We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (review)

We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism examines how Theodore Roosevelt defined American identity and its implication for racial relations. Leroy G. Dorsey argues, "To protect American identity and to prevent social chaos, Roosevelt took on a seemingly impossible task: he would bring race, ethnicity, and citizenship into the spotlight of public discourse, and he would offer all of these diverse groups the opportunity to see themselves as 'Americans pure and simple'" (3). Roosevelt accomplished this task by appealing to the Frontier Myth.

Dorsey opens with a chapter examining how myths function before offering four chapters focusing on Roosevelt's rhetoric on immigrants, Native Americans, African Americans, and "hyphenated" Americans. His concluding chapter examines what lessons we might glean from Roosevelt for our current conversations about what it means to be an American. Dorsey demonstrates that Roosevelt's faith in rugged individualism meant that he could argue that some minorities met the standards determined by the Frontier Myth even while maintaining that these groups were often backward in relation to true Americanism. Dorsey draws from a wide range of Roosevelt's writing and speeches, but focuses most heavily on his earlier works.

Dorsey explains that, for Roosevelt, the Frontier Myth relied on three tenets: "strength, integrity, and earned equality." He also asserts that Roosevelt "called for a retelling of the Puritans' mission into the wilderness and the application of the lessons they learned to the modern era" (39). Roosevelt valorizes many of the early immigrants—after all, their success in early America proved his ideals. But he argues they made these accomplishments only by assimilating and by forgetting the Old World. Dorsey shows in a later chapter how this relates to Roosevelt's distaste for hyphenated Americans, particularly German Americans at the outbreak of World War I. Roosevelt saw the immigrant story as mythically powerful yet held immigrants to standards that demanded their assimilation.

For racial minorities, the myth was often less empowering. The Frontier Myth crafted a special role for Native Americans, and Roosevelt's rhetoric often cast them as savage and even a part of nature itself (like beasts). Also, early immigrants proved their virtue by fighting the elements, but they also proved their worth by violently displacing indigenous populations. Roosevelt's rhetoric largely vilified Indians, yet he also argued that some tribes and a handful of individual natives rose above the savagery. Roosevelt was concerned with a weakening of the United States' spirit and believed that Native American blood revitalized the nation, keeping it from the "malaise of the modern era" (90).

African American blood, however, did not fit as easily into Roosevelt's Frontier Myth. Yet African Americans had also proved their strength and integrity under slavery and during its aftermath, and thus Roosevelt held that some African Americans might fulfill expectations of American ideals. For most African Americans, however, he argued they should pursue their own economic success in trade industries—thus benefiting the economy of the United States. Roosevelt also pacified white concerns about black equality by exemplifying black individuals who worked with whites and former slaves who had helped benefit their masters.

Dorsey concludes by reflecting on how the struggles between competing understandings of American identity continue today. He argues that the myth of the American Dream draws from many of the same themes of Roosevelt's Frontier Myth, even if today we seldom hear rhetors tease out the racial assumptions that underlie policies about belonging and equality. Dorsey argues that publicly Roosevelt was able to find a rhetorical balance between the needs of the white majority and the interests of the ethnic minorities even while his personal sentiment viewed minorities as generally inferior.

One of the strengths of Dorsey's text is this ability to show Roosevelt's struggle to find a way for white audiences to deal with race without compromising white...