Omaha daily bee., 1919-10-27
Remembering Roosevelt
From the New York Times,

Roosevelt week brings an opportunity that
comes but seldom in the life OF any nation:
A great historic figure is passing from the world
of contemporary act, the world OF the morning
paper, and into the world of memory and OF
history. Such little time ago men loved and
praised fellow-citizen or disagreed with him;
it was always as man to man. The intensely
personal feeling shut, off the larger vision.
Even when some ranked him next to Washing
ton and Lincoln, the Judgment which purported
to be historic was mainly partisan. Now we
know, are beginning to know, the great pa
. triot and leader of men in his true and per-
manent proportions.
We use the flag as symbol of the nations
tribute to all our heroic dead; but we are using
it today with difference. Others have been
shrouded in it and laid away amid the hush OF
awe. For Roosevelt we gave it to relays of
swift-footed, clean-limbed youngsters who car
red it across the great state he loved, and then
from post to post in the city of his nativity.
OF what other American has youth and swift
strength and the mounting of Joy of life been
so fit an expression? At the stations where
the flag lay overnight it was guarded by boys
who were often chosen because they were not
born of our people, but had made themselves
Americans. Among our great men no one has
expressed so vigorously our hospitality to all
who love freedom and the solemn obligations
of those who accept it. AT each station new
star was sewed upon the flag by group Of
girls and young women. In one of our schools,
of the five who sewed each an angle of the star
four were descended from veterans of the
Revolution, the Civil war; the Spanish war,
and the Great War, and the fifth was daughter
of a naturalized Hungarian. That would have
meant much to Roosevelt, for he was the first
great American to express for us the tram
scendent- dignity of all womanhood. Others of
our leaders have been reverenced devoutly,
mourned in the deep heart of the nation. The
memory of this man lives in the spirit of manly
youth and vigor, of feminine beauty and stead
fastness. In the final stage of the flag, which
will bring it to. the grave at Sycamore, it will
soar aloft in the sky. In that, too, there is a
memorable symbol
In his lifetime fortunes Bullets and rewards
came to him in inverse order. There were dec
AIDES when, in his public appearances, the heav-
ems never once failed to smile on his robust
and Joyous face. He had only to will thing
and it happened. Then came a time when it
seemed that nothing he touched could prosper
The greatest crisis which the world has ever
endured came in his prime, and he had no active
part in it, though the moral effect of his inhu-
ence on the issue may some day be reckoned
as his greatest accomplishment. To realize
what that meant one would have to be as am
bilious as he was-as eager for the larger life
as full of the flame of patriotism. But long
before with the bullet of an intended assassin
in his flesh, he had expressed the thought that
now sustained him. A mans happiness is only
ito spend and to be spent" To its last pulse
his great strength was spent for his country
That is the thought which men will remember
which will carry his fame forward through the
ages