For this month’s Voter’s Choice post, we are dee-lighted to consider Theodore Roosevelt and marginalia. In case you didn’t know, marginalia is the overarching term used to describe notes in the margins of books and other published materials.

A Brief Discussion of Marginalia—Sublime or Not?

Since Roosevelt was such an avid reader, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that Roosevelt and British author and statesman George Otto Trevelyan exchanged several letters about marginalia.

In 1876, Trevelyan had written a book about the life of his maternal uncle, Lord Macaulay, entitled The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. Trevelyan found Macaulay’s marginal notes intriguing and told Roosevelt how eager he was to show him Macaulay’s marginal notes in a December 1904 letter.

“I should dearly love . . . to show you Macaulay’s books with their marginal notes. Personally, I think these notes, better than his writings, his speeches, his conversation, or his letters. Goodness, how they light the books up! I seem to be reading aloud with him.”

Roosevelt felt less passionate about marginalia as compared to Trevelyan. While we don’t know how he responded to Trevelyan’s 1904 letter, we do know he mentioned marginal notes in a 1908 letter to Trevelyan discussing his delight upon reading Trevelyan’s new edition of The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay.

Roosevelt had but one complaint of the book: “[W]hy do you quote Rosebery’s comment on Macaulay’s marginal notes to the effect that he was a ‘sublime guide to sublime things?’” In Roosevelt’s mind, the word “sublime” should be reserved for “certain things in nature” and “a very few of the loftiest feelings, emotions and actions of mankind.”

As Roosevelt concluded, “There is only an occasional cathedral, an occasional great poem, to which the word could rightly be applied; and not to marginal notes by anybody about anything.”

In other words, while marginalia seemed to light up books for Trevelyan and he considered them better than Macaulay’s writings, speeches, conversation, and letters, Roosevelt was less laudatory about marginal notes.

Even so, as Roosevelt wrote in a 1907 letter to Trevelyan, he appreciated the latter sending him a copy of Marginal Notes by Lord Macaulay, selected and published by Trevelyan. As Roosevelt noted, “It is the kind of book that I rejoice in, especially when I have many things to worry me, and do not feel like reading books that are too long or too serious unless they are also very interesting!”

This suggests that even if marginalia wasn’t sublime for Roosevelt, at least Macaulay’s marginalia was worth reading even while he was occupied with the presidency!

Roosevelt’s Most Ubiquitous Marginalia in the Digital Library

Much of Roosevelt’s marginalia in the digital library appears on drafts of speeches. We’ve always found these interesting because they allow the reader to gain insights into Roosevelt’s thought process and editing process. We’ve included a small sampling below to illustrate this point.

This is page nine of this 1906 speech, more popularly known as “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” due to Roosevelt’s references to a character in John Bunyan’s 1678 work, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Roosevelt is credited with coining the term “muckraker” to describe investigative journalists that are overly sensationalist and do not offer solutions.

This is the speech which President Roosevelt delivered to the Great White Fleet upon its return from circumnavigating the globe and contains his handwritten edits. The item is incomplete, however, as it is missing pages.

In this 1902 speech, Roosevelt talks about the importance of sincere goodwill in society, specifically referencing the book A Simple Life by Charles Wagner as an inspiration.

A Newspaper-Worthy Marginal Note

While Roosevelt’s marginal notes weren’t often of any great significance, there was one exception. It was some marginalia he had written during his presidency that wasn’t discovered until Roosevelt left office.

In fact, the marginalia was so noteworthy that it was national news and was included in newspapers like the Brooklyn Eagle under the headline of “A President’s Marginal Note” in late May and early June 1912 right as Roosevelt was challenging William Howard Taft for the Republican nomination.

New York Congressman John Joseph Fitzgerald, a Democrat, found an otherwise non-descript memorandum “discussing the location of a building to be used for official purposes by the President of the United States” in his papers around the time Roosevelt was running for office in 1912.

The memorandum pertained to the temporary executive offices, which Roosevelt had sent on behalf of the architect to the House Appropriations Committee years before during the White House Renovation in 1902. The sentence of interest and nearby marginal note read: “Provision for temporary quarters for executive offices is comparatively a simple matter.”

The word “temporary” was underlined in pencil, and a short note—also in pencil—was in the left margin: “To be permanent during my lifetime. T.R.” According to Fitzgerald, this note was in Roosevelt’s handwriting.

You can test your knowledge of Roosevelt’s handwriting by looking at the facsimile from the 1912 Congressional Record below to see if you agree with Fitzgerald.

In his ten-minute May 29, 1912 speech to Congress, Fitzgerald cast doubt on Roosevelt’s current presidential campaign, hinting that perhaps the latter had had designs on the presidency for many years.

Unsurprisingly, Roosevelt did not take too kindly to this implication, and he issued a scathing reply: “Mr. Fitzgerald’s accusation, or the implied accusation, is too preposterous to need any serious discussion. Just as machinery can be expressed in terms of horsepower, so some intellects can be expressed in terms of guinea pig power. That kind of accusation can only be heeded by men with brains of about three-guinea pig power.” Talk about an insult!

As far as whether or not the marginal note is genuine, we believe it is since the memorandum in question (available in the digital library and included below) does indeed seem to have a marginal note in Roosevelt’s handwriting.

However, what exactly Roosevelt meant by “permanent” during his lifetime is less clear. Our best guess is that he intended for the “temporary” quarters for the executive offices to be permanent during his presidency, and future presidents could decide the location of a permanent building for them.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this peek behind the curtain into Roosevelt’s marginalia to get a feel for what he was like outside of the arena and the public eye. Of course, we will never know Roosevelt completely, but it’s discoveries like these that help shed new light on our twenty-sixth president.

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Two days from now is National Beach Day, and we felt we would be remiss if we didn’t devote a post to Theodore Roosevelt and beaches since they were an important part of his life.

The inspiration for this post came from a delightful letter written on July 20, 1907 to John Lewis Childs while Roosevelt was at Sagamore Hill, the summer White House. In it, Roosevelt told him about seeing a yellow-throated or Dominican warbler before including a story we especially enjoyed, which we will include in its entirety below.

“You may also be interested, bearing in mind what you told me about the nest of the spotted sandpiper, in knowing that the other day while riding along a sandy road far from any pond or water, my horse almost stepped on a little spotted sandpiper, evidently very recently hatched.”

Now, as Roosevelt makes clear, he wasn’t riding on a beach, but we feel that the spotted sandpiper is such an iconic “beach bird” that it was an anecdote worth including! So, without further ado, we’ll delve into the beaches Roosevelt visited.

Roosevelt Beach

Today the beach behind Sagamore Hill, the beach Roosevelt visited regularly, is called Roosevelt Beach. And sandpipers were hardly the only birds—or animals—Roosevelt saw near the beach.

Rather Roosevelt saw all kinds of wildlife, which he often mentioned in letters to family and friends, during family picnics and camping trips. (A key component of a Roosevelt beach day often included one or the other.)

