The materials contained in the Addresses and State Papers of Theodore
Roosevelt, while President of the United States, possess far more than
a transitory interest and value. It is obvious indeed that for the
future student of American politics and history their preservation in
convenient and authentic form is not merely an important service, but
an indispensable one; for it would have been impossible to collate
them in any accurate or complete way from the scattered files of
newspapers, especially since many of the addresses were delivered
at points remote from news centers, and some of these were very
inadequately reported by the press. This observation, it is needless
to say, does not apply to the formal State Papers—chiefly messages
to Congress—for such official deliverances are duly preserved and
published by the Government itself. It is, however, suitable as well
as convenient to include these State Papers in a collection of the
recent utterances of President Roosevelt, for reasons so obvious as to
need little comment.
The palpable fact is that President Roosevelt’s messages to Congress
and a large number of his speeches, delivered in various parts of
the country in his capacity as President, pertain to the same topics
and serve a like public purpose. The messages must, of course, deal
with matters affecting the welfare of the nation, and with various
questions of public business or policy, in those aspects that bear
upon the work of Congress. It is the President’s Constitutional right
and duty to present information upon such topics, or to expound
them from the standpoint of the Administration. In the long series
of Presidential messages one may, indeed, read the history of this
country for more than a hundred years. To that official narrative
these messages by Mr. Roosevelt add some of the most fascinating
chapters.
The speeches here collected, on the other hand, have a much wider
range. Nevertheless, a great number of the addresses and speeches do
in fact deal with precisely the same topics as those presented in the
messages to Congress, and were intended not merely for a particular
audience but for the whole country through the medium of the press.
And for Mr. Roosevelt’s full disclosure of his views and policies
touching some questions of large public concern, it is necessary to
read his speeches in connection with his general or special messages
to Congress. Since a number of his speeches here printed, like his
general messages, deal with a variety of matters, the reader who
wishes to compare and collate his utterances upon a given subject—as,
for example, the regulation of the trusts, the reorganization of the
army, the relations of the United States to Cuba, or our methods and
policies of administration in the Philippines—will find it desirable
to consult the index, which is intended to make these volumes
available for ready reference.
Quite apart from their obvious value for reference purposes to the
student of our contemporary history and politics, or to the campaign
speaker of one party or another—who may wish to know authoritatively
what Mr. Roosevelt said about various public issues—this collection of
addresses has several distinct merits and advantages that must give it
a place among works relating to the national life and character. Mr.
Roosevelt, as an exponent of the aims and ideals of a great portion
of his own generation of men and women in the United States, stands
unquestionably first. In two volumes of his previously collected
essays and papers, one entitled _American Ideals_ and the other _The
Strenuous Life_, both of which are included in the present edition
of his works, Mr. Roosevelt has expressed with remarkable vigor,—as
well as with an unwavering conviction and a wholesome philosophy
of work and courage,—those views of politics, citizenship, and
organized social and economic life to which the best conscience and
intelligence of his fellow-countrymen have made sympathetic response.
These essays, it is true, set forth no abstract scheme of political or
social philosophy. Yet out of them there might be evolved a systematic
body of doctrine relating to the duties of citizenship in a democracy,
and to the ethics of administration and government. The explanation
is that the doctrines and principles have come to be embodied in the
character and convictions of the man himself; and thus the essays
and addresses have not been the mere intellectual products of a man
addicted to the use of the pen or to the phrasing of sentences, but
rather the direct and wellnigh spontaneous expression of Mr. Roosevelt
in relation to topics rendered timely by events and occasions.
In like manner and in an even higher sense, these later speeches,
made under the sobering sense of responsibility that must come with
the holding of so great an office as the Presidency, express Mr.
Roosevelt’s convictions respecting our American life and citizenship
in such manner as to form a sort of record for the study of the
psychology of the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, these addresses and public papers, while to some extent
homely, unstudied and unconventional in their phraseology, have the
quality of permanent literature in a much higher measure than the
utterances of almost any other American public man of our time.
The traditional American political oratory is highly stilted and
artificial—overloaded with rhetoric and figures of speech, lacking
vernacular force and directness. While the orotund and rhetorical
method of the past has largely disappeared, there has followed it
another method almost equally artificial, in which the stately periods
of the old-fashioned orator have been succeeded by the illustrative
amusing anecdote, the highly burnished witticism, and the pointed
phrase or apothegm.
Mr. Roosevelt’s method is wholly different from either of these.
