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TEDDY ROOSEVELT 1883
The Duties of American Citizenship
It follows the full text transcript of
Theodore Roosevelt's The Duties of American
Citizenship speech, delivered at Buffalo, NY - January
26, 1883.
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Of course, in one
sense, |
the first
essential for a man's being a good citizen is
his possession of the home virtues of which we
think when we call a man by the emphatic
adjective of manly. No man can be a good citizen
who is not a good husband and a good father, who
is not honest in his dealings with other men and
women, faithful to his friends and fearless in
the presence of his foes, who has not got a
sound heart, a sound mind, and a sound body;
exactly as no amount of attention to civil
duties will save a nation if the domestic life
is undermined, or there is lack of the rude
military virtues which alone can assure a
country's position in the world. In a free
republic the ideal citizen must be one willing
and able to take arms for the defense of the
flag, exactly as the ideal citizen must be the
father of many healthy children. A race must be
strong and vigorous; it must be a race of good
fighters and good breeders, else its wisdom will
come to naught and its virtue be ineffective;
and no sweetness and delicacy, no love for and
appreciation of beauty in art or literature, no
capacity for building up material prosperity can
possibly atone for the lack of the great virile
virtues.
But this is aside from my subject, for what I
wish to talk of is the attitude of the American
citizen in civic life. It ought to be axiomatic
in this country that every man must devote a
reasonable share of his time to doing his duty
in the Political life of the community. No man
has a right to shirk his political duties under
whatever plea of pleasure or business; and while
such shirking may be pardoned in those of small
cleans it is entirely unpardonable in those
among whom it is most common--in the people
whose circumstances give them freedom in the
struggle for life. In so far as the community
grows to think rightly, it will likewise grow to
regard the young man of means who shirks his
duty to the State in time of peace as being only
one degree worse than the man who thus shirks it
in time of war. A great many of our men in
business, or of our young men who are bent on
enjoying life (as they have a perfect right to
do if only they do not sacrifice other things to
enjoyment), rather plume themselves upon being
good citizens if they even vote; yet voting is
the very least of their duties, Nothing worth
gaining is ever gained without effort.
You can no more
have freedom without striving and suffering for
it than you can win success as a banker or a
lawyer without labor and effort, without
self-denial in youth and the display of a ready
and alert intelligence in middle age. The people
who say that they have not time to attend to
politics are simply saying that they are unfit
to live in a free community. Their place is
under a despotism; or if they are content to do
nothing but vote, you can take despotism
tempered by an occasional plebiscite, like that
of the second Napoleon. In one of Lowell's
magnificent stanzas about the Civil War he
speaks of the fact which his countrymen were
then learning, that freedom is not a gift that
tarries long in the hands of cowards: nor yet
does it tarry long in the hands of the sluggard
and the idler, in the hands of the man so much
absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure or in the
pursuit of gain, or so much wrapped up in his
own easy home life as to be unable to take his
part in the rough struggle with his fellow men
for political supremacy. If freedom is worth
having, if the right of self-government is a
valuable right, then the one and the other must
be retained exactly as our forefathers acquired
them, by labor, and especially by labor in
organization, that is in combination with our
fellows who have the same interests and the same
principles.
We should not
accept the excuse of the business man who
attributed his failure to the fact that his
social duties were so pleasant and engrossing
that he had no time left for work in his office;
nor would we pay much heed to his further
statement that he did not like business anyhow
because he thought the morals of the business
community by no means what they should be, and
saw that the great successes were most often won
by men of the Jay Gould stamp. It is just the
same way with politics. It makes one feel half
angry and half amused, and wholly contemptuous,
to find men of high business or social standing
in the community saying that they really have
not got time to go to ward meetings, to organize
political clubs, and to take a personal share in
all the important details of practical politics;
men who further urge against their going the
fact that they think the condition of political
morality low, and are afraid that they may be
required to do what is not right if they go into
politics.
The first duty of an American citizen, then, is
that he shall work in politics; his second duty
is that he shall do that work in a practical
manner; and his third is that it shall be done
in accord with the highest principles of honor
and justice. Of course, it is not possible to
define rigidly just the way in which the work
shall be made practical. Each man's individual
temper and convictions must be taken into
account. To a certain extent his work must be
done in accordance with his individual beliefs
and theories of right and wrong. To a yet
greater extent it must be done in combination
with others, he yielding or modifying certain of
his own theories and beliefs so as to enable him
to stand on a common ground with his fellows,
who have likewise yielded or modified certain of
their theories and beliefs. There is no need of
dogmatizing about independence on the one hand
or party allegiance on the other.
