Theodore Roosevelt
Connecting Maine Communities
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Old Orchard Beach
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The Biddeford Daily Journal’s President’s speech in Old Orchard Beach on August 26. 1902:
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My Fellow Citizens, men and women of Maine:
Of course we are not to be excused if we do not get through the nation the best laws that can be obtained. Good laws can do some good but we must never deceive ourselves into the belief that the law will do more than let the man after the law has been put upon the statute books work out his own salvation.
It is indeed a pleasure to me to have the chance of visiting your great and beautiful state, and I thank you from my heart for the greeting which you have extended to me.
In almost every meeting I see veterans like you (pointing to a veteran) like you over there and you with the boy in your arms there, who wear the button that shows that in the time that tried men's souls you proved your truth by your endeavor.
In those days Maine was a lesson to all for the way her sons bore themselves in war.
Since then and now she is a lesson to us because of the high average of citizenship that shows within her borders, and I think that it is the same reason in the one case as in the other.
The fact that here you have remained on the whole true to the Old American theory of treating each man on his worth as a man without regard to the incidentals of his position.
Now you over there, (pointing) you were in the great war. When you went to war and moved into battle you took an immense interest in what the man on your right hand and your left did, but you did not care the least bit in the world whether they were bankers or lumbermen or farmers or what, if they stayed put. (cries of “That id right!”) That is what you wanted. (Cheers and cries of “God bless you.”)
What you wanted was to know that the man had the right stuff in him, (a voice, “That is it”) and if he had, you were for him (a voice, “Yes sir”) and if he did not have you were not for him.
You can have got to have the same principle in citizenship. You have got to apply the same principle in civil life that you made succeed in the days when you fought because the nation called to you in her direst need.
The state can do much, but it cannot begin to do everything. The state can do something for all of us, but not as much as we can do for the state. (A voice “Amen”) That is what is going to count in the long run. (A voice “That’s business). The government, national and state, can mighty easily spoil chances for all of us.
Bad law will work badly enough but it is hard by the best laws to do more than shape conditions so as to give each man a square and fair chance and then he has got to work out his future for himself.
It is a much easier thing to tell people that you have got a patent recipe that will save them from having to take trouble themselves than it is to tell them perfectly plain, homely truths.
It is an easier thing to make the promise but it is a much uglier thing afterwards to carry out the promise and on the whole it is not worth while making a promise if you have got to feel ashamed of yourself for breaking it afterwards. (Cries of “Good.”)
Roosevelt's presidential train tour moved on to Portland next.
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Mr. Mayor, and you my fellow citizens, men and women of Maine:
I wish to say a word to you in recognition of great service rendered not only to all our country but to the entire principle of democratic government throughout the world, by one of your citizens. The best institutions are of no good if they won’t work. I do not care how beautiful a theory is, if it won’t fit in with the facts it is of no good. If you built the handsomest engine that ever had been built and it did not go, its usefulness would be limited. Well, that was just about the condition that Congress had reached at the time when Thomas B. Reed was elected Speaker. We had all the machinery, but it didn’t work, - that was the trouble, - and you had to find some one powerful man who would disregard the storm of obloquy sure to be raised by what he did in order to get it to work. Such a man was found when Reed was made Speaker. We may differ among ourselves as to policy. We may differ among ourselves as to what course government should follow; but if we possess any intelligence we must be united in the opinion that it shall be able to follow some course. If government can not go on it is not government. If the legislative body can not enact laws, then there is no use of misnaming it a legislative body; and if the majority is to rule some method by which it can rule must be provided. Government by the majority in Congress had practically come to a stop when Mr. Reed became Speaker. Mr. Reed, at the cost of infinite labor, at the coat of fierce attacks, succeeded in restoring that old principle; and now through Congress we can do well or ill, accordingly as the people demand, but at any rate, we can do something - and we owe it more than to any other one man to your fellow-citizen, Mr. Reed. It is a great thing for any man to be able to feel that in some one crisis he left his mark deeply scored for good in the history of his country, and Tom Reed has the right to that feeling.
Now a word or two more. I was greeted here not only by your mayor, not only by other men standing high, but by you, General Chamberlain, to whom it was given, at the supreme moment of the war, to win the supreme reward of a soldier. All honor to the man, and may we keep ourselves from envying because to him came the supreme good fortune of winning the medal of honor for mighty deeds done in the mightiest battle that nineteenth century saw - Gettysburg.
I see everywhere I stop - in Maine, as in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut - men who in the times that tried the nation’s worth, rose level to the nation’s need and offered gladly all life itself upon the nation’s altar - the men who fought in the great Civil War from ‘61 to ‘65. They taught us much by their life in war time, and they have taught us as much by their life ever since. They were soldiers when we needed soldiers, and they were of the very best kind, and when the need was citizenship in civil life they showed us they could give the highest kind of citizenship. Not merely did they leave us a reunited country; not merely did they leave us the memory of the great deeds they did, to be forever after an inspiration to us, but they left us the memory of the way the deed was done. All the time, gentlemen, we have people - often entirely well meaning - who will rise up and tell us that by some patent device we can all be saved in citizenship or in social life. Now, General, and you, you veterans who wear the button, when you came down to the root of things in war time you had to depend upon the qualities of manhood which had made good soldiers from the days when the children of Israel marched out of Egypt, down. Rifles now instead of boys then, but the man behind the rifle is more important than the rifle itself.