Since we covered Roosevelt picnics in a previous post, we decided to include a story about camping. In an August 6, 1903 letter to his sister-in-law Emily Carow, Roosevelt described the camping trip he took the previous week with Kermit, Archie, and their cousins, noting he fried beefsteak and potatoes in bacon fat, which they enjoyed.

As interesting as camp food is, the more notable part of that story is that they heard a fox barking in the distance that evening and briefly discussed the likelihood of seeing it in the morning. And they actually did, as Roosevelt recalled in a letter to his friend, John Burroughs on July 19, 1907. That year, during a similar camping trip, Roosevelt and the crew even saw two young foxes, which he estimated to be “this year’s cubs,” which kept coming up to the fire for scraps. Roosevelt “very much wish[ed]” Burroughs could have seen this with him.

Although Roosevelt spent more time on the beach in the summer, it wasn’t the only time he was on the beach. As he mentioned in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, Roosevelt went to the beach near Sagamore Hill where he saw—and shot—an Ipswich sparrow on the “ice-rimmed beach, where the long coarse grass waved in front of a growth of blueberries, beach-plums, and stunted pines.”

The beach close to Sagamore Hill even makes an appearance in Roosevelt’s Autobiography when he describes what the children were like when he and Edith returned from rowing: “… we would often see the children waiting for us, running like sand-spiders along the beach.”

Other Beaches

Although today’s Roosevelt Beach was the one where Roosevelt spent the most amount of time, it wasn’t the only beach Roosevelt mentioned in his writings.

In fact, beaches appeared quite frequently in his boyhood diaries, which he often described as “great fun.” And the beaches were across Europe, including Liverpool, England; Nice, France; and San Remo, Italy.

Years later, Roosevelt visited the beaches of Caribbean when he and Edith went to Trinidad in March 1916 where he wrote his sister Corinne about “the trade wind tossing the fronds of the palms on the white beaches.”

But many of the beaches Roosevelt wrote about were in the United States and were connected to birds in some way. For example, when Roosevelt was in Del Monte, California in 1903, he wrote to his son Kermit, “To-day, by the way, as I rode along the beach I saw seals, cormorants, gulls and ducks, all astonishingly tame.”

Perhaps most famously Roosevelt traveled to the Breton and Chandeleur Islands off the coast of Louisiana in 1915 to visit what is today known as the Breton Island Wildlife Refuge, which Roosevelt established in 1904.

As the name “island” implies, Roosevelt spent a lot of time at the beach watching birds during this trip. Some of the birds he came across included pelicans, herons, and gulls nesting in the marshes and along the sandbars. The trip was even memorialized in a 15-minute silent film entitled, “Roosevelt: Friend of the Birds.”

Roosevelt described his experience on the islands and their beaches in a Scribner’s Magazine article entitled, “The Bird Refuges of Louisiana,” and concluded the article emphasizing the importance of bird conservation and tied it in part to the beach.

“The extermination of the passenger pigeon meant that mankind was just so much poorer; exactly as in the case of the destruction of the cathedral at Rheims. And to lose the chance to see frigate birds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach—why the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.”

Other “Beach-y” Items

Obviously, there’s a lot more we could say about Roosevelt and the beach, but we’ll conclude this Friday Fun post with some of our favorite “beach-y” items in the digital library.

We’d be scared if we saw this sea-serpent coming out of the water!

Building houses on the sand never works, even if it seems like a good idea.

Ever had a rough day at the beach? Us too, TR III!

Roosevelt’s oldest grandchild Grace seems to be having a better time at the beach than TR III.

Finally, perhaps the most fascinating item related to Roosevelt and beaches is a 1906 letter to his sister Anna “Bamie” where he explains that in order to build a bathhouse, boathouse, and dock, he had to get the right of way from his cousin Emlen Roosevelt. (See the map below to get a better understanding of the property lines around Sagamore Hill.)

In closing, we wish you all a happy beach day! And even if you’re far from a beach, we hope you have a relaxing day out enjoying nature just like Roosevelt himself would have—beach or not!

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As you likely know, Theodore Roosevelt adored Sagamore Hill, the family home, and the people who resided in it more than anything else in the world. He believed what really counted was “a full and happy home life.”

But he also was a technological progressive, becoming the first president to ride in an automobile as part of official duties, the first to ride in a submarine, and the first to ride in an airplane (after he left office). Roosevelt actually wasn’t the first person in his family to ride in an airplane, as his daughter Ethel followed by her brother Kermit did before their father!

Roosevelt often reflected on the need to balance progress and simplicity in his speeches and writings, including in a speech delivered in Providence, Rhode Island on August 23, 1902—the source of today’s #WednesdayWisdom.

“Life is not so simple as it was; and surely, both for the individual and the community, the simple life is normally the healthy life.”

We like this quotation for a number of reasons, most notably because it demonstrates Roosevelt’s balanced approach to progress. It can bring great good, but it also has some downsides. Sometimes what is simpler is healthier, but Roosevelt also believed it was possible to approach progress in a healthy way.

Just the day before Roosevelt delivered this speech, he rode in an automobile for the first time as part of official duties in Hartford, Connecticut. We think it’s very likely that Roosevelt thought about his own personal experiences in the changing world around him when he delivered this speech.

Roosevelt believed often the best way to move forward was through a slow and steady march—doing something, to use his words. He didn’t believe in perfection but rather consistency and a desire for something to be done.

“No man can promise a perfect solution, at least in the immediate future. But something has already been done, and much more can be done if our people temperately and determinedly will that it shall be done.”

Another interesting note about this speech is that after Roosevelt spoke in Providence, Rhode Island, he headed down to Newport, Rhode Island, to attend the christening of Theodore Ward Chanler, the infant son of one of his Rough Riders, Winthrop Chanler, on Sunday, August 24.

Roosevelt then spent Monday, August 25 with his close friends, Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Anna Cabot Lodge, at their home in Nahant, Massachusetts before returning to the White House.

Read the entire speech titled “The Opportunities and Burdens of Prosperity” where Roosevelt both praises progress in the United States as well as identifies resulting problems and how they might be addressed.

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Given that tomorrow is the 110th anniversary of the creation of the National Park Service, we thought it was perfect time to examine Theodore Roosevelt and public lands and hopefully address some common misconceptions.

But before we discuss Roosevelt’s role as it relates to public lands, we will start with a broad overview and history of the national parks to provide some additional background information.

The National Parks—As a Concept

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing Yellowstone National Park as the first American national park—and indeed the first national park in the world.

Called a “public park” in the bill itself, Yellowstone had only just recently been explored by White Americans, beginning first with fur traders and trappers in the early nineteenth century and followed by a plethora of amateur expeditions in the 1860s when the gold rush came to Montana.

