I do not mean that it will reduce him to an abstraction of
perfection, as ill-judged worshipers of George Washington
attempted to do with him. Theodore Roosevelt was so vastly human,
that no worshiper can make him abstract and retain recognizable
features. We have reached the time when we will not suffer
anybody to turn our great ones into gods or demigods, and to
remove them far from us to dwell, like absentee deities, on a
remote Olympus, or in an unimaginable Paradise; we must have them
near, intimates whom our souls can converse with, and our hearts
love. Such an intimate was Roosevelt living, and such an intimate
will he be dead. Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt--those are the
three whom Americans will cherish and revere; each of them a
leader and representative and example in a structural crisis in
our national life.
Those of us who knew him, knew him as the most astonishing human
expression of the Creative Spirit we had ever seen. His manifold
talents, his protean interests, his tireless energy, his
thunderbolts which he did not let loose, as well as those he did,
his masterful will sheathed in self-control like a sword in its
scabbard, would have rendered him superhuman, had he not
possessed other qualities which made him the best of playmates
for mortals.
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