So with our laws. We need good laws. We need a wise administration of the law, an upright and fearless administration of the law, an upright and fearless administration of the law. But the best constitution that was ever devised by the wit of man and the best laws that were ever put upon the statute books, will not avail to save us if the average citizen has not in him the root of right living. The Army of the Potomac could never have seen Appomattox if it had not for the spirit that drove you from the office and the factory and the farm to take up the burden of war, and when you went to war to stay there until you saw it through. They did not conquer in war by hysterics. Doubtless you will remember that after Bull Run there were some excellent people that thought the war was over, and over the wrong way. It was not over. Three years and nine months had to elapse and then it got over the other way.
About the worst quality you can have in a soldier is hysterics or anything approaching it, and it is pretty nearly the worst quality in civil life. We need in civil life the plain, practical, every-day virtues which all of us admit in theory to be necessary and which when we all practice will come mighty near making a state perfect. Brilliancy is a good thing. So is genius. Every now and then the chance comes to render some such great service as I told you about Tom Reed’s rendering, some such service, General, as you rendered at Gettysburg, but normally what we want is not genius but the faculty of seeing that we know how to apply the copy-book moralities that we write down, and as long as we think of them only as fit for the copy-book there is not much use in us.
We need in our public life as in our private life the virtues that everyone could practice if he would. We need the will to practice them. There are two kinds of greatness that can be achieved. There is the greatness that comes to the man who can do what no one else can do. That is a mighty rare kind, and of course it can only be achieved by the man of special and unusual qualities. Then there is the other kind that comes to the man who does the things that everyone could do but that everyone does not do; who goes ahead and does them himself. To do that you first of all have got to school yourselves to do the ordinary, commonplace things.
Now, General, I was a very little time in my war; you were a long time in yours. I did not see much fighting, but I saw a lot of human nature. I recollect one young fellow who came down to join a cavalry regiment. He was filled with enthusiasm, thinking he was going to look all the time like my friend in that smart khaki uniform who welcomes me over there, who welcomes me and whom I want to thank for coming to meet me. After three days the young man came down to me and said, “Colonel, I wish to make a complaint, sir; I came down here to fight for my country, and the captain has put me to work digging kitchen sinks.” I asked the captain about it and he said, “Yes.” The captain was a large man from New Mexico, and he explained to that excellent youth that he would go right on digging kitchen sinks, and when the fighting came he should have all the fighting there was, but at present his duty was to dig kitchen sinks. In other words, he had to do the small duties that were done, and thereby best fit himself to do the big duties that might loom in the future.
So it is with us in the work of everyday citizenship. I believe that the nation will rise level to any great emergency that may meet it, but it will only be because now in our ordinary work-a-day life, the times of peace, in the times when no great crisis is upon us, we school ourselves by constant practice in the commonplace, everyday, indespicible duties, so that when the time arrives we shall show that we have learned aright the primary lessons of good citizenship. I thank you.
(Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 26, 1902.)
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Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow countrymen and women of this beautiful State:
In the first place, Mr. Mayor let me in thanking all of you for your greeting, thank especially the Mayor, the official representative of the city, for the kindness with which he has spoken. Mr. Mayor, I can hardly imagine any man able to occupy the Presidency of this people and not feeling, with all his faith, that he was indeed the servant and the representative of the people, but if it were necessary to have such feeling words like yours would supply it.
My fellow citizens, coming here this afternoon I saw along the streets and here and there I see in the audience before me men who wear the button that shows that in the times that tried men’s souls they proved their truth by their endeavor; they rose level to the nation’s need. It always seems to me when I see such men that the lesson they taught by what they did during the war, and by the way in which when once the war was over they turned to the works of peace, is a lesson peculiarly applicable to us under the strain to of the enormous and complex development of our industrial civilization.
Here in Maine, you combine as in but few states both the old conditions and the new. In your country districts, on your beautiful farms, on the edges of the great northern forests, among your seafaring people on the coast, you have men leading substantially the lives, under substantially the conditions that obtained in the days of our forefathers who founded this Republic; and then, again, in industrial centers like this city of which, Mr. Mayor, you are the chief executive - in these centers, we perceive the full play of the great forces which have brought about that marvelous material progress of which we are so proud, but which at the same time have bought us face to face with problems of a wholly different type from those that we confronted in the simpler life.
These problems are very difficult. I might put it more strongly than that. It is impossible to devise any one perfect solution, and one complete solution, for all the problems of our latter-day industrial civilization.
But there are certain elementary truths which we tend to forget, but which nevertheless, remain operative in the biggest city, in the most feverish industrial center, just as much as on any farm in the countryside.
Fundamentally, through the qualities by which the success of the individual is attained, must the success of the nation be wrought, and these are the same qualities the showing of which made the foundation of this nation possible.
The man who fought in the Civil War fought with different weapons from those carried by Washington’s Continentals at Trenton and the Brandywine, through the dark days of Valley Forge, and at the ultimate triumph of Yorktown. And now, in the warfare of today, the weapons have changed again, and the tactics have changed with them, but the man behind the gun has got to be of the same old stuff, or the best gun won’t save him.
No improvement in firearms, no perfection of equipment, no change in tactics will avail unless back of them all lies the spirit that sent you and your fellows from ‘61 to ‘65, again and again against the Confederate lines; that sent you after defeat back again just as if you had won, and after defeat again back again, until from defeat you had wrenched the victory.
The great battleship of today would have seemed veritable nightmares to Howe and Perry in the 1812 and ‘14, and as for the guns, why in those days, - in 1812, the commander of a small vessel walk up and down the quarter-deck with an entire broadside of cartridges in one coat-tail pocket!
But we won completely in ‘98 and with such little effort because we had men with the spirit of 1812, with the spirit of Farragut’s fleet in the Civil War, back of the guns and the ships. I is the man behind the gun, the man in the engine room, the man in the conning-tower,- these are they who fundamentally govern. Of course, you have got to have the weapons, but you can’t win with bows and arrows.