In the spring of 1871, geologist and surveyor Ferdinand Hayden convinced Congress to fund a scientific expedition to the Yellowstone region. He hired scientists of all types—including an ornithologist, a meteorologist, and a mineralogist—and support staff as well as artists, including a photographer, William Henry Jackson, and a painter, Thomas Moran.

After the expedition when the group returned to Washington, DC, Hayden put together a Yellowstone exhibit in the Washington Rotunda to encourage Congress to protect the region.

Spurred by railroad owners like Jay Gould who hoped to reap a good profit from tourism to Yellowstone, Hayden lobbied Congress to create the act that became the Yellowstone Park Protection Act. It was introduced in Congress in December 1871, debated in January and February 1872, and signed into law on March 1, 1872.

Although Yellowstone was the first national park, it wasn’t the first federally protected area. Congress set aside Hot Springs Reservation in Arkansas to protect the natural thermal springs in 1832, and President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant, handing the area over to the state of California for preservation, in 1864. Both are national parks today.

The Establishment of NPS

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, Congress continued to create more national parks in addition to Yellowstone. Before the National Park Service was established by the Organic Act (HR 15522) as part of the Department of Interior on August 25, 1916, a total of fifteen national parks had been established.

But by 1916, the nation’s second national park—Mackinac National Park—had already been abolished and given to Michigan, so there were only fourteen national parks in total. And of course, that didn’t include the national monuments that Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson had established—thirty-three prior to the Organic Act signed by Wilson on August 25.

As the amount of land preserved for the public grew, reformers felt that there should be clear standards and streamlining in the federal government to manage public lands and pushed for the creation of the National Park Service (NPS).

When the NPS was established on August 25, the fourteen national parks and twenty-one of the national monuments overseen by the Department of the Interior became part of the fledging NPS.

Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the department that controlled the land when the monument was established managed the monument, meaning that the Department of Agriculture (Forest Service) and the War Department also oversaw national monuments in addition to the Department of the Interior.

This meant that some national monuments still were administered outside of the NPS even after it was created. It wasn’t until 1933 during the “other” Roosevelt’s administration that the remaining fifty-six national monuments overseen by the Forest Service and War Department were transferred to the NPS.

Public Lands with a Roosevelt Connection

A number often cited regarding how much land Roosevelt conserved or protected is 230 million acres. It should be noted that this number includes temporary mineral reserves Roosevelt established while president.

See this note for an archival collection that Roosevelt had sixty-six million acres of coal lands withdrawn from sale, which later were allowed to be sold in 1910, or this 1909 article about Roosevelt noting he saved sixty-seven million acres of coal lands.

National forests are Roosevelt’s greatest conservation legacy, which we plan to cover in a future Substack post, but the names of the national parks and national monuments he helped to establish are more well-known.

Roosevelt signed legislation for five different national parks during his administration:

• Crater Lake National Park (Oregon) – May 22, 1902

• Wind Cave National Park (South Dakota) – January 9, 1903

• Sullys Hill National Park (North Dakota) – April 27, 1904

• Mesa Verde National Park (Colorado) – June 29, 1906

• Platt National Park (Oklahoma) – June 29, 1906

Two of the five are no longer national parks: Sullys Hill National Park is now White Horse Hill National Game Preserve, and Platt National Park was combined with another area to create Chickasaw National Recreation Area.

Roosevelt also established eighteen national monuments during his administration. (Only Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have established more than Roosevelt.)

• Devils Tower (Wyoming)

• El Morro (New Mexico)

• Montezuma Castle (Arizona)

• Petrified Forest (Arizona)

• Chaco Canyon (New Mexico)

• Cinder Cone (California)

• Lassen Peak (California)

• Gila Cliff Dwellings (New Mexico)

• Tonto (Arizona)

• Muir Woods (California)

• Grand Canyon (Arizona)

• Pinnacles (California)

• Jewel Cave (South Dakota)

• Natural Bridges (Utah)

• Lewis and Clark Cavern (Montana)

• Tumacácori (Arizona)

• Wheeler (Colorado)

• Mount Olympus (Washington)

Of the national monuments Roosevelt designated, five became national parks (Grand Canyon, Olympic, Petrified Forest, Pinnacles, and Lassen Volcanic), two remain in the NPS (Chaco Culture and Tumacácori), and two were decommissioned and are now protected by other agencies. Lewis and Clark Cavern became Montana’s first state park, while Wheeler is protected within the Rio Grande National Forest.

Devils Tower (the first US national monument), El Morro, Montezuma Castle, Gila Cliff Dwellings, Tonto, Muir Woods, and Jewel Cave have kept their original designation status as national monuments.

But, as we all know, Roosevelt wasn’t merely a pencil pusher. He visited national parks as well, including Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon before it became a national park. He actually visited the latter three times—once in 1903 before he declared it a national monument and two other times in 1911 and 1913 after it was a national monument.

Since conservation is a major part of his legacy—particularly related to the national parks—we wanted to saw a few brief anecdotes about his time in those three places.

There’s a delightful letter in the digital library where Roosevelt writes to C. Hart Merriam in the midst of his two-week visit to Yellowstone in April 1903 where he talks at length about the elk in Yellowstone. (This wasn’t Roosevelt’s first time in Yellowstone; he visited in 1890 with his wife Edith and his sisters, Anna “Bye” and Corinne.)

During this 1903 trip, Roosevelt is more well-known for counting elk or tracking bighorn mountain sheep, but an anecdote he included in this letter to Merriam reveals his deep power of observation while taking note of animal activity.

When describing the elk he saw, Roosevelt wrote, “I saw a golden eagle attack a band driving them in their fright directly towards me. It separated a weak yearling from the herd and then hovered around his head – almost striking it at it but evidently unable quite to make up its mind to the attack; finally it left and flew away.”

The photograph above of Roosevelt and John Muir is certainly one of the most well-known pictures of Roosevelt. It comes from his trip to Yosemite in 1903. We feel that Roosevelt’s brief recounting of his trip to Yosemite in a letter to Muir on May 19, 1903 belongs right with it.

“I trust I need not tell you, my dear sir, how happy were the days in the Yosemite I owed to you, and how greatly I appreciate them. I shall never forget our three camps; the first in the solemn temple of the sequoias; the next in the snow storm among the silver firs near the brink of the cliff; and the third on the floor of the Yosemite, in the open valley fronting the stupendous rocky mass of El Capitan with the falls thundering in the distance on either hand.”

Finally, a post about Theodore Roosevelt and the national parks wouldn’t be complete without a reference to the Grand Canyon. When Roosevelt visited in 1903, he was in awe of the natural wonder and famously said, “Leave it as it is.”

As much as we love his public speech, we also enjoyed reading the way Roosevelt described the Grand Canyon in a May 10, 1903 letter to his daughter Ethel, who was then eleven years old.

“It was very interesting going through New Mexico and seeing the strange old civilization at the desert, and next day the Grand Canyon of Arizona, wonderful and beautiful beyond description. I could have sat and looked at it for days.”