There are
occasions when it may be the highest duty of any
man to act outside of parties and against the
one with which he has himself been hitherto
identified; and there may be many more occasions
when his highest duty is to sacrifice some of
his own cherished opinions for the sake of the
success of the party which he on the whole
believes to be right. I do not think that the
average citizen, at least in one of our great
cities, can very well manage to support his own
party all the time on every issue, local and
otherwise; at any rate if he can do so he has
been more fortunately placed than I have been.
On the other hand,
I am fully convinced that to do the best work
people must be organized; and of course an
organization is really a party, whether it be a
great organization covering the whole nation and
numbering its millions of adherents, or an
association of citizens in a particular
locality, banded together to win a certain
specific victory, as, for instance, that of
municipal reform. Somebody has said that a
racing-yacht, like a good rifle, is a bundle of
incompatibilities; that you must get the utmost
possible sail power without sacrificing some
other quality if you really do get the utmost
sail power, that, in short you have got to make
more or less of a compromise on each in order to
acquire the dozen things needful; but, of
course, in making this compromise you must be
very careful for the sake of something
unimportant not to sacrifice any of the great
principles of successful naval architecture.
Well, it is about
so with a man's political work. He has got to
preserve his independence on the one hand; and
on the other, unless he wishes to be a wholly
ineffective crank, he has got to have some sense
of party allegiance and party responsibility,
and he has got to realize that in any given
exigency it may be a matter of duty to sacrifice
one quality, or it may be a matter of duty to
sacrifice the other.
If it is difficult to lay down any fixed rules
for party action in the abstract; it would, of
course, be wholly impossible to lay them down
for party action in the concrete, with reference
to the organizations of the present day. I think
that we ought to be broad-minded enough to
recognize the fact that a good citizen, striving
with fearlessness, honesty, and common sense to
do his best for the nation, can render service
to it in many different ways, and by connection
with many different organizations. It is well
for a man if he is able conscientiously to feel
that his views on the great questions of the
day, on such questions as the tariff, finance,
immigration, the regulation of the liquor
traffic, and others like them, are such as to
put him in accord with the bulk of those of his
fellow citizens who compose one of the greatest
parties: but it is perfectly supposable that he
may feel so strongly for or against certain
principles held by one party, or certain
principles held by the other, that he is unable
to give his full adherence to either.
In such a case I
feel that he has no right to plead this lack of
agreement with either party as an excuse for
refraining from active political work prior to
election. It will, of course, bar him from the
primaries of the two leading parties, and
preclude him from doing his share in organizing
their management; but, unless he is very
unfortunate, he can surely find a number of men
who are in the same position as himself and who
agree with him on some specific piece of
political work, and they can turn in practically
and effectively long before election to try to
do this new piece of work in a practical manner.
One seemingly very necessary caution to utter
is, that a man who goes into politics should not
expect to reform everything right off, with a
jump. I know many excellent young men who, when
awakened to the fact that they have neglected
their political duties, feel an immediate
impulse to form themselves into an organization
which shall forthwith purify politics
everywhere, national, State, and city alike; and
I know of a man who having gone round once to a
primary, and having, of course, been unable to
accomplish anything in a place where he knew no
one and could not combine with anyone, returned
saying it was quite useless for a good citizen
to try to accomplish anything in such a manner.
To these too hopeful or too easily discouraged
people I always feel like reading Artemus Ward's
article upon the people of his town who came
together in a meeting to resolve that the town
should support the Union and the Civil War, but
were unwilling to take any part in putting down
the rebellion unless they could go as
brigadier-generals.
