The Partly Cloudy Patriot

In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech in Chicago called “The Strenuous Life.” It begins, “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of the ignoble eases, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife.”

When you are a westerner living on the East Coast, this is just the sort of folksy anecdote the city slickers expect you to tell. But I was the worst Montanan in history.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

I was such a young fogy that growing up involved becoming less mature.

I’m a sucker for Puritan New England and the Civil War. Because those two subjects feature the central tension of American life, the conflict between freedom and community, between individual will and the public good.