For a man who didn’t like to sit and be still for long, that is a true compliment indeed!

We hope you’ve enjoyed this overview of Theodore Roosevelt and the national parks. Hopefully we’ve been able to clear up a few common misconceptions. Let us know in the comments below if there are questions you still have related to Roosevelt and the national parks. We are always willing to do a part two!

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Welcome to Maine! Phil Morse here from the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport. I released the Theodore Roosevelt Maine Heritage Trail project during the summer of 2022, when the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library began.

Personally, I’m part of a family with genealogical connections to Maine going back to 1637. And surprisingly, that family connection is directly with Winfield Scott Libbey, who worked to have the historic electric interurban, Narcissus, built in 1912.

Theodore Roosevelt was a passenger aboard the most elegant ride, Narcissus, here in Maine, on August 18, 1914. The Narcissus is on the National Register of Historic Places and is currently being restored at the Seashore Trolley Museum.

I have been a member of the Trolley Museum since 1991. I am a former Trustee, President/CEO, Executive Director, Director of Community Relations, and more. As a volunteer, I am the Board-appointed sponsor for the Narcissus Project.

I felt that Theodore Roosevelt, having been a passenger aboard the Narcissus, would become a very important talking point in developing support for the project

My interest in Theodore Roosevelt began in 2010. I began researching TR’s connections in Maine as I sought information on his visit when he was a passenger aboard the Narcissus. As my research progressed, I became fascinated with TR and his profound attachment to Maine.

I read TR’s biography in 2010. He was in Maine in 1872. He was 13. A portion of the story is of him being bullied by a couple of young teenage boys while they were in a stagecoach. It was a life-changing event for young Roosevelt in Maine.

He pledged to himself to work diligently to become physically fit so he could defend himself in the future. The steps he took to do just that are well-documented. This stagecoach ride in Maine in 1872 clearly had a direct impact on the boy who would become the man that we now know.

To me, what cemented TR’s attachment to Maine and its people was his next three trips to Island Falls, Maine (August 1878, February 1879, August 1879), spending weeks tramping, canoeing, snowshoeing, riding in sleighs and buckboards, through the woods, lakes, rivers, and up the mountains of Maine with William Sewall and Wilmot Dow.

Those three trips to Maine followed the earlier visit (1872), followed by several more visits over the years, until his final trip in August of 1918, when he, his wife, and other family members stayed in a cottage in Dark Harbor, on Islesboro, Maine, to grieve the loss of the youngest of TR’s sons, Quentin.

[TRC staff note: you can read more about Roosevelt’s visit to Dark Harbor in one of our previous Substack posts if you missed it and watch a presentation about TR camping and tramping in the wilderness of Maine as well as New York and North Dakota here.]

The thoughts about connecting various communities in Maine with TR and the Narcissus developed as I personally visited and conducted research in some of those communities that they had visited.

The Narcissus1912 Blog was created in April 2015. A professional friend, Patricia “Tricia” Erikson, PhD, suggested I create a blog to help expand public awareness of the project. Tricia expressed that the blog’s future public awareness would potentially benefit the Narcissus Project and the Trolley Museum. Tricia was correct. Last month (June 2026), there were 84,000 page views, the second most in a month so far in 2026. March 2026 had 110,000 page views.

In May of 2016, I sent an email to Sharon Kilzer, Project Manager at the Theodore Roosevelt Center (TRC) at Dickinson State University. I was seeking feedback on some TR-related research. On the TRC website, there was a TR Trail map of North Dakota. You tap on any of the highlighted signs/symbols; a small window opens with a photo and description of TR’s activities at that location. On that map page, the TRC invited other states with TR connections to reach out to the TRC to work together to add that state’s TR trail to the map on the TRC’s website. I began thinking of a TR map for Maine.

The thought became more concrete when I attended my first Maine Woods Forever (MWF) Roundtable meeting at Unity College in Unity, Maine, in October 2015. Mimi McConnell, a Board member, shared print materials with me, including a map and guide for the Thoreau-Wabanaki Trail. The map included Thoreau’s travels in the Maine Woods during 1846, 1853, & 1857. As I examined the map, I became inspired to work towards developing a similar product for what has become the TR Maine Heritage Trail.

I also met another Board member, Bart DeWolf. Bart, having learned of my interest in TR, shared his desire to research the trails and camping areas that TR used to access Mount Katahdin in 1879. For three summers, Bart had been the overseer of a team collecting all the geographic data for the 87,500 acres for the Federal application for what became the Katahdin Woods & Water National Monument. TR’s time spent on the property in 1879 was crucial evidence included in the application that the Federal government approved.

I felt Theodore Roosevelt and the Narcissus should work together on connecting Maine communities. With TR as its motorman, they could be the catalyst instilling collaboration among stakeholders, which, in turn, could lead to positive outcomes, providing benefits to Maine communities and to their visitors.

Theodore Roosevelt is omnipresent in Maine. From Kittery to Presque Isle, TR has left his mark throughout Maine. If not TR himself, admirers have, on his behalf. Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most recognized Presidents of the United States. I think that, working together, we could do more to enhance the general population’s understanding of TR’s relationship with Maine by making his trips and travels in Maine better known. By presenting a statewide description and then articulating the individual communities he spent time in, or had some indirect relationship to, visitors will develop an innate interest. Many of the TR stories are very compelling, leading people wanting to visit communities for a look-see.

The point I’m trying to make at this time is that TR has left us a gift here in Maine. A gift that keeps on giving. His Maine legacy is here, reflected in his writings, news stories, books about his time spent here, the friends he made here, and what those friends have also left for us. Each Maine community and organization in that area touched by TR has a TR story to tell. We have an opportunity to uncover, collect, organize, review, research gaps and questions, refine an overall plan, and create something incredibly special with those stories that will attract people to these special Maine places.

If you’re interested in learning more about TR in Maine, visit the Narcissus 1912 blog here, which links out to seven posts that contain links to TR-related posts in the title.

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As we’ve mentioned in several previous Substack posts (here and here, for example), Theodore Roosevelt deeply valued working hard. He didn’t believe in overworking (he loved to play!), but he also didn’t believe in underworking.

As Roosevelt stated in a 1903 address in Ventura, California, “Get all the enjoyment you legitimately can out of life, but remember that the only sure way of getting in the end no enjoyment out of life, is to start in to make it the end of your existence.”

Roosevelt also famously talked about the life of “ignoble ease” in his 1899 “Strenuous Life” speech: “A mere life of ease is not in the end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.”

Rather, Roosevelt believed a good life had a nice mix of work and play. One of our favorite Roosevelt quotations on this topic comes from a May 29, 1903, speech in Idaho: “I believe in work and I believe in play. Play hard while you play; and when you work don’t play at all. That is good advice for children, and it is good advice for grown folks too.” He also made a similar comment in Nebraska in April 1903.