After the battle
of Bull Run there were a good many hundreds of
thousands of young men in the North who felt it
to be their duty to enter the Northern armies;
but no one of them who possessed much
intelligence expected to take high place at the
outset, or anticipated that individual action
would be of decisive importance in any given
campaign. He went in as private or sergeant,
lieutenant or captain, as the case might be, and
did his duty in his company, in his regiment,
after a while in his brigade. When Ball's Bluff
and Bull Run succeeded the utter failure of the
Peninsular campaign, when the terrible defeat of
Fredericksburg was followed by the scarcely less
disastrous day at Chancellorsville he did not
announce (if he had any pluck or manliness about
him) that he considered it quite useless for any
self-respecting citizen to enter the Army of the
Potomac, because he really was not of much
weight in its councils, and did not approve of
its management; he simply gritted his teeth and
went doggedly on with his duty, grieving over,
but not disheartened at the innumerable
shortcomings and follies committed by those who
helped to guide the destinies of the army,
recognizing also the bravery, the patience,
intelligence, and resolution with which other
men in high places offset the follies and
shortcomings and persevering with equal mind
through triumph and defeat until finally he saw
the tide of failure turn at Gettysburg and the
full flood of victory come with Appomattox.
I do wish that more of our good citizens would
go into politics, and would do it in the same
spirit with which their fathers went into the
Federal armies. Begin with the little thing, and
do not expect to accomplish anything without an
effort. Of course, if you go to a primary just
once, never having taken the trouble to know any
of the other people who go there you will find
yourself wholly out of place; but if you keep on
attending and try to form associations with
other men whom you meet at the political
gatherings, or whom you can persuade to attend
them, you will very soon find yourself a weight.
In the same way,
if a man feels that the politics of his city,
for instance, are very corrupt and wants to
reform them, it would be an excellent idea for
him to begin with his district. If he Joins with
other people, who think as he does, to form a
club where abstract political virtue will be
discussed he may do a great deal of good. We
need such clubs; but he must also get to know
his own ward or his own district, put himself in
communication with the decent people in that
district, of whom we may rest assured there will
be many, willing and able to do something
practical for the procurance of better
government Let him set to work to procure a
better assemblyman or better alderman before he
tries his hand at making a mayor, a governor, or
a president. If he begins at the top he may make
a brilliant temporary success, but the chances
are a thousand to one that he will only be
defeated eventually; and in no event will the
good he does stand on the same broad and
permanent foundation as if he had begun at the
bottom.
Of course, one or
two of his efforts may be failures; but if he
has the right stuff in him he will go ahead and
do his duty irrespective of whether he meets
with success or defeat. It is perfectly right to
consider the question of failure while shaping
one's efforts to succeed in the struggle for the
right; but there should be no consideration of
it whatsoever when the question is as to whether
one should or should not make a struggle for the
right. When once a band of one hundred and fifty
or two hundred honest, intelligent men, who mean
business and know their business, is found in
any district, whether in one of the regular
organizations or outside, you can guarantee that
the local politicians of that district will
begin to treat it with a combination of fear,
hatred, and respect, and that its influence will
be felt; and that while sometimes men will be
elected to office in direct defiance of its
wishes, more often the successful candidates
will feel that they have to pay some regard to
its demands for public decency and honesty.
But in advising you to be practical and to work
hard, I must not for one moment be understood as
advising you to abandon one iota of your
self-respect and devotion to principle. It is a
bad sign for the country to see one class of our
citizens sneer at practical politicians, and
another at Sunday-school politics. No man can do
both effective and decent work in public life
unless he is a practical politician on the one
hand, and a sturdy believer in Sunday-school
politics on the other. He must always strive
manfully for the best, and yet, like Abraham
Lincoln, must often resign himself to accept the
best possible.
Of course when a
man verges on to the higher ground of
statesmanship, when he becomes a leader, he must
very often consult with others and defer to
their opinion, and must be continually settling
in his mind how far he can go in just deference
to the wishes and prejudices of others while yet
adhering to his own moral standards: but I speak
not so much of men of this stamp as I do of the
ordinary citizen, who wants to do his duty as a
member of the commonwealth in its civic life;
and for this man I feel that the one quality
which he ought always to hold most essential is
that of disinterestedness. If he once begins to
feel that he wants office himself, with a
willingness to get it at the cost of his
convictions, or to keep it when gotten, at the
cost of his convictions, his usefulness is gone.
Let him make up his mind to do his duty in
politics without regard to holding office at
all, and let him know that often the men in this
country who have done the best work for our
public life have not been the men in office.
