The speech: what “Citizenship in a Republic” is arguing

Almost everyone who knows the arena passage met it alone — on a wall, in a locker room, at the front of a book. This page puts it back into the thing it was cut out of, in order, paragraph by paragraph, so that the famous sentences can be read as what they were: one beat in an argument about why republics fail.

What the address actually is

A private citizen stood in the Sorbonne and told the French academic establishment what makes a republic survive. Roosevelt held no office in April 1910. He had been president for seven and a half years, had been out for thirteen months, and was on the European leg of a long journey home from an African expedition. The invitation came through the French ambassador, M. Jusserand.

Roosevelt explains his choice in the foreword to the 1910 book that collects these speeches. The Oxford and Berlin lectures, he writes, were scholastic, built for the learned bodies in front of him. Paris he handled differently: after consulting Jusserand he decided to speak more generally, as the citizen of one republic addressing the citizens of another. That decision is the design of the whole speech: not a lecture on history or biology, but one citizen's account of what citizenship demands, delivered to citizens who happened to be scholars.

An address to the most prestigious university in Europe could have been about exceptional people. Roosevelt makes it about unexceptional ones, then tells the exceptional people in the room what that costs them.

The bet on the average citizen

Four paragraphs of ceremony come first: the shadows of kings in this hall, a New World hacked out of wilderness by people who had no leisure for learning, that New World now returning to the Old to recover what its ancestors put down. Then, in paragraph 6, the subject — individual citizenship.

The premise is comparative and blunt. Under a monarchy or an oligarchy the quality of the rulers is what matters; a nation can be brilliant for generations on a few good men, however low the quality of the ordinary citizen, because that citizen is almost negligible in producing the result. A republic has no such margin. There the result is made by everyone, so it is decided by everyone's ordinary conduct — first in daily life, only then in the crises that call for heroic virtues.

“The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, ¶7

Then the turn on his hosts. If the average is to be kept high, the standard of the leaders must be very much higher — and leaders come from exactly the classes seated in the amphitheatre. To you and your kind much has been given, he tells them, and much should be expected. Two paragraphs on the failings peculiar to trained intellect and inherited position follow. That is the setup for everything famous.

The whole speech in nine movements

The transcript numbers every block of the 1910 printing from 0 to 38: paragraph 0 is the title, 1 names the occasion, and 38 is a printer's row of asterisks, so the address itself runs 37 paragraphs. Here is the argument mapped onto them, with each movement's share of the 8,838 words.

Two things fall out. The arena is four per cent of the address, while the political middle on equality, reward and class hatred is nearly a third of it and is almost never read. And the arena arrives about a fifth of the way in — not where a peroration goes, but where an argument turns.

The paragraph before the paragraph

Paragraph 9 changes how the famous lines read, and almost nobody has seen it. It is addressed to the man of learning and the man of lettered leisure, and it names their characteristic temptation: to pose, to themselves and to others, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life, Roosevelt says, is to face it with a sneer. He describes men who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not attempt, and calls the cynical habit a mark not of superiority but of weakness — a way of hiding weakness behind contempt for other people's achievements.

Then, as the last sentence before the arena begins, comes the line that ought to be printed under every copy of the passage:

“The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, ¶9 — the sentence immediately before “It is not the critic who counts”

He is ranking cowardices, and he puts below the critic the man who sneers at criticism as well as at performance. Criticism is cheap when it substitutes for action; dismissing criticism itself is cheaper still. That clause is why the passage cannot honestly be used as a licence to ignore critics — developed on what he meant by “the critic”.

Where the arena sits, and what it is doing

Paragraph 10 opens on the sentence everyone knows and closes 385 words later on a Shakespeare reference almost nobody does. About 140 of those words — from “It is not the critic who counts” to “cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat” — are the extract that travels. The rest stays behind.

Its job is specific. Paragraph 9 diagnosed a failure in the educated class; paragraph 10 supplies the counter-image, the man whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who errs and comes short again and again because there is no effort without error, and who at worst fails while daring greatly. Paragraph 12 then states the principle plainly: above mind and above body stands character. The arena passage is the hinge — where the address stops describing a defect and starts asserting the standard. Everything after it, from money and oratory to socialism and the conduct of nations, is that standard applied to a subject.

