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THE MAN WHO DOES NOT SHRINK FROM HARDSHIP - ROOSEVELT 1899
The Strenuous Life
It follows the full text transcript of
Theodore Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life speech, delivered at
Chicago, Illinois - April 10, 1899.
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In speaking to
you, men of the greatest city of the West, |
men of the State
which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men
who preeminently and distinctly embody all that
is most American in the American character, I
wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble
ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life,
the life of toil and effort, of labor and
strife; to preach that highest form of success
which comes, not to the man who desires mere
easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink
from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil,
and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate
triumph.
A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace
which springs merely from lack either of desire
or of power to strive after great things, is as
little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I
ask only that what every self-respecting
American demands from himself and from his sons
shall be demanded of the American nation as a
whole. Who among you would teach your boys that
ease, that peace, is to be the first
consideration in their eyes-to be the ultimate
goal after which they strive? You men of Chicago
have made this city great, you men of Illinois
have done your share, and more than your share,
in making America great, because you neither
preach nor practice such a doctrine.
You work
yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work.
If you are rich and worth your salt, you will
teach your sons that though they may have
leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for
wisely used leisure merely means that those who
possess it, being free from the necessity of
working for their livelihood, are all bound to
carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in
science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in
historical research-work of this type we most
need in this country, the successful carrying
out of which reflects most honor upon the
nation. We do not admire the man of timid peace.
We admire the man who embodies victorious
effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor,
who is prompt to help a friend, but who has
those virile qualities necessary to win in the
stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail,
but it is worse to never have tried to succeed.
In this life we get nothing save by effort.
Freedom from
effort in the present merely means that there
has been some stored up effort in the past. A
man can be freed from the necessity of work only
by the fact that he or his fathers before him
have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus
purchased is used aright, and the man still does
actual work, though of a different kind, whether
as a writer or as a general, whether in the
field of politics or in the field of exploration
and adventure, he shows he deserves his good
fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom
from the need of actual labor as a period , not
of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even
though perhaps not of the vicious enjoyment, he
shows that he is simply a cumberer of the
earth's surface, and he surely unfits himself to
hold his own with his fellows if the need to do
so should again arise. A mere life of ease is
not in the end a very satisfactory life, and,
above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits
those who follow it for serious work in the
world.
In the last analysis a healthy state can exist
only when the men and women who make it up can
lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the
children are so trained that they shall
endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to
overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how
to rest triumph from toil and risk. The man must
be glad to do a man's work, to dare and endure
and to labor; to keep himself, and those
dependent on him. The woman must be the
housewife, the helpmeet of the homemaker, the
wise and fearless mother of many healthy
children. In one of Daudet's powerful and
melancholy books he speaks of "the fear of
maternity, the haunting terror of the young wife
of the present day." When such words can be
truthfully written of a nation, that nation is
rotten to the heart's core. When men fear work
or fear of righteous war, when women fear
motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom;
and well it is they should vanish from the
earth, where they are fit subjects for the scorn
of all men and women who are themselves strong
and brave and high-minded.
As it is with the individual, so it is with the
nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy
is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy
is the nation that has a glorious history. Far
better it is to dare mighty things, to win
glorious triumphs, even though checkered by
failure, than to take rank with those poor
spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much,
because they live in the gray twilight that
knows not victory nor defeat. If in 1861 the men
who loved the Union had believed that peace was
the end of all things, and war and strife the
worst of all things, and had acted upon their
belief, we would have saved hundreds of
thousands of lives, we would have saved hundreds
of millions of dollars. Moreover, besides saving
all the blood and treasure we then lavished, we
would have prevented the heartbreak of many
women, the dissolution of many homes, and we
would have spared the country those months of
doom and shame when it seemed as if our armies
marched only to defeat.
We could have
avoided all this suffering simply by shrinking
from strife. And if we had thus avoided it, we
would have shown that we were weaklings, and
that we were unfit to stand among the great
nations of the earth. Thank God for the iron in
the blood of our fathers, the men who upheld the
wisdom of Lincoln, and bore the sword or rifle
in the armies of Grant! Let us, the children of
the men who proved themselves equal to the
mighty days, let us, the children of the men who
carried the great Civil War to a triumphant
conclusion, praise the God of our fathers that
the ignoble counsels of peace were rejected;
that the suffering and loss, the blackness of
sorrow and despair, were unflinchingly faced,
and the years of strife endured; for in the end
the slave was freed, the Union restored, and the
mighty American republic placed once more as a
helmeted queen among nations.
We of this generation do not have to face a task
such as that our fathers faced, but we have our
tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them!
