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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER10

 THE CITIZEN AND THE PUBLIC MAN

WHILE I was pastor at the Trinity Methodist Church at Newburgh, N. Y., I asked Governor Roosevelt if he would come and give us a lecture in our church. He said he had so many calls for public service that he could not accept one out of a hundred, and that if he were to accept such a request as I was making of him he could speak three times a day every day in the year. But he said: "As you and I are such special friends I will make an exception in your case and come to you. Occasionally I make a special exception, but it is exceedingly rare." We had the church crowded with an audience that numbered a thousand. In introducing him I said: "We are honored to-night with the presence and service of Governor Roosevelt; he is a brave soldier, a wise statesman, a fearless reformer, a manly man, the ideal American and a Christian gentleman. He has phosphorus in his brains, iron in his blood, lime in his bones and back-bone enough for one hundred men." Just then I heard the Governor laugh aloud and I turned my face towards him and as his eye both twinkled and snapped he said: " I am likely to have need of all that back-bone before I get through with my job."
Governor Roosevelt then delivered his speech on the citizen and the public man

His address was as follows:

Good citizenship does not necessarily imply genius. Genius has.been defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains, and good citizenship consists in the practice of ordinary, humdrum, common virtues, which we all take for granted, and which, in practice, sad to say, all of us do not carry out

Jefferson said that the whole art of government consists in being honest. That is not the whole art, but it is the foundation of all government. The foundation is not enough; but, if you do not have that, you cannot erect upon it any superstructure that is worth building. You must have honesty as the first requisite of good citizenship. We have too much of a tendency in this country to deify mere smartness, mere intellectual acumen, unaccompanied by morality. There is no attitude that speaks worse for a commonwealth than this of admiring, or failing to condemn, the man who is unconscientious, unscrupulous, and immoral, but who succeeds. If a man has not the root of honesty in him —has not, at the foundation of his character, righteousness and decency—then, the abler and the braver he is, the more dangerous he is. It is an additional shame to a man that he should be evil, when he has in him the power to do much good.

In all our history, who is the man first thought of when Americans wish to name the arch type of evil? Benedict Arnold, the traitor, who had not the root of honesty in him. And yet he was one of the most brilliant soldiers that ever wore the American uniform. Had he ended as he began, he would have been an example to all Americans. How would our nation look if we failed to condemn Arnold as his crime deserved?—if we said: "Arnold, a traitor? Oh, yes, but then he was a dreadfully smart man." There is no danger of anybody else becoming an Arnold. He is condemned, and nobody desires to follow in his footsteps. But there is a danger to us, as a nation, in the career of the Benedict Arnolds of the political and financial worlds; of the men who prosper in business or in politics by wrongdoing, and who find weak-minded apologists, who say for them: "Oh, well! maybe he has been a little tricky, but he has succeeded." Shame to any man who permits his admiration for success to lead him into condoning crime when that crime has led to success! Shame to those men who permit admiration for wealth and political position to make them condone the evil-doing through which wealth or position was attained. We are in no danger from the Benedict Arnolds; that danger is past; but a hundred others remain. We are in danger from the man who tries to rise to political prominence as a demagogue by inflaming class against class, or section against section. We are in danger from the man who tries to rise to political power by truckling either to the wealthy man who seeks to take corrupt advantage of his wealth, or to the man without wealth who is moved by malice, envy, and hatred, to conspire against the man who is thriftier or more progressive than he. It is necessary to condemn the two types alike. We are in danger from the men who rise in business through swindling, whether on a big or small scale, and the reason we are in danger is because public opinion is not awake enough—enlightened enough—to make the crushing weight of its condemnation felt against the men who prosper in these ways.

