Quotes from Kermit Roosevelt III

We are at war, and in time of war there is only one rule. Form your battalion and fight.

I never wanted to safe... I wanted to be good.

And that's maybe a better description of the experience of reading the Federalist Papers now, if you're reading them for guidance through a modern crisis. The predictions of the Framers of the Constitution were accurate for a time, but history diverged from their path a while back.

Most Americans don't know that military coups swept over half the country, with the acquiescence of the federal government. But that is what happened. The legitimate governments of southern states and cities were overthrown by force, by white supremacist paramilitary organizations. Black people and Republicans were disenfranchised and massacred. They call it the Redemption of the South, and what it means is we turn away from the idea of equality.

Redeemer governments write new constitutions; they put up monuments to Confederates and terrorists. In 1891, the Redeemer government of New Orleans erects a monument to the victors of the Battle of Liberty Place: the White League. In 1920, a committee erects a monument to honor the three white men who died in the attack on the Grant Parish courthouse as "heroes . . . fighting for White Supremacy.

That is the attitude we need today. That is the "Battle Hymn of the Republic": the soldiers who sang that they would die to make men free.

The Revolutionaries who declare their independence overstate the injustices inflicted on them and ignore the injustices they inflict on others. The America they create fails—the Articles of Confederation are a disaster, lasting less than ten years. Americans work within them as long as they can, hoping for improvement, but in the end they have to break the existing order.

But we do go forward. Inspired, once again, by military service and a war against a racist enemy—this time Nazi Germany—Black Americans press their calls for equality. The Supreme Court invalidates government racial segregation, in public schools and elsewhere.

One final note: in this book I say "we" a lot. No matter who you are, you will probably encounter at least one "we" to which your reaction is "not me." And maybe that's true. But that reaction illustrates a theme of the book, which is that the basic American struggle is over who is an insider and who an outsider—who comes within the most fundamental "we": We the People.

Regie Gibson said, "Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. . . . What we love is nostalgia. We love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. History itself is often an indictment. And people? We hate to be indicted.

But the idea that letting people know how deeply rooted racism has been will make them lose faith in America is both patronizing and implausible. Patronizing because it suggests that some Americans can't handle the truth, and implausible because the people most likely to lose faith—Black Americans—know the problem of racism all too well already.

But Lincoln says something about the future that's pretty amazing. He says that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. And it does. The Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—give us a new set of founding principles.

They laugh because they're surprised, because of course they've been taught the standard story about how wonderful and successful the Constitution has been. Most of them haven't heard the phrase "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." It originates, remember, from William Lloyd Garrison, who urged northern secession rather than union with slaveholders and burned a copy of the Constitution. "So perish all compromises with tyranny!

The Founders' Constitution is a deal. You get an American nation, but you must accept slavery. That's a bargain with evil, a deal with the devil. And like most deals with the devil, it doesn't work out very well.

The liberty to do what one wants to the limits of one's strength—including the liberty to do as one wills with other people—is the liberty of the state of nature. No one has the right to demand obedience from anyone else, although some have the ability to compel it by force.

The government, Lincoln suggests, should intervene to protect individuals from other individuals—to redress the natural consequences of inequalities of power.

Uncompensated emancipation suggests not that the Founders' Constitution is being changed but that it is being repudiated—claims based on slavery are as invalid as claims based on rebel debt. Uncompensated emancipation is of course also a feature of the Emancipation Proclamation—and the Takings Clause issue is one of several reasons to think that the Emancipation Proclamation is unconstitutional under the Founders' Constitution.

Indeed, when people talk about how the Constitution is designed to implement the principles of the Declaration, they almost always point to the Fourteenth Amendment—sometimes without noticing that this means they are not talking about the Founders' Constitution. In part due to Supreme Court decisions, however, the federal government ended up protecting individuals primarily from states and secondarily, if at all, from other individuals.

It is a sign of how thoroughly the Reconstruction Constitution has displaced the Founders' Constitution that these are the cases that define our constitutional order. We are not Founding America, and we are not the heirs of that first Republic, either. We are the heirs of the people who destroyed it. We are Reconstruction America.

From the front row of the balcony, I look out over the Uptown Cinema. The red velvet seats are emptying, the credits scrolling up the screen. Ginger Rogers married a Nazi, but Cary Grant got her out of it. Their ship is sailing to America; sun burns away the fog and the wind blows free. Now they are gone and I am coming back to reality, breathing a harsher air. It is how I always feel when a movie ends.

In time of war, it is not enough to say, 'I am a citizen and I have rights.' One must also say, 'I am a citizen and I have obligations.

I have crossed over, and that childhood is as far away and strange as something that happened to someone else in a land beyond the sea. That boy is not me, though I am what he became.

There is no suspension, no whispered prayer for silk to stop my fall. There is only the falling, and it goes on and on, in fierce silence and sharp bursts of breath.

But for a moment I stay there, suspended above the green swell of the land as though thrown up onto the crest of a wave, seeing for the first time a break in the at horizon. For this the boats crossed the ocean, the wagons climbed the mountain pass. For this the songs were sung with desert all around. This is what is given: the promise there is still a way, if we can find it, the promise we can always be renewed.