But it is no matter how good the weapons are which you have, you must have good men to use them.
And more than that, it is not only courage that counts, it is thoroughness in training. That made a big difference between Bull Run and Gettysburg. Now in our Navy and Army, if you ever have to face a foreign foe, we want to train in advance, so that Gettysburg may come without Bullrun, and there must be preparedness in advance. This is why we want to keep our fleet trained and practiced.
Any one of you who sees a great modern warship must realize that no one can learn and be trained to handle that trade in a week, any more than the ordinary unskilled laborer could learn to become a skilled machinist or a watch manufacturer in the same length of time. Put men who mean well but who do not know, on a good ship and send them up against a competent foe and you invite not merely disaster but a good deal worse - disgrace. Have the men trained in advanced - months and years in advance. That is how the victory comes.
At Manila and Santiago, there were plenty of brave men amongst the Spaniards but they didn’t know how to shoot, and they didn’t know how to keep their machinery in gear, and our men did because they had taken the time in advance, because they didn’t expect off-hand, in one day, to solve the problem of carrying on the war. Month in and month out, year after year out, the ship-wright, the officer, the enlisted man afloat and ashore, had done their several duties in making ready the great ships, in maneuvering with them at sea, in drilling the crews at target practice, until when the final day came we had men who could rise level to the demand upon them.
Now, my fellow citizens, the same thing is substantially true in our civil life. Exactly as back of the gun stand the man behind the gun, and more important, so behind legislation, behind the best that can be done by constitutions and by-laws, must stand a high average of decent citizenship, if we are to get good results in this Republic. We need good laws, good constitutions, and upright and honest administration of the laws. We need all these, just as in the navy we need good ships and guns, but they are not enough. You have to have men honestly bent on doing the best that is in them under those laws in order to get the best results.
And, now, gentlemen, how about doing the best? Is it a work of special genius? Not a bit of it. In the army, you developed two or three or half a dozen geniuses. You had a Grant, a Sherman, a Sheridan, with Farragut on the sea; but the great thing is that you developed the average American citizen who had gone into the ranks and developed himself into a first-class fighting man, and he was so developed by those over him, not through genius, but by doing well all of the small things that were to be done. In any new regiment, there is always a certain proportion of recruits who want to be heroes, but they don’t want to go through the preliminaries - they don’t want to dig out kitchen sinks. Sentry duty does not appeal to them; keeping the camp police is rather repulsive. They want to win a great battle without preparing for it. That sort of man doesn’t make a hero. He doesn’t even make an ordinarily good soldier.
Now, in our civic life, distrust the man who thinks that if some great emotional crisis came he would rise up and reform everything, but meanwhile doesn’t want to do his ordinary common-place duty! This is a work-a-day world, and we can get along in it only if we show the work-a-day qualities. It is a very essential thing to be able to show the other qualities. It is a very fine thing. It is necessary for the nation that you shall have men eager to volunteer when some man like Cushing starts out to do a deed of daring, where death stares every man in the face, but before the Cushings can get their chance, there has got to be any amount of wearisome blockading, of standing on and off before the ports, of training the men until they can follow the Cushings.
And so in our civic life, we shall never have any healthy government in any community until the citizens of that community perform their own duties of citizenship, - not spasmodically or hysterically, but day by day, regularly, as they come in.
Duties of citizenship. Now, of course, the first business of citizenship is that the man shall care for those dependent upon him; that the man shall be a good breadwinner; deal well by his wife and the children. I am of an archaic temperament, and I wish you all large families by the way.
And in addition to being straight at home, each man has got to be straight with his neighbors, has got to be a decent man in his ordinary work, and if he is not decent at home, if he is not a faithful loyal man in whom you can trust in the ordinary business relations, in the factory, in the shop, and on the farm; if he is not that, he is not going to be a good citizen.
But besides all that he has got to show certain other qualities. He has got to remember that in addition to his duties to those nearest to him, under our republican system of government he is not to be excused if he fails to do his duty to himself and his neighbors and to that representative of himself and his neighbors, the State, the government.
He does not need to have any unusual grace to make himself a good citizen in this way. He has got in the first place, to be honest and decent. That first of all. No amount of smartness will avail to make up for these, the root of righteous living, of righteous dealing with his neighbors. Don’t forget that. There is nothing I dislike more than having some scoundrel spoken of with admiration, as when someone says. “He is a smart fellow, but you can’t depend on him.” Distrust the man about whom that is said, and the man who says it.
You have got to be honest first. And that is not enough. In the Civil War, you had to have patriotism first, but the patriotism was no good if the man wanted to run away. The honest man who is timid isn’t of any use. With honesty, you must have courage. Honesty and courage! And they are not enough. I do not care how brave and how honest the man is, if he is a natural-born fool you can do nothing with him. You have to have honesty and courage and then to them the saving grace of common sense. And you need it. You need the common sense in the management of the state just as much as you need it in the management of your own individual affairs.
The sum and substance of it all is, the greatest problem, the real problem, is the problem of keeping our average citizens good, upright, sensible, and brave men and women.
(Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 27, 1902)
The Daily Kennebec Journal's President’s speech in Augusta on August 26. 1902:
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Governor Burleigh, my fellow citizens, men and women of Maine:
It would be difficult for any man speaking to this audience and from the front of the house in which Blaine once lived to fail to feel whatever of Americanism there was in him stirred to the depths. For my good fortune, I knew Mr. Blaine quite well when he was Secretary of State, and I have thought again and again during the past few years how pleased he would have been to see so many of the principles for which he had stood approach fruition.
