For the New Animal in America

Will Levington Comfort

My enemy has written a book.[1]

This is not man-to-man enmity, but there need be no quibble about it. For seventeen years I have studied T. R. as representative of that America which has consistently betrayed the finer aspirations of our people, shamed the real workman, bewildered the young in millions with noise and show and shine, and unerringly dimmed for the many the approaches to the Real. He stands today for armament, against all that the New Spirit has shown us out of the bleeding heart of the world, against the plain fact of the war as the quickener of spiritual life, and against every dream that was ever born in the human breast out of the loss of the love of self.

You will say, “But why this study of T. R. now? Surely he has received his Thumbs-down even from the crowd, and with a unanimity seldom accorded a public man still in the flesh.” ... I am not so sure. I wish I could be sure that his latest message would be shut from the receptivity of this land, as a door upon an evil draught.

We have managed to clump along with bunglers through the recent dropsical years of peace, but there was never such a need as now for a man of vision and power at the forefront of our affairs. These States since August have committed atrocities of short-sightedness and triumphs of selfishness—enough to complicate us for future years. The partisan and the militarist have already made our neutrality unclean. I would like to be sure that their strongest influence has already been encountered.

On our southern borders is war, and our northern border is black with distrust and the British point of view. From Vancouver to Halifax, the voice of this hour is, “If Roosevelt were only in the chair at Washington——” The ensuing part of the “if” covers the present issues from Mexico to Belgium, and the trouble is that Canada knows from England what she is wishing us; at least, in part, the venom and abomination of the saying. To judge from the Press of the States there are still many who would incite afresh the animal efficiency of our country, and who range themselves in the background with this master of the low vibration, calling upon us to answer Europe with a similar desolation.

... How many times have you heard it said, “This T. R. is in the comprehension of the crowd.” This is true. The saddest conviction ever forced into the mind of genius of any age is the opaqueness of the surface which the crowd presents to light or loveliness of any kind. And T. R. is in the comprehension of the bleakest generation which this country has ever known; nor will there ever be another like it, for we are at the end of the night. That which is about to break is either dawn or doom.

T. R. is still searching for the crowd through the endless folds of its obliquity. Who shall say that these folds are not endless; that he may not turn over still another fateful, if momentary allegiance, from the bowels of our materialism?

Enough that he is the voice to-day of the Prussian factor in America, a voice from the throat of the militarists—that curious solution of beef, iron and wine, from which—as Thou seest the Oise and the Aisne and the Vistula flow red—oh, Lord, deliver us!

I hold the conviction that if the militarists ever get in full cry after this country, we shall lose our Peace and our personality. This is an hour to stand by, and it is only in such an hour that I would venture to study a party through the character of its loudest voice. For seventeen years I have watched T. R. stand for the physical and the obvious. There has been more noise about his name in America than about any other, and yet he has never risen to a single great moment. And steadily he has mounted higher in the consciousness of T. R. Many of us thought that the crisis was reached, when for a day (a little before the last presidential nominations) the ego broke within him, and those close at hand saw a deranged creature.... A troop of us camped beside him in Tampa, and followed the Rough Riders afield above Santiago. Perhaps he has a certain animal courage—the cheapest utility of the nations—but there is no moral quality to the courage of a man who would permit himself to be cast into popular approval on a fake.... There was a reunion two years afterward of those same Rough Riders in Oklahoma. T. R. was there, campaigning on the shoulders of McKinley, much as Dr. Cook did. On the way down through Kansas for two days, we heard him on the back platform of the private coach, at every station where two or three would gather together—pouring the most terrific physical energy into political bickerings and half-truths, the same at each station—until we drew the press table as far as possible forward, and bore the oppressive heat with shut windows rather than that repeated clamor of words. He would come in conqueringly, the black coat damp with sweat.... I remember the ruffian exhibition with the cattle—steer-torturing, the brand, the snap of bone, the tightened noose, thud of poor beasts to the ground—all in a frame for him—the hat with the pinned-back brim, waving over all....

No other man has been so mighty to keep the pestiferousness of America alive in the minds of medieval Europe. As our representative citizen, he has romped our yankeeisms and cutenesses from Queenstown to Port Said and around. And so it has been for seventeen years since that Tampan camp, from party to group, from fame to notoriety, from brute-shooting and affidavits, to cocktails and new African rivers furnished with sworn statements, from woman’s suffrage back to bayonetism,—always in the sweat and heft of flesh, unvaryingly the animal man.

They say that if a child is bred and born right, his earlier years passed in hands that start him straight—such a child will return to the beauty of his inception, if time and the world are permitted to work sufficient misery upon him; misery being the great corrective. These States of America were bred of a fair dream and born of a singular beauty. The hope of the world today is that as a nation, we restore the old dream, the old inspiration; not a turning back, for that is against the law, but turning to a finer dimension of that old passion which made us a refuge and a brotherhood.

There has been fine living virtue in two recent actions of this government—two bits of high behavior. Through one of these, it seemed that a shaft of light poured down from the fatherland of the future—if day is ahead and not doom. I refer to the return of the Boxer indemnity to China.... It was like a fine moment in a busy life, and there was poetry in the answer from old Mother China.... There are men who love these States well enough to hate her many moments of unworthiness. The other figment of true national character is the determination of the part of Washington to keep her promise to Colombia.... I perceived that T. R. has risen against that, even since his book setting forth the needs of a new predatory impetus for our national life.... To anyone who asks a law to go by, for the good of the country and the rectitude of self, I would say, “Take the side that this man does not, and it will be impossible for you to lose.”