For the generation of my grandparents and Thomas Plant, the builder of Lucknow, Theodore Roosevelt epitomized the ideal of righteous nationalism.

Thomas Plant built a guest bedroom suite at Lucknow for his friend, TR, out of admiration for his muscular patriotism.

My great grandfather, George Henry Colby (father of my grandmother, Susan Colby Tobey), for whom my father was named, shared the Rough Rider's spirit. In 1898, at the age of fifty-seven, he answered McKinley's call for volunteers for the war with Spain, and joined the New Hampshire 1st Regiment.

George Colby used this chest in the Civil War and again in the Spanish American War.

My grandmother, Susan Tobey, gave the chest to my father. My father gave it to me.

George Colby's officer's wardrobe trunk is material witness to his nationalist spirit. He volunteered for duty in both the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. My father was drafted into World War Two in 1944, having avoided duty as long as possible. Once inducted, he served honorably. I was called up in the Vietnam War in 1966, but I was classified as 4F, primarily because of childhood illnesses, and did not serve.

My mother and father were disappointed that I could not serve. My mother said, “Your father had his war, and now you have yours.” I opposed the war politically in a variety of ways, though I did not consider myself a political activist. I briefly worked in Eugene McCarthy's campaign in Pennsylvania in 1968 and joined anti-war marches in Pittsburgh in 1969.

The history of military service to the United States by three generations of my family reflects, I suppose, the desanctification of American patriotism. Nonetheless, when terrorists attacked my country on September 11, my patriotism quickly surged up through my mourning for the victims of the massacres and their families and my fears for my children.

The dedication of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City, to Theodore Roosevelt, is another relic of the nation's commitment to righteous nationalism and the active state that Roosevelt espoused and helped to create. The horseback sculpture of Roosevelt, by Daniel Chester French, on the Museum’s steps, epitomizes the belief that the politically organized nation, guided by righteous men and women, has an idealistic civilizing mission.

I had difficulty accepting the ideal of nationalism. Before I was fifteen years old, I was reading “One World” literature and collected a small library of thin books about the One-World Movement. I twice represented Plymouth High School in the New Hampshire State Model United Nations, experiences that helped shape my political philosophy.

Growing up in a small, Republican New England village of 800 persons, I certainly did not understand the historical context of the alternative vision I embraced. I knew nothing of Wilsonian Idealism, the League of Nations, the Federation of Atomic Scientists, Henry Wallace’s final campaign, the Disarmament Movement, and the Anti-Nuclear Testing Movement.

In the Cold War, certainly in New England, I did hear much that was terrible of Communism and Stalinism. My most lasting, vivid, radio memories are of listening late into the night to news broadcasts about the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. That Communism did not appeal to me is easy to explain. But what assemblage of cues in a New England village, where conservative nationalism was the public ideology, where the Civil War and the Revolutionary War were ceremonialized, and veterans marched in uniform in local parades, led me to think that nationalism was the great political problem of our era?

Now I—like so many persons of my generation—patriotically prepare myself for war for the first time. The second Roosevelt quotation, below, expresses an important motive in our views of the coming war in the Middle East.

Cessation of the killing of Jews is assuredly a matter of righteousness. It is as radical a demand as was the New England call for immediate emancipation of the slaves in the 1830s. It is the outstanding international issue of our times.