One secret, perhaps I might say the chief secret, of Mr. Blaine’s extraordinary hold upon the affections of his countrymen was his entirely genuine and unaffected Americanism. When I speak of Americanism I do not for a minute mean to say, gentlemen, that all the things we do are all right. I think there are plenty of evils to correct and that often a man shows himself all the more a good American because he wants to cut out any evil of the body politic which may interfere with our approaching the ideal of true Americanism. But not only admitting but also emphasizing this, it yet remains true that throughout our country if he did not believe in the country, Mr. Blaine possessed to an eminent degree the confident hope in the nation’s future which made him feel that she must ever strive to fit herself for a great destiny. He felt that this Republic must in every way take the lead in the Western Hemisphere. He felt that this Republic must play a great part among the nations of the earth. The last four years have shown how true that feeling of his was.
He had always hoped that we would have a peculiarly intimate relation with the countries south of us. He could hardly have anticipated - no one could have - the Spanish War and its effects. In consequence of that war America’s interest in the tropic islands to our south and the seas and coasts surrounding those islands is more complicated than ever before. The Monroe Doctrine is simply a statement of our very firm belief that on this continent the nations now expiring here must be left to work out their own destinies among themselves and that the continent is no longer to be regarded as colonizing ground for any European power. The pone power on the continent that can make that doctrine effective is, of course, ourselves; for in the world as it is, gentlemen, the nation which advances a given doctrine likely to interfere in any way with other nations must possess power to back it up if she wished the doctrine to be respected.* We stand firmly on the Monroe Doctrine.
* (”What will you say to Europe in your forthcoming message?” I once asked President Roosevelt.
“I shall say,” he replied with an iron twinkle in his eyes - “I shall say that we are one of the most peaceable nations with one of the best navies in the world.” - A. H. I.)
The event of the last nine months have rendered it evident that we shall soon embark on the work of excavating the Isthmian Canal to connect the two great oceans - a work destined to be, the greatest engineering feat of the twentieth century, certainly a greater engineering feat that has ever yet been successfully attempted among the nations of mankind; and as it is the biggest thing of its kind to be done I am glad it is the United States that is to do it. Whenever a nation undertakes to carry out a great destiny it must make up its mind that there will be work and worry, labor and risk, in doing the work. It is with a nation as it is with an individual; if you are content to attempt but little in private life you may be able to escape a good deal of worry, but you won’t achieve very much. The man who attempts much must make up his mind that there will now and then come days and nights of worry; there will come even moments of seeming defeat. But out of the difficulties we wrest success. So, it is with the nation. It is not the easy take that is necessarily the best.
Passing through your streets I see, as is natural to a city having a great Soldiers’ Home in its neighborhood, many men who fought in the great war for the Union, and no state relatively to its resources did more splendidly gallant and efficient work than Maine in that mighty struggle, and the reason the Union cause triumphed then was because out people had in their hearts deep down the conviction that there were certain things which far outweighed ease, pleasure, material success, or even life itself.
In’61 the easy thing to do was to let the seceding states go. Not only timid, selfish men, but the very good men who did not think deeply enough said that, in addition to the very good men who were faint at heart. That was the easy thing to do, and if our fathers had done it not a man here would be walking with his head as high as he now holds it, for this country would have embarked upon a career both mean and contemptible, a career of being split up into half a dozen squabbling little rival nationalities. We won out because our fathers had iron in their blood because they dared greatly and did greatly, because when they were convinced where their duty lay they resolutely did it, no matter what the coast.
During the last four years, we have had certain lesser duties, but still, important ones presented to the nation. The war with Spain itself was a slight struggle, an easy one, calling for the exercise of but a fraction of the nation’s giant strength. But following that war there came some real and serious difficulties which commanded the exercise on the part of this nation of qualities no altogether remote from those shown in the great days, the days of the Civil War. The demand upon us during this crisis for the qualities shown from ‘61 to ‘65 was nothing like as great as it was in that time, but it did not differ greatly in kind; the degree was much less, but the king of quality demanded was much the same.
We found ourselves, for instance, in the Philippines in possession of a great growth of tropical islands, whose people had moved upward very unequally a certain distance from savagery and subjection, but whose people were wholly unable to stand alone. If we went out of the islands it was certain that they would fall into black chaos and savagery. It was certain that some other stronger power would step in to do the work which in such case we would have failed to perform.
Now, the easy thing to do was to get out of the islands, and, as in ‘61, all the men of little faith wanted to get out. Every man who wanted to avoid trouble, every man who put the avoidance of trouble above everything else, and even the good men whose thoughts did not strike down to the root of things, wanted to get out. But exactly as in ‘61 the heart of the people ran true.
The average common sense of the American people determined our course far more than the leadership of any one man. The average sense of the American people was that we had gotten into the islands, we had put our hands to the job and we had to see it through.
It was not very easy. There was a great deal to puzzle and bewilder us. The warfare was carried on under very difficult conditions of climate, of country, and against a singularly cruel and treacherous foe, a very elusive foe. It was very hard to find a chance to strike blows that would end the content and often the same bit of work had seemingly to be done over and over and over again, and every time it had to be done over again there were people out here on this side of the world in our own country who said that it could not be done. But it was done, and finally, on the fourth of July last, we were able by proclamation to announce the definite pacification of the Philippine islands. I now speak of the Filipinos proper, not of the Mohammedan Moros. If they insist upon having it, why, they will have it. When they do have it they will have it for keeps.
