What Killed Teddy Roosevelt?

There can be little doubt that, here in America, 2010 will be remembered as a tough year coming on the heels of a tough decade. Be it unprecedented rancor, record-setting obstructionism, the waxing crescent moon of our economy, or the continuously embarrassing fecklessness of much of the media, this year gave us a great deal to cringe about. Sure, we benefited as a nation from many of the hard-fought legislative achievements of the most productive Congress in fifty years, but each of those gains -- substantial though they may be -- carries the heavy asterisk of what could have been. This is the year that brought us the nightmarish stultification of the conservative movement and the nearly parodic collapse of the exhausted liberal will; it introduced us to Christine O'Donnell, Eric Massa, Tony Hayward, Sharron Angle, Terry Jones, bedbugs, death panels, Miami LeBron, and Four Loko. As demoralizing as so much of it was, however -- I'm looking at you, Four Loko -- my biggest regret of 2010 is reserved for an event that never happened.

2010 ought to have commemorated the hundredth anniversary of an American political movement which sought to make our country a kinder and better land, a movement which was conceived on August 31st, 1910 in the southwest corner of Osawatomie, Kansas, and which died, stillborn, during the presidential election of 1912. That August evening was supposed to have marked the culmination of a two-day festival memorializing America's most famous radical, John Brown, with the dedication of a park in his name; in the course of an hour-and-a-half-long address, however, the illustrious keynote speaker hardly even mentioned the notorious honoree. Two years removed from the presidency and two years shy of announcing that he would run again, Teddy Roosevelt spoke to 30,000 Kansans from atop a kitchen table that night, delivering what would come to be known as the "New Nationalism Speech." It was a speech about justice, about the principles we as a nation hold dear; it was a clarion call that -- for a moment -- reminded us of America's promise of a fair shake for all, and of how far we had already fallen from that foundational ideal.

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