I often watch Dirty Jobs. The episode on fishing for slime eels off the coast of Maine has to have been some of the most weirdly compelling television ever. Unfortunately, I did not see the episode about safety, "Safety Third," episode 05x18, which was first aired November 24, 2009.

Poking about the blogosphere for comments on that episode, I see that several people refer to the Roosevelt quote, and mention that it was from a letter that Roosevelt wrote to his son. The quote they refer to, however, is not from a letter to Roosevelt's son. It is part of a letter that Roosevelt wrote to Solomon Stanwood Menken, the head of the National Security League and the chairman of its Congress of Constructive Patriotism, on January 10, 1917. Roosevelt's younger sister, Mrs. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, read the letter to a national meeting of the organization on January 26, 1917. The quote is in bold below, with more of the letter reproduced for context:

Americanism means many things. It means equality of rights and, therefore, equality of duty and of obligation. It means service to our common country. It means loyalty to one flag, to our flag, the flag of all of us. It means on the part of each of us respect for the rights of the rest of us. It means that all of us guarantee the rights of each of us. It means free education, genuinely representative government, freedom of speech and thought, equality before the law for all men, genuine political and religious freedom and the democratizing of industry so as to give at least a measurable equality of opportunity for all, and so as to place before us as our ideal in all industries where this ideal is possible of attainment, the system of cooperative ownership and management, in order that the tool users may, so far as possible, become the tool owners. Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob. To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American. All privileges based on wealth, and all enmity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American—both of them equally so. Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America.The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Preparedness must be of the soul no less than of the body. We must keep lofty ideals steadily before us, and must train ourselves in practical fashion so that we may realize these ideals. Throughout our whole land we must have fundamental common purposes, to be achieved through education, through intelligent organization and through the recognition of the great vital standards of life and living. We must make Americanism and Americanization mean the same thing to the native-born and to the foreign-born; to the man and to the woman; to the rich and to the poor; to the employer and to the wage-worker. If we believe in American standards, we shall insist that all privileges springing from them be extended to immigrants, and that they in return accept these standards with whole-hearted and entire loyalty. Either we must stand absolutely by our ideals and conceptions of duty, or else we are against them. There is no middle course, and if we attempt to find one, we insure for ourselves defeat and disaster.

The National Security League was founded by Menken and General Leonard Wood (the Army Chief of Staff) in December 1914. It emphasized the need for American "preparedness" in the face of challenges around the world. A swirl of various worries contributed to its rapid growth. Roosevelt echoed some of them here, including a conviction that American character had grown weak and soft, and so its ability to resist challenges had been dangerously reduced. Its young men had been "mollycoddled" by parents, especially mothers, who doted on them. The League's idea was to keep America at peace by keeping it strong. It formed the Military Training Camps Association of America, which operated summer camps for boys, the most successful one at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

The League also heavily promoted (along with the American Legion and the American Red Cross) a 1915 movie, "The Battle Cry of Peace," starring Norma Talmadge in her first leading role, in which American pacifists, used as dupes by foreign agents, successfully lobby against defense spending. America is then invaded and New York and Washington are destroyed and enslaved. Admiral George Dewey and General Wood both played themselves in the film.

The challenges that the League had in mind were not only direct confrontations with foreign powers, which appeared to be looming in dark political clouds throughout Europe and Asia, but also more indirect confrontations within American society between democracy and its foes: an elite, moneyed oligarchy from the right, and a violent, fracturing anarchism from the left, both of which were popularly seen as being unnatural, foreign importations into America.

Among other efforts to promote American preparedness, the League proposed universal athletic and military training for young men, which would not only prepare them for possible battles, but also increase the general "vigor" of the population, and contribute to the assimilation of immigrants into the mainstream. Despite the League's early popularity across the spectrum of political allegiances, after a few years it lost most of its membership when it veered off into a form of xenophobic nativism that encouraged the formation of paramilitary units among youth.

Roosevelt, as is well known, was a firm believer in the virtues of physical exercise and adventures that tested and developed one's courage and inner resources. It is no surprise that he should criticize "safety-first instead of duty first." But he placed duty above physical prowess as well.

President Roosevelt wrote to his son Kermit, who was at Groton Academy, on October 4, 1903:

I am delighted to have you play football. I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one's existence. I don't want you to sacrifice standing well in your studies to any over-athleticism; and I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master. Did you ever read Pliny's letter to Trajan, in which he speaks of its being advisable to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics, because it distracted their minds from all serious pursuits, including soldiering, and prevented their ever being dangerous to the Romans? . . .. A man must develop his physical prowess up to a certain point; but after he has reached that point there are other things that count more.

On September 27, 1905, he wrote:

Have you started at your football? I think this is important, too, although of course it must be sacrificed to your studies if necessary. But it would be good for you to have the bodily development that comes from football, and it unquestionably has some effect in helping you with the other boys.