Which means the passage is aimed, not general. The people being told they are not in the arena are the people in front of him: the refined, the cultivated, the men with libraries. The aim is explicit in the sentence immediately after the famous stop, the one the extract cuts off:

“Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, ¶10 — the sentence immediately after “cold and timid souls”

After it come the cloistered man who shrinks from contact with his fellows; those who deride the men who bear the brunt of the day; those who would act if only conditions were different; the line that the man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in history whether he is cynic, fop, or voluptuary; and finally Hotspur, war-worn and spent, remembered for his many errors and his valiant end — preferred to the young lord in Henry IV who complained that but for the vile guns he would have been a soldier. The whole passage is on the transcript, and is taken apart clause by clause in the close reading.

Character above intellect, and the virtues underneath it

Paragraph 11 is a compliment with a point. France, Roosevelt says, has proved across centuries that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft: the country of the Chanson de Roland is also the country of the proverbial French soldier. That closes the trap opened in paragraph 9. Cultivation is not the problem; cultivation used as an excuse is.

Paragraph 12 states the principle without ornament. Keep the scholarship, he says, and then remember that it stands second.

“We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities.”— Theodore Roosevelt, Citizenship in a Republic, ¶12

The solid qualities are then named: self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility while still acting with others, courage and resolution. Paragraphs 13 to 15 make them concrete as three duties — work, the capacity to fight at need, and the raising of children. The first two age reasonably. The third is the ugliest stretch in the address: Roosevelt calls wilful childlessness a crime of ease and self-indulgence and ranks the power to perpetuate the race above every other virtue. That is the “race suicide” argument he pressed all his life, taken up on the other nine-tenths and in the critiques. Paragraph 22 returns to that ground more mildly, putting the homely virtues of the household at the bottom of character — then insisting that good citizenship shown only in the home is not good citizenship.

Money, talkers, and the two sets of qualities

Six paragraphs, a sixth of the speech, go to wealth and influence. Roosevelt refuses to recognise the mere multi-millionaire as an asset to any country: credit attaches to how a fortune was earned and used, never to the fact of having it. The man who piles up a great fortune and returns no corresponding benefit should be made to feel an unworthy citizen, left to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.

Paragraph 17 compresses his politics into two clauses: property rights must be carefully safeguarded, and human and property rights are usually identical — but where they genuinely conflict, human rights have the upper hand, because property belongs to man and not man to property. Paragraphs 18 and 19 apply the same test to the two gifts a democracy over-admires in themselves, money-making and oratory, and then to the orator's more influential brother, the journalist. A commonwealth carried away by mere oratory, valuing words divorced from deeds, shows marked political weakness.

Paragraphs 20 and 21 fuse the strands. The good citizen needs the qualities that make for efficiency and the qualities that aim it at the public good, and neither is any use without the other; there is little place in active life for the timid good man. But efficiency unguided by a moral sense makes a man worse the better he is at it — and a people that condones wickedness because the wicked man triumphs proves itself unfit for liberty.

The long middle: how republics actually die

The largest movement, paragraphs 22 to 31, is the one quoted least. Its argument is that self-government is a practical craft and that both of the available purities wreck it. Roosevelt goes after the closet philosopher who explains from his library how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, the one-sided fanatic, the mob leader, and the man who promises what cannot be performed; the impracticable visionary, whom he calls the embittered foe of the real reformer, the man who with stumblings and shortcomings gives practical effect to what idealists want; and, with equal force, the “practical” men whose practicality amounts to a disbelief in decency.

On economics he refuses both doctrines. Extreme individualism and extreme socialism are equally doctrinaire, and where the line falls between individual initiative and common effort is a question for practical experiment — illustrated by drainage and water supply, which one farmhouse can handle alone and a town cannot. His rule for any proposal: judge it on its merits and disregard who is advancing it. If it seems good, try it; if it proves good, accept it.

On equality he quotes Lincoln at length — the only extended quotation in the address — to hold two things at once: that the Declaration meant equality in certain inalienable rights rather than in all respects, and that this was a standard maxim to be constantly approximated. He then takes both halves of a hard position. It is dishonourable to stop working against inequality of right, opportunity and privilege; it is dishonest to pretend unequal service should bring equal reward. Level up, and beware of levelling down: help a man who stumbles, but do not carry a man who lies down.

