“Patriotism should be an integral part of our every feeling at all times.â€
Fear God and Take Your Own Part is Theodore Roosevelt’s cutting criticism of pacifism and the lack of preparedness of his country under Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
Writing two years after the outbreak of World War One, Roosevelt saw that helpless nations such as Belgium were being utterly destroyed by the forces of war, yet the United States was following a policy a neutrality.
America itself was under threat by Germany, its merchant shipping was being attacked and the Lusitania had been sunk in 1915 causing the deaths of over one thousand innocent passengers. However, even despite this Roosevelt continued to see his beloved nation pursuing an isolationist and pacifist policy.
Roosevelt therefore uses this book as a call to arms. He urges the government to begin training its young men in preparation for the fight which he believed the United States must join.
This work is a collection of long essays in which Roosevelt comments on a wide variety of America’s foreign policy issues. As the New York Times states, one chapter provides a “slashing indictment†of Wilson’s “Administration toward Mexico, wherein Colonel Roosevelt charges that the President has, in effect, interfered in Mexico in the matter of purely internal affairs and has refused to interfere for the protection of American citizens.â€
Although Roosevelt wrote Fear God and Take Own Part one hundred years ago it remains as pertinent for the twenty-first century as it was for the twentieth.
“Its remarkable chapters are treated in a style almost brutal in its frankness and regard to truth.†The Columbia Spectator
Theodore Roosevelt was an American statesman, author, explore, soldier, naturalist and reformer who served as the 26th President of the United States. He died in 1919.