Volume CXXXIII, Number 6 October 19, 2001 f

Roosevelt and a Usable Past
TED REINERT
STAFF WRITER

Jean M. Yarbrough, the first Gary M. Pendy, Sr., Professor of Social Sciences, delivered her inaugural lecture: "Teddy Roosevelt and the Search for the Useable Past" in Massachusetts Hall on Tuesday night.

"It is a long standing academic tradition that you inaugurate a chair with some form of intellectual celebration," Yarbrough explained, "and at Bowdoin, this takes the form of an inaugural lecture, or concert or performance. They're happy occasions."

The Pendy chair was established in 2000 by Stanley Druckenmiller '75, a Trustee of the College. It honors the memory of Gary M. Pendy, Sr., father of Gary "Mike" Pendy, Jr., '93, Druckenmiller's co-worker at Duquesne Capital Management.

According to Associate Vice President and Director of Budgets and Associate Treasurer Gerald Boothby, "In general terms, $2,000,000 is currently needed to endow a professorship at the College. The assumptions include a 5 percent endowment spending rate or annually approximately $100,000. This $100,000 covers the actual salary costs, fringe benefits… and other associated expenses."

President Barry Mills introduced Yarbrough and spoke about the foundation of the chair.

Yarbrough's lecture concerned the "TR phenomenon", the status of Theodore Roosevelt today as a figure admired and idolized by reform politicians such as John McCain, and whether or not Roosevelt deserves that status.
Yarbrough mentioned the qualities which make Roosevelt so attractive, including his "larger than life personality" are view of the present as "a steward of the people."

Yarbrough explained that [the revival of manly virtues] indeed may be where TR can play his most useful role, inspiring by his forceful rhetoric and personal example, a generation grown soft to rise to the challenge before it. As TR himself once wrote: 'The things that will destroy American 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.'"

Yarbrough then spoke about the problems with Roosevelt, including his embrace of manifest destiny, Social Darwinism, and imperialism.

She concluded, "In these troubled times, TR's stirring rhetoric can help to brace us to our duty and renew a sense of patriotism and national honor among our citizens. But on the more fundamental questions of what we stand for as a republic, Roosevelt is far less useful.

"In the search for a useable past, we would be better off to take a fresh look at the Founders (without the distorting lens of Progressivism) and then consider how TR's Lincoln remained faithful to the Founders' vision under radically altered conditions. From such lessons, we may then come to understand better how our republican institutions can be preserved from the evils of our own time."

The lecture was followed by about a half an hour of questions, discussion, and refreshments.

The Pendy chair is the one of five new chairs this year, and Yarbrough's lecture was the first of the 2001-2002 faculty lecture series. The professorship inaugurals for Allen Wells, Roger Howell, Jr., Professor of History is scheduled for November 6; Barbara Weiden Boyd, Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek, February 28; Susan E. Bell, A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences, April 11.