Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin have recently argued in their book Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life (ForeEdge, 2018) that there is much to be gained in examining Roosevelt through the lens of his prolific writing and voracious reading throughout his life. While the distinction holds and is certainly in line with a structural reading of Inferno, we might also consider it an extension of focus on the neutrals, on indifference and inaction as considered by a relative of FDR: Theodore Roosevelt. Parker traces Kennedy’s engagement with Dante back to Franklin Roosevelt’s acceptance speech at the Democratic convention of 1936, where he said: “Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.” For Parker, this distinction is between upper and lower hell, between the heat of incontinence and the coldness of treachery.

In the same vein, Teodolinda Barolini extends consideration of JFK’s focus on neutrality as an abhorrent form of moral cowardice to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s use of the same line in his 1967 speech explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War.Īs both Parker and Barolini make clear, the line cited by JFK and MLK does not technically come from Dante nor does it correctly state the precise details of Dante’s heterodoxical treatment of the neutral souls of Inferno 3: far worse than the ‘hottest places of hell,’ those who refused to take a stand in life are excluded from heaven and hell altogether. Raffa draws important attention to issues of social justice and freedom that animate Longfellow’s appreciation of Lincoln and Dante, alluding also to Dennis Looney’s book Freedom Readers ( University of Notre Dame Press, 2011) on the reception of Dante in African-American culture.

The Dante-Longfellow connection has also been the subject of a recent special issue of Dante Studies(2010), edited by Giuseppe Mazzotta and Arielle Saiber. Guy Raffa, casting a glance further back in the UT Austin history blog Not Even Past, considers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s appreciation of Abraham Lincoln in the light of his contemporaneous work of translating Dante’s Commedia into English. Kennedy’s relationship to Dante and in particular his persistent use of a line he attributed to Dante, “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those, who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”

In the June 2018 issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly, Deborah Parker has examined John F. The afterlife of Dante in American culture and politics has long been the subject of study.

Teddy Roosevelt and the Man in the Arena.

Teddy Roosevelt, Dante, and the Man in the Arena

The man in the arena teddy roosevelt