Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials

The request, repeated and urgent, has come from many sources that the editorial articles, contributed by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt to The Kansas City Star during our country’s participation in the World War, be preserved for the future. It is in response to this request that this volume is published.

Newspaper publication is ephemeral. Newspaper files are short-lived. Anybody who has examined a newspaper of thirty years ago knows how flimsy it is, how it breaks and disintegrates to the touch. It lacks the enduring quality of the newspaper of sixty or seventy-five years ago when other elements entered into the composition of news-print paper. Newspaper publication is the thought of to-day; to-morrow, it is gone save for the impression left on the mind of the reader. That the recollection of Colonel Roosevelt’s articles may have something to appeal to aside from crumbling newspaper files is the aim of this book. And so these expressions on the events in a crisis in our national history—from the mind of a man whose intense love of country was the admiration of all who knew him, expressions which at the time of their publication stirred many to greater sacrifice for country, some to anger, even to rage—are here presented in enduring form.

Colonel Roosevelt’s contributions to The Star were his most frequent expressions on the war; they were the outpouring of a great soul deeply stirred by the country’s situation. There were more than one hundred articles from his pen. They covered the vital time of our part in the war from October, 1917, until his death January 6, 1919.

The reason he chose The Star as his medium of reaching the people, in a period when a large section of the American people sought and was guided by what he said, was that Colonel Roosevelt and The Star had known and understood each other for a long, long time. Their acquaintance dated back to the period of his service in the New York legislature. The Star saw behind his conduct then the qualities and the spirit which it was continually seeking to place at a premium in offices of public trust.