Part 8

In closing, I want to call your attention to something that is especially my business for the time being, and that is measurably your business all the time, or else you are unfit to be citizens of this Republic. In the seventh hymn which we sung, in the last line, you all joined in singing “God save the State!” Do you intend merely to sing that, or to try to do it? If you intend merely to sing it, your part in doing it will be but small. The State will be saved, if the Lord puts it into the heart of the average man so to shape his life that the State shall be worth saving, and only on those terms. We need civic righteousness. The best constitution that the wit of man has ever devised, the best institutions that the ablest statesmen in the world have ever reduced to practice by law or by custom, all these shall be of no avail if they are not vivified by the spirit which makes a State great by making its citizens honest, just, and brave. I do not ask you as practical believers in applied Christianity to take part one way or the other in matters that are merely partisan. There are plenty of questions about which honest men can and do differ very greatly and very intensely, but as to which the triumph of either side may be compatible with the welfare of the State—a lesser degree of welfare or a greater degree of welfare—but compatible with the welfare of the State. But there are certain great principles, such as those which Cromwell would have called “fundamentals,” concerning which no man has a right to have more than one opinion. Such a question is honesty. If you have not honesty in the average private citizen, in the average public servant, then all else goes for nothing. The abler a man is, the more dexterous, the shrewder, the bolder, why the more dangerous he is if he has not the root of right living and right thinking in him—and that in private life, and even more in public life. Exactly as in time of war, although you need in each fighting man far more than courage, yet all else counts for nothing if there is not that courage upon which to base it, so in our civil life, although we need that the average man in private life, that the average public servant, shall have far more than honesty, yet all other qualities go for nothing or for worse than nothing unless honesty underlies them—honesty in public life and honesty in private life; not only the honesty that keeps its skirts technically clear, but the honesty that is such according to the spirit as well as the letter of the law; the honesty that is aggressive, the honesty that not merely deplores corruption—it is easy enough to deplore corruption—but that wars against it and tramples it under foot. I ask for that type of honesty, I ask for militant honesty, for the honesty of the kind that makes those who have it discontented with themselves as long as they have failed to do everything that in them lies to stamp out dishonesty wherever it can be found, in high place or in low. And let us not flatter ourselves, we who live in countries where the people rule that it is ultimately possible for the people to cast upon any but themselves the responsibilities for the shape the government and the social and political life of the community assumes. I ask then that our people feel quickened within them burning indignation against wrong in every shape, and condemnation of that wrong, whether found in private or in public life. We have a right to demand courage of every man who wears the uniform; it is not so much a credit to him to have it as it is shame unutterable to him if he lacks it. So when we demand honesty, we demand it not as entitling the possessor to praise, but as warranting the heartiest condemnation possible if he lacks it. Surely in every movement for the betterment of our life, our life social in the truest and deepest sense, our life political, we have a special right to ask not merely support but leadership from those of the Church. We ask that you here to whom much has been given will remember that from you rightly much will be expected in return. For all of us here the lines have been cast in pleasant places. Each of us has been given one talent, or five, or ten talents, and each of us is in honor bound to use that talent or those talents aright, and to show at the end that he is entitled to the praise of having done well as a faithful servant.

I greet you this afternoon, and am glad to see you here, and I trust and believe that after this service every one of us will go home feeling that he or she has been warranted in coming here by the way in which he or she, after going home, takes up with fresh heart, with fresh courage, and with fresh and higher purpose the burden of life as that burden has been given to him or to her to carry.

AT THE CENTENNIAL EXERCISES IN THE N. Y. AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., NOV. 16, 1903

_Mr. Justice_:

Let me first express the appreciation that all of us feel to Professor McMaster for his exceedingly interesting address; and the address showed why he can justly claim to be the historian of the people of the United States, for what he has told us was what the people did, not merely what the outward forms and observances were, but what the life of the people was a century ago. And, Mr. Justice, I think that the recital has left in the minds of all of us the feeling that while we revere our ancestors, we are not wholly discontented that we live in the present day.

To each generation comes its allotted task; and no generation is to be excused for failure to perform that task. No generation can claim as an excuse for such failure the fact that it is not guilty of the sins of the preceding generation. It was a surprise to me, I suppose it was a surprise to many of us, to realize that a hundred years ago, in the days of the fathers, the lot of the poor debtor was so hard. It seems incredible to us now that there should have been such callousness to the undeserved human suffering then. I hope sincerely that a century hence it will seem equally incredible to the American of that generation that there should be corruption and venality in public life. We can divide, and must divide, on party lines as regards certain questions; as regards the deepest, as regards the vital questions, we can not afford to divide, and I have the right to challenge the best effort of every American worthy of the name to putting down by every means in his power corruption in private life, and above all corruption in public life. And, remember, you, the people of this government by the people, that while the public servant, the legislator, the executive officer, the judge, are not to be excused if they fall short of their duty, yet that their doing their duty can not avail unless you do yours. In the last resort we have to depend upon the jury drawn from the people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life; and unless that jury does its duty, unless it is backed by the public sentiment of the people, all the work of legislator, of executive officer, of judicial officer, are for naught.