We cannot, if we would, play the part of China,
and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease
within our borders, taking no interest in what
goes on beyond them, sunk in scrambling
commercialism; heedless of higher life, the life
of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying
ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for
the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a
shadow of question, what China has already
found, that in this world the nation that has
trained itself into a career of unwarlike and
isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down
before other nations which have not lost the
manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be
a really great people, we must strive in good
faith to play a great part in the world. We
cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we
can determine for ourselves is whether we shall
meet them well or ill.
In 1898 we could
not help being brought face to face with the
problem of war with Spain. All we could decide
was whether we should shrink like cowards from
the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a
brave and high-spirited people; and, once in,
whether failure or success shall crown our
banners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the
responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii,
Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Phillippines. All we
can decide is whether we shall meet them in a
way that will redound to the national credit, of
whether we shall make of our dealings with these
new problems a dark and shameful page in our
history. To refuse to deal with them at all
merely amounts to dealing with them badly. We
have a given problem to solve. If we undertake
the solution, there is, of course, always danger
that we may not solve it aright; but to refuse
to undertake the solution simply renders it
certain that we cannot possibly solve it aright.
The timid man, the lazy man, the man who
distrusts his country, the over-civilized man,
who has lost the great fighting, the masterful
values, the ignorant man, and the man of dull
mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the
mighty lift that thrills "stern men with empires
in their brains"-all these, of course, shrink
from seeing the nation undertake its new duties;
shrink from seeing us build a navy and an army
adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do
our share of the world's work, by bringing order
out of the chaos in the great, fair tropic
islands from which the valor of our soldiers and
sailors has driven the Spanish flag.
These are the men
who fear the strenuous life, who fear the only
national life which is really worth leading.
They believe in that cloistered life which saps
the hearty virtues in a nation, as it saps them
in the individual; or else they are wedded to
that base spirit of grain and greed which
recognizes commercialism the be-all and end-all
of national life, instead of realizing that,
though an indispensable element, it is, after
all, but one of the many elements that go to
make up true national greatness. No country can
long endure if its foundations are not laid deep
in the material prosperity which comes from
thrift, from business energy and enterprise,
from hard, unsparing efforts in the fields of
industrial activity; but neither was any nation
ever yet truly great if it relied upon material
prosperity alone. All honor must be paid to the
architects of our material prosperity, to the
great captains of industry who have built our
factories and our railroads, to the strong men
who toil for wealth with brain or hand; for
great is the debt of the nation to these and
their kind. But our debt is yet greater to the
men whose highest type is to be found in a
statesman like Lincoln, a soldier like Grant.
They showed by their lives that they recognized
the law of work, the law of strife; they toiled
to win a competence for themselves and those
dependent upon them; but they recognized that
there were yet other and even loftier duties -
duties to the nation and duties to the race.
We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and
avow ourselves merely an assemblage of
well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what
happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even
its own end; for as the nations grow to have
ever wider and wider interests, and are brought
into closer and closer contact, if we are to
hold our own in the struggle for naval and
commercial supremacy, we must build up our power
without our own borders. We must build the
isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of
vantage which will enable us to have our say in
deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East
and the West.
So much for the commercial side. From the
standpoint of international honor the argument
is even stronger. The guns that thundered off
Manila and Santiago left us echoes of glory, but
they also left us a legacy of duty. If we drove
out a mediaeval tyranny only to make room for
savage anarchy, we had better not begun the task
at all. It is worse than idle to say that we
have no duty to perform, and can leave to their
fates the islands we have conquered. Such a
course would be a course of infamy. It would be
followed at once by utter chaos in the wretched
islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier power
would have to step in and do the work, and we
would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to
carry to successful completion the labors that
great and high-spirited nations are eager to
undertake.
The work must be done; we cannot escape our
responsibility; and if we are worth our salt, we
shall be glad of the chance to do the work -
glad of the chance to show ourselves equal to
one of the great tasks set modern civilization.
But let us not deceive ourselves as to the
importance of the task. Let us not be mislead by
the vainglory into underestimating the strain it
will put on our powers. Above all, let us, as we
value our own self-respect, face the
responsibilities with proper seriousness,
courage and high resolve. We must demand the
highest order of integrity and ability in our
public men who are to grapple with these new
problems. We must hold to a rigid accountability
those public servants who show unfaithfulness to
the interests of the nation or the inability to
rise to the high level of the new demands upon
our strength and our resources.
Of course we must remember not to judge any
public servant by any one act, and especially
should we beware of attacking the men who are
merely the occasions and not the causes of
disaster. Let me illustrate what I mean by the
army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had
gone to war, we should have the navy as
absolutely unprepared as the army. At that time
our ships could not have encountered with
success the fleets of Spain any more than
nowadays we can put untrained soldiers, no
matter how brave, who are armed with archaic
black-powder weapons, against well-drilled
regulars armed with the highest type of modern
repeating rifle. But in the early eighties the
attention of the nation became directed to our
naval deeds.
