Kermit Roosevelt III > Quotes

“I never wanted to safe... I wanted to be good.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, Allegiance

“We are at war, and in time of war there is only one rule. Form your battalion and fight.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, Allegiance

“The “Address at a Sanitary Fair” shifts, somewhat abruptly, to a discussion of the meaning of liberty. “We all declare for liberty,” he says, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Thus, Lincoln continues, “the shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“do argue that the standard account of American history isn’t accurate—not because it leaves out unpleasant truths, although of course it does. It’s because it tells us a fundamentally false story about where our values come from, and about who the heroes and villains of our national story are. Once we see that, we also see something else: There is another story that hasn’t been told. There is a different, better way to understand America. It is more true, it is more inspiring, and it is more useful. It can bring us together in the way the standard story promised to.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Uncompensated emancipation suggests not that the Founders’ Constitution is being changed but that it is being repudiated—claims based on slavery are as invalid as claims based on rebel debt. Uncompensated emancipation is of course also a feature of the Emancipation Proclamation—and the Takings Clause issue is one of several reasons to think that the Emancipation Proclamation is unconstitutional under the Founders’ Constitution.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“The liberty to do what one wants to the limits of one’s strength—including the liberty to do as one wills with other people—is the liberty of the state of nature. No one has the right to demand obedience from anyone else, although some have the ability to compel it by force.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Most Americans don’t know that military coups swept over half the country, with the acquiescence of the federal government. But that is what happened. The legitimate governments of southern states and cities were overthrown by force, by white supremacist paramilitary organizations. Black people and Republicans were disenfranchised and massacred. They call it the Redemption of the South, and what it means is we turn away from the idea of equality.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“But what makes us American—our deepest ideal—is that we keep trying. America is born in an attempt to find a new and better way, to escape the stale and oppressive monarchies of Europe. We don’t get it right immediately. Yet we keep going. We’re looking for America, and we know that the America we’re looking for isn’t something that’s given to us by Founding Fathers. It’s something we make, something we find inside ourselves. The true America is not handed down from the past but created anew by each generation, created a little better, and what we can give the future is the opportunity to get just a little closer than we did ourselves. That’s the promise that makes us American.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Abraham Lincoln did many remarkable things, but one of the most remarkable is this sort of magic trick—he makes people think that he’s the one fighting for the Declaration and the Founders’ Constitution, when in fact he’s against them.10 If you draw a line from the Declaration of Independence through the Founders’ Constitution, it doesn’t lead to us. It goes to the rebel South, and it stops there. We aren’t, as John F. Kennedy said, the heirs of the first Revolution. We aren’t the heirs of the Founders. We’re the heirs of the people who rejected the theory of the Declaration—who defeated it by force of arms. We also rejected the Founders’ Constitution. And we did so, again, by force of arms.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“The Revolutionaries who declare their independence overstate the injustices inflicted on them and ignore the injustices they inflict on others. The America they create fails—the Articles of Confederation are a disaster, lasting less than ten years. Americans work within them as long as they can, hoping for improvement, but in the end they have to break the existing order.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Indeed, when people talk about how the Constitution is designed to implement the principles of the Declaration, they almost always point to the Fourteenth Amendment—sometimes without noticing that this means they are not talking about the Founders’ Constitution. In part due to Supreme Court decisions, however, the federal government ended up protecting individuals primarily from states and secondarily, if at all, from other individuals.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Measured according to the goals set out in the preamble, the Founders’ Constitution is a worse disaster than the Articles. It does not create a more perfect union: eleven states secede, thirteen if you accept the Confederate claims to Missouri and Kentucky. It does not insure domestic tranquility: Americans kill more Americans than any foreign enemy ever has, some three-quarters of a million dead. It brings the blessings of liberty to the Founders, but to their posterity the curse of war.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Abolitionists, though, find no support in the political theory of the Declaration. This point is hard to accept today. But the contemporaneous understanding of the Declaration was pretty clearly that it was about national independence, not individual liberty, and certainly not the liberty of political outsiders. Even more: the Declaration can be mustered to make an argument about slavery—but it is an argument against abolition.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“The government, Lincoln suggests, should intervene to protect individuals from other individuals—to redress the natural consequences of inequalities of power.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“The America promised in Lincoln’s speeches and delivered by the Reconstruction Amendments is not a fulfillment of founding ideals but their repudiation. It is based on inclusive equality, not exclusive individualism. Its political community is open rather than closed by race. Its criterion of legitimacy is not whether a government protects the natural rights of insiders—a principle that prohibits redistribution to outsiders and even to other insiders—but rather whether it represents the will of the people. This principle allows insiders not just to fight for their own rights but to make sacrifices for others. The Civil War, far more than the Revolution, embodies this principle, which the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” celebrates: Let us die to make men free.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“They laugh because they’re surprised, because of course they’ve been taught the standard story about how wonderful and successful the Constitution has been. Most of them haven’t heard the phrase “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” It originates, remember, from William Lloyd Garrison, who urged northern secession rather than union with slaveholders and burned a copy of the Constitution. “So perish all compromises with tyranny!”