Mr. Justice, a man would be a poor citizen of this country if he could sit in Abraham Lincoln’s pew and not feel the solemn sense of the associations borne in upon him; and I wish to thank the people of this church for that reverence for the historic past, for the sense of historic continuity, which has made them keep this pew unchanged. I hope it will remain unchanged in this church as long as our country endures. We have not too many monuments of the past; let us keep every little bit of association with that which is highest and best of the past as a reminder to us, equally of what we owe to those who have gone before and of how we should show our appreciation. This evening I sit in this pew of Abraham Lincoln’s, together with Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, who, for my good fortune, now serves as Secretary of State in my Cabinet.

If ever there lived a President who during his term of service needed all of the consolation and of the strength that he could draw from the unseen powers above him, it was Abraham Lincoln, who worked and suffered for the people, and when he had lived for them to good end gave his life at the end. If ever there was a man who practically applied what was taught in our churches, it was Abraham Lincoln. The other day I was rereading—on the suggestion of Mr. Hay—a little speech not often quoted of his, yet which seems to me one of the most remarkable that he ever made; delivered right after his re-election, I think, to a body of serenaders who had come, if my memory is correct, from Maryland, and called for an address from him from the White House. It is extraordinary to read that speech, and to realize that the man who made it had just come successfully through a great political contest in which he felt that so much was at stake for the Nation that he had no time to think whether or not anything was at stake for himself. The speech is devoid of the least shade of bitterness. There is not a word of unseemly triumph over those who have been defeated. There is not a word of glorification of himself, or in any improper sense of his party. There is an earnest appeal, now that the election is over, now that the civic strife has been completed, for all decent men who love the country to join together in service to the country; and in the speech he uses a thoroughly Lincoln-like phrase when he says “I have not willingly planted a thorn in the breast of any man,” thus trying to make clear that he has nothing to say against any opponent, no bitterness toward any opponent; that all he wishes is that those who opposed him should join with those who favored him in working toward a common end. In reading his works and addresses, one is struck by the fact that as he went higher and higher all personal bitterness seemed to die out of him. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates one can still catch now and then a note of personal antagonism; the man was in the arena, and as the blows were given and taken you can see that now and then he had a feeling against his antagonist. When he became President and faced the crisis that he had to face, from that time on I do not think that you can find an expression, a speech, a word of Lincoln’s, written or spoken, in which bitterness is shown to any man. His devotion to the cause was so great that he neither could nor would have feeling against any individual.

In closing, Mr. Justice, in thanking you of this church, the church so closely kindred to my own Dutch Reformed Church, in thanking you for asking me here, let me say how peculiarly glad I am that in the chair sits one man, a Justice of the Supreme Court, and that I could be escorted here by another man, who has just severed his connection with one of the highest places in the United States Army, both of whom—you, Justice Harlan, you, General Breckinridge—had enjoyed the wonderful privilege of proving by their deeds the faith that was in them in the days that tried men’s souls; both of whom did their part in holding up the hands of mighty Lincoln, and both of whom were born in the State of Lincoln’s birth.

REMARKS TO THE DELEGATES OF THE GERMAN SOCIETIES RECEIVED AT THE WHITE HOUSE, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1903

_Mr. Voelckner, and Gentlemen_:

It gives me peculiar pleasure to greet you to-day; and it is a matter of real regret to me that I can not attend formally your celebration.

You are quite right, Mr. Chairman, when you speak of the stand that the German element in our citizenship has always taken in all crises of our national life. In the first place, from the beginning of our colonial history to this day, the German strain has been constantly increasing in importance among the many strains that go to make up our composite national character. I do not have to repeat to you the story of the early German immigration to this country—the German immigration that began in a mass toward the end of the seventeenth century, but before that time had been represented among the very first settlers. Allow me to give you one bit of ancestral experience of mine. The first head of the New York City Government who was of German birth was Leisler, about the year 1680. He was the representative of the popular faction in the New York colony of that day, and among the Leislerian aldermen was a forbear of mine named Roosevelt. You are entirely familiar, of course, with the German immigration that went to the formation of Pennsylvania from the beginning. That element was equally strong in the Mohawk Valley in New York; it was equally strong in Middle and Western Maryland. For instance, in the Revolutionary War, one of the distinguished figures contributed by New York to the cause of independence was that of the German Herkimer, whose fight in the Mohawk Valley represented one of the turning points in the struggle for independence; and one of the New York counties is now named after him. The other day I went out to the battlefield of Antietam, here in Maryland. There the Memorial Church is the German Lutheran Church, which was founded in 1768, the settlement in the neighborhood of Antietam being originally exclusively a German settlement. There is a list of its pastors, and curiously enough a series of memorial windows of men with German names—men who belonged to the Maryland regiment recruited largely from that region for the Civil War, which Maryland regiment was mainly composed of men of German extraction. In the Civil War it would be difficult to paint in too strong colors what I may wellnigh call the all-importance of the attitude of the American citizens of German birth and extraction toward the cause of Union and Liberty, especially in what were then known as the border States. It would have been out of the question to have kept Missouri loyal had it not been for the German element therein. It was the German portion of the city of St. Louis which formed the core of the Union cause in Missouri. And but little less important was the part played by the Germans in Maryland, and also in Louisville and other portions of Kentucky.