If, on the other
hand, he attains public position, let him not
strive to plan out for himself a career. I do
not think that any man should let himself regard
his political career as a means of livelihood,
or as his sole occupation in life; for if he
does he immediately becomes most seriously
handicapped. The moment that he begins to think
how such and such an act will affect the voters
in his district, or will affect some great
political leader who will have an influence over
his destiny, he is hampered and his hands are
bound. Not only may it be his duty often to
disregard the wishes of politicians, but it may
be his clear duty at times to disregard the
wishes of the people. The voice of the people is
not always the voice of God; and when it happens
to be the voice of the devil, then it is a man's
clear duty to defy its behests. Different
political conditions breed different dangers.
The demagogue is as unlovely a creature as the
courtier, though one is fostered under
republican and the other under monarchical
institutions.
There is every
reason why a man should have an honorable
ambition to enter public life, and an honorable
ambition to stay there when he is in; but he
ought to make up his mind that he cares for it
only as long as he can stay in it on his own
terms, without sacrifice of his own principles;
and if he does thus make up his mind he can
really accomplish twice as much for the nation,
and can reflect a hundredfold greater honor upon
himself, in a short term of service, than can
the man who grows gray in the public employment
at the cost of sacrificing what he believes to
be true and honest. And moreover, when a public
servant has definitely made up his mind that he
will pay no heed to his own future, but will do
what he honestly deems best for the community,
without regard to how his actions may affect his
prospects, not only does he become infinitely
more useful as a public servant, but he has a
far better time. He is freed from the harassing
care which is inevitably the portion of him who
is trying to shape his sails to catch every gust
of the wind of political favor.
But let me reiterate, that in being virtuous he
must not become ineffective, and that he must
not excuse himself for shirking his duties by
any false plea that he cannot do his duties and
retain his self-respect. This is nonsense, he
can; and when he urges such a plea it is a mark
of mere laziness and self-indulgence. And again,
he should beware how he becomes a critic of the
actions of others, rather than a doer of deeds
himself; and in so far as he does act as a
critic (and of course the critic has a great and
necessary function) he must beware of
indiscriminate censure even more than of
indiscriminate praise.
The screaming
vulgarity of the foolish spread-eagle orator who
is continually yelling defiance at Europe,
praising everything American, good and bad, and
resenting the introduction of any reform because
it has previously been tried successfully
abroad, is offensive and contemptible to the
last degree; but after all it is scarcely as
harmful as the peevish, fretful, sneering, and
continual faultfinding of the refined,
well-educated man, who is always attacking good
and bad alike, who genuinely distrusts America,
and in the true spirit of servile colonialism
considers us inferior to the people across the
water. It may be taken for granted that the man
who is always sneering at our public life and
our public men is a thoroughly bad citizen, and
that what little influence he wields in the
community is wielded for evil. The public
speaker or the editorial writer who teaches men
of education that their proper attitude toward
American politics should be one of dislike or
indifference is doing all he can to perpetuate
and aggravate the very evils of which he is
ostensibly complaining.
Exactly as it is
generally the case that when a man bewails the
decadence of our civilization he is himself
physically, mentally, and morally a first-class
type of the decadent, so it is usually the case
that when a man is perpetually sneering at
American politicians, whether worthy or
unworthy, he himself is a poor citizen and a
friend of the very forces of evil against which
he professes to contend. Too often these men
seem to care less for attacking bad men, than
for ruining the characters of good men with whom
they disagree on some pubic question; and while
their influence against the bad is almost nil,
they are sometimes able to weaken the hands of
the good by withdrawing from them support to
which they are entitled, and they thus count in
the sum total of forces that work for evil. They
answer to the political prohibitionist, who, in
a close contest between a temperance man and a
liquor seller diverts enough votes from the
former to elect the liquor seller Occasionally
it is necessary to beat a pretty good man, who
is not quite good enough, even at the cost of
electing a bad one- but it should be thoroughly
recognized that this can be necessary only
occasionally and indeed, I may say, only in very
exceptional cases, and that as a rule where it
is done the effect is thoroughly unwholesome in
every way, and those taking part in it deserve
the severest censure from all honest men.
Moreover, the very need of denouncing evil makes
it all the more wicked to weaken the effect of
such denunciations by denouncing also the good.
