Tr Roosevelt Quotes

T.R.’s real name was Theodore Roosevelt. He was just a puppy when Papa took me to Atlanta to hear the president speak; I named him Theodore Roosevelt when I got home that day—then shortened it to T.R. so folks wouldn’t think my dog was a Republican.

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to join American forces in combat as Lafayette was. The two shared a child’s ideal of manly military glory. Though in Lafayette’s defense, he was an actual teenager, unlike the thirty-nine-year-old TR.

Let’s ask him,” Lincoln Steffens suggested. The two men dashed across to headquarters and burst into Roosevelt’s office. Riis put the question directly. Was he working to be President? The effect, wrote Steffens, “was frightening.” TR leaped to his feet, ran around his desk, and fists clenched, teeth bared, he seemed about to throttle Riis, who cowered away, amazed. “Don’t you dare ask me that,” TR yelled at Riis. “Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that, you—you—” Riis’s shocked face or TR’s recollection that he had few friends as devoted as Jake Riis halted him. He backed away, came up again to Riis, and put his arm over his shoulder. Then he beckoned me close and in an awed tone of voice explained. “Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of … But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to—” He stopped, held us off, and looked into our faces with his face screwed up into a knot, as with lowered voice he said slowly: “I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?” Again he looked at us as if we were enemies; then he threw us away from him and went back to his desk. “Go on away, now,” he said, “and don’t you ever mention the—don’t you ever mention that to me again.”141

Behind those thick glasses (of TR's) was a man who did not blink.

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

The harshest verdict on the biography came from the White House. ‘I dislike the father and dislike the son,’ said President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Randolph and Winston possessed ‘such levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety, as to make them poor public servants’, thought ‘TR’, and Winston’s book was ‘A clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar life of that clever, forceful, rather cheap and vulgar egoist.

Fresh from victories over Spain, Germany, and Britain, and dominant from Alaska to Venezuela, Roosevelt declared in his 1904 State of the Union speech that the US had assumed responsibility for the peace and stability of its geopolitical neighborhood. In the future, TR stated, “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.”76 This resolution became known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

TR recalled the typical American for whom he had governed. In his Autobiography, the former president reprinted a cartoon of an elderly, bewhiskered man, his feet by a fire, reading a copy of “The President’s Message” in a newspaper. The caption: “His Favorite Author.” TR loved it. “This was the old fellow whom I always used to keep in my mind,” Roosevelt recalled. “He had probably been in the Civil War in his youth; he had worked hard ever since he left the army; he had been a good husband and father; he brought up his boys and girls to work; he did not wish to do injustice to any one else, but he wanted justice done to himself and to others like him; and I was bound to secure justice for him if it lay in my power to do so.” TR firmly believed

Three days after a German submarine sank the Lusitania, Wilson addressed an audience of recently naturalized citizens in Philadelphia. "You cannot become thorough Americans", he told them, "if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups, A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American". "We can have no 'fifty-fifty' allegiance in the country", Theodore Roosevelt said two years later. "Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all". He condemned Americans who saw the world from the standpoint of another nation. "We Americans are children of the crucible", T.R. said. "The crucible does not do its work unless it turns out those cast into it in one national mould".

The race that followed constituted one of the great campaigns in American history. A three-way contest with a major party split, it recalled the 1860 election, when the fate of the nation had hung on the outcome. No such momentous stakes rode on the 1912 election, despite [Theodore] Roosevelt's insistent comparison of his new Progressive party with Lincoln's Republicans. Yet the campaign crackled with excitement. The most colorful politician since the Civil War [TR] squared off against the most articulate politician since the early days of the Republic. Everyone recognized that the race was between Roosevelt and [Woodrow Wilson]. [President] Taft remained a candidate solely to spoil Roosevelt's chances.

About the same time, Ronald Reagan stepped into the Oval Office and began to pursue policies that reminded many Americans of TR's Big Stick diplomacy. Roosevelt, who had doubled the size of the navy and sent his Great White Fleet on a voyage around the world, surely would have approved of Reagan's plans for a six-hundred ship navy, dramatically increased military spending, and eagerness to challenge the Soviet Union. These policies fit perfectly with TR's philosophy of deterrence (which Reagan expressed succinctly as "peace through strength"), and they were promoted in the same unequivocal moral terms--the American "shining city on a hill" versus the Soviet "evil empire"--that Roosevelt habitually used when describing enemies, foreign and domestic.

One of the most recognizable and celebrated Americans alive, the former 26th president of the United States, the hero of San Juan Hill and the daring leader of the legendary Rough Riders. The Republican progressive who as president broke the industrial trusts, regulated the railroads, set aside 230-million acres for national parks and forests and preserves, and who had fought to give the workingman “a Square Deal” through his eight years in the White House. This was T.R., the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who brokered the end of the Russo-Japanese War and who championed the seemingly impossible dream of cutting a canal through Panama to connect the mighty oceans. The historian, writer and naturalist whose death-defying adventures in the jungles of Africa and South America had captivated the country.

TR’s reflections on the invitation tell us much about the era. Though asking Washington to dine was a pioneering act, the president was not a civil rights pioneer in the ways we, from a different century and in a different context, might hope to find. For his time, however, Roosevelt was closer to the side of the angels than many other Americans were.

We did not agree in all things,… but we did in some, and those we pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics… if you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.

TR’s capacity on some occasions to stand for equality and for openness and in other contexts to argue that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to rule the world was a particular example of a more universal American inconsistency. We believed in life and liberty for some; we simultaneously believed in imposing our will on the lives and liberties of others on the grounds that they were innately inferior. The tension between these visions of identity, of assimilation, and of power have long shaped American life, and rarely more so than in the Age of the first Roosevelt.