New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1918-04-01
The Leader of Americanism

Theodore Roosevelt will be the Re-
publican candidate for President in
1920
He is the only man who can restore
the partys prestige and make it again
an instrument of militant Americanism.
Colonel Roosevelt's Portland speech
emphasizes again the value in politics
of the constructive imagination. 1t must
bring home to every Republican who
reads it the magnitude Of the folly COM
mitted by the party in 1916. If the Re-
publicans had then had the prescience
and courage to demand a rupture of re.
lations with Germany it would have lost
with honor if it had lost at ALL Events
would have indicated it.
1t would have come to its own long
ago as an original and unequivocal war
party
All the traditions of Republicanism
were in consonance with such action.
The party owed it's birth to an issue
which soon led to war. 1t was willing to
fight in 1861 to preserve the Union. 1t
had been throughout its career the cham
pion of an unyielding nationalism. It
had never become innoculated with the
virus of pacifism. 1t owed to its own
past reaction against German aggres-
sion as vigorous as it's original reaction
against slavery and secession.
For reasons which it is not necessary
to go into here Republican leadership
failed. The Republicans drifted into the
war, just as the Democrats did. And
because of that fact the Republican
party has ever since had difficulty in
establishing a moral claim to usefulness
as an opposition. 1t has also been hand
icapped by the curious popular delusion
that criticism of the conduct of the war
involves a certain bunting of the fine
edge of patriotic emotion. An effort
largely successful-has been made by
facile sentimentalists of the John Sharp
Williams type to attach to such criticism
the stigma of non-respectability.
But this popular notion is an obses-
sion. Such theory obtains in no other
country whose energies have been alb
sorbed by the war. Criticism of the gov
eminent for it's management of the war
has been rife in France, Great Britain
and Italy. 1t has worked enormous
benefit in those countries in remedying
mismanagement. 1t has compelled many
ministerial reorganizations. Even in
Germany criticism has been rampant,
and the Kaiser has yielded to it by
changing Chancellors twice since 1914.
With our inelastic political system
(which makes the Chief Executive ir-
replacable for term of years and indie
pendent of changes of opinion as re-
flected in Congress), real opposition is
sorely needed in war time. The more
sympathetic it is with the aims of the
war and the more determined to carry
the war through unf1inchingly, the better
the case for such an opposition. It is
needed to hold the party in power up to
its task, TO overcome inertia and ineffi-
cheney in Office by exposing them, to keep
before the public mind an alternative
war and after the war programme in
viting helpful comparison with the pro-
gramme of the government.
SO far the Republican party has not
succeeded in doing this. 1t can do it and
it ought to do it.
Colonel Rooscvelt's leadership offers it
the chance. His own war record is clear
clearer than that of any other Amcri-
can leader.
lie realized from the beginning that
!. IL we held TO our inherited American
conceptions a clash with Germany was
4 inevitable.
He demanded preparation for war
He denounced all policies which aimed
at keeping us out of war at the cost of
national self-rcspcct.
lie urged declaration of war after
the sinking of the Luxitanin