Hero Tales

Hero Tales:

After Hitchen's manifestation of last Friday, I cut directly down the hill to where it ran to water, a long and pretty stream called Rock Creek. It stretches through the capital, a basin between the cities that is left green and fertile; it winds beneath the mighty Taft bridge, a magnificient structure decorated with lions and copper. I walked the length of the park from the Danish embassy to the National Zoo.

While I was proceeding along the creek, I remembered something I read a while ago: the introduction to Hero Tales: How Common Lives Reveal the Heroic Spirit of America. The subtitle is not honest: there is nothing common about the lives detailed within the book, nor about its authors. Those authors were Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge.
The introduction to this edition was written by George Grant of Bannockburn College (the Bannockburn! Another name resonant in the history of liberty). In it, Grant reminds us that Roosevelt and Lodge took regular walks together along Rock Creek a century ago, pondering the history of the Republic, and the right way to champion and further its principles.

What they came up with was this book, a collection of essays about great Americans. You could do worse for reading matter: and, at less than nine dollars' price, I feel confident in promising that you won't find a richer treasure at a smaller cost. Daniel Boone, Washington, Davy Crockett and the Alamo, the cruise of the Wasp and "Damn the Torpedos!," Stony Point and King's Mountain, "Stonewall" Jackson and General Sheridan, Robert Gould Shaw and Francis Parkman, these and more are capped with an essay on the life of Lincoln.

Every American ought to read it, the more if they have been educated by those modern historians who present 19th century America in the solitary light of the oppression of the Indians, the breaking of unions, slavery and corporate greed. If you want to hear the other side, written by men -- genuine progressives! -- who loved and defended their country, here it is.