It is the duty of all citizens, irrespective of
party, to denounce, and, so far as may be, to
punish crimes against the public on the part of
politicians or officials. But exactly as the
public man who commits a crime against the
public is one of the worst of criminals, so,
close on his heels in the race for iniquitous
distinction, comes the man who falsely charges
the public servant with outrageous wrongdoing;
whether it is done with foul-mouthed and foolish
directness in the vulgar and violent party
organ, or with sarcasm, innuendo, and the
half-truths that are worse than lies, in some
professed organ of independence.
Not only should
criticism be honest, but it should be
intelligent, in order to be effective. I
recently read in a religious paper an article
railing at the corruption of our public life, in
which it stated incidentally that the lobby was
recognized as all-powerful in Washington. This
is untrue. There was a day when the lobby was
very important at Washington, but its influence
in Congress is now very small indeed; and from a
pretty intimate acquaintance with several
Congresses I am entirely satisfied that there is
among the members a very small proportion indeed
who are corruptible, in the sense that they will
let their action be influenced by money or its
equivalent. Congressmen are very often
demagogues; they are very often blind partisans;
they are often exceedingly short-sighted,
narrow-minded, and bigoted; but they are not
usually corrupt; and to accuse a narrow-minded
demagogue of corruption when he is perfectly
honest, is merely to set him more firmly in his
evil course and to help him with his
constituents, who recognize that the charge is
entirely unjust, and in repelling it lose sight
of the man's real shortcomings.
I have known more
than one State legislature, more than one board
of aldermen against which the charge of
corruption could perfectly legitimately be
brought, but it cannot be brought against
Congress. Moreover these sweeping charges really
do very little good. When I was in the New York
legislature, one of the things that I used to
mind most was the fact that at the close of
every session the papers that affect morality
invariably said that particular legislature was
the worst legislature since the days of Tweed.
The statement was not true as a rule; and, in
any event, to lump all the members, good and
bad, in sweeping condemnation simply hurt the
good and helped the bad. Criticism should be
fearless, but I again reiterate that it should
be honest and should be discriminating. When it
is sweeping and unintelligent, and directed
against good and bad alike, or against the good
and bad qualities of any man alike, it is very
harmful. It tends steadily to deteriorate the
character of our public men; and it tends to
produce a very unwholesome spirit among young
men of education, and especially among the young
men in our colleges.
Against nothing is fearless and specific
criticism more urgently needed than against the
"spoils system," which is the degradation of
American politics. And nothing is more effective
in thwarting the purposes of the spoilsmen than
the civil service reform. To be sure, practical
politicians sneer at it. One of them even went
so far as to say that civil-service reform is
asking a man irrelevant questions. What more
irrelevant question could there be than that of
the practical politician who asks the aspirant
for his political favor - "Whom did you vote for
in the last election?" There is certainly
nothing more interesting, from a humorous point
of view, than the heads of departments urging
changes to be made in their underlings, "on the
score of increased efficiency" they say; when as
the result of such a change the old incumbent
often spends six months teaching the new
incumbent how to do the work almost as well as
he did himself!
Occasionally the
civil-service reform has been abused, but not
often. Certainly the reform is needed when you
contemplate the spectacle of a New York City
treasurer who acknowledges his annual fees to be
eighty-five thousand dollars, and who pays a
deputy one thousand five hundred dollars to do
his work-when you note the corruptions in the
New York legislature, where one man says he has
a horror of the Constitution because it prevents
active benevolence, and another says that you
should never allow the Constitution to come
between friends! All these corruptions and vices
are what every good American citizen must fight
against.
Finally, the man who wishes to do his duty as a
citizen in our country must be imbued through
and through with the spirit of Americanism. I am
not saying this as a matter of spread-eagle
rhetoric: I am saying it quite soberly as a
piece of matter-of-fact, common-sense advice,
derived from my own experience of others. Of
course, the question of Americanism has several
sides. If a man is an educated man, he must show
his Americanism by not getting misled into
following out and trying to apply all the
theories of the political thinkers of other
countries, such as Germany and France, to our
own entirely different conditions. He must not
get a fad, for instance, about responsible
government; and above all things he must not,
merely because he is intelligent, or a college
professor well read in political literature, try
to discuss our institutions when he has had no
practical knowledge of how they are worked.