Roosevelt was very fond of football, of all organized team sports. But during 1905, his older son, Ted, played football on the freshman team at Harvard, and during the Harvard-Yale game, the young man appears to have had his nose broken deliberately by the Yale players, who laid him out on the field three times and kicked him in the face. It was all of a piece with an escalation of violence in college football that caused many schools to consider banning the sport. On October 9, 1905, the President wrote to Kermit:

To-day I see the football men of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, to try to get them to come to a gentleman's agreement not to have mucker play.

In fact, he invited two representatives from all three universities to the White House and voiced his concerns to them about the unsportsmanlike aura of unbridled violence that had come to be a feature of college football. Partly as a result of the publicity from this meeting, the college football association agreed the following year to a series of rule changes to the game that were meant to reduce pointless violence.

After Roosevelt left office and war broke out in Europe, he became heartsick at what he regarded as Woodrow Wilson's attempts to keep America out of the war despite German outrages on American lives and property. He attempted to raise a volunteer force to fight for the Allies and, defending the effort, Roosevelt wrote:

Let us pay with our bodies for our souls' desire. Let us, without one hour's unnecessary delay, put the American flag at the battle-front in this great war for Democracy and civilization, and for the reign of justice and fair-dealing among the nations of mankind.

He used his considerable influence to place his sons (with their eager permission) at the very front of the fighting when American forces were sent. He had already written the justification back in 1905, in an address he entitled "The Strenuous Life":

If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at the hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.

In George Washington’s Farewell Address (1796), the retiring president warned that the creation of political factions, “sharpened by the spirit of revenge,” would most certainly lead to “formal and permanent despotism.” Despite Washington’s cautionary words, two of his closest advisors, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, helped to form the factions that led to the dual party system under which the U.S. operates today. Other men, most notably James Madison and John Adams, also contributed to the formation of political parties, but Hamilton and Jefferson came to represent the divisions that shaped the early national political landscape.

Although both men had been active in the Revolutionary effort and in the founding of the United States, Jefferson and Hamilton did not work together until Washington appointed Jefferson the first secretary of State and Hamilton the first secretary of the Treasury. From the beginning, the two men harbored opposing visions of the nation’s path. Jefferson believed that America’s success lay in its agrarian tradition. Hamilton’s economic plan hinged on the promotion of manufactures and commerce. While Hamilton distrusted popular will and believed that the federal government should wield considerable power in order steer a successful course, Jefferson placed his trust in the people as governors. Perhaps because of their differences of opinion, Washington made these men his closest advisors.

Hamilton’s economic plan for the nation included establishing a national bank like that in England to maintain public credit; consolidating the states’ debts under the federal government; and enacting protective tariffs and government subsidies to encourage American manufactures. All of these measures strengthened the federal government’s power at the expense of the states. Jefferson and his political allies opposed these reforms. Francophile Jefferson feared that the Bank of the United States represented too much English influence, and he argued that the Constitution did not give Congress the power to establish a bank. He did not believe that promoting manufactures was as important as supporting the already-established agrarian base. Jefferson deemed “those who labour in the earth” the “chosen people of God . . . whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.” He advised his countrymen to “let our work-shops remain in Europe.”

When George Washington’s administration began, the two camps that formed during the Constitutional ratification debates – those groups known as the Federalists and Anti-Federalists – had not yet solidified into parties. But, disagreements over the nation’s direction were already eroding any hope of political unity. In May of 1792, Jefferson expressed his fear to Washington about Hamilton’s policies, calling Hamilton’s allies in Congress a “corrupt squadron.” He expressed fear that Hamilton wished to move away from the Constitution’s republican structure, toward a monarchy modeled after the English constitution. That same month, Hamilton confided to a friend that “Mr. Madison cooperating with Mr. Jefferson is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to me and my administration, and . . . dangerous to the union, peace and happiness of the Country.”

By the time Jefferson and John Adams vied for the presidency in 1796, political factions had formed under the labels “Republicans” and “Federalists.” In fact, by 1804 the advent of political parties necessitated a constitutional amendment that changed the electoral process to allow president/vice president tickets on the ballot. The Federalists dominated the national government through the end of the 18th century. Despite President Washington’s efforts at unity, political differences proved to be too deep to promote consensus. The Republican Party emerged as organized opposition to Federalist policies, and despite Jefferson’s assurances in his first inaugural address that Americans were “all republicans” and “all federalists,” faction had solidified into party.

This version of Young George and the Colt is attributed to Horace E. Scudder.

There is a story told of George Washington's boyhood—unfortunately there are not many stories—which is to the point. His father had taken a great deal of pride in his blooded horses, and his mother afterward took pains to keep the stock pure. She had several young horses that had not yet been broken, and one of them in particular, a sorrel, was extremely spirited. No one had been able to do anything with it, and it was pronounced thoroughly vicious as people are apt to pronounce horses which they have not learned to master.

