Democracy's Documents: Theodore Roosevelt - "Citizenship in a Republic"
After leaving the presidency in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt toured Africa and Europe. He made this speech at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910. He focused on what makes for good citizenship in a republic increasingly focused on individualism and the pursuit of wealth.
Roosevelt began by tracing the arc of American history, noting that the rugged pioneer days have given way to an advancing, material civilization whose “conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings.” Yet, “the life of material gain . . . is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals.”
“[T]he average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed,” he said. Speaking to leaders he added that “the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.”
Roosevelt next urged active, committed citizenship:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
He then spoke to the demands of character. “There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character . . . Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution.”
Man’s “foremost duty”, he noted, is “owed to himself and his family,” but that “represents nothing but the foundation.” Beyond that, he does not exalt the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself. That “is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country.” Indeed, the person who “piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community.”
Roosevelt is not averse to wealth and property. In “the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.”
Roosevelt next warned about the danger of oratory:
“Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker . . . whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic.”
Returning to a focus on character, Roosevelt warned that: “if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic.” Indeed, to “judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.”
Good citizenship also means attending to the less fortunate. “Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country.” We must avoid pressure that “substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, or substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category . . . The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separated class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth.”
In a plea for respecting diversity, Roosevelt said “[W]ide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.”
Roosevelt concluded with a warning to be aware of “the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic . . . The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest.”
Photo Credit: National Portrait Gallery