Again, if he is a
wealthy man, a man of means and standing, he
must really feel, not merely affect to feel,
that no social differences obtain save such as a
man can in some way himself make by his own
actions. People sometimes ask me if there is not
a prejudice against a man of wealth and
education in ward politics. I do not think that
there is, unless the man in turn shows that he
regards the facts of his having wealth and
education as giving him a claim to superiority
aside from the merit he is able to prove himself
to have in actual service. Of course, if he
feels that he ought to have a little better
treatment than a carpenter, a plumber, or a
butcher, who happens to stand beside him, he is
going to be thrown out of the race very quickly,
and probably quite roughly; and if he starts in
to patronize and elaborately condescend to these
men he will find that they resent this attitude
even more. Do not let him think about the matter
at all.
Let him go into
the political contest with no more thought of
such matters than a college boy gives to the
social standing of the members of his own and
rival teams in a hotly contested football match.
As soon as he begins to take an interest in
politics (and he will speedily not only get
interested for the sake of politics, but also
take a good healthy interest in playing the game
itself - an interest which is perfectly normal
and praise-worthy, and to which only a prig
would object), he will begin to work up the
organization in the way that will be most
effective, and he won't care a rap about who is
put to work with him, save in so far as he is a
good fellow and an efficient worker. There was
one time that a number of men who think as we do
here to-night (one of the number being myself)
got hold of one of the assembly districts of New
York, and ran it in really an ideal way, better
than any other assembly district has ever been
run before or since by either party.
We did it by hard
work and good organization; by working
practically, and yet by being honest and square
in motive and method: especially did we do it by
all turning in as straight-out Americans without
any regard to distinctions of race origin. Among
the many men who did a great deal in organizing
our victories was the son of a Presbyterian
clergyman, the nephew of a Hebrew rabbi, and two
well-known Catholic gentlemen. We also had a
Columbia College professor (the stroke-oar of a
university crew), a noted retail butcher, and
the editor of a local German paper, various
brokers, bankers, lawyers, bricklayers and a
stone-mason who was particularly useful to us,
although on questions of theoretic rather than
applied politics he had a decidedly socialistic
turn of mind.
Again, questions of race origin, like questions
of creed, must not be considered: we wish to do
good work, and we are all Americans, pure and
simple. In the New York legislature, when it
fell to my lot to choose a committee - which I
always esteemed my most important duty at Albany
- no less than three out of the four men I chose
were of Irish birth or parentage; and three
abler and more fearless and disinterested men
never sat in a legislative body; while among my
especial political and personal friends in that
body was a gentleman from the southern tier of
counties, who was, I incidentally found out, a
German by birth, but who was just as straight
United States as if his ancestors had come over
here in the Mayflower or in Henry Hudson's
yacht.
Of course, none of
these men of Irish or German birth would have
been worth their salt had they continued to act
after coming here as Irishmen or Germans, or as
anything but plain straight-out Americans. We
have not any room here for a divided allegiance.
A man has got to be an American and nothing
else; and he has no business to be mixing us up
with questions of foreign politics, British or
Irish, German or French, and no business to try
to perpetuate their language and customs in the
land of complete religious toleration and
equality. If, however, he does become honestly
and in good faith an American, then he is
entitled to stand precisely as all other
Americans stand, and it is the height of
un-Americanism to discriminate against him in
any way because of creed or birthplace. No
spirit can be more thoroughly alien to American
institutions, than the spirit of the
Know-Nothings.
In facing the future and in striving, each
according to the measure of his individual
capacity, to work out the salvation of our land,
we should be neither timid pessimists nor
foolish optimists. We should recognize the
dangers that exist and that threaten us: we
should neither overestimate them nor shrink from
them, but steadily fronting them should set to
work to overcome and beat them down. Grave
perils are yet to be encountered in the stormy
course of the Republic - perils from political
corruption, perils from individual laziness,
indolence and timidity, perils springing from
the greed of the unscrupulous rich, and from the
anarchic violence of the thriftless and
turbulent poor. There is every reason why we
should recognize them, but there is no reason
why we should fear them or doubt our capacity to
overcome them, if only each will, according to
the measure of his ability, do his full duty,
and endeavor so to live as to deserve the high
praise of being called a good American citizen.
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