Each body of immigrants, each element that has thus been added to our national strain, has contributed something of value to the national character; and to no element do we owe more than we owe to that element represented by those whom I have the honor this day of addressing.

WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, _October 18, 1902_

MY DEAR MRS. VAN VORST:

I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated your article, “The Woman who Toils.” But to me there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country—that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial.

An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be “independent,” that is, to live one’s life purely according to one’s own desires, are in no sense substitutes for the fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong racial qualities without which there can be no strong races—the qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base, and selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be, provided the end to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry. I do not know whether I most pity or despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally means cost and effort. If a man or woman, through no fault of his or hers, goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys which spring only from home life, from the having and bringing up of many healthy children, I feel for them deep and respectful sympathy; the sympathy one extends to the gallant fellow killed at the beginning of a campaign, or the man who toils hard and is brought to ruin by the fault of others. But the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.

Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no one quality will save a nation. But there are certain great qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life can atone, and which show decadence and corruption in the nation, just as much if they are produced by selfishness and coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively poor people as if they are produced by vicious or frivolous luxury in the rich. If the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many different ways, with all their might and strength, and ready and able to fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future.

There is no physical trouble among us Americans. The trouble with the situation you set forth is one of character, and therefore we can conquer it if we only will.

Very sincerely yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT

MRS. BESSIE VAN VORST, Philadelphia, Pa.

_Personal._ WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, _November 26, 1902_

MY DEAR SIR:

I am in receipt of your letter of November 10 and of one from Mr. —— under date of November 11, in reference to the appointment of Dr. Crum as collector of the Port of Charleston.

In your letter you make certain specific charges against Dr. Crum, tending to show his unfitness in several respects for the office sought. These charges are entitled to the utmost consideration from me and I shall go over them carefully before taking any action. After making these charges you add, as a further reason for opposition to him, that he is a colored man, and after reciting the misdeeds that followed carpet-bag rule and negro domination in South Carolina, you say that “we have sworn never again to submit to the rule of the African, and such an appointment as that of Dr. Crum to any such office forces us to protest unanimously against this insult to the white blood”; and you add that you understood me to say that I would never force a negro on such a community as yours. Mr. —— puts the objection of color first, saying: “First, he is a colored man, and that of itself ought to bar him from the office.” In view of these last statements, I think I ought to make clear to you why I am concerned and pained by your making them and what my attitude is as regards all such appointments. How any one could have gained the idea that I had said I would not appoint reputable and upright colored men to office, when objection was made to them solely on account of their color, I confess I am wholly unable to understand. At the time of my visit to Charleston last spring, I had made, and since that time I have made, a number of such appointments from several States in which there is a considerable colored population. For example, I made one such appointment in Mississippi, and another in Alabama, shortly before my visit to Charleston. I had at that time appointed two colored men as judicial magistrates in the District of Columbia. I have recently announced another such appointment for New Orleans, and have just made one from Pennsylvania. The great majority of my appointments in every State have been of white men. North and South alike it has been my sedulous endeavor to appoint only men of high character and good capacity, whether white or black. But it has been my consistent policy in every State where their numbers warranted it to recognize colored men of good repute and standing in making appointments to office. These appointments of colored men have in no State made more than a small proportion of the total number of appointments. I am unable to see how I can legitimately be asked to make an exception for South Carolina. In South Carolina, to the four most important positions in the State I have appointed three men and continued in office a fourth, all of them white men—three of them originally Gold Democrats—two of them, as I am informed, the sons of Confederate soldiers. I have been informed by the citizens of Charleston whom I have met that these four men represent a high grade of public service.

I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I legitimately can I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong. If, as you hold, the great bulk of the colored people are not yet fit in point of character and influence to hold such positions, it seems to me that it is worth while putting a premium upon the effort among them to achieve the character and standing which will fit them.