But with the Filipinos themselves peace had now definitely come, and a greater measure not only of good government but of self-government than they have ever known before during their existence, before Spanish rule, and after it. Each Filipino now has a better chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness than he ever dreamed of having before - than he could have ever dreamed of acquiring under the rule of any little native oligarchy.
Now, when a nation embarks on such a course of action as that upon which this nation has embarked, it must count the cost. You know in the Bible it says when a king goes to war with another king you want to count the cost to both; you want to count up the power of both himself and his rival. Now, whenever we undertake any bit of action, private or public, we show ourselves most foolish if we do not think it out in advance, and if we do not try so to act as to make good what we promise or threaten to do. Any man here who goes into any bit of business on any other plan will not only fail but will be regarded by his neighbors as a fool, and the nation must show the good sense that we exact of an individual.
We must, in the first place, in dealing with these new islands, deal with them so as to give them the highest measure of government efficiency. Now, it is always pleasant to point to an example which we can follow rather than avoid, and we have such an example ready in what we have done during the past four years with the island of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico became ours and we undertook to govern it and we have governed it so well that I haven’t the least doubt that about half my audience have to think pretty carefully before they can remember that we are governing it at all.
There is no opportunity whatever for headlines, Governor Burleigh, in any newspaper about Puerto Rico, because no editor would think of wasting space upon such an announcement as “Everything still prosperous in Puerto Rico.”
So well has everything been managed there that our very success has resulted in out not thinking of the matter at all, and it has been managed because we have sent the best type of men that we could find to administer the island, and have striven to administer it not only honestly, not only efficiently, but with due reference to the prejudices of the people themselves.
Now, the last is a very important point, gentlemen, in dealing with people whose antecedents are widely from ours. Every one of us knows in private life some friend, and I think a great many of us know some kinsman of kinswoman who may be an excellent person, but whom we perfectly loathe and dread because he or she wants us to live out lives in their way, and not in ours. Their way may be all right, but it is not ours. We want to manage ourselves in our own way and not in the other person’s.
Now, in all these new dependencies we want to interfere just as little as may be with the manners of life, the customs, the methods of living of the inhabitants. We will have to interfere more or less, but let the interference be minimized, and where it can possibly take the shape of education and persuasion let it take the shape of education and persuasion let it take that shape. Now, for one thing, especially, we have got to give the very best service in the island; we have got to jealousy guard their interests because that will guard our own.
Maine always stood by the navy, and I think it always will. But we must not only be devoted to the navy, we must be intelligently devoted to it. Every one of you who has seen or studied about a modern warship knows that it is a singularly delicate and complicated as well as a singularly formidable bit of mechanism. You can not build it in a short time, and still less can you train anyone to handle it in a short time.
At Manilla, the ships that went in on that first of May, four years ago, went in while McKinley was President, but they had been built during the presidencies of Arthur and Cleveland and Harrison. The men fought and won the victory on that May day, but they had prepared themselves to win the victory during years of careful training, of exercise of the great ships at sea, of exercise of the men at the guns day in and day out in target practices.
Our men showed valor and self-devotion, but there was valor and self-devotion also on the side of our foes. Many Spaniards showed great bravery, but they did not hit what they shot at, and they let their engines get out of gear; and in this world, when you shoot you want to hit; you want to keep your engines all ready.
That applies to civil life just as much as in military life. There had been on our part careful preparedness in advance. In consequence we not only won, but we won practically without getting scratched ourselves. It is a good thing to look back at if it does not make us commit the grievous error of thinking that we can always count, in the event of a war, on our antagonists not shooting straight.
That won’t do. We have got to proceed upon the assumption that if - which heaven forbid - there ever should be a war we may have to encounter a most powerful and skillful antagonist; and to overcome it we must have not merely a fair degree of efficiency on our part, but the very highest degree of efficiency; the best ships and guns and the best men behind the guns.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, in closing, just one word. We have many external problems to solve, but our internal problems are, of course, more serious. Life has grown much, more complex, much more difficult during the past century that has closed, and we who stand on the threshold of a new century see more problems looming large before us; problems which will tax the energies, tax the courage, and resources of us and our children and our children’s children.
We need to devise new government methods for meeting these problems, but we need the same fundamental qualities of manhood and womanhood in our average citizens that we always have needed.
Exactly as the soldier of the Civil War, though he fought with different weapons from those carried by the soldiers in Washington’s army, needed yet the same courage and tenacity, the same soldierly devotion to duty and resolute refusal to accept defeat which made the men who wore the blue and buff victorious, exactly as nowadays when the high power rifle has revolutionized not merely the armament but the tactics of armies and yet has left unchanged the need in the soldier of the old fundamental soldierly qualities, - exactly as all that is true, so it is true in the field of citizenship, of civic work in civic life. In the old life of the countryside, the life which for Maine’s good fortune Maine retains to so large an extent, the problems are simpler. It is a little clearer to see our duty to our neighbor and our deep underlying brotherhood to him than in the case in a great city.
Yet in a great city in an industrial center, though we need new laws, though there must be greater interference on the part of the nation and the state in the affairs that were formerly left purely to individual initiative, yet deep down under all laws, under all governmental schemes, there must be the old qualities that make up good citizenship.
You need several of them, but three above everything else. In the first place, honesty, honesty in the widest meaning of the term; honesty that means square dealing as between man and man, readiness on the part of the individual to do his duty to his fellows and to state. And honesty is not enough. No matter how honest a man is if he is afraid he is no good. The timid good man is of very little help in this world. A good man, who when he goes out and meets the forces of evil, is shocked and wants to go home does not amount to much.
This is a rough world. The men who are going to do good work in it are those who are able to do rough work, able to do it with clean hands, but able to do it. You have got to have courage as well as honesty. And courage and honesty combined are not enough. No matter how brave a man is, no matter how decent he is, if he is a fool you can do nothing with him.