Given Roosevelt’s own reflections about work and play throughout his life, we were excited when we came across what we selected as today’s #WednesdayWisdom since it alludes to his conception of the right amount of work but with different language: “Too heavy a burden is a crushing and dreadful thing; but there can be no worse fate than that of the man who has no burden.”

This sentence, which comes from a brief 1903 letter to journalist Edward S. Martin, emphasizes the need to do something and have some sort of work. Roosevelt didn’t think work should be too heavy of a burden, but he believed too much work was better than doing nothing.

This reasoning was in fact why Roosevelt initially opposed the vice presidency. As he wrote in a February 1900 letter to Henry Cabot Lodge, “[I]n the Vice Presidency I could do nothing. I am a comparatively young man and I like to work. I do not like to be a figurehead.”

Roosevelt thought the world was better off when each person played an active role in their homes, in government, and in society.

As far as the rest of the letter, it’s an interesting—and quick—read. Roosevelt informed Martin he intended to “plagiarize” his work in an upcoming speech because he believed Martin “put the whole business admirably.”

So what did Martin write? We know because his original letter is in the digital library. After including a short clipping of his writing, Martin wrote, “The people who don’t work at some things worthwhile don’t develop & if they amount to anything at the start they degenerate.”

Everything was a potential source for Roosevelt in his speeches and writings. As we’ve said before, he was much like a stand-up comedian workshopping jokes. If he found a turn of phrase he liked (whether it was something he came up with or someone else did), he would use it again and again in different iterations. And it’s also fun to find a different variation of one of his tried-and-true beliefs.

Read the entire letter here in the digital library.

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If you’ve spent a good amount of time in the digital library, chances are that you’ve run into a letter with a caption and/or title “Letter from Secretary of Theodore Roosevelt” like the one below.

If you’re wondering, there are nearly 8,500 other letters in the digital library with the exact same title. In this post, we will highlight the people who served as Roosevelt’s secretary as well as briefly look at the variety of stenographers, clerks, and others who kept up with all of Roosevelt’s paperwork—much like we do today!

A brief note before we begin. As is the case for many of the posts we write, this post could have been much longer depending on how much material we decided to include. We made an intentional choice to highlight only Roosevelt’s secretaries from his governorship until his death to focus in on the people who supported Roosevelt during the most popular years of his life.

William J. Youngs (1898-1900)

William J. Youngs served as Roosevelt’s secretary when he was governor. In fact, he was Roosevelt’s first appointment as newly elected governor, according to an 1898 newspaper article, observing, “Mr. Youngs has long been a neighbor of Col. Roosevelt at Oyster Bay.”

Youngs, who was an attorney and a politician from New York and who had also served in the Assembly, gave up his position as district attorney with a salary of $5,000 a year (roughly $200,000 today) to become Roosevelt’s private secretary with a salary of $4,000 a year (roughly $160,000 today).

The earliest letter we have in the digital library signed by Youngs is dated January 23, 1899, and includes a postscript in Roosevelt’s handwriting that says, “How I wish I wasn’t a reformer, oh Senator!”

Even though Youngs was only Roosevelt’s secretary while the latter was governor, Roosevelt appreciated his service. The last letter in which Youngs signs his name with the title “secretary” seems to be dated January 1, 1901, the day after Roosevelt left office as governor.

After becoming president, Roosevelt appointed him District Attorney for the state of New York in December 1902, a position he held until 1915, and the two remained in contact with one another. Shortly after Youngs’s death in April 1916, his widow, May Benson Emory Youngs, wrote to Roosevelt, “Your friendship meant everything to Billy.”

George B. Cortelyou (1901-1903)

George B. Cortelyou initially served as President William McKinley’s secretary, and Roosevelt corresponded with him occasionally during the campaign. See, for example, this July 1900 letter from Roosevelt to Cortelyou informing the latter he couldn’t travel to Kentucky because he needed some rest in August.

Cortelyou also received correspondence from William Loeb, secretary to then Governor Roosevelt, who forwarded a letter to Cortelyou in late November 1900 after McKinley and Roosevelt had won the election.

When Roosevelt assumed office after McKinley’s death in 1901, the executive office included Cortelyou as secretary, two assistant secretaries (Benjamin F. Barnes and Octavius L. Pruden), two executive clerks (Rudolph Forster and William H. Crook), and eight clerks, according to the July 1901 Official Register.

Roosevelt kept Cortelyou on as secretary to the president. He began assisting Roosevelt with correspondence the day he became president on September 14, 1901, and you can see Cortelyou’s signature above the title “secretary to the president” on a September 23, 1901, letter.

Cortelyou worked as the principal secretary but had others in his office, including William Loeb (who later served as Roosevelt’s principal secretary during his presidency) and Benjamin F. Barnes, as Cortelyou noted in a January 26, 1901, letter to Police Chief Richard Sylvester. Cortelyou also assisted with Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt’s correspondence before Isabella “Belle” Hagner was hired as the first social secretary.

Cortelyou served as Roosevelt’s principal secretary for less than two years, becoming Secretary of Commerce and Labor on February 18, 1903, and William Loeb assumed the role of principal secretary. (See more below in the section on Loeb.)

Even after Loeb became principal secretary, almost all of McKinley’s staff remained on Roosevelt’s staff when the 1903 Official Register was issued, all except for Cortelyou, Pruden, and one clerk.

The earliest correspondence in the digital library from Cortelyou after he became Secretary of Commerce and Labor to Loeb is a letter dated April 23, 1903, in which Cortelyou recommends Rudolph Forster as “an ideal Assistant Secretary” since he has handled everything in the Executive Office “with becoming dignity and with tact and discretion.”

Cortelyou held his position in the Commerce and Labor department for just over year (2/18/1903-6/30/1904). He then became chair of the Republican National Committee (1904-1907), Postmaster General (3/6/1905-1/14/1907), and Secretary of the Treasury (3/4/1907-3/7/1909). As Secretary of the Treasury, Cortelyou helped keep the economy stable during the Panic of 1907.

Cortelyou and Roosevelt corresponded occasionally for the rest of Roosevelt’s life. In one of the last letters from Cortelyou to Roosevelt in the digital library, Cortelyou sends Roosevelt a copy of a book he thought Roosevelt would like, remarking, “I used to know pretty well what you liked in the way of books.”

William Loeb (1899-1909)

William Loeb—officially William Loeb, Jr.—initially served as one of four stenographers during the first few months of Roosevelt’s administration as Governor of New York. We have one letter in the digital library where Loeb listed his title as “stenographer” from February 1899.

As the story goes, Roosevelt asked his secretary William J. Youngs for a stenographer, and the group of stenographers sent Loeb because they had heard Roosevelt was a “terror to take” since he didn’t stop talking.

Loeb didn’t miss a word. When Roosevelt needed a stenographer the next day, he said, “[T]hat young fellow I had yesterday.” And thus began a years-long working relationship between Roosevelt and Loeb.