Except for being at times a trifle more earnest and hortatory, it is
the method of some of the best contemporary English speakers. They do
not posture, and do not attempt to be either orators or mere platform
entertainers. Rather, they prefer to state in a direct, conversational
manner certain things that they wish to say. Their language is that
which naturally, and without conscious effort, clothes their thoughts
as men of culture and mature intellectual life. Mr. Roosevelt being a
man of trained mind, strong conviction, historical knowledge, and wide
public experience, combined with great practical energy and executive
force, and buoyant physical health, has both his own opinions and his
own ready and forcible way of expressing them.
Thus many of the speeches contained in this collection are as nearly
extemporaneous utterances as any which have ever been put into
similarly permanent form. Here are addresses made in almost every
State and Territory of the Union; and they were prepared and delivered
within a very short range of time, during which a far greater number
of briefer and more casual speeches have been made, thousands of
letters written, and innumerable statements upon matters of a public
character addressed to the Cabinet (collectively and individually), to
Senators and members of Congress, to various executive officials, to
public men and citizens from every part of every State of the Union,
to committees and deputations representing all classes and interests,
and to representatives and visitors from all countries—whether a royal
prince from Germany or a defeated Boer general from South Africa.
And when one considers all these demands upon a President’s time,
and knows something of the prodigious industry with which the Chief
Executive must devote himself to the almost innumerable duties that
present themselves daily in connection with his executive work, it
becomes plain that these speeches and addresses have been in the main
the spontaneous utterances of a richly stored mind inspired by firm
conviction and resolute will, and supported by extraordinary physical
strength and vigor.
Yet Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches have not been carelessly prepared. Nor
have they ever been left—as some speakers profess to leave theirs—to
the “inspiration of the moment.” Mr. Roosevelt has unusual powers
of concentration; and his achievement of so much work is due to his
ability to turn promptly from one thing to another and to give each
successive task his whole undivided attention. With an excellent
memory and a disciplined mind, he is able to summon to his aid at a
given moment all his past resources of reading, study, and thought
upon a given topic. Thus, before going on several of the long trips
in connection with which a great number of addresses in these volumes
were made, the more important of the speeches for which dates had been
fixed were dictated one after another to his stenographers late in
the evening when the day’s work was cleared away, social or official
guests had departed, and an hour or two of uninterrupted time was at
his disposal.
This, indeed, is the same method by which a number of the essays and
addresses which have become familiar in the collected volumes entitled
_American Ideals_, and _The Strenuous Life_, had been prepared at
former periods when Mr. Roosevelt was under stress of much occupation.
There has been no attempt to polish sentences or to make fine phrases,
yet there is the orderly and the deliberate expression that results
from orderly processes of thinking. And there is the assured and
confident tone that reveals a steadfast mind seldom tormented by
doubts or misgivings.
Again, it is to be noted that these addresses are patriotic rather
than partisan, and that where they deal with matters of controversy
they show a spirit as little contentious or polemic as possible. While
believing in the utility of the party system, Mr. Roosevelt spoke as
President of the whole country and not merely as the chief of a party.
His speeches, in short, are the utterances of a man who embodies the
national spirit more broadly and fully than almost any other man of
his day. He expresses himself upon a wide range of topics with a
larger fund of experience and direct knowledge than is possessed by
any other conspicuous public man of either party.
It is only through some understanding of the career that led up to
his assumption of the Presidency that the richness, the fulness, and
the authoritative quality of his observations on many varied themes
can be appreciated. Mr. Roosevelt’s life has, amid much variety,
possessed great unity. While still in college at Harvard, his mind
became centered upon the study of American life, American history, and
American government and policy. Whatever he undertook after leaving
college added steadily to his understanding of the people of his own
country and their institutions. Almost at once he threw himself into
the politics of the great State of New York, served several terms in
the Legislature, and made himself known throughout the country by the
vigor and courage with which he applied himself to current problems
of State and municipal reform. At a time when the so-called “spoils
system” was powerfully rooted in the practical government of nation,
State, and city, he became a civil service reformer.
Everything that was worth while was of interest to him and everything
that he undertook to do was done whole-heartedly and thus made its
contribution to his own development. He was an officer in the militia,
and learned lessons which became, years afterward, valuable to him as
a colonel in the Spanish-American war and later as commander-in-chief
of the army by virtue of the Presidential office.
