corner, so I did what I always do when I’m near words: read. Most of the books I have, of course, read. But as the library was closed, I was reading and re-reading my own collection. And my eyes fell on a book I had purchased at an old bookstore in New Hampshire one year by had never gotten around to reading: Fear God and Take Your Own Partby Theodore Roosevelt. I pulled it out and started skimming…and then wondered what the fearless Roosevelt would have to say about 2020 and his beloved nation’s response to a virus. Of course, I can’t say for sure but I’m pretty sure it would be scathing.
The book is a collection of articles he wrote around 1914, mostly in response to Woodrow Wilson’s “peace at all cost” response to what we now call World War I. It, too, is scathing. And clearly states the position America should have taken at the start of World War I, along with other mistakes the Wilson administration was making towards Mexico and regular protests arising around the country from what Roosevelt calls “hypehnated-Americans” (people who took great pride in being German-American or Irish-American instead of just plain old American). More than 100 years later…it would seem that while the issues may take on different terminology, some things never change.
As I read this book, I had to jot down some of my favorite parts. From peace vs. righteousness, to hard work, to duty, to the right of war…Theodore Roosevelt had plenty to say that is just as imperative today as it was in 1914.
“For a man to stand up for his own rights, or especially for the rights of somebody else, means that he must have virile qualities: courage, foresight, willingness to face risk and undergo effort. It is much easier to be timid and lazy. The average man does not like to face death and endure hardship and labor.”
“Peace is not the end. Righteousness is the end. When the Savior saw the money-changers in the Temple He broke the peace by driving them out. At that moment peace could have been obtained readily enough by the simple process of keeping quiet in the presence of wrong. But instead of preserving peace at the expense of righteousness, the Savior armed Himself with a scourge of cords and drove the money-changes from the Temple. Righteousness is the end, and peace a means to the end, and sometimes it is not peace, but war which is the proper means to achieve the end. Righteousness should breed valor and strength. When it does breed them, it is triumphant; and when triumphant, it necessarily brings peace. But peace does not necessarily bring righteousness.”
“Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.”
“…there can be no greater waste of time than to debate about non-debatable things.”
“The hyphenated American of any type is a bad American and an enemy to this country.”
“A sillier falsehood has never been uttered than the falsehood that “war settles nothing”. War settled the independence of this country; war settled the question of union; war settled the question of slavery.”
“Such pacifism puts peace above righteousness, and safety in the present above duty in the present and safety in the future.”
“Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, yet it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war may be far better than not to have fought at all.”
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