The Wisdom of Theodore Roosevelt

The Wisdom of

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

EDITED BY DONALD J. DAVIDSON

Philosophical Library

CITADEL PRESS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

www.kensingtonbooks

CONTENTS

Preface

Editor’s Note

Part I   The Quotations

America and Americans

America First

The American Boy

Americanism

Americans Abroad

Anarchists and Anarchism

Armageddon

Army Uniforms

A Big Stick

Books

Bull Moose

A Bully Pulpit

Campaign Contributions

Character

Character Assassination

Checks and Balances

Childhood and Children

Citizenship

Collective Bargaining

Congress

Conservation

Constitutions

Corporations

Corruption

Cuba

Dark Horses

Democracy

Demagoguery

Duty

Efficiency

Empire

English

Envy

Equality

Evil

Fear

Germany

Glory

Government

John Hay

Heroism

Honesty

Hyphenated Americans

Ideals

Ignorance

Immigrants and Immigration

In God We Trust

Japan and the Japanese

The Judiciary

Labor

Law

Legislators

Life

Malefactors of Great Wealth

The Man in the Arena

Manhood

The Medal of Honor

Military Service

Monopoly

The Monroe Doctrine

Mothers and Motherhood

Muckrakers

Nature Fakers

The Negro

Neutrality

New Amsterdam

New York and New Yorkers

Nostrums

Opportunity

Pacifists and Pacifism

Panama Canal

Party Loyalty

Patriotism

Peace

Play

Politics

Preparedness

The President

Presidential Power

Property

Public Service

Reform and Reformers

Religion

Alice Roosevelt

Roosevelt on Roosevelt

Russia and the Russians

Scholarship

Seeing

Self-Government

Self-Reliance

The Senate

Settlers

Snobbery

The Spoils System

A Square Deal

The Stars and Stripes

States’ Rights

Statesmanship

The Strenuous Life

Success

The Supreme Court

Taxes

Tyranny of the Majority

Unions

Unpreparedness

Virtue

War

Booker T. Washington

Weasel Words

Woodrow Wilson

Wisdom

Women

Work

Part II   The Excerpts

The Duties of American Citizenship, 1893

Washington’s Forgotten Maxim, 1897

The Control of Corporations, 1902

Liberty Under the Law, 1903

The Education of the Negro, 1905

The Nation and the States, 1910

The New Nationalism, 1910

The Right of the People to Rule, 1912

The Recall of Judicial Decisions, 1912

Limitation of Governmental Power, 1912

How I Became a Progressive, 1912

From The Naval War of 1812: Excerpts from the Summary to Chapter 9

From The Winning of the West: Note to Chapter 4

PREFACE

Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States (1901–09), was born October 27, 1858, and died January 5, 1919. His sixty years spanned the period from the Civil War to the end of the First World War.

Roosevelt entered political life in 1881. From then until his death, he never ceased to be involved with politics, either as an office holder or a candidate for office, an administrator or manager, or as a national leader and irritant to Republican Party stalwarts. He was, successively, New York State assemblyman, 1882-84, candidate for New York mayor, 1886, U.S. civil-service commissioner, 1889-94, New York City police commissioner, 1895-97, assistant secretary of the navy, 1897-98, governor of New York State, 1899-1900, vice president of the United States, 1901, and then president, 1901—all of this by the age of forty-two.

Roosevelt was a complex man. To his career as politician can be added rancher, historian, naturalist, soldier, and explorer. Finally, and not least, he was a literary man, undoubtedly the best among our presidents, not excluding Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Lincoln, and Wilson. He was the author of published histories (The Naval War of 1812, 1882; The Winning of the West, 1889-96; New York, 1891), biographies (Gouverneur Morris, 1888; Thomas Hart Benton, 1887; Oliver Cromwell, 1900), papers in natural history (Protective Coloration, 1910) and exploration (Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 1914) and memoirs and travel narratives (Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 1885; Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, 1888; African Game Trails, 1910) and numerous book reviews and reflective essays. To these must be added voluminous letters, speeches, addresses, and his own marvelous memoirs, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, 1913. His collected works, published in 1926, ran to twenty-four volumes. Much has been added to the record since his death. Eight volumes of his correspondence have been published in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Elting M. Morison (1951-54), and there have been other collections; taken altogether they still comprise a small sample of those he wrote in his lifetime.