Loeb didn’t stay as a stenographer for long as Roosevelt quickly realized that Loeb knew New York politics well and recognized his abilities as a secretary. Roosevelt made Loeb his private secretary.

In less than two years, Loeb went from secretary to the governor to “secretary to the vice president” to secretary to the president. At first, Loeb was Roosevelt’s assistant secretary when Cortelyou was Roosevelt’s principal secretary from 1901 to 1903.

As one newspaper correspondent described Loeb, “[He] is in reality [Roosevelt’s] secretary, his stenographer and his confidential friend . . .”

We don’t know for sure if William Loeb was the writer of the letter above since it is signed only “assistant secretary to the president,” but it is likely.

In 1903, Loeb became principal secretary and held that position until 1909 when Roosevelt left office. As principal secretary, Loeb oversaw an office of roughly fifteen clerks and messengers. They handled Roosevelt’s correspondence, which ranged from five hundred to a thousand letters a day, clipped newspaper articles for Roosevelt to review, and also worked with the press.

According to James Morgan in Theodore Roosevelt: The Boy and The Man (1907), clerks opened all of the mail even letters marked “private” or “personal,” except correspondence known to be from close friends and family marked with initials in the corner of the envelopes. HCL for Henry Cabot Lodge, for example.

Roosevelt came to trust Loeb so much that he let him speak with journalists on his behalf, much like a modern-day press secretary. He controlled access to Roosevelt and gained the nickname of “Stonewall Loeb” due to his willingness to bar the door to the president if necessary.

Cartoonists even depicted Loeb in their political cartoons. See the example below featuring Loeb drawn by Clifford K. Berryman, whose “Drawing the Line in Mississippi” cartoon led to the creation of the teddy bear.

Loeb served mainly as Roosevelt’s secretary but, like Cortelyou before him, also responded to correspondence addressed to Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt. See the letter below, for example.

In recognition of his years-long service to Roosevelt, President William H. Taft appointed Loeb as Collector of the Port of New York shortly after Roosevelt left office, due in part to influence from Roosevelt.

In March 1910, Roosevelt wrote Loeb, “Every mail I got contains some account of the really great work you have done in the Custom House; it makes me feel very proud of you.”

Roosevelt considered Loeb his “right-hand man,” and the two men had a deep respect for one another. As James Morgan mentioned, Roosevelt once wrote on the flyleaf of a book for Loeb: “To William Loeb Jr., My Friend and Fellow Politician. Theodore Roosevelt.” And Loeb even made Roosevelt the godfather of his son William.

After Roosevelt died in 1919, Loeb became a founding member of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association. Loeb himself became a businessman and served as vice president of the American Smelting and Refining Company in New York City in the 1920s before his death in 1937. Learn more about William Loeb in our TR encyclopedia here.

Frank Harper (1909-1914)

In the photograph above, Roosevelt is pictured in the middle with Frank Harper standing second from the right.

After Roosevelt left the office of president, Frank Harper became his private secretary. The earliest letter in the digital library written by Harper with the title “secretary” is dated March 16, 1909, to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company—less than two weeks after Taft had become president.

As far as when he became Roosevelt’s secretary, we’ve seen several dates, including from Roosevelt himself. In June 1914, Roosevelt said Harper became his secretary when “he came from New York to meet me at Rome early in 1911, and he has been with me as my secretary ever since then.” (See, for example, this 1911 letter with Harper’s signature above the title “secretary.”)

In that letter, Roosevelt noted that Harper traveled across the country with him and even accompanied him to South America. Harper even wrote a memoir about his time in South America with Roosevelt, which you can find in the digital library.

Moreover, Harper also notably served as Roosevelt’s secretary during the 1912 presidential campaign. But despite his years of great service to Roosevelt, he found himself without a job in 1914 when The Outlook “rearranged their affairs” shortly after the trip to South America. (Roosevelt worked as an editor for The Outlook, and British-born Harper was employed at The Outlook as his private secretary.)

In the aforementioned June 1914 letter, Roosevelt asked his former secretary William Loeb if either he had a position at his firm for Harper or if he knew of some firm that needed a secretary. As Roosevelt concluded his letter, “If I were able I should myself employ him permanently; but I cannot afford a private secretary . . .”

Roosevelt also followed up with a July 1914 letter to Loeb: “Don’t forget our conversation about Harper. As you know, I always like to do everything I can for the man who in intimate relations have served me faithfully.”

In late November 1914, when Roosevelt heard that Robert Watchorn and Harper might work together, Roosevelt reached out to Watchorn with a letter of recommendation for Harper. Ironically, in this letter as compared to the 1914 letter, Roosevelt stated “Harper has been with me now for over five years,” so we stand by our 1909 date!

John W. McGrath (1914-1916)

According to John W. McGrath’s obituary, he served as Roosevelt’s secretary for four years from 1912 and 1916. This is inaccurate. We already thought 1914 to 1916 was more accurate, given that much of the material in the digital library listing McGrath as the creator is from 1914 and forward. For example, see this August 1914 letter from McGrath to Roosevelt’s eldest son, Ted.

Moreover, we thought the date of 1914 made more sense given Roosevelt’s concern about finding Harper a new job and his comment to Loeb that he could not hire a private secretary permanently in the summer of 1914.

Our hunch was confirmed when we read McGrath’s cross-examination in the 1915 William W. Barnes case, in which McGrath indicates he had been Roosevelt’s private secretary since May 1914.

Going back, we found a May 21, 1914, letter to Roosevelt’s sister, Anna “Bye” Roosevelt Cowles, signed “Theodore Roosevelt,” but definitely not in Roosevelt’s handwriting. As the accompanying note from McGrath states, “Colonel Roosevelt dictated the enclosed letter and asked me to sign his name to it, so that it would reach out without delay.”

The end date given in the obituary does seem to be accurate, especially since one of the last letters in the digital library signed by McGrath with the title of “secretary to Theodore Roosevelt” is dated June 10, 1916.

Although McGrath was Roosevelt’s private secretary for a shorter amount of time, Roosevelt was quite fond of him. As he wrote in a 1915 letter to Frances Kellor, a social reformer, “Mr. McGrath occupies toward me the same kind of confidential position that Mr. Loeb once occupied.” High praise for McGrath comparing him to Roosevelt’s “right-hand man!”

Josephine M. Stricker (1916-1919)

Roosevelt’s final secretary was a woman, and she served as his private secretary from November 1916 until his death in January 1919. In October 1919, Stricker wrote a newspaper article about her experience working with Roosevelt and included an anecdote she thought would be “of great interest to women.”

After Roosevelt’s funeral, four of his close friends were talking about how several politicians had encouraged Roosevelt to replace Stricker on the basis that she was a woman.

As Roosevelt’s close friend relayed to Stricker, he said, “Miss Stricker is the first woman secretary I have ever had. I have never had better service than she has rendered. She shall continue as my secretary!”

John Joseph Leary likewise reported that Roosevelt had nothing but positive things to say about Stricker and was even open to her serving in the White House should he become president again.