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Jefferson recognized, of course, that people would not remain in the state of nature. They would come together to form governments to secure their rights. But the job of such a government is to secure the rights of the people who create it. The government formed by wolves would protect the rights of wolves against each other, and it would protect their rights to do as they willed with the sheep, too. A government that protects the rights of its citizens, including their right to enslave outsiders, is a Declaration-style government. It is the government that the southern states consistently sought to form and protect—by leaving the British Empire, by joining the Union, and, in the end, by leaving the Union, too.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“That is the terrible contradiction at the heart of the standard story—not that slave owners wrote a document promising equality to all men (they didn’t), but that it gives us a story within which we are not the heroes at all. We are the bad guys. Yet there’s another twist. The bad guys—the national government—turned out to be good. The Reconstruction Constitution is better than the Founding Constitution. Lincoln’s equality is better than Jefferson’s equality.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“That is the attitude we need today. That is the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: the soldiers who sang that they would die to make men free.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“This is the moment that you should have when you realize how backward the standard story is. When you look down at the corpse of the Confederacy—and you might want to double tap to be sure it’s dead—you are not seeing the deviant outsider that was properly vanquished by the principles of the Declaration. You are seeing the body of Founding America. You are seeing the death of the central principle of the Declaration, the death of the Founders’ Constitution. (Thurgood Marshall: “While the Union survived the Civil War, the Constitution did not.”25) That’s what you see so vividly in Federalist no. 46. Madison—who of course is a slave owner from Virginia—is describing the Civil War and telling us not to worry, the South will win.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“Redeemer governments write new constitutions; they put up monuments to Confederates and terrorists. In 1891, the Redeemer government of New Orleans erects a monument to the victors of the Battle of Liberty Place: the White League. In 1920, a committee erects a monument to honor the three white men who died in the attack on the Grant Parish courthouse as “heroes . . . fighting for White Supremacy.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“But we do go forward. Inspired, once again, by military service and a war against a racist enemy—this time Nazi Germany—Black Americans press their calls for equality. The Supreme Court invalidates government racial segregation, in public schools and elsewhere.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“One final note: in this book I say “we” a lot. No matter who you are, you will probably encounter at least one “we” to which your reaction is “not me.” And maybe that’s true. But that reaction illustrates a theme of the book, which is that the basic American struggle is over who is an insider and who an outsider—who comes within the most fundamental “we”: We the People.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“He spoke of Black suffrage: on April 11, 1865, he expressed a desire to allow some Blacks (those who had fought for the Union and, in a less appealing phrase, the “very intelligent”) to vote. Present at that speech was John Wilkes Booth, who fumed in response, “That means n***** citizenship” and “That is the last speech he will ever make.” Four days later Lincoln was dead—a martyr not for the cause of Union, but for Black citizenship. Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency, and public opinion hardened against the South.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“The Revolution and the Founders’ Constitution chose unity over justice, but the Civil War and Reconstruction put justice ahead of unity. The heroes and villains are different. The Founding reveres paramilitary organizations like the Sons of Liberty. The army of the national government is viewed suspiciously—the Founders did not want a standing army. In Reconstruction, US Army troops, including many Black soldiers, are the heroes, and paramilitary organizations like the Klan and the White League are the villains. The presence of a standing army within a civilian population, dreaded by the Revolutionaries, is what protects the freedpeople”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“But Lincoln says something about the future that’s pretty amazing. He says that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. And it does. The Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—give us a new set of founding principles.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“The Founders’ Constitution is a deal. You get an American nation, but you must accept slavery. That’s a bargain with evil, a deal with the devil. And like most deals with the devil, it doesn’t work out very well.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“But the idea that letting people know how deeply rooted racism has been will make them lose faith in America is both patronizing and implausible. Patronizing because it suggests that some Americans can’t handle the truth, and implausible because the people most likely to lose faith—Black Americans—know the problem of racism all too well already.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“It is a sign of how thoroughly the Reconstruction Constitution has displaced the Founders’ Constitution that these are the cases that define our constitutional order. We are not Founding America, and we are not the heirs of that first Republic, either. We are the heirs of the people who destroyed it. We are Reconstruction America.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story

“the lower South, its meaning was settled by the overtly discriminatory Black Codes. These codes, described by Kenneth Stampp as “a twilight zone between slavery and freedom,”12 restricted Blacks by, for instance, requiring them to sign labor contracts and prohibiting them from taking any job other than farmer or servant without receiving a license and paying a tax.13 Extensive regulation of the “employment” relationship made it resemble slavery, with “masters” allowed to whip “servants.” Breaching or not entering into a contract could trigger the application of vagrancy laws, which took advantage of the Thirteenth Amendment back door: Blacks convicted of vagrancy could be sentenced to work or leased out while prisoners.”
― Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story