I’ve had several people unfriend me over the past few days because I’ve criticized President Donald J. Trump and/or because I’ve argued that Islam and the Qur’an aren’t fundamentally and murderously evil. With regard to the former complaint, I want to share something:
On 7 May 1918, during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, an editorial appeared in the Kansas City Star. In part, it read as follows:
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
The letters to the editor of the Kansas City Star that followed this piece were largely negative and angry. While many merely insisted that the article’s author should stand by President Wilson, others were far less gentle. One suggested that “He should be stood before a stone wall and shot.”
Who wrote the article? Who was this traitor? It’s author was Col. Theodore Roosevelt, the heroic leader of the famous “Rough Riders” during the Spanish-American War, who, from 1901 to 1909, had served as twenty-sixth president of the United States of America.
Thanks to Alden Weight for first calling part of the quotation above to my attention.
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