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At one of the first planning meetings for Books & Culture, in 1994, someone cited as a model of intellectual engagement the fierce exchanges of letters that are sometimes to be found in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Another participant in the meeting strongly disagreed, suggesting that such exchanges serve largely to draw attention to the inflated egos of the writers.

No doubt that is often the case, but nevertheless we badly need more sustained debate. The notion that there is something fundamentally unedifying about such give-and-take is unsupportable. Of course disagreement can easily degenerate into personal attacks and petty quarrels, but without genuine engagement we have no solid basis for choosing between conflicting claims.

—John Wilson, editor, Books & Culture

George Grant's response to my piece in CT, available on his Web site, is embarrassing for the reader if not for the writer. In it he makes several basic errors, suggesting (for instance) that the now massive skin trade in the Philippines which grew alongside the U.S. military presence in that country has no historical connection to the occupation of the Philippines by the U.S. military in the early twentieth century.

The way that Mr. Grant's political biases dictate how he writes history is also evident in his comments on William Jennings Bryan, purveyor of a "fantastic witch's brew of political socialism, cultural radicalism, and dispensational fundamentalism." It is Mr. Grant's prerogative to dislike Bryan but it is odd that he should so glibly—and inaccurately—attack a historical figure who, everyone agrees, was a committed Christian, even if of a variety unpalatable to Mr. Grant.

Instead, Mr. Grant apparently wants us to believe that Theodore Roosevelt was a devout orthodox Christian. In my Anglo-Catholic church we pray each week for people whose faith is known to God alone, so I am not in a position finally to say whether Roosevelt was a believer or not. As far as the public record goes, however, Roosevelt provided little evidence that he was a committed orthodox Christian.

Roosevelt grew up a Unitarian; he was a hardcore social Darwinist until the last years of his life (thus his lust for the U.S. acquiring unquestioned power in the western hemisphere and a balance of power in Asia); and, as was common at the time, he was given to exploiting the Bible to nationalistic ends. Mr. Grant's own book proves the latter point: as evidence for Roosevelt's supposed devotion to the Good Book, Mr. Grant depicts Roosevelt ransacking the Bible for support of manifest destiny. (I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on late nineteenth-century Canadian nationalists' use of the Bible and I know that this sort of thing was common among English-speaking politicians and imperialists.)

As Grant suggests, there's no doubt that Roosevelt knew the Bible well. But given the historical context in which Roosevelt lived, that doesn't mean very much. The Bible was a common source of allusions and figures of speech. Scratch the rhetoric and what you'll usually find is Scripture being employed to further manifestly political ends. (I invite readers to see my exceedingly dull article, "The Bible and Protestant British North American Identity in the Early 1860s" in the American Review of Canadian Studies [winter 1999].)

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June (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45