Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism

Abstract

Any examination of American nationalism must, sooner or later, contend with its contradictory character. On the one hand, it offers a civic creed promising all Americans the same individual rights irrespective of color, religion, or sex. That creed has strongly influenced American politics and society, imparting social cohesion to a sprawling, heterogeneous population and inspiring countless democratic movements. On the other hand, American nationalism has long harbored racial ideologies that define the United States and its mission in ethnoracial ways and have sought to prove American racial superiority through economic might and military conquest. As Rogers Smith, Matthew Jacobson, and others have shown, racialized constructions of American nationalism were present from the early days of the Republic: in the Constitution itself, which legalized slavery, and in a 1790 law declaring that naturalization would be limited to those individuals who were free and white. And such constructions persisted well into the twentieth century.' This essay explores the contradictory character of American nationalism. It does so not by identifying groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), espousing one principle or the other, but by examining how both principles often coexisted in the minds of single individuals. No individual better illustrates this phenomenon than Theodore