Even after Roosevelt’s death, Stricker continued to assist the family in “clearing up Colonel Roosevelt’s work,” including sending letters to people who had requested autographed photographs, but they arrived “too late.”

After serving as Roosevelt’s secretary, Stricker became a “real-estate dealer” in Buffalo, New York. She also worked as a secretary for the late Albert J. Hooker of the Hooker Electro Chemical Company, according to her obituary.

Assistant Secretaries, Clerks, Stenographers, and More

We have highlighted just a few of the people who kept Roosevelt’s paperwork in order, but we wanted to make at least a brief nod to the countless others who assisted, especially while he was president.

As noted above, Roosevelt’s principal secretaries while he was president oversaw offices of around fifteen workers. Some of the more recognizable names include assistant secretaries Benjamin F. Barnes, who sometimes served as acting secretary to the president, and Rudolph Forster, both pictured below with Cortelyou. (Barnes is third from left, and Forster is fifth from left with Cortelyou in the middle.)

A name that is less well-known but, in our estimation, should be more well-known is William H. Crook, who served as executive clerk during much of Roosevelt’s administration.

He wrote a delightful memoir that includes his time in Roosevelt’s White House: Memories of the White House : the home life of our presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt, being personal recollections of Colonel W.H. Crook, published in 1911.

In it, Crook records when Roosevelt first met his office staff after becoming president. According to Crook, Roosevelt said, “‘I’m glad to see you all, gentlemen . . . . But I didn’t know I had such a large office force!’ Then he came still nearer, and shook hands with each one.”

Given that Roosevelt himself thought he had such a large office force, we thought it would be helpful if we compiled lists of those who worked in the Executive Office during Roosevelt’s presidency, which we’ve included below. We drew on the biennial official registers as well as Washington, DC directories from his presidential years.

1903 (staff of 18)

1. William Loeb, Secretary to the President

2. Benjamin F. Barnes, Assistant Secretary to the President

3. Rudolph Forster, Assistant Secretary to the President

4. Warren S. Young, Executive Clerk

5. William H. Crook, Executive Clerk

6. Arthur J. Leonard, Clerk

7. Nelson P. Webster, Clerk

8. Wilbur S. Hinman, Clerk

9. Clarence E. Ingling, Clerk

10. Maurice C. Latta, Clerk

11. John J. Malone, Clerk

12. John L. McGrew, Clerk

13. Thomas H. Netherland, Clerk

14. Edward W. Smithers, Clerk

15. Charles G. Forster, Clerk

16. Edward C. Heasley, Clerk

17. Jules A. Rodier, Clerk

18. Ira R. T. Smith, Clerk

According to the 1904 Washington, DC directory, all of the top staff remained the same (Loeb, Barnes, Forster, Young, and Crook).

1905 (staff of 18)

1. William Loeb, Secretary to the President

2. Benjamin F. Barnes, Assistant Secretary to the President

3. Rudolph Forster, Assistant Secretary to the President

4. Warren S. Young, Executive Clerk

5. William H. Crook, Executive Clerk

6. Arthur J. Leonard, Clerk

7. Nelson P. Webster, Clerk

8. Edward W. Smithers, Clerk

9. Thomas H. Netherland, Clerk

10. Maurice C. Latta, Clerk

11. John L. McGrew, Clerk

12. Clarence E. Ingling, Clerk

13. John J. Malone, Clerk

14. Wilbur S. Hinman, Clerk

15. Ira R. T. Smith, Clerk

16. Edward C. Heasley, Clerk

17. Jules A. Rodier, Clerk

18. Miss Isabella L. Hagner

Again, according to the 1906 Washington, DC directory, all of the top staff remained the same (Loeb, Barnes, Forster, Young, and Crook) at the beginning of the year.

In June 1906, a change occurred when Latta—previously a clerk—replaced Barnes, who became Postmaster of Washington, DC, as assistant secretary to the president.

1907 (staff of 12)

1. William Loeb, Secretary to the President

2. Rudolph Forster, Assistant Secretary to the President

3. Maurice C. Latta, Assistant Secretary to the President

4. William H. Crook, Executive Clerk and Disbursing Agent

5. Warren S. Young, Executive Clerk

6. Wilbur S. Hinman, Clerk

7. Clarence E. Ingling, Clerk

8. Arthur J. Leonard, Clerk

9. John L. McGrew, Clerk

10. Thomas H. Netherland, Clerk

11. Edward W. Smithers, Clerk

12. Nelson P. Webster, Clerk

According to the 1908 Washington, DC directory, no changes in the top staff took place in Roosevelt’s final year as president. When Taft became president in 1909, he kept many of Roosevelt’s staff, but he moved some of them around. Latta, for example, became executive clerk, while Warren S. Young returned to a clerk position, according to the 1909 Official Register.

Roosevelt had many great men and women who served in his office, and even people who never worked for him liked the idea of being his secretary. As Edgar Allen Forbes told Roosevelt in a January 28, 1911 letter, he planned to quit his job and asked Roosevelt, “Why not let me be one of your secretaries?”

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We were not prepared for a photograph of Roosevelt’s and Quentin’s derrieres based on the title of “Theodore Roosevelt and Quentin Roosevelt,” so it made us laugh—and we thought it would make a fun post as Roosevelt, the butt of the joke. So without further ado, let’s begin!

If you’re wondering, this isn’t the only picture of Roosevelt with his back to the camera. We also discovered other photographs below, but we were more prepared this time since the title gave one a hint of what was coming. The photograph immediately below is titled, “Theodore Roosevelt on flag-draped platform, with his back to the camera, speaking to the crowd.”

Similarly, there’s the photograph below of Roosevelt and an unidentified naval officer with their backs to the camera. This one also didn’t surprise us since the title gave us a heads-up.

But by far, our favorite “butt of the joke” photograph almost seemed to lean into the hilarity of the image in the title: “Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback, rear view.” Of course, it also helps that it has a horse since we love horses here at the Center.

As far as joking in general, Roosevelt had a great sense of humor. Often he was the person joking around, and there are plenty of examples in the digital library finding something entertaining, including one 1912 letter where he admitted to chuckling!

Other examples include an October 1911 letter Roosevelt wrote to his sister Bye, “I enclose the autograph. The unfortunate creature who asked for it evidently knew nothing of my handwriting!” (We actually don’t think Roosevelt’s handwriting is that bad. Bye’s on the other hand . . .)

Roosevelt even occasionally cracked jokes in speeches, including one speech delivered at Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, where almost the entire speech was humorous.

“Ladies and Gentlemen: If I had known whom I was to meet here I should have come prepared to take the bath I so urgently need. As it is I shall thank you greatly for giving me this chance of greeting you. I have enjoyed to the full all of today. I became lured into taking a ride with the cavalry regiment, which accounts for part of my appearance. I did not expect to have the chance of meeting such a gathering, and I shall simply thank you and say how pleased I am to have seen you. I wish you could see me under circumstances more favorable.”