You have got to have courage, you must have honesty, and in addition to that, you must have not merely as a preliminary to success in private life, but as a prerequisite to success in making the nation what it should and shall be made, the saving virtue of common sense.
(Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine, August 27, 1902)
I passed by your State House in Augusta this morning. Your legislature only meets every other year, and only stays in session about months. Quite right. We do not need too many laws, too much legislation. What we need is stability of laws, fearlessness in applying legislation to new evils, when the evils spring up, but above all commonsense and self-restraint in applying these remedies, and the fixed and unchangeable belief that fundamentally each man’s salvation rests in his own hands. All of us stumble at times. There is not a man here who does not at times need a helping hand stretched out towards him. Shame upon the man who, when the opportunity to help is given, fails to stretch out the hand. Hep the man that stumbles. Help a brother that slips. Set him up on his feet. Try to start him along the right road. But if he lies down, make up your mind you cannot carry him. If he won’t try to walk himself he is not worth carrying. That is so among your neighbors; that is so in your families. Every father of a large family - and being an old-fashioned man, I believe in large families - knows that if he is to do well by his children they must try to do well by themselves.
Now, haven’t you in your own experience known men - and I am sorry to say even often, women - who think that they are doing a favor to their children when they shield them from every effort? When they let the girls sit at ease and read while the mother does all the housework? Don’t you know cases like that? I do. Yes; when a boy will be brought up to be very ornamental and not particularly useful? Don’t you know that, too? Exactly. Now, those are not good fathers and mothers. They are foolish fathers and mothers. They are not being kind; they are simply being silly. That’s all. It is not any good that you do your son or daughter by teaching him or her how to shirk difficulties; you do him or her good, only if you teach him or her to face difficulties and by facing them to overcome them. Isn’t that true? Don’t you know it to be so in your own families? Well, it is just so on a larger scale in the state. The only way by which, in the long run, any man can be helped is by teaching him to help himself. Of course, there may come sudden cataclysms where you have got to extend help with a free hand, thinking only of the immediate need, not of the ultimate results. Of course, new conditions will arise here and there, especially in the complex industrial life of great cities, where you must shape the legislation of the country on a new basis to meet the new conditions. But fundamentally, it is true that only permanent betterment in the condition of any nation is to raise the standards of individual citizenship throughout that nation.
My fellow citizens, I wish to thank you, to thank all the people of Maine for the way in which I have been greeted. I feel in a certain sense a right to the greeting, for at least I am trying to put into practice the principles in which you believe. I feel that the art of successful government in our country is the art of applying practically the everyday principles of decency, morality, and common sense, which must be applied by the average citizen if he is to be a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor, and a good citizen.
There is not any wonderful brilliancy or genius in it. What we need is the application of the everyday principles that a man needs if he is in to make his business a success, if he is to do his duty in his own family and to his neighbor. Now, up here in Maine you are so fortunate as to have a State which, on the whole, represents as well as any other in the Union (better than all, save a very few others, in our Union) the conditions of life, the ways of looking at life, out of which such a republican, such a democratic government as ours springs. You believe practically that each man must work out his fate for himself. And yet that the state must be called on to try to give each man a fair show in life.
(Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 27, 1902)
Bangor
My fellow citizens, my fellow countrymen:
It is indeed a great pleasure to be greeted by you today, as it has been to be greeted by people all over Maine. I can see by your faces that the old American spirit still burns as freely as ever. Driving through the thronged streets I see men who wear the button which tells that they fought in the great struggle. As soon as I saw the mounted policemen I knew that some of them were old cavalrymen.
You men who fought in that war did the greatest deed which men have ever done. You preserved for us a united country and showed the world that it was ever to be united.
While modes of fighting were different in the time of Lincoln from that of Washington, and still more different today, the spirit that wins is just the same.
The soldier of today who is worth his salt must have the same spirit which won at Appomattox. The only way to obtain good government is for each man to do his own share.
Now, my friends, let me interrupt just for a moment, I have a friend here who is lost in the crowd somewhere. He is Bill Sewall, of Island Falls, Aroostook county, and if anyone sees him please say to him that I want him to come to lunch with me here and now.
(Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine August 28, 1902)
The Daily Kennebec Journal article describes the end of Roosevelt's speech from the Bangor Hosue balcony and the accounts during the rest of the day in Bangor.
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My fellow citizens:
I am glad to greet the farmers of Maine. During the century that had closed, the growth of industrialism has necessarily meant that cities and towns have increased in population more rapidly than the country districts. And yet it remains true now, as it always has been, that in the last resort the country districts are those in which we are surest to find the old American spirit, the old American habits of thought and ways ofliving. Conditions have changed in the country far less than they have changed in the cities, and in consequences there has been little breaking away from the methods of life which have produced the great majority of the leaders of the Republic in the past. Almost aloof our great Presidents have been brought up in the country, and most of them worked hard on the farms in their youth and got their early mental training in the healthy democracy of farm life.
The forces which made these farm-bred boys leaders of men when they had come to their full manhood are still at work in our country districts. Self-help and individual initiative remain to a peculiar degree typical of life in the country, life on a farm, in the lumbering camp, on a ranch. Neither the farmers nor their hired hands can workthrough combinations as readily as the capitalists or the wage-workers of cities can work.
