Teddy Roosevelt came to Kansas in 1910 with a vision for democracy's long game. It's still vital. • Kansas Reflector

Theodore Roosevelt arrived at 9:30 in the morning at the Osawatomie depot on the Missouri Pacific from Pueblo. The 51-year-old former president must have been weary, because on the previous day he had been greeted by thousands in Colorado, met with dignitaries, and laid the cornerstone of the new YMCA. Since his return from an extended African safari a few months earlier, he had been pressed into civic service at appearances across the nation, placing stones in wet mortar or otherwise helping dedicate new public buildings and parks.

But today — Aug. 31, 1910 — in Kansas, he aimed to lay a metaphorical cornerstone for a new political philosophy. He would call for Americans to come together to work for the good of all, instead of for the robber barons who dominated society

The turmoil of the current election cycle has me thinking about Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” and how relevant it remains today. The former president was concerned, as many of us are now, about the future of American democracy and the welfare of the common people.

Roosevelt carefully chose the location for the most important speech of his political career. Osawatomie was a town of about 5,000 on the banks of the Marais de Cygnes River in northwest Kansas, but it had outsized political significance.

It was here, on another August day, in 1856, that several hundred pro-slavery men had attacked the free-state settlers, killed five of them, then sacked and burned the town. It had been founded just two years earlier by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which provided support to free-staters to relocate in Kansas Territory.

The “Battle of Osawatomie” was one of the defining moments in the history of Bleeding Kansas, the grim prelude to the Civil War. John Brown, a zealous abolitionist, had been among the defenders who were routed. The town was rebuilt after the attack, the war over slavery would come and eventually end, and Osawatomie would become one of those small Kansas towns — like Baxter Springs, Fort Scott or Dodge City — remembered mostly for its past.

When Roosevelt came in 1910, the battle was still within memory of some of those attending, but for most had receded into the safety of the past. It was for the history books. The radicalism of abolitionists like Brown, which in 1856 had burned with a sometimes murderous intensity — he and his informal militia shot and hacked to death five pro-slavery neighbors along Pottawatomie Creek — had cooled from the passage of time. The question was settled, Brown was dead, Kansas had been admitted as a free state, and the war was long over.

The Republican Party formed in 1854 to oppose the expansion of slavery. Its first presidential nominee, pathfinder John C. Frémont, lost to Democrat James Buchanan, but the party found a winner in Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. The Kansas Republican Party was founded in 1859 at Osawatomie, at the Jillson Hotel. In attendance was Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune, and one of the founders of the national party.

So it was that Roosevelt came to Osawatomie in 1910 with his own radical vision of what his party, the Republican Party, could be. The party of Lincoln had originally stood for labor, he knew, but in the intervening decades had become the party of capital.

Roosevelt, the running mate of William McKinley, became president in 1901 when McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist at the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo. At 42, he was the youngest U.S. president ever. He had previously served as governor of New York, and of course was already famous because of his “Rough Rider” regiment during the Spanish-American War. He was also a rancher, historian, naturalist and writer. His foreign policy — although brutally imperialistic, especially when it came to the Philippines — paved the way for the United States to become a world power. In many ways, he was the first modern American president.

During his two terms in office, Roosevelt drifted left of his party, so much so that by 1908 he was railing against “predatory wealth” and urging an unmoved Congress to adopt new labor laws.

William Howard Taft, with Roosevelt’s blessing, was the Republican nominee in 1908 and won handily against Democrat William Jennings Bryan. But Roosevelt soon became disillusioned with Taft because he saw the new administration falling in line with the party’s rigid, pro-monopoly political conservatives.

By the time Roosevelt came to Osawatomie in 1910, he had already formulated his new political philosophy of “New Nationalism,” an extension of his Square Deal domestic policies. One of his official duties that day was to dedicate the new “Battleground Memorial Park.” His political agenda was to lay out his progressive vision for America.

“Most of the items on his agenda had appeared in one or another of his annual messages as president,” the historian H.W. Brands notes in his 1997 biography of Roosevelt. “Yet he had never stated his objectives so comprehensively or packaged them so concisely as a single approach to the country’s problems.”