Congress most
wisely made a series of appropriations to build
up a new navy, and under a succession of able
and patriotic secretaries, of both political
parties, the navy was gradually built up, until
its material became equal to its splendid
personnel, with the result that in the summer of
1898 it leaped to its proper place as one of the
most brilliant and formidable fighting navies in
the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to
the men controlling the navy at the time it won
these great deeds, honor to Secretary Long and
Admiral Dewey, to the captains who handled the
ships in action, to the daring lieutenants who
braved death in the smaller craft, and to the
heads of the bureaus at Washington who saw that
the ships were so commanded, so armed, so
equipped, so well engined, as to insure the best
results. But let us also keep ever in mind that
all of this would not have availed if it had not
been for the wisdom of the men who during the
preceding fifteen years had built up the navy.
Keep in mind the
secretaries of the navy during those years; keep
in mind the senators and congressmen who by
their votes gave the money necessary to build
and to armor the ships, to construct the great
guns, and to train the crews; remember also
those who actually did build the ships, the
armor, and the guns; and remember the admirals
and captains who handled battle-ship, cruiser,
and torpedo-boat on the high seas, alone and in
squadrons, developing the seamanship, the
gunnery, and the power of acting together, which
their successors utilized so gloriously at
Manila and off Santiago. And, gentleman,
remember the converse, too. Remember that
justice has two sides. Be just to those who
built up the navy, and, for the sake of the
future of the country, keep in mind those who
opposed its building up. Read the "Congressional
Record." Find out the senators and congressmen
who opposed the grants for building the new
ships; who opposed the purchase of armor,
without which the ships were worthless; who
opposed any adequate maintenance for the Navy
Department, and strove to cut down the number of
men necessary to man our fleets. The men who did
these things were one and all working to bring
disaster on the country. They have no share in
the glory of Manila, in the honor of Santiago.
They have no cause to feel proud of the valor of
our sea-captains, of the renown of our flag.
Their motives may or may not have been good, but
their acts were heavily fraught with evil. They
did ill for the national honor, and we won in
spite of their sinister opposition.
Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day.
Our army never has been built up as it should be
built up. I shall not discuss with an audience
this puerile suggestion that a nation of seventy
millions of freemen is in danger of losing its
liberties from the existence of an army of one
hundred thousand men, three fourths of whom will
be employed in foreign islands, in certain coast
fortresses, and on Indian reservations. No man
of good sense and stout heart can such a
proposition seriously. If we are such weaklings
as the proposition implies, then we are unworthy
of freedom in any event. To no body of men in
the United States is the country so much
indebted as to the splendid officers and
enlisted men of the regular army and navy. There
is no body from which the country has less to
fear, and none of which it should be prouder,
none which it should be more anxious to upbuild.
Our army needs complete reorganization, not
merely enlarging, and the reorganization can
only come as a result of legislation. A proper
general staff should be established, and the
positions of ordnance, commissary, and
quartermaster officers should be filled by
detail from the line. Above all, the army must
be given the chance to exercise in large bodies.
Never again should we see, as we saw in the
Spanish war, major-generals in command of
divisions who had never before commanded three
companies together in the field. Yet, incredible
to relate, Congress has shown a queer inability
to learn some of the lessons of war. There were
large bodies of men in both branches who opposed
the declaration of war, who opposed the
ratification of peace, who opposed the
upbuilding of the army, and who even opposed the
purchase of the armor at a reasonable price for
the battle-ships and cruisers, thereby putting
an absolute stop to the building of any new
fighting ships for the navy.
If, during the
years to come, any disaster should befall our
arms, afloat or ashore, and thereby should shame
the United States, remember the blame will lie
upon the men whose names appear on the
roll-calls of Congress on the wrong side of
these great questions. On them will lie the
burden of the loss of our soldiers and sailors,
of any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and
the people of this country will lie the blame if
you do not repudiate, in no unmistakable way,
what these men have done. The blame will not
rest upon the untrained commander of the untried
troops, upon the civil officers of a department
the organization of which has been left utterly
inadequate, or upon the admiral with an
insufficient number of ships; but upon the
public men who have so lamentably failed in
forethought as to refuse to remedy these evils
long in advance, and upon the nation that stands
behind those public men.
So, at the present hour, no small share of the
responsibility for the blood shed in the
Philippines, the blood of our brothers, and the
blood of their wild and ignorant foes, lies at
the thresholds of those who so long delayed the
adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those
who by their worse than foolish words
deliberately invited a savage people to plunge
into a war fraught with sure disaster for them-a
war, too, in which our own brave men who follow
the flag must pay with their blood for the
silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who
sit at home in peace.