George was determined to ride this colt, and told his companions that if they would help him catch it, he would ride and tame it. Early in the morning they set out for the pasture, where the boys managed to surround the sorrel, and then to put a bit into its mouth. Washington sprang upon its back, the boys dropped the bridle, and away flew the angry animal.

Its rider at once began to command. The horse resisted, backing about the field, rearing and plunging. The boys became thoroughly alarmed, but Washington kept his seat, never once losing his self-control or his mastery of the colt. The struggle was a sharp one; when suddenly, as if determined to rid itself of its rider, the creature leaped into the air with a tremendous bound. It was its last. The violence burst a blood-vessel, and the noble horse fell dead.

Before the boys could sufficiently recover to consider how they should extricate themselves from the scrape, they were called to breakfast; and the mistress of the house, knowing that they had been in the fields, began to ask after her stock. "Pray, young gentlemen,'' said she, "have you seen my blooded colts in your rambles? I hope they are well taken care of. My favorite, I am told, is as large as his sire.''

The boys looked at one another, and no one liked to speak. Of course the mother repeated her question. "The sorrel is dead, madam,'' said her son, "I killed him.'' And then he told the whole story. They say that his mother flushed with anger, as her son often used to, and then, like him, controlled herself, and presently said, quietly: "It is well; but while I regret the loss of my favorite, I rejoice in my son who always speaks the truth.''

Historians have not put much credence in the sorrel colt story. Washington's biographer Marcus Cunliffe identified the story as having appeared in print for the first time in an article written by Washington's step-grandson (the grandson of Martha Washington), George Washington Parke Custis, that was published in the United States Gazette on May 13, 1826, some twenty years after the cherry tree anecdote had first been included in the fifth edition of Rev. Mason L. Weems's The Life of Washington. Custis's article subsequently was reprinted in additional publications of the time, including the January 1827 issue of Casket (available online in the ProQuest subscription database "American Publications Series"), where it was entitled "The Mother of Washington" and identified as taken from the "'Recollections of Washington,' a new work by George W. P. Custis." That work, however, would not be published in book form until 1860, three years after Custis's death.

Custis, Cunliffe surmised, "did more than anyone to propagate the cult of the Mother of Washington. . . . [but] he does not carry conviction as a historian." Although the story was repeated in numerous accounts of Washington's life—a version sans didactic ending was reproduced as fact in a biography published as late as 1997—a few authors even in the 19th century expressed reservations about the story's veracity. Caroline M. Kirkland, in her Memoirs of Washington, published in 1857, cautioned, "The story of his having ridden to death a fiery colt of his mother's . . . sounds a little too much like a modernized version of Alexander's taming Bucephalus; so we shall not repeat it here." In his 1889 two-volume biography, Henry Cabot Lodge discounted the tale, commenting, "How Mr. Custis, usually so accurate, came to be so far infected with the Weems myth as to tell the colt story after the Weems manner, cannot now be determined."

Horace E. Scudder (1838–1902), a biographer, author of children's books, compiler of stories, and also the editor of Atlantic Monthly, was one of the many 19th- and early 20th-century authors who related the story, especially in books intended to educate children. David Ramsay dedicated his 1807 book on Washington to the "Youth of the United States," while John Corry offered his 1809 biography to "the Youth of America." James K. Paulding included the colt story, while omitting that of the cherry tree, in his 1835 biography of Washington dedicated to "the pious, retired, domestic MOTHERS OF THE UNITED STATES. . . . for the use of their children."

Historian Barbara Welter has noted that according to the dominant domestic ideology of the time, "mothers must do the inculcating of virtue [in children] since the fathers, alas, were too busy chasing the dollar." During the Revolutionary era, mothers especially were urged to instill virtue in their sons. In his biography of Washington that was published as part of the "Riverside School Library," Scudder asserted that Washington "owed two strong traits to his mother—a governing spirit and a spirit of order and method." The mother of the father of our country, Scudder related, "taught him many lessons and gave him many rules; but, after all, it was her character shaping his which was most powerful. She taught him to be truthful, but her lessons were not half so forcible as her own truthfulness." While Washington himself honored "my revered Mother; by whose Maternal hand (early deprived of a Father) I was led from Childhood," historians have found no evidence with which to validate the truth of the sorrel colt story.

George Bancroft, Secretary of the Navy under Polk, recalled many years later that Polk had announced in 1845 near the beginning of his presidency that the acquisition of California was one of "four great measures" he hoped to accomplish while in office. Historian Sam W. Haynes has identified Polk as a "fitting representative" of the "expansionist impulse" known as Manifest Destiny. As a condition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, the government of Mexico ceded to the U.S. a vast amount of territory that included the present state of California.

