Roosevelt in 1910: the ex-president between arenas

The passage assumes a specific person: someone beaten in public, criticised by people who never attempted the thing, who has decided in advance what he will think of himself when it happens again. Roosevelt in April 1910 was that person, and about to become a far more extreme version of it. This page is the biography the paragraph stands on.

Who he was by the time he said it

Theodore Roosevelt was born in Manhattan on 27 October 1858 into money, and into a body that did not work. He was asthmatic, short-sighted and repeatedly ill; he later described himself as a sickly, delicate boy who suffered much from chronic asthma and frequently had to be taken away on trips to find a place where he could breathe. The family story — from his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson's memoir, not from any contemporaneous document — is that his father put it to him directly.

“Theodore, you have the mind, but you do not have the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body.”— Theodore Roosevelt Sr., as recalled by Corinne Roosevelt Robinson; quoted by the Theodore Roosevelt Center

A gymnasium went onto the back piazza and the boy went into it. That is where everything he later preached about effort comes from.

The rest happened fast. Harvard, then the New York State Assembly at twenty-three. On 14 February 1884 his wife Alice and his mother Mittie died in the same house on the same day, Alice of Bright's disease two days after giving birth, Mittie of typhoid. Roosevelt went to the Dakota Badlands, where he had bought a ranch the autumn before, and spent much of two years there as a working cattleman. Then east again: a lost mayoral race in 1886, the Civil Service Commission, the New York police, Assistant Secretary of the Navy — a post he resigned to go and fight the Spanish war. The Rough Riders charged at San Juan Heights in July 1898; he was governor of New York by November, vice-president by 1901, and president on 14 September 1901, six days after an anarchist shot William McKinley. He was forty-two, and no one has held the office younger. He served seven and a half years and in December 1906 became the first American of any kind to win a Nobel Prize, for mediating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. By any reasonable measure he had won.

The promise he made and could not unmake

On the night of 8 November 1904, elected in a landslide in his own right, Roosevelt issued a short statement from the White House: four sentences of gratitude, and then this.

“On the Fourth of March next I shall have served three and one-half years, and this three and one-half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”— Theodore Roosevelt, statement following his election, 8 November 1904 (American Presidency Project)

Nothing forced it — no law, no term limit, only a custom and his own reading of it. He was forty-six when he wrote it and fifty when it took effect. He handed the party to William Howard Taft, left office on 4 March 1909, and got on a boat nineteen days later; a departed president who stays in the country is a rival, and one in the Rift Valley is not. It did not fix the underlying problem, which was that Roosevelt at fifty was still the most energetic public man in America, with no office and no obvious next thing.

That is the position the Sorbonne paragraph is written from. Not a man in an arena. A man who has just left one and does not yet know how he is getting into another.

Eleven months in East Africa

The Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition sailed from New York on 23 March 1909 aboard the Hamburg and did not leave Africa until 30 March 1910. It was not a holiday, and not strictly Roosevelt's: he proposed it to the Smithsonian, which supplied three staff naturalists — Edgar Mearns, Edmund Heller and J. Alden Loring — and raised about $30,000 by private subscription, Andrew Carnegie among the backers. Roosevelt paid his own way from a $50,000 Scribner's contract for the articles that became African Game Trails, and took his son Kermit as photographer.

The scale is where the modern reader flinches. Moving through what is now Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan with porters, gun bearers and armed askari, the party killed or trapped roughly 11,400 animals — some 4,900 mammals, 4,000 birds, 2,000 reptiles and amphibians, 500 fish. With invertebrates and plants, the material shipped to Washington came to about 23,151 natural-history specimens, which the National Museum took eight years to catalogue. Roosevelt and Kermit shot 512 animals between them, including eighteen lion, twelve elephant and more than a hundred rhinoceros.

He was attacked for it at the time, and his defence was institutional: to condemn the expedition, he said, was to condemn the existence of natural history museums as such. Take that at whatever discount seems right; what matters here is the choice. A fifty-year-old ex-president with the pick of the world's lecture circuits took a year of tsetse flies and skinning tables. The face marred by dust and sweat is not a metaphor he had to reach for.

A private citizen received as a head of state

The journey home took eleven weeks and amounted to a royal progress conducted by a man whose only title was Colonel. He spoke at the American Mission in Khartoum and at the National University in Cairo, lecturing Egyptian nationalists on self-government in terms that infuriated them. In Rome an audience with Pope Pius X was arranged and then cancelled: the Vatican asked him to undertake not to meet the city's Methodist missionaries first, and he refused any condition on whom he saw. It was front-page news on two continents.

Then Paris and the Sorbonne; Brussels, The Hague, Copenhagen; then Christiania, where on 5 May he delivered the Nobel lecture he had owed the committee since 1906, arguing for arbitration treaties and a league of peace. He lectured at the University of Berlin on 12 May and reviewed the German army with the Kaiser. Edward VII had died six days earlier, and Taft named his predecessor special representative of the United States; on 20 May Roosevelt took his place in the funeral procession in London, in which nine reigning sovereigns rode — the last assembly of Europe's crowned heads before they went to war with one another. Then Cambridge; the Guildhall, where he told the City of London, to its discomfort, that Britain should either govern Egypt properly or leave; Oxford's Romanes Lecture; New York on 18 June.