Roosevelt’s military career was brief, but electrifying. As colonel in the Rough Riders, the volunteer cavalry unit that fought in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, he became a national hero, and fame propelled him into the governorship of New York State and then to the vice presidency.

For an American of his era, Roosevelt had an unusually deep acquaintance with the world. As a child in a wealthy family, he was educated at home, by family and tutors, and twice traveled to Europe, and once to Egypt. He graduated from Harvard University and studied law in New York City. As a young man, he was a rancher and a deputy sheriff in the Dakota Territory; he crisscrossed the United States several times in his political career; he hunted animals everywhere, including Maine and the Adirondacks, the American plains, the Mississippi Valley, the American Southwest, Africa, and South America. He associated with ranchers and hunters and farmers at one end of the social scale and with foxhunters and socialites at the other—and he was friends with all. He could sleep on the ground in the Dakotas and discuss Icelandic sagas in Washington, scale Mont Blanc and swim the Potomac, celebrate with cowboys and address a banquet. He had conquered his fears and was not afraid to descend in a submarine or fly in a rickety airplane, stand up to a lion’s charge or to corporate America. He could wade in an Amazonian river or deliver a lecture to the American Historian Association, of which he was president.

He was widely known as a politician when a very young man, and the circle of his acquaintances, high and low, was vast. He was deeply liked (and disliked) and admired (and criticized). He spoke and wrote forthrightly, and he loved a good fight. He gave us as legacy the expressions bully pulpit, muckraker, strenuous life, man in the arena, and much more. In his years in the presidency he stood forthrightly for the regulation of corporations, just then developing vast economic powers, and for the preservation of our nation’s natural resources.

It was his work for conservation that was perhaps his greatest contribution. During his seven-and-one-half years in the White House, Roosevelt placed almost 230 million acres under public protection as national parks, national forests, game and bird preserves, and other federal reservations (a land area equivalent to that of all the East Coast states from Maine to Florida). But he was not single-minded on the subject: his Forest Service also opened up national forests for logging, and his Reclamation Bureau built dams to provide water for farmers.

Roosevelt did not fear to use and expand the power of the presidency, as he did in the building of the Panama Canal or in opposition to European powers, nor to make a show of power by sending the American fleet around the world. His achievements in office included intervention in the anthracite coal strike of 1902, the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor, enactment of the Elkins Act, the Hepburn Act, the Meat Inspection Act, and the Pure Food and Drug Act. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, and he was a lifelong advocate of a strong navy and national preparedness.

Roosevelt had a large family and reveled in family life. He was married twice. His first wife, Alice Lee, died immediately after giving birth to baby Alice. He married a second time, to Edith Carow, a childhood playmate; they had five children. He delighted in his six children, a rambunctious group, and carried on with them a correspondence both delightful and sensible, and remarkably open and adult.

As a Harvard student, he remarked that he thought he had a second-rate brain but a capacity for action. He was better than that. He once lamented, What is most needed is not the ability to see what very few people can see, but to see what almost anybody can see, but nobody takes the trouble to look at. Roosevelt, as he matured, saw deeply into American society and its problems, and he sought to mobilize the people to deal with them. To us all he gave a remarkable model of the active, engaged citizen, who put his heart and soul into his work, all of it.

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Wisdom of Theodore Roosevelt has two parts. The first contains quotations taken from his speeches, articles, letters, and other writings. Quotations within sections are given in date order. Short forms are used to identify sources. If not otherwise sourced, quotations are taken from The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (National Edition), 20 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), or from the title work as separately printed.