It must not be understood from this that there has been bo change in farming and farm life. The contrary is the case. There has been much change, much progress. The granges and similar organizations, the farmers’ institutes, and all the agencies which promote interlligent cooperation and give opportunity for social and intellectual intercourse among the farmers, have played a large part in raising the level of life and work in the country districts. In the domain of government, the Department of Agriculture since its foundationhas accomplished results as striking as those obtained under any other branch of the national administration. By scientific study of all matters connected with the advancement of farm life; by experimental stations; by the use of trained agents, sent to the uttermost countries of the globe; by the practical application of anything which in theory has been demonstrated to be efficient; in these ways, and in many others, great good has been accomplished in raising the standard of productiveness in farm work throughout the country. We live in an era when the best results can only be achieved, if to individual self-help we add the mutual self-help which comes by combination, both of citizens in their individual capacity and of the citizens working through the state as an instrument. The farmers of the country have grown more and more to realize this, and farming has tended more and more to take its place as an applied science - though, as with everything else, the theory must be tested in practical work, and can avail only when applied in practical fashion.
But after all this has been said, it remains true that the countryman - the man on the farm, more than any other of our citizens today, is called upon continually to exercise the qualities which we like to think of as typical of the United States throughout its history - the qualities of rugged independence, masterful resolution, and individual energy and resourcefulness. He works hard (for which no man is to be pitied), and often he lives hard (which may not be pleasant); but his life is passed in healthy surroundings, surroundings which tend to develop a fine type of citizenship. In the country, moreover, the conditions are fortunately such as to allow a closer touch between man and man, than, too often, we find to be the case in the city. Men feel more vividly the underlying sense of brotherhood, of community of interest. I do not mean by this that there are not plenty of problems connected with life in our rural districts. There are many problems; and great wisdom and earnest disinterestedness in effort are needed for their solution.
After all, we are one people, with the same fundamental characteristics, whether we live in the city or in the country, in the East or in the West, in the North or in the South. Each of us, unless he is contented to be a cumberer of the earth’s surface, must strive to do his life-work with his whole heart. Each must remember that, while he will be noxious to every one unless he first do his duty by himself, he must also strive ever to do his duty by his fellow. The problem of how to do these duties is acute everywhere. It is most acute in great cities, but ir exists in the country, too. A man, to be a good citizen, must first be a good bread-winner, a good husband, a good father - I hope the father of many healthy children; just as a woman’s first duty is to be a good housewife and mother. The business duties, the home duties, the duties to one’s family, come first. The couple who bring up plenty of healthy children, who leave behind them many sons and daughters fitted in their turn to be good citizens, emphatically deserve well of the State.
But duty to one’s self and one’s family does not exclude duty to one’s neighbor. Each of us, rich or poor, can help his neighbor at times; and to do this he must be brought into touch with him, into sympathy with him. Any effort is to be welcomed that brings people closer together, so as to secure a better understanding among those whose walks of life are in ordinary circumstances far apart. Probably the good done is almost equally great on both sides, no matter which one may seem to be helping the other. But it must be kept in mind that no good will be accomplished at all by any philanthropic or charitable work, unless it is done along certain definite lines. In the first place, if the work is done in a spirit of condescension, it would be better never to attempt it. IT is almost as irritating to be patronized as to be wronged. The only safe way of working is to try to find out some scheme by which it is possible to make a common effort for the common good. Each of us needs at times to have a helping hand stretched out to him or her. Every one of us slips on some occasion, and shame to the fellow who then refuses to stretch out the hand that should always be ready to help the man who stumbles. It is our duty to lift him up; but it is also our duty to remember that there is no earthly use in trying to carry him. If a man will submit to being carried, that is sufficient to show that he is not worth carrying. In the long run, the only kind of help that really avails is the help which teaches a man to help himself. Such help every man who has been blessed in life should try to give to those who are less fortunate, and such help can be accepted with entire self-respect.
The aim to set before ourselves in trying to aid one another is to give that aid under conditions which will harm no man’s self-respect, and which will teach the less fortunate hos to help themselves as their stronger brothers do. To give such aid it is necessary not only to possess the right kind of heart, but also the right kind of head. Hardness if heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful whether, in the long run, it works more damage than softness of head. At an rate, both are undesirable. The prerequisite to doing good work in the field of philanthropy - in the field of social effort, undertaken with one’s fellows for the common good - is that it shall be undertaken in a spirit of broad sanity no less than broad and loving charity.
The other day, I picked up a little book called “The Simple Life,” written by an Alsatian, Charles Wagner, and he preaches such wholesome, sound doctrine that I wish it could be used as a tract throughout our country. To him the whole problem of our complex, somewhat feverish modern life can be solved only by getting men and women to lead better lives. He sees that the permanence of Liberty and democracy depends upon a majority of the people being steadfast in morality and in that good plain sense which, as a national attribute, comes only as the result of slow and painful labor of centuries, and which can be squandered in a generation by the thoughtless and vicious. He preaches the doctrine of the superiority of the moral to the material. He does not undervalue the material, but he insists, as we of this nation should always insist, upon the infinite superiority of the moral, and the sordid destruction which comes upon either the nation or the individual is it or he becomes absorbed only in the desire to get wealth. The true line of cleavage may, and often does, run at right angles to that which divides the rich and the poor. The sinews of virtue lie in man’s capacity to care for what is outside himself. The man who gives himself up to the service of his appetite, the man who the more goods he has the more wants, has surrendered himself to destruction. It makes little difference whether he achieves his purpose or not. If his point of view is all wrong, he is a bad citizen whether he be rich or poor. It is a small matter to the community whether in arrogance and insolence, he has misused great wealth, or whether, though poor, he is possessed by the mean and fierce desire to seize a morsel, the biggest possible, of that prey which the fortunate of earth consume. The man who lives simply, and justly, and honorably, whether rich of poor, is a good citizen. Those who dream only of idleness and pleasure, who hate others, and fail to recognize the duty of each man to his brother, these be they rich or poor, are the enemies of the State. The misuse of property is one manifestation of the same evil spirit which, under changed circumstances, denies the right of property because this right is in the hands of others. In a purely material civilization the bitterness of attack on another’s possession is only additional proof of the extraordinary importance attached to possession itself. When outward well-being, instead of being regarded as a valuable foundation on which happiness may with wisdom be built, is mistaken for happiness itself, so that material prosperity becomes the one standard, then, alike by those who enjoy such prosperity in slothful or criminal ease, and by those who in no less evil manner rail at, envy, and long for it, poverty is held to be shameful, and money, whether well or ill-gotten, to stand for merit.