Paragraph 30 is the political heart of the speech. The best test of a country's love of liberty is how it treats minorities. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, whoever is doing it, and class hatred is bad in the same way: the arrogance that would crush a man for being poor and the malice that would destroy a man for being rich are two sides of one shield. The old republics fell, he says, because their parties divided along the line separating wealth from poverty, and it made no difference whether the winner was an oligarchy or a mob — once loyalty to a class had replaced loyalty to the republic, the end was at hand. The cleavage between good and bad citizenship runs at right angles to the cleavage between class and class. Paragraph 31 adds the temperament required: intensity of conviction combined with broad tolerance of difference of conviction.

Paragraphs 32 and 33 name the man who exploits that fault line: the one who solicits support on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens, promising profit at their expense, by class hatred, class interest, or religious prejudice. Roosevelt closes with a story from his cattle-ranching years — a newly hired cowboy putting the boss's brand on a neighbour's maverick, fired on the spot with the line that a man who will steal for him will steal from him. A public man who offers to do something wrong in a citizen's interest will, when it becomes worth his while, do something wrong against it.

Nations, honour, and the parting word

The last movement raises the same standard a level. Roosevelt is no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism: a man must be a good patriot in order to be a good citizen of the world, and the man who claims to care nothing for his country because he cares so much for mankind usually proves an undesirable citizen wherever he stands. But patriotism is not licence. The true patriot is as jealous of the national honour as a gentleman is of his own, and sees that his nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong; three times in one paragraph Roosevelt denies that political morality differs from private morality.

He then concedes the difficulty honestly. International law has no sanction — no outside force compelling obedience — so each nation still judges for itself in vital matters. He expects that to change as the generations pass, calls it the duty of statesmen to build whatever can substitute for force in settling disputes, and insists in the same breath that civilized peoples must keep both the will and the power to resent wrongdoing. Preach righteousness, he says, but do not preach weakness. The closing paragraph is a tribute: two republics among the great powers, an old friendship, and a nation whose loss would be a loss to all the world.

What the speech asks of a reader in the end

Not courage in the abstract, and not the permission to fail that the extract is usually taken to grant. The address asks something narrower and harder: that a republic is judged by the everyday conduct of unremarkable people, which means the conduct of the reader; that education and cleverness buy no exemption from that and are the classic route to evading it; that criticism is owed and must be answered but is not a place to live; that efficiency without a moral sense is worse than incompetence; that reward should track service, and that hatred of the poor and hatred of the rich are one disease; and that enthusiasm for humanity in the abstract excuses nobody who fails the people nearest him.

Read whole, the arena paragraph is not a permission slip. It is the emotional peak of a demand made on people who had every advantage and were, Roosevelt thought, at risk of spending it on a pose.

Sources for this page

• African and European Addresses — Theodore Roosevelt, with an introduction by Lawrence F. Abbott, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910 · the printed text this map treats as canonical, and the source of every quotation above. Roosevelt's own foreword is where he explains that the Paris address was deliberately general, unlike the scholastic lectures at Oxford and Berlin. It does not describe the delivery or the audience.
• African and European Addresses, full HTML text — Project Gutenberg ebook #13930 · the same 1910 printing as a single readable page, including the Cairo, Oxford, Berlin, Christiania and Guildhall addresses from the same journey.
• The complete speech, with paragraph anchors — this map · every paragraph numbered 0–38 to match the citations on this page; the arena paragraph is anchored at #arena.
• Citizenship in a Republic — Wikisource · the version most online copies descend from. It differs from the 1910 print throughout — ten readings inside the arena paragraph alone, and elsewhere a whole clause dropped from paragraph 35 — so it is not used for quotation here; the differences are catalogued on the close reading.
• Theodore Roosevelt Center — Dickinson State University · digital library of Roosevelt's papers and correspondence; useful for what he was doing and writing around the 1910 tour, not for the text of the speech itself.
• Every source used in this map, verified — this map · including which transmission stories about the passage are documented and which are only attributed.