After honesty as the foundation of the citizenship that counts, in business or in politics, must come courage. You must have courage not only in battle, but also in civic life. We need physical and we need moral courage. Neither is enough by itself. You need moral courage. Many a man has been brave physically who has flinched morally. You must feel in you a very fiery wrath against evil. When you see a wrong, instead of feeling shocked and hurt and a desire to go home, and a wish that right prevailed, you should go out and fight until that wrong is overcome. You must feel ashamed if you do not stand up for the right as you see it; ashamed if you lead a soft and easy life and fail to do your duty. You must have courage. If you do not, the honesty is of no avail.

But honesty and courage, while indispensable, are not enough for good citizenship. I do not care how brave and honest a man is; if he is a fool, he is not worth knocking on the head. In addition to courage and honesty, you must have the saving quality of common sense. One hundred and ten years ago France started to form a republic, and one of her noted men—an exceedingly brilliant man, a scholar of exceptional thought, the Abbe Sieyes—undertook to draw ,up a constitution. He drew up several constitutions, beautiful documents; but they would not work. The French national convention resolved in favor of liberty; and, in the name of liberty, they beheaded every man who did not think as they did. They resolved in favor of fraternity, and beheaded those who objected to such a| brotherhood. They resolved in favor of equality, and cut off the heads of those who rose above the general level. They indulged in such hideous butcheries, in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity, as to make tyranny seem mild in comparison —and all because they lacked common sense as well as morality.

Two or three years before that, we, in America, had a body of men gathered in a constitutional convention to make a constitution. They assembled under the lead of Washington, with Alexander Hamilton, Madison, and many other prominent men. They did not draw up a constitution in a week, as the brilliant Sieyes did, but just one constitution, and that one worked. That was the great point!

It worked, primarily, because it was drawn up by practical politicians—by practical politicians who believed in decency, as well as in common sense. If they had been a set of excellent theorists, they would have drawn up a constitution which would have commended itself to other excellent theorists, but which would not have worked. If they had been base, corrupt men, mere opportunists, men who lacked elevating ideals, dishonest, cowardly, they would not have drawn up a document that would have worked at all. On the great scale the only practical politics is honest politics. The makers of our constitution were practical politicians, who were also sincere reformers, and as brave and upright as they were sensible.

Take Washington, for example. He was not a mere theorist—not a bit of it. He had served, before the war broke out, in the Virginia Legislature, again and again. There he acquired the experience that every man must have in a Legislature, if he tries to accomplish anything. He found, when he was with a lot of men actuated by different motives, that he could not have his way altogether; that he had to get the best result he could out of the materials at hand. Alexander Hamilton had taken a prominent part in the politics of New York. So had Madison, the Adamses, and Patrick Henry, in their commonwealths. These men were all men of theories; but they were not mere theorists. They had worked in popular bodies, had seen what representative governments and legislatures could and could not do, what the people would and would not stand, just how far they could lead them, just how far they could drive them. They knew they could not get all they wanted, but they knew they could get a good deal. They were not fools; and, therefore, they did not insist upon the impracticable best. If they had been either fools or knaves, they would have done irreparable damage to the country—just as much if they had been one as the other. The fool and the knave play into each other's hands. They do not think they do, but they do. If the men of whom I speak had insisted upon the impossible, on what they could not get, we would not have any constitution. If they had not insisted upon the best they could get, their work would not have been worth doing at all. In other words, they had to work as Washington and Lincoln always did work.

For instance, there were, in that constitutional convention, men who were almost as wide-awake as we of to-day, on the evils of Negro slavery; but they lived in a generation when not one man in a thousand felt as they did, and they had to consent not merely to the recognition of human slavery, but to give increased representation to the slave states for the Negro slaves they contained within their borders. It was indefensible from the standpoint of logic, and, later, the constitution was denounced as "a league with death and a covenant with hell," because of its containing such a provision. We, of our day, would be criminal, if we put in such a provision. But our forefathers, working under the actual conditions, had to accept the provision, or they could not have obtained the Union—this free republic. They would have begun exactly such a career as we have seen the republics of South America follow during the eighty years that have elapsed since they threw off the yoke of Spain.