“I had the high honor of being deputed to come to the funeral as the representative of America, and by my presence to express the deep and universal feeling of sympathy which moves the entire American people for the British people in their hour of sadness and trial.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Guildhall address, London, 31 May 1910, in African and European Addresses (Scribner, 1910)

What happened in the next thirty months

Taft did not govern as Roosevelt expected. The Ballinger–Pinchot affair set Taft's Interior Secretary against Roosevelt's conservation men, the antitrust record slackened, and Roosevelt concluded his successor lacked both the appetite and the theory of executive power the moment required. Ten weeks after landing he gave the “New Nationalism” speech at Osawatomie and the break was public. He declared for the nomination in February 1912, won most of the primaries, and lost the convention anyway: at Chicago the Taft men seated the delegates they needed, Roosevelt told his people to walk out, and in August the new Progressive Party nominated him. Asked how he felt, he said he felt as strong as a bull moose.

Outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee on the evening of 14 October 1912, a saloonkeeper named John Flammang Schrank shot him in the chest at close range. The bullet went through a steel spectacle case and a folded fifty-page speech manuscript before lodging in the chest muscle, short of the pleura. Roosevelt coughed, found no blood, judged the wound survivable, and went on to the auditorium.

“I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Milwaukee, 14 October 1912 (Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library). Transcriptions differ on the words just before this — “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible” and “Ladies and gentlemen” both circulate.

He then spoke with the bullet in him. How long is genuinely unsettled: the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library says nearly an hour and a half, and elsewhere eighty minutes; other accounts say about fifty; retellings have hardened on ninety. The physical evidence is not in doubt. The perforated manuscript and spectacle case survive, the surgeons left the bullet where it was, and he carried it for his remaining six years.

It did not work. On 5 November Wilson took 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt's 88 and Taft's 8. Roosevelt's 27 per cent of the popular vote is still the best any third-party presidential candidate has managed in the United States, and it is still a loss — one he caused himself, by splitting the party that would otherwise probably have held the office.

Eleven months later a planned South American lecture tour became the Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition: the first descent of the Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt, a thousand miles of unmapped water in the Brazilian interior. Twenty-two men started down it in February 1914. Roosevelt sliced his leg open on a rock freeing a canoe; the wound went septic, fever followed, and a surgeon opened the leg on the riverbank. One man drowned in a waterfall, and a porter shot dead the man who caught him stealing food. Roosevelt, delirious, repeatedly demanded to be left behind to die, and Kermit refused. He got home having lost a quarter of his body weight, and was never physically the same.

1909–1919, dated

His own failures, plainly

The passage is not written from a winning streak. Four public defeats are in the record; two of them were behind him when he stood up in Paris.

• The 1886 mayoral race. He ran for mayor of New York at twenty-seven and came third: Abram Hewitt 90,552, Henry George 68,110, Roosevelt 60,435. Not a near miss — a distant third, behind a single-tax radical.
• The cattle operation, winter 1886–87. A large share of his inherited capital had gone into the Maltese Cross and Elkhorn ranches. The winter the Dakotas still call the Great Die-Up — blizzards, temperatures near −50°F, cattle suffocating in the drifts — killed most of the northern plains herds. He rode back in the spring of 1887 to a landscape of carcasses and wound the business down.
• 1912. He lost, and took his party down with him.
• The River of Doubt. He got a thousand miles of river mapped, and it cost him a quarter of his body weight, two of his men, and most of the health he had left. He was fifty-five.

Then the part that is not a failure but is the heaviest thing in the biography. Quentin, the youngest of four sons, all of whom he had pushed towards the war he spent three years demanding, was shot down near Chamery on 14 July 1918, aged twenty. Roosevelt did not recover, and died at Sagamore Hill six months later, aged sixty.

The parts that complicate the moral

None of this makes him admirable across the board. Three things in the record cut against the paragraph; all are documented, not inferred.

Race. Lecturing in New York in January 1886, Roosevelt said he did not go so far as to think the only good Indians were dead Indians, but believed nine out of every ten were, and would not like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth — recorded in Hermann Hagedorn's Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, confirmed authentic by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. As president he had 167 Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry discharged without honour after the Brownsville shooting of 1906, with no court-martial and no individual evidence against any of them, costing them their pensions. He never recanted. The discharges were made honourable in 1972, by which point one of the 167 was alive to hear it.

Empire. In the same 1899 speech that gave us “it is hard to fail”, he wrote of anti-imperialists that they made a pretence of humanitarianism to hide their timidity, and “cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men”. The arena is a figure of speech about effort. It was also, for him, a literal description of other people's countries.

