Why Theodore Roosevelt's Call to American Ideals Still Matters Today

Theodore Roosevelt, born 168 years ago this month, was our 26^th president – serving from 1901 through 1909. He was unique – outspoken, hardworking, conservationist, trust buster, cowboy, police commissioner, “Rough Rider” (1898 soldier, later Medal of Honor winner), assistant secretary of the Navy, governor of New York, Nobel Peace Prize winner (ending Russo-Japanese war). He wrote dozens of books, 150,000 letters, and loved people.

Theodore Roosevelt was also an idealist, in a time of high cynicism. Idealists, especially in times of cynicism and uncaring political leadership, must be optimists. He was that too. Among his many articles was one written in 1895 entitled simply “American Ideals.”

That punchy essay – like his “Strenuous Life” and “Man in the Arena” speeches – is worth a visit today. It is refreshing, as we watch everything from socialism to cynicism rise. Wrote Theodore Roosevelt, our leaders’ “deeds and words” have a “material effect,” but also “indefinable moral influence” on our “national character.” Of course, the same happens at the state level.

Citing Washington, Lincoln, and others, Theodore Roosevelt noted we “inherit … all that is best and highest in their characters and in their lives” just by remembering them. Referring to Lincoln, he makes a point too soon lost – We get the power of his example with his deeds.

“We inherit from Lincoln and from the might of Lincoln’s generation not merely the freedom of those who once were slaves; for we inherit also the fact of the freeing of them; he inherit the glory and the honor and the wonder of the deed that was done, no less than the actual results of the deed when done.”

On the other hand: “We rightfully value success, but sometimes we overvalue it, for we tend to forget that success may be obtained by means which should … make it abhorred and despised by every honorable man.” In short, ideals matter in all walks and times of life.

Expanding on that theme: “it is unhappily true that we inherit the evil as well as the good done by those who have gone before us, and in the one case as in the other, the influence extends far beyond the mere material effects.”

His push is simple: Keep your ideals high and then apply them, get involved, work to make them real, and understand that, in doing so, you affect others’ willingness to do so.

Wrote Theodore Roosevelt: “The man who is content to let politics go from bad to worse, jesting at the corruption of politicians, the man who is content to see the maladministration of justice without an immediate and resolute effort to reform it, is shirking his duty and is preparing the way for infinite woe in the future.”  We cannot be those people, was his message.

He concludes his appeal to idealism – and its application – this way: “The men who have profoundly influenced growth of our national character have been, in most cases, … those whose influence was for the best … antagonistic to the worst tendency of the age.”

To get there, we must recognize the perils of our age, turn to them, and act to restore faith in actions drawing on ideals, since the biggest influence on us is deeds inspired by ideals.

Theodore Roosevelt could be pithy. The “most” good is “done by the men who have spoken to us through deeds and not words … whose words have gathered their especial charm and significance because they came from men who did speak in deeds.”

Put differently: “A nation’s greatness lies in its possibility of achievement in the present, and nothing helps it more than the consciousness of achievement in the past.”