But our leaders were not merely "practical" men, either. They were accustomed to the conduct of affairs, but they were also men of the study, of the library, men who could draw on their knowledge of what had been done in other nations, in other ages. They not only drew from their experience for actual government, but from their wealth of knowledge of past history. They did not belong to the narrow-minded type, which says, "Oh, I am practical," as an excuse (or being illiterate and base. Distrust any man who advances the excuse of being practical when he is convicted of some infamy, or is shown to have been utterly ignorant of history.

To be practical, if you use the word in its proper and highest sense, necessarily implies that the man shall have a knowledge of history as well as of current practice; above all else, should thoroughly understand that to be practical does not Imply being base. In the long run, being practical implies being decent; and, if it does not imply that, then drop it.

It does no good to resolve against vice in '• the abstract. All the good comes from acting, in the concrete, in a way that carries out in practice the principles laid down in the abstract. There should be an eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt tell the truth, and thou shalt tell it just as much on the stump as in the pulpit." Do not fail to perform whatever you have promised. On the other hand, do not, through weakness, folly, or wickedness, promise, or ask to have promised, what you know cannot be performed. When a man runs for office, if you ask him to promise what you know cannot be done, you are asking him to lie. You are taking a position that is infamous for yourself, because you are asking him to take an infamous position. On the other hand, if you ask him, as you have a right to ask him, to do what can be performed, and he fails to redeem his promise, hold him to the strictest accountability. If he promises you the millennium, distrust him. If he tells you that, providing you vote for his particular patent remedy, he will cure all diseases of the body politic, and will see that everybody is happy, rich, and prosperous, not only distrust him, but also set yourselves down as fools if you follow him.

We have lived one thousand and nine hundred years in the Christian era, and as yet we have had to make our progress step by step, with Infinite pains and infinite labor. In spite of baitings and shortcomings, we have been striving onward and upward; and, as we have made progress in the past, so we shall make it in the future. You will not find any royal road in patent legislation, In curious schemes by which everybody gets virtuous and happy. Not a bit of it! We are* going ahead, I trust, a little faster than in the past, but only a little faster. We hope to keep going forward, but by steps, not by bounds. We must keep our eyes on the stars; but we must also remember that our feet are on the ground. When you get a man who tries to make you think anything else, he is either a visionary or a demagogue, and in either event he is an unsafe leader.

The citizen who does his whole duty will be careful not to, attribute wrongfully, dishonest or bad motives to a public servant. This is as reprehensible as to fail to condemn the actually blameworthy. In either case you tend to confuse the public conscience, to debauch the public morality, to make the rogue strive and prosper and drive the honest man from public life. It is of vital consequence that our public servants be honest; it is of no less vital consequence to the welfare of the nation that the real truth should be told about the dishonest and honest alike; and woe to the man who offends in either respect.

Finally, remember to stand for both the ideal and the practical. Remember that you must have a lofty ideal, as Abraham Lincoln had, and that you must try to achieve it in practical ways as he tried to achieve it during the four years that he lived and worked and suffered for the people, until his sad, patient, kindly soul was sent to seek its Master. Remember, also, that you can do your duty as citizens in this country only if you are imbued through and through with the spirit of brotherhood; the spirit that we call Americanism. You can do no permanent good unless you feel, not only in theory, but also in practice, that fundamentally we are knit together by close ties,—the ties of morality, of fellow feeling and sympathy, in its broadest and deepest sense. We cannot live permanently as a republic; we cannot hold our own as the mightiest commonwealth of self-governing, free men upon which the sun has ever shown unless we have it ground into our souls that we know no class, no section; that east, west, north, and south, our people, whatever may be their occupations, whatever their conditions in life, stand shoulder by shoulder, striving for honesty, for decency, for all the fundamental virtues and morals that make good American citizenship.

This address was afterwards published in Dr. Marden's Success Magazine and in his "Success Library."