Meanwhile his first literary undertaking was the history of the
naval war of 1812, which appeared in 1882, and which will always
remain a vital and standard account of our last war with Great
Britain, especially from the standpoint of naval strategy and actual
operations. Whether taking part himself in the current life of his
country and in the making of its history, or whether studying or
writing about the part that others have taken in the development of
the nation, there has been on Mr. Roosevelt’s part always a singleness
of purpose and a harmony of effort. Thus, when he wrote about the War
of 1812, as when in later years he wrote the graphic yet accurate
and well-poised studies of those Western movements, military and
civil, that created the Mississippi Valley (comprised in the series
of volumes entitled _The Winning of the West_), there was on his
part just as much a sense of dealing with realities as when in 1899
he wrote out the story of the part played by his regiment of Rough
Riders in the Spanish-American war of the year before. This single
work, on _The Winning of the West_, in the opinion of the authorities,
justified the honorary degree conferred upon Colonel Roosevelt by the
University of Norway on May 6, 1910.
The circumstances which took him to the West in 1884 to become for
some years a cattle ranchman, a resident of the great plains, and
an exponent of hunting and frontier life, involved in no manner an
interruption of the career upon which he had made so propitious an
entrance. On the contrary, this was the best possible step that could
have been taken for the rounding out and development of the career of
a man destined, either in letters or in action, to spend his life in
dealing with American affairs from a broad standpoint.
Many of the most marked traits of the American people have been
evolved through the process of pioneering. For three centuries our
people have been engaged in subduing a continent that they had found a
pathless wilderness. No man who has lacked contact with some concrete
phases of our pioneering life can ever wholly enter into the spirit
of the nation’s historical development, or perfectly understand the
inherited qualities of our present day citizenship. Mr. Roosevelt’s
Western life supplied that needful element of understanding, while it
gave him physical hardihood and a continental breadth of view. It gave
him, furthermore, that traditional American readiness with a horse and
a gun, and that adaptability to the free life of field and of woods
which is the heritage of the average young American, and which made
the greater part of the Northern and Southern armies in the Civil War
so unequaled, for effectiveness, in all military history.
Through these years of practical life in the West Mr. Roosevelt
never lost the studious and literary habit, nor did he lose any
of his zest for the public affairs of the country. In due time he
returned to the East, took an active part in New York politics again,
and was nominated for Mayor. Then he went to Washington, where
for a number of years he served as Chairman of the Board of Civil
Service Commissioners and became an expert in the field of national
administration. After that came his two years as President of the
Police Commissioners of New York City—a truly strenuous period that
tested every quality of his mind and character. The navy had been at
low ebb when Mr. Roosevelt in 1882 wrote his _Naval War of 1812_, and
that book fairly contributed toward the revival of interest which
soon set on foot the movement for the creation of our modern fleet.
The author of that book had ever afterward been regarded both at home
and abroad as an expert student of naval history and of sea power,
and he had retained an enthusiastic interest in the whole subject. He
was well fitted, therefore, for the post of Assistant Secretary of the
Navy, to which President McKinley appointed him at the very time when,
more clearly than most others, he foresaw the probability of a war
with Spain.
He threw his whole intense energy into the work of fitting our navy
for such a test, devoting himself especially to the questions of
readiness and efficiency in practical detail. And then came the
outbreak of war. With the feeling that he was no longer needed in the
naval department, and that it was his duty to respond to the call for
volunteer soldiers, he entered the army. The history of that service
he has himself told in a fascinating way in the volume entitled _The
Rough Riders_, included in this edition of his works.
The war being ended, he returned to his own State of New York at a
moment when his party was casting about for a candidate for Governor.
The outlook was not propitious; but Mr. Roosevelt’s recent career
had given him a great personal popularity, and he was accordingly
nominated and elected. Great questions of administration are always
pending in the State of New York, and there are few governmental
offices in any country better adapted to train the incumbent for the
tasks of practical statesmanship. Mr. Roosevelt took up the work
of the Governorship with characteristic industry, and with results
that were successful and valuable in many directions. So well had he
satisfied the expectations of his party and of the State that his
renomination as Governor was assured; and the whole country had its
attention fixed upon him as the probable nominee of his party for the
Presidency in the year 1904.
A variety of circumstances, however, most of them unexpected and some
of them dramatic, led to an overwhelming demand by the Republican
National Convention at Philadelphia in 1900 that he forego his
prospect of a second term as Governor of New York in order to take the
nomination for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Mr. McKinley.