All this does not mean condemnation of progress. It is mere folly to try to dig up the dead past, and scant is the good that comes from asceticism and retirement from the world. But let us make sure that prosperity without moral lift toward righteousness means a diminished capacity for happiness and a debased character. The worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its center. When this man lacks moral rectitude, material progress only makes bad worse, and social problems still darker and more complex.
The newspaper gave a little background on the goings on in the crowd in attendance. Several newspapers did a report on the band of pick-pocket thieves that were identified as following the President's travels and stealing from the people in the large crowds.
Daily Kennebec Journal, Morning -
Library of Congress
A few more details from the President's Bangor visit on August 27, 1902
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Mr. Senator, and you, my friends and fellow citizens:
I have thoroughly enjoyed the two days that I spent in your beautiful state. I have enjoyed seeing the state and I have enjoyed the most meeting what really counts in any state - the men and women.
I think that the more one studies the problems of life and of civilization, the more one realizes the infinite;y greater importance of the man than of his physical surroundings. Of course, one has to have certain physical advantages in order to exercise to the best advantage one’s pwn qualities; but it is the last that counts. There are other countries than ours just as fitted by Nature to be agricultural, commercial, (and) industrial centers, and they fail to reach the height that ours has reached because they have not the same men to take advantage of the condition.
Now, we ought not to say that in any spirit of boastfulness. We ought to say it as a reminder to us that we are not to be excused if in the future we do any less well than has been done in the past. There are plenty of problems ahead of us. We stand on the threshold of a new century. No one can say what trial will be before this nation during that century, but that there must be trials we may be sure. No nation can face greatness without having to face trial, exactly as no man can deliberately enter upon a career which leads upward and onward without making up his mind that there will be roughness for him to surmount.
Whether we will or not we must hereafter play in the world the part of a great power. We can play that part ill or we can play it well, but play it somehow we must. It is not open to us to dodge difficulties. We can run away if we want to, but I do not think, gentlemen, that you are built that way.
I earnestly hope, and I can say in all sincerity that I believe, that there is but small chance of our having to face trouble abroad, but we shall avoid it not by blindly refusing to admit that there ever might be trouble, but by safeguarding against it. And the best possible safeguard for this nation is an adequate and highly efficient navy. I am glad to speak in the home of the chairman of the Senate committee on naval affairs. I do not suppose it is necessary to tell any audience which has had a thoroughly good common school education that you do not win victories merely on the day on which the battle is fought. You have got to prepare for them in advance. When Manila and Santiago were fought, great glory came to the men aboard the ships who did the fighting, but an equal need of praise belongs to those men who prepared in advance.* Dewey’s ships won their great victory under the presidency of McKinley, but they were built under Presidents Arthur, Cleveland, and Harrison. The men and the officers aboard them were able to do what they did because, through months and years of patient practice, often under officers to whom it was denied to be in actual battle, they were trained to the point of efficiency we saw. The men of Congress, such as my host of this evening and his fellows, who saw the need, who voted for the ships, who voted for the guns, who voted to allow money for powder which could be used to best advantage by being used up in practice - those were the men who rendered that victory possible. Nor, it is the work that is being done in the navy which will render that navy fit to respond to any call that may be made upon it, if, which heaven forbid, such call should ever be made. So much for what is our duty in reference to matters without. Even more important is it to deal well and wisely with affairs within our own borders.
Take the evils that come up to our mind when we speak of the trusts. The word trust is used very loosely in the ordinary significance, which means simply a large corporation created in one state, probably doing business in other states and usually with an element of monopoly pertaining to it. Now, some of the evils are allowed imaginary, others are very real. Certainly, the change produced along a number of lines by the increase of power of these corporations by their increase in magnitude is not a change that most of us welcome. There is every reason why we should resolutely declare our purpose, and put into effect our purpose, to take cognizance of the evils and find out what of the alleged evils are real and imaginary, and to minimize or to do away with those evils. On the one hand, I believe that the men of great means should understand that when we demand some method of asserting the power of the nation over all corporations, we are acting not against their interest, but in their interest.
* There were influences in Washington that wanted to weaken Dewey. They would have taken the Olympia from him if it hadn’t been for the fight that Mr. Roosevelt, then-Assistant Secretary of the Navy, made against it. When at last he triumphed and it was decided not to weaken Dewey, Mr. Roosevelt cabled the Admiral the news in these words: “ Keep the Olympia and keep her full of coal.” It was Mr. Roosevelt’s foresight, as much as any other element, that was the battle of Maila. - A.H. L.
(Portland Daily Press, Portland, Maine, August 28, 1902)
Companion curriculum State-standard-based units,
vocabulary, and reading activities for use in grades 3-8
are available online as downloadable resources through
Seashore Trolley Museum's website
www.trolleymuseum.org/elegantride/
* Renaissance Charitable Foundation (LPCT) by Fiduciary Trust Charitable Giving Fund
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