The army and the navy are the sword and the
shield which this nation must carry if she is to
do her duty among the nations of the earth-if
she is not to stand merely as the China of the
western hemisphere. Our proper conduct towards
the tropic islands we have wrested from Spain is
merely the form of which our duty has taken at
the moment. Of course we are bound to handle the
affairs of our own household well. We must see
that there is civic honesty, civic cleanliness,
civic good sense in our home administration of
the city, State, and nation. We must strive for
honesty in office, for honesty towards the
creditors of the nation and of the individual;
for the widest freedom of the individual
initiative where possible, and for the wisest
control of individual initiative where it is
hostile to the welfare of the many. But because
we set our own household in order we are not
thereby excused from playing our part in the
great affairs of the world. A man's first duty
is to his own home, but he is not thereby
excused from doing his duty to the State; for if
he fails in this second duty it is under the
penalty of ceasing to be a free-man. In the same
way, while a nations first duty in within its
own borders, it is not thereby absolved from
facing its duties in the world as a whole; and
if it refuses to do so, it merely forfeits its
right to struggle for a place among the peoples
that shape the destiny of mankind.
In the West Indies and the Philippines alike was
are confronted by most difficult problems. It is
cowardly to shrink from solving them in the
proper way; for solved they must be, if not by
us, then by some stronger and more manful race.
If we are too weak, too selfish, or too foolish
to solve them, some bolder and abler people must
undertake the solution. Personally, I am far too
firm a believer in the greatness of my country
and the power of my countrymen to admit for one
moment that we shall ever be driven to the
ignoble alternative.
The problems are different for the different
islands. Porto Rico is not large enough to stand
alone. We must govern it wisely and well,
primarily in the interest of its own people.
Cuba is, in my judgment, entitled ultimately to
settle for itself whether it shall be an
independent state or an integral portion of the
mightiest of republics. But until order and
stable liberty are secured, we must remain in
the island to insure them, and infinite tact,
judgment, moderation, and courage must be shown
by our military and civil representatives in
keeping the island pacified, in relentlessly
stamping out brigandage, in protecting all
alike, and yet in showing proper recognition to
the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The
Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their
population includes half-caste and native
Christians, warlike Moslems, and wild pagans.
Many of their people are utterly unfit for
self-government and show no signs of becoming
fit. Others may in time become fit but at the
present can only take part in self-government
under a wise supervision, at once firm and
beneficent.
We have driven
Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let
it be replaced by savage anarchy, our work has
been for harm and not for good. I have scant
patience with those who fear to undertake the
task of governing the Philippines, and who
openly avow that they do fear to undertake it,
or that they shrink from it because of the
expense and trouble; but I have even scanter
patience with those who make a pretense of
humanitarianism to hide and cover their
timidity, and who cant about "liberty" and the
"consent of the governed," in order to excuse
themselves for their unwillingness to play the
part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out,
would make it incumbent upon us to leave the
Apaches of Arizona to work out their own
salvation, and to decline to interfere in a
single Indian reservation. Their doctrines
condemn your forefathers and mine for ever
having settled in these United States.
England's rule in India and Egypt has been of
great benefit to England, for it has trained up
generations of men accustomed to look at the
larger and loftier side of public life. It has
been of even greater benefit to India and Egypt.
And finally, and most of all, it has advanced
the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty
aright in the Philippines, we will add to that
national renown which is the highest and finest
part of national life, will greatly benefit the
people of the Philippine Islands, and, above
all, we will play our part well in the great
work of uplifting mankind. But to do this work,
keep ever in mind that we must show in a very
high degree the qualities of courage, of
honesty, and of good judgment. Resistance must
be stamped out. The first and all-important work
to be done is to establish the supremacy of our
flag. We must put down armed resistance before
we can accomplish anything else, and there
should be no parleying, no faltering, in dealing
with our foe. As for those in our own country
who encourage the foe, we can afford
contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be
remembered that their utterances are not saved
from being treasonable merely by the fact that
they are despicable.
When once we have put down armed resistance,
when once our rule is acknowledged, than an even
more difficult task will begin, for then we must
see to it that the islands are administered with
absolute honesty and with good judgment. If we
let the public service of the islands be turned
into prey of the spoils of politician, we shall
have begun to tread the path which Spain trod to
her own destruction. We must send out there only
good and able men, chosen for their fitness, and
not because of their partisan service, and these
men must not only administer impartial justice
to the natives and serve their own government
with honesty and fidelity, but show the utmost
tact and firmness, remembering that, with such
people as those with whom we are to deal,
weakness is the greatest of crimes, and next to
weakness comes lack of consideration for their
principles and prejudices.
I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our
country calls not for the life of ease but for
the life of strenuous endeavor. The twentieth
century looms before us big with the fate of
many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek
merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace,
if we shrink from the hard contests where men
must win at the hazard of their lives and at the
risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and
stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win
for themselves the domination of the world. Let
us therefore boldly face the life of strife,
resolute to do our duty well and manfully;
resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve
high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above
all, let us shrink from no strife, through hard
and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately
win the goal of true national greatness.
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