Short forms used in the credits:

The second part contains a few representative articles and speeches. They are presented entire (or, in three instances, abridged) to show not just the scope of Roosevelt’s thought but also the vigor of his expression and style.

Part I

THE QUOTATIONS

America and Americans

Our nation is that one among all the nations of the earth which holds in its hands the fate of the coming years.

"True Americanism," The Forum, April 1894

To bear the name of American is to bear the most honorable [of] titles; and whoever does not so believe has no business to bear the name at all, and, if he comes from Europe, the sooner he goes back there the better.

"True Americanism," The Forum, April 1894

If of two families in a neighborhood one is perpetually gossiping about and criticizing the other, with a querulous, jealous insistency in faultfinding, it is in reality the gossiping family, not the other, which betrays the greater sensitiveness. The newspapers of both the United States and England are on a common—and low—level in this respect; but a comparison of the upper class of American and English magazines will show that there are in the former very few pages dealing with English morals and manners, whether for blame or for praise, whereas the latter teem with foolish and abusive articles about the United States. These articles are rarely read here unless they contain some unusually flagrant absurdity, in which case they are greedily seized by the jaded editors of the press and clipped into material for the funny columns. Our corresponding writers have no such morbid desire to criticise England’s shortcomings. We are not interested in them. We have plenty of problems to solve for ourselves, and it is these that interest us; moreover, taking us as a whole, we care but little for foreign criticism of our methods of solution.

"A Colonial Survival," Cosmopolitan

Magazine, December 1892

Our country has been populated by pioneers, and therefore it has more energy, more enterprise, more expansive power than any other in the wide world.

"National Duties," speech at Minnesota State

Fair, September 2, 1901

The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is once kindled it burns like a consuming flame.

First annual message to Congress,

December 3, 1901

I have a great deal of faith in the average American citizen. I think he is a pretty good fellow.

Speech at Topeka, Kansas, May 1, 1903

We are the heirs of the ages.…

Inaugural address, March 4, 1905

This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in if it is not a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.

"What a Progressive Is," address at Louisville,

Kentucky, April 3, 1912

In the long run this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.…

"The Recall of Judicial Decisions," address at

Philadelphia, April 10, 1912

We believe that this country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.

"The Case Against the Reactionaries,"

speech at the Republican National

Convention, Chicago, June 17, 1912

America First

The present [Wilson] Administration, with its inveterate fondness for Ephraim’s diet,* and its conviction that phrase-making is an efficient substitute for action, has plumed itself on the sentence, America First. … In practice it has acted on the theory of America Last, both at home and abroad, both in Mexico and on the high seas.

Fear God and Take Your Own Part, 1916

The American Boy

Of course what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man. Now, the chances are strong that he won’t be much of a man unless he is a good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward or a weakling, a bully, a shirk, or a prig. He must work hard and play hard. He must be clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold his own under all circumstances and against all comers. It is only on these conditions that he will grow into the kind of American man of whom America can be really proud.

"The American Boy," St. Nicholas Magazine,

May 1900

A healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, or tortures animals.

Ibid.

Americanism

Americanism is a question of spirit, conviction, and purpose, not of creed or birthplace.

"True Americanism," The Forum, April 1894

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

"Americanism," address before the Knights of Columbus,

Carnegie Hall, New York, October 12, 1915;

in Fear God and Take Your Own Part, 1916

The events of the last few years have made it evident that in this country we should not only refuse to tolerate a divided allegiance but also that we should insist on one speech. We must have in this country but one flag, the American flag, and for the speech of the people but one language, the English language.