The term Manifest Destiny appeared in print for the first time a few months following Polk's inauguration in an editorial published in the Jacksonian United States Magazine and Democratic Review calling for an end to political strife regarding the recent vote in Congress over the annexation of Texas, a hotly contested issue that figured prominently in the election Polk won. The author of the piece, the journal's editor, John L. O'Sullivan, pointed out that England and France had interfered with the process of annexation "for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." In a diary entry recorded later in 1845, Polk, a Jacksonian Democrat, identified this view with that of the general public, writing that "the people of the United States would not willingly permit California to pass into the possession of any new colony planted by Great Britain or any foreign monarchy."

Haynes writes, "In 1845, for both President Polk and the public at large, Manifest Destiny remained inchoate, undefined, an effusive, bumptious spirit rather than a clearly articulated agenda for empire." In addition to reflecting anxieties over European nations controlling parts of the American West, Manifest Destiny, as interpreted in the works of numerous historians, expressed a number of other diverse fears, beliefs, visions, goals, and interests of divergent segments of the population. Surveying the work of a number of scholars, John C. Pinheiro states in a recent book that while one prominent historian of Manifest Destiny, Frederick Merk, identified "a belief in a religious-like republican mission as the primary motivation for American expansion," others have posited that many Americans imbued with the spirit of Manifest Destiny "desired only to ensure freedom for themselves or to encourage the United States's development as a white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant republic." Some historians have argued that desires for specific diplomatic and economic outcomes were the prime motivations for Manifest Destiny, while others have emphasized racism, anti-Catholicism, and Jacksonian doctrines derived from Jeffersonian principles as dominant factors.

Many historians agree that the doctrine spread quickly, especially throughout the North and West, through the institution of the penny press, which had begun to proliferate during the previous decade. Some historians, however, have objected to the use of such a vaguely defined term to adequately characterize U.S. expansionism during this period.

While the public's fear of foreign involvements in continental North America may have concurred with Polk's agenda, the war he fought against Mexico that began in May 1846 and concluded in February 1848 sparked widespread criticism throughout political, journalistic, and literary circles in addition to strong support. Following the annexation of Texas, the Mexican government had severed diplomatic relations with the U.S. Polk subsequently sent an envoy, former Louisiana congressman John Slidell, to Mexico to try to resolve disputes over the Texas boundary and over damages that the Mexican government owed to U.S. citizens but could not pay. Polk instructed Slidell to make an offer that the U.S. would pay off Mexico's debt in order to acquire "Upper California and New Mexico" and would spend as much as $40 million to purchase the land.

Concurrently, the administration-controlled newspaper, the Washington Union, stated that resistance by Mexico would result in an invasion and occupation by U.S. troops. When Mexico refused to sell, Polk began to prepare a declaration of war, but before its completion he learned that Mexican forces had killed or wounded 16 U.S. soldiers in the disputed territory. On May 11, 1846, Polk presented a special message to Congress announcing that "war exists" between the two countries because the Mexican government has "at last invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil."

Although the next day Congress passed a war resolution by overwhelming margins in both the House and Senate to the delight of many Americans clamoring for war, adverse reaction to Polk's war message quickly was expressed in Congress and the press. Many Whigs, deeming the conflict "Mr. Polk's War," charged that the president and members of his party in Congress had employed stampede tactics to ensure the resolution's passage and to foment public hysteria. Polk, they contended, had provoked the Mexicans to attack in order to start a war against a weak neighbor so that the U.S. could acquire with relative ease the desired western territory. Radical members of the Whig party stated that Polk's primary goal in instigating war was to expand slavery in order to increase the political power of slaveholding states. The Massachusetts legislation passed resolutions charging that the war "was unconstitutionally commenced by the order of the President . . . with the triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the slave power, and of obtaining the control of the Free States."

Democratic Senator John C. Calhoun, while abstaining from the vote on the war resolution, vehemently objected to stampede tactics and argued for "dispassionate consideration" to be given to the issue of war. In addition to the attacks on Polk by politicians and members of the press, antiwar sentiments were expressed by the American Peace Society, the American Anti-Slavery Society, and by literary and religious figures such as James Russell Lowell, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips.

As fighting intensified, calls for U.S. forces to capture all of Mexico increased in the penny presses of the urban Northeast and in Illinois, but by the time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified, Frederick Merk has written, "the nation was utterly weary of the war." Merk argues that had there been less dissent during the course of the war, more Mexican territory would have been acquired. In a recent article, however, Piero Gleijeses criticizes historians for failing to examine the relative lack of dissent during the period leading up to war. He posits that a broad consensus existed for acquiring land from Mexico, but contends that the fierce opposition to Polk following the war resolution derived from the belief that the desired land could have been easily acquired without going to war.