Last week, I visited Sagamore Hill, the home of Theodore Roosevelt in Oyster Bay, N.Y. Roosevelt died in 1919 but his wife occupied the house until the 1940s, when she passed away–at which point it more or less became the T.R. memorial that it is today. Just about everything in the house is original. A friend told me that in walking through the house, you have the sense that T.R. still lives there, but has just stepped away for a minute. That’s about right.
I enjoyed the tour and recommend it to anybody who has an interest in T.R. But I’m going to nitpick. I was struck (but not really surprised) by the complete lack of anything having to do with Roosevelt’s Christian faith. This is a guy who made a point of becoming a Sunday school volunteer when he went off to Harvard as a young man. When he went for hikes, he often carried a Bible with him. He didn’t wear religion on his sleeve, but it was important to him. You just wouldn’t know that from the site dedicated to his life–not from the house, not from the museum, not from the park ranger. The place has been secularized.
I’ve written about the secularization of public memorials previously. In Washington, neither the FDR Memorial nor the WW2 Memorial contain even a single mention of God. Here’s what T.R. himself once wrote about faith:
I have no patience with those who attack, who would destroy, a man’s belief in religion–no patience with those who would convert the Jew en masse, or the Catholic. More likely than not, where they succeed at all they succeed only in destroying something–they take something real away and give nothing in return, leaving the victim bankrupt. I am always sorry for the faithless man, just as I am sorry for the woman without virtue.
(This passage may be found in Theodore Roosevelt’s History of the United States, a forthcoming book edited by Daniel Ruddy.)