"The Children of the Crucible," in The Foes of

Our Own Household, 1917

Americans Abroad

Every missionary, every traveler in wild lands, should know, and is inexcusable for not knowing, that the American Government has no power to pay the ransom of anyone who happens to be captured by brigands or savages.… If a man goes out as a missionary he has no kind of business to venture to wild lands with the expectation that somehow the Government will protect him as well as if he stayed at home. If he is fit for his work he accepts the risk as an incident to the work and has no more right to complain of what may befall him than a soldier has in getting shot.…

TR to Alvey August Adee, October 2, 1901,

Letters

Anarchists and Anarchism

The wind has been sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they cannot escape their responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped.… If ever anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for but one red moment, to be succeeded for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.

First annual message to Congress,

December 3, 1901

Armageddon

Our cause is the cause of justice for all in the interest of all. The present contest is but a phase of the larger struggle. Assuredly the fight will go on whether we win or lose; but it will be a sore disaster to lose. What happens to me is not of the slightest consequence; I am to be used, as in a doubtful battle any man is used, to his hurt or not, so long as he is useful, and is then cast aside or left to die. I wish you to feel this. I mean it; and I shall need no sympathy when you are through with me, for this fight is far too great to permit us to concern ourselves about any one man’s welfare. If we are true to ourselves by putting far above our own interests the triumph of the high cause for which we battle we shall not lose. It would be far better to fail honorably for the cause we champion than it would be to win by foul methods the foul victory for which our opponents hope. But the victory shall be ours, and it shall be won as we have already won so many victories, by clean and honest fighting for the loftiest causes. We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind; fearless of the future; unheeding of our individual fates; with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes; we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.

Peroration of "The Case Against the

Reactionaries," speech at the Republican

National Convention, Chicago, Illinois,

June 17, 1912

Six weeks ago, here in Chicago, I spoke to the honest representatives of a convention which was not dominated by honest men; a convention wherein sat, alas! a majority of men who, with sneering indifference to every principle of right, so acted as to bring to a shameful end a party which had been founded over a half-century ago by men in whose souls burned the fire of lofty endeavor. Now to you men, who, in your turn, have come together to spend and be spent in the endless crusade against wrong, to you who face the future resolute and confident, to you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing what in that speech I said in closing: We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.

"A Confession of Faith," address before the

national convention of the Progressive Party

in Chicago, August 6, 1912

Army Uniforms

The first requisite in the service uniform is absolute ease and freedom. Anything that binds the body, particularly the knees, hips and arms, and anything that confines the neck, is all wrong.… The present shirt is all right in material, but dark blue is one of the worst possible colors for actual campaign use. The shirt should invariably be of a neutral tint, like gray or brown.

TR to William Cary Sanger, October 8, 1901,

Letters

A Big Stick

I have always been fond of the West African proverb: Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far. If I had not carried the big stick the organization would not have gotten behind me, and if I had yelled and blustered as Parkhurst and the similar dishonest lunatics desired, I would not have had ten votes. But I was entirely good-humored, kept perfectly cool and steadfastly refused to listen to anything save that [Lou] Payn [New York State superintendant of insurance] had to go, and that I would take none but a thoroughly upright and capable man in his place. Unless there is some cataclysm, these tactics will be crowned with success.

TR to Henry L. Sprague, January 26, 1900,

Letters

A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb: Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far. If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; but neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.

"National Duties," speech at Minnesota

State Fair, September 2, 1901

Boasting and blustering are as objectionable among nations as among individuals, and the public men of a great nation owe it to their sense of national self-respect to speak courteously of foreign powers, just as a brave and self-respecting man treats all around him courteously. But though to boast is bad, and causelessly to insult another, worse; yet worse than all is it to be guilty of boasting, even without insult, and when called to the proof to be unable to make such boasting good. There is a homely old adage which runs: Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far. If the American Nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.

"The Monroe Doctrine," speech at Chicago,

Illinois, April 2, 1903

Books

I find reading a great comfort. People often say to me that they do not see how I find time for it, to which I answer them (much more truthfully than they believe) that to me it is a dissipation, which I have sometimes to try to avoid, instead of an irksome duty.

TR to George Otto Trevelyan, May 28, 1904,

Letters

Personally the books by which I have profited infinitely more