War, and error. Roosevelt is more careful about war in the Sorbonne speech than his reputation suggests. War is a dreadful thing and unjust war a crime against humanity, he tells the audience — and then: “But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war.” (¶14). The trouble is not the theory. It is that he wanted the Spanish war, agitated hard for the next one, and could rarely be brought to concede a specific mistake. The man who wrote that there is no effort without error and shortcoming was poor at naming his own errors aloud — Brownsville above all. The paragraph forgives error in general; its author would not admit it in particular. Those are not the same virtue, and the difference is what the critiques page is for.

Read it as autobiography

Try the passage once more with the biography under it. The face marred by dust and sweat and blood is a man who had ridden in a cavalry charge and would be shot in the chest. The one who errs and comes short again and again came third in a mayoral race and lost a herd to a blizzard. He who at the worst fails while daring greatly is, within thirty months, a man who lost an election he had blown up his own party to contest. And the cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat are, on the plainest reading, everyone who told him from a comfortable distance that leaving office was a mistake and the third party vanity.

That is why it does not read like advice. Advice is addressed outward. This is a man setting the terms on which he intends to be judged before the judging starts — and, less flatteringly, deciding in advance that the people who will judge him do not count. The second is why it is so easy to misuse. Roosevelt had earned the right to say it about himself; nobody inherits that right by quoting him.

The other half of the problem is the word “critic”, which he did not use the way his admirers assume. That is the next page.

Sources for this page

• The Life of Theodore Roosevelt — Theodore Roosevelt Center, Dickinson State University · the dated chronology this page's timeline is built on, from the birth date to the funeral. It does not narrate causes or resolve disputed details.
• Roosevelt in the Badlands — Theodore Roosevelt Center · the Dakota years in dates: the 1883 purchase, the 14 February 1884 deaths, the Elkhorn, and the divestment after the Great Die-Up. Does not give his dollar losses.
• Asthma — Theodore Roosevelt Center · the childhood illness, the gymnasium and the father's challenge, with the challenge correctly sourced to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson's memoir rather than to a contemporaneous record.
• Statement Following Victory in the Presidential Election, 8 November 1904 — American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara · the full text of the pledge, verbatim. His later regret is testimony recorded elsewhere, not in this document.
• African and European Addresses — Theodore Roosevelt, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910 (Project Gutenberg) · the canonical printing of the Sorbonne text and the dated companion addresses (Khartoum, Cairo, Christiania, Berlin, Cambridge, Guildhall, Oxford) that fix the tour's sequence. The Guildhall speech is the source for his role at Edward VII's funeral.
• The Strenuous Life — Theodore Roosevelt, 1900 (Project Gutenberg) · the Hamilton Club address of 10 April 1899, verified here for both the “hard to fail” sentence and the passage on anti-imperialists.
• Smithsonian–Roosevelt African expedition — Wikipedia · the specimen breakdown, cited to the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and Roosevelt's own game tallies from African Game Trails. Good for numbers; check them against the Smithsonian directly where it matters.
• In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt Embarked on an Ambitious Expedition to East Africa — Smithsonian magazine · the naturalists, the $30,000 subscription, the Scribner's contract, and the contemporary backlash. Gives no exact specimen total.
• Why was Theodore Roosevelt Shot? and Bullet Speech — Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · the Milwaukee shooting, the spectacle case and manuscript, and the library's own estimate of the speech's length, which other accounts contradict.
• The Bull Moose Campaign of 1912 — Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · the causes of the Taft break, the primaries, the Chicago credentials fight, and the November percentages.
• The Brownsville Affair: An Injustice That Took 66 Years to Correct — Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · the 167 discharges, the absence of any hearing, Roosevelt's refusal to recant, and the 1972 reversal.
• Common Misquotes: What Theodore Roosevelt Actually Said (and Didn't Say) — Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · confirms the January 1886 remark about Indians via Hagedorn, and separates it from the Sheridan aphorism it is usually confused with.
• The Death of Quentin Roosevelt — Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library · 14 July 1918, the 95th Aero Squadron, and the effect on his father.
• Theodore Roosevelt: Life After the Presidency — Miller Center, University of Virginia · the post-presidential arc in outline, including the Amazon journey and the death at Sagamore Hill. Thin on the European tour and imprecise on where Quentin died.
• Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition — Wikipedia · the dates and route of the descent (27 February to 26 April 1914), the deaths, the leg wound and fever, and the renaming. Gives no figure for his weight loss.
• The Amazonian Expedition That Nearly Killed Teddy Roosevelt — History.com · the quarter of his body weight, the riverbank surgery, the drowning and the killing, and Roosevelt demanding to be left behind. A popular account drawing largely on Candice Millard's The River of Doubt.
• Treaty of Portsmouth — Theodore Roosevelt Center · the 1905 mediation the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for.
• Theodore Roosevelt — Nobel Peace Prize 1906 · the award itself. The lecture was not delivered until Christiania, 5 May 1910.
• Colonel Roosevelt — Edmund Morris, Random House, 2010 · the standard narrative biography of exactly these years, 1909 to 1919, and the fullest account of the safari, the European tour and the Rome episode. Linked to the publisher's page, not to a text.