There is a photograph, reproduced in an issue of a scholarly journal, that shows Roosevelt delivering his remarks. The ex-president is standing on what appears to be a dining room table draped with an American flag. He’s dressed in a dark three-piece suit, a sheaf of papers in his hand. There’s a knot of listeners around him, some of them perhaps other speakers, and the former president and his plinth-like table and all the rest are in the middle of a grove of trees within battlefield park.

“Our country — this great Republic — means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government,” Roosevelt told the crowd.

There had been two great crises in American history, he said, the first being the challenge of its founding and the second when it threatened to fracture during the Civil War.

“With this second period of our history the name of John Brown will forever be associated,” Roosevelt said, “and Kansas was the theater upon which the first act of the second of our national life dramas was played. It was the result of the struggle in Kansas which determined that our country should be in deed as well as in name devoted to both union and freedom, that the great experiment of a democratic government on a national scale should succeed and not fail.”

Roosevelt advocated that day for equal opportunity and the rewards of hard work, for curbing the influence of special interests, for ending political contributions by corporations.

“The object of government is the welfare of the people,” he declared.

At another point: “Political action must be made simpler, easier, and freer from confusion for every citizen.”

And this: “No matter how honest and decent we are in our private lives, if we do not have the right kind of law and the right kind of administration of the law, we cannot go forward as a nation.”

Part of what had propelled Roosevelt to activism was a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lochner v. New York, which found a law limiting working hours for bakers was unconstitutional. Roosevelt said the decision was an example of the court using the Constitution as a means of thwarting the will of the people, rather than establishing the absolute right of people to rule themselves.

In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican nomination and lost. He then formed the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party and ran a third party campaign, with a platform that included women’s suffrage and an eight-hour workday. Roosevelt ended up beating Taft — 27% to 23% of the popular vote — but both lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who received 42%.

By 1918, the Bull Moose party had all but evaporated.

But the influence of Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” remains. Many of the reforms proposed by the Bull Moose party eventually became part of everyday American life — a standard 40-hour work week, through the Fair Labor Standards Act, for example, and the right of women to vote, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Other changes that Roosevelt outlined in the New Nationalism, such as economic equality and limiting the influence of corporate influence in politics, continue to elude us.

In 2011, President Barack Obama came to Osawatomie to deliver a speech in which he talked about a “make or break” moment for the American middle class. The financial downturn and years of ideological gridlock, he said, had battered working families.

Like Roosevelt, Obama was using our nation’s collective memory to make a point about the choices that were before us — and to set the tone for his reelection campaign. As America’s first Black president, it was appropriate that he came to where the fight over slavery began. Obama delivered his remarks in the local high school gym festooned with patriotic bunting, and he stressed the consequences of economic inequality.

“Inequality also distorts our democracy,” Obama said. “It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and it runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder.”

The fact that Obama, a Democrat, would come to deep-red Kansas to deliver an important address on the economy left some bewildered, but not those who knew the history of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 address.

Looking back at Obama’s speech from a distance of 13 years, what strikes me now is its civility. Although Miami County would vote for Mitt Romney over Obama by a margin of more than two to one in 2012, Obama was welcomed by the community. I know, because I was in Osawatomie that day and, despite political differences, observed none of the meanness that marks so much of politics today.

Obama’s visit to Osawatomie may not have had the impact he had hoped for, but it was another stone in the foundation of democracy. These stones are not the domain of one party or another — as Roosevelt demonstrated — but belong to all of us. We build on the civic materials that have been left to us by those who have gone before. Roosevelt died in 1919, but some of his goals of were achieved by his distant cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the New Deal of the 1930s.

While it is easy to become discouraged by the stream of depressing political headlines that assault us daily, it’s important to recognize that American democracy is a long game. The vision that Theodore Roosevelt articulated in 1910 is undimmed by time. The call for economic equality that Obama made in 2011 is even more important today.

We don’t know who will prevail in our current political strife, but if we are to go forward — if we are to make progress on critical issues that have plagued us for more than a century — then we must recognize that our challenges will not be met in a single day, a single election, or perhaps not in a single lifetime. But that should not dissuade us from the important work of building foundations — or leaving blueprints — for generations yet to come.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.