But other times, Roosevelt was the butt of the joke—sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. As we mentioned in the Washington section of our previous TR in every state series, mammalogist C. Hart Merriam introduced a new variety of elk in December 1897 and named it after Roosevelt.

We also noted that Roosevelt was a “lumper” who preferred broad categories of animals whereas Merriam was a “splitter” who was very willing to add new species.

It was in this context that Roosevelt told Frederick Courteney Selous about how Merriam had joked with him: “When he sent me this pamphlet [about the Roosevelt elk] he accompanied it with a good-humored note, chaffing me about my controversy with him last year, and telling me that if I thought it only a sub-species he would immediately change the name.”

Roosevelt was even able to see the humor in a serious matter when he had unwittingly been the butt of the joke as can be seen from a series of letters in early 1911. In January 1911, Roosevelt wrote to then Secretary of the Navy George von Lengerke Meyer about his opinions of a lesser punishment for desertion during peacetime.

On January 24, 1911, Meyer replied, “I find that during your term, in October, 1908, (probably unknown to you in the press of business), you changed the punishment for desertion from one year to two and one-half years.”

In turn, Roosevelt wrote back, “I think it is an awful joke on me, my having unwittingly increased the punishment for desertion while I was President.”

We’ll conclude this sillier than usual post with a short poem from Secretary of State Elihu Root in 1908 joking about Roosevelt’s activities that concludes with the line: “Can’t you stop for ten minutes?”

And speaking of Roosevelt always being on the move, check out a short video we recently made inspired by the “sit down for a documentary” trend that tells the story of our work at the TRC in a fun and lighthearted way that pokes fun at Roosevelt just a little bit!

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Often our inspiration for our Wednesday Wisdom posts comes from something we’ve read while researching for another post, but today’s was different.

Rather than coming across a quotation and saving it for later, we decided to dive into Theodore Roosevelt’s writing with the specific goal of finding a quotation that would make a great Wednesday Wisdom post.

Our starting point was the comprehensive biography of Roosevelt’s writings available on the Center’s website here thanks to the hard work of Co-Director Dr. Michael Patrick Cullinane and LtCol Gregory A. Wynn.

We read through the various article titles and ultimately decided on Roosevelt’s 1900 article published in The Outlook entitled “Character and Success” since it sounded like there would be some good quotations in there.

We had barely gotten through the first page when we thought we had found the perfect quotation: “Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character.”

But in true Roosevelt fashion, we kept reading until the end and decided on another sentence that we felt mentioned not only the importance of character but also what ought to be displayed. According to Roosevelt, the most important component of character was what he called “steadfast resolution.”

“The boy who is going to make a great man, or is going to count in any way in after life, must make up his mind not merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses or defeats.”

Much emphasis is placed on Roosevelt’s concept of daring greatly, a phrase most commonly found in his Citizenship in a Republic speech in 1910 although it appears in other speeches as well. For example, he gave a 1901 speech in Colorado on the quarter-centennial of its statehood where he praised those who went West and “greatly dared and greatly did.”

But as Roosevelt makes clear in today’s #WednesdayWisdom, steadfastness in spite of failures was better than daring greatly and attempting to overcome obstacles. In the final sentence of the “Character and Success” article, Roosevelt emphasized character—for both nation and individual—“that does and dares as well as endures . . .” (emphasis added)

Action wasn’t enough. A person of character also endured. Five years later, Roosevelt would again emphasize resolution when he wrote to his son Kermit in 1905 about his grades starting to drop.

As Roosevelt wrote, “[I]t would be far better to think just as little as possible about coming home and resolutely set yourself to putting your best thought into your work. It is an illustration of the old adage about putting your hand to the plow and then looking back.”

The adage to which Roosevelt refers is Luke 9:62: “And Jesus said unto him, ‘No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’” In other words, the person who had character endured even when things got difficult.

For Roosevelt, it wasn’t just about getting into the arena; it was about staying in there, enduring, and putting one’s hands to plow and not looking back. People of character didn’t just overcome obstacles; they were strong, firm, and steadfast and didn’t give up in spite of defeats.

Read Roosevelt’s entire article about character and success in The Outlook here.

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Lately in our Monday posts, we’ve been examining an aspect about Theodore Roosevelt that is well-known but in greater depth like Roosevelt and nationalism and the Elkhorn Ranch.

Today we’re doing the exact opposite and looking at a topic one wouldn’t typically associate with Roosevelt and doing a deeper dive on that. This particular post was inspired by a question from Rachel’s sister, Rebekah Slonim, who is a project editor for the University of Virginia’s Journal of Contemplative Studies: what interactions did Theodore Roosevelt have with Eastern thought, meditation, and other contemplative practices?

Although Eastern thought wasn’t a big part of Roosevelt’s life, there were enough examples in the digital library that we thought it would make a worthwhile post. If you’re aware of other examples of Roosevelt’s opinions of Eastern thought, please let us know in the comments below!

Roosevelt’s Encounters with Eastern Thought

About a year ago when we were researching birthday gifts Roosevelt received, we discovered that he received a book entitled Hatha Yoga for his birthday from Admiral Dewey’s wife, Mildred McLean Hazen Dewey.

We were so shocked initially that we thought the word “yoga” had to mean something different because we just couldn’t see Roosevelt doing yoga or even reading about it.

But when we looked the book up, we found one entitled Hatha Yoga, or the Yogi Philosophy of Physical Well-Being that was published in 1907, the same year Mildred Dewey sent her birthday gift to Roosevelt so we feel it is likely the one she sent.

We did a little more research and discovered the Yogi Publication Society in Chicago, Illinois which published the book was tied to William Walker Atkinson, a lawyer who was interested in Eastern philosophy and its practices in the West. Some believe “Yogi Ramacharaka” was a pseudonym for Atkinson, although others think it is possible that he had a co-writer instead.

Since Roosevelt received the book as a gift, we don’t know if he actually read it. But if he did, he would have been introduced to “the underlying principles of Hatha Yoga—giving the Yogi plan of physical life.” Even if he didn’t read it, the fact that Admiral Dewey’s wife sent it to Roosevelt as a gift suggests that it was something she thought he’d be interested in reading.

As we continued to research, we discovered that Eastern thought was indeed something that Roosevelt found interesting. When writing to Basil D. Hall about his late father Charles Cutherbert Hall in 1908, Roosevelt told the younger Hall, “I prized and admired your father. I deeply sympathized with his work . . . . Your father was deeply interesting to me because he could tell me of these matters [the Eastern Soul and the Oriental Conscience].”

Even so, Roosevelt felt he could not write the introduction for the elder Hall’s posthumous book because he simply did not have “the knowledge to write on such subjects as the Eastern Soul or the Oriental Conscience.”

We believe the book Hall and Roosevelt referred to is Christ and the Eastern Soul: The Witness of the Oriental Consