SPEECH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT THE REUNION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF
THE POTOMAC, G. A. R., AT THE NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
FEB. 19, 1902
_Mr. Chairman, Commander-in-Chief, and you, my Comrades_:
I can say that there is nothing else of which I am quite so proud
as having won, in a sense, the right to claim comradeship with you.
And, gentlemen, I recollect speaking with a friend at the time of the
Spanish War as to why we went, and it was agreed that it was simply
because we could not stay away. We had taken to heart the great
object-lesson that you gave. I am very glad to have the chance of
seeing you this evening and of being with you. I would be but a poor
American if I did not appreciate to the full the debt under which
America rests to you, not alone for the lesson in war that you have
given, but for what that lesson teaches as to peace. I meet you here
and I see the general and the man from the ranks honor one another by
the highest title either knows—comrade. I see you applying the great
lesson of brotherhood—the lesson that must be applied in civil life
no less than in military life if we are to work out, as we shall work
out, aright the problems that face the Republic. The war in which I
was engaged was a small affair; but it gave us an understanding of
what you had done and of what you had been through. I know pretty
well what kind of memories you have. I know what you did, what you
risked, what you sacrificed. I know what it meant to you, and I know
why you did it. There are two or three lessons that you taught that
I hope this country will not only never forget, but will never cease
applying. In the first place the motive—the tissue of motives that
spurred you on—the love for liberty, love for union, and the love for
the stable and ordered freedom of a great people. You braved nights
in the freezing mud of the trenches in winter, and the marches under
scorching midsummer suns; fever cots, wounds, insufficient food,
exhausting fatigue of a type that those that have not tried it can
not even understand. You did it without one thought of the trivial
monetary reward at the moment; you did it because your souls spurred
you on. And that is the reason why to this day, when any man speaks
to a body of veterans he speaks to a body of men who are instant to
respond to any call for adherence to a lofty ideal. In other words,
you practiced, and by practicing preached, in the strongest manner,
the ideal of doing your duty, of doing duty when duty calls, without
thought of what the reward might be. In the days when the sad, kindly,
patient Lincoln—mighty Lincoln—stood in the White House like a high
priest of the people, between the horns of the altar, and poured
out the blood of the bravest and best, it was because only by that
sacrifice could the flag that had been rent in sunder once again be
made without a seam. You taught the ideal of duty—duty, a word that
stands above glory, or any other word. Glory is a good word, too, but
duty is a better one.
You taught, in addition to that, brotherhood. In the ranks, as you
stood there shoulder to shoulder, little any one of you cared what the
man next to you was as regarded wealth, trade, or education, if he was
in very truth a man. And, friends, short would have been our shrift
if in our army as a whole there had been any failure to exercise just
that type of judgment—to exercise the judgment on the man as a man;
short would have been our shrift if we had failed to do justice to the
bricklayer on the one hand, or to the banker on the other; if we had
shown either contempt of the one, or the no less mean emotion of envy
for the other. If we are to go on, as we shall and must go on in our
national career, we must apply in the civic life of our nation exactly
the principles which obtained in the Grand Army of the Republic.
There are plenty of foes to fight and we can not afford to have
honest men betrayed into hostility toward one another; betrayed into
acting toward one another in a way that will permanently deteriorate
the standard of our national character. We can afford to disagree
on questions of proper political difference. There are plenty such.
But we can not afford, if we are to remain true to the ideals of the
past, to differ about those ideals. We can not afford to do less than
justice to any man. We can not afford to shrink from seeing that the
right obtains; nor, on the other hand, to rebuke any effort to stir up
those dark and evil forces which lurk in each man’s breast, and which
need to be kept down, not excited.
The Commander-in-Chief spoke of the great and good President—of
President McKinley—who died for the people exactly as Abraham Lincoln
died. You who wore the blue in the early sixties warred against that
spirit of disunion which, if successful, would have meant widespread
governmental anarchy throughout this land. You warred for orderly
liberty. So now it behooves each of us so to conduct his civil life,
so to do his duty as a citizen, that we shall in the most effective
way war against the spirit of anarchy in all its forms. You did mighty
deeds, and you leave us more than mighty deeds, for you leave us the
memory of how you did them. You leave us not only the victory, but
the spirit that lay behind it and shone through it. You leave us not
only the triumph, but the memory of the patient resolution, of the
suffering, of the dogged endurance and heroic daring through which
that triumph came to pass. You in your youth and early manhood took
up the greatest task which fell to the lot of any generation of our
people to perform. You did it well. We have lesser tasks, and yet
tasks of great and vital importance. Woe to us if we do not show
ourselves worthy to be your successors, by doing our lesser tasks with
the same firm determination for right that you displayed when you
fought to a finish the great Civil War, when you upheld the arms of
Abraham Lincoln, and followed to victory the flag of Ulysses S. Grant.