He was put forward by his party in that summer of 1900 as its most
effective campaigner. But it has not been thought by him desirable
that any of the speeches made in a hotly contested Presidential
electoral campaign should be included in a collection of his public
addresses. The tragic death of President McKinley, in September, 1901,
occurred only six months after his entrance upon a second term, and
thus it happened that Mr. Roosevelt had only a short time to serve in
the office of Vice-President.
So remarkable and so rapid a succession of valuable public
experiences, all of a kind to give training for the duties of the
Presidency, is probably unparalleled in our history, unless in the
case of his successor, President Taft. Mr. Roosevelt had been the
chief Civil Service Commissioner of this great nation, the head of
the police administration of our metropolis, the active official of
the naval department, the most energetic volunteer officer in the
Spanish-American war, the Governor of New York, and the Vice-President
of the United States. The man who had succeeded brilliantly in all
these positions, and who had treated every one of them in turn as if
it furnished the one great opportunity for rendering public service,
could but bring to the Presidency an accumulated knowledge and
experience that must make itself felt in every part of the work of
that supreme office.
It is this wide range of experience and knowledge that has given Mr.
Roosevelt the easy mastery of many subjects exhibited in the addresses
and public papers that make up these volumes. Further, it is these
speeches and messages, far more than anything else contained in his
writings, that show him in his capacity as a practical statesman. They
afford the unconscious but inevitable expression of the man in his
relation to public affairs.
To sum up and to conclude: These addresses reveal the unity and
consistency of Mr. Roosevelt’s character and career. He is indeed
a many-sided and versatile man, but there is nothing mutually
contradictory about the different phases of his nature or of his past
undertakings. His vital Americanism is shown equally in his historical
studies of the pioneer movement that built up our great West and in
his accounts of ranching life and his studies of the big game of
America.
In his varied literary work, as in his other efforts and activities,
there is little or nothing of an incidental or _dilettante_ nature;
all of it is the frank expression of the man himself. The book on the
War of 1812 was written when he was still very young. It might well
have proved to be the merely boyish effort of a young man who had
said to himself, “Lo, I will go to work and write a book!” But, on
the contrary, it was in fact the outgrowth of vital interest and of
strong conviction regarding his subject; and so the book lives and
will continue to live. Thus all of his work, whether literary in its
character or active and official, has been done in the same direct,
straightforward way as simply pertaining to the task in hand; and the
task, whether great or small, has always been deemed worthy of the
whole vital energy of the man.
The great assemblage of public papers and addresses which we are
presenting in the eight volumes that follow, herewith, belong for
the most part to the period of Mr. Roosevelt’s Presidential service,
which ended March 4, 1909. Upon his reelection to the Presidency in
1904, Mr. Roosevelt had declared that he would not be a candidate in
1908 for another term. Although great pressure was brought to bear
upon him in 1907 and in the first half of 1908 to permit the party
to place his name again at the head of the Presidential ticket, he
remained firm in the view that no President should serve for more than
two consecutive terms. One of the last, as it is also one of the best,
addresses of his memorable Presidential period is the one delivered
at the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of
Abraham Lincoln, on February 12, 1909, and contained in the last of
these volumes. For a period of more than a year there is no speech or
paper of Mr. Roosevelt that finds record in this collection. Almost at
once after retiring from the White House, Mr. Roosevelt, in pursuance
of a long-cherished plan, accompanied by his son Kermit and several
scientific experts, departed for Africa. He had been commissioned
by the Smithsonian Institution to obtain a collection of African
fauna, particularly the larger animals, for the Government’s museum
at Washington. Mr. Roosevelt’s carrying out of this great project was
with all his familiar vitality and enthusiasm, and with results as
successful as could have been desired. His return by way of Egypt, and
his experiences as traveler and lecturer in Europe, preliminary to his
return to America in June, 1910, were matters of interest everywhere.
Mr. Roosevelt, throughout Europe as well as in his own country, had
been fully recognized for those qualities which these introductory
pages have tried to set forth. His European travels, as originally
planned, were to have been those of a private citizen seeking no
honors or publicity. But wherever he went governments and rulers, as
well as the masses of plain people, accorded him so great a welcome
that it can fairly be said that few men have ever received such
ovations at any time in history. The death of King Edward led to the
appointment of Mr. Roosevelt as special ambassador to represent the
American government in the formalities of the funeral. The diplomatic
character thus given to his presence in England added a final touch
to the varied experiences of this remarkable foreign journey. Our
concluding volume contains the chief addresses delivered by him in
Europe, notably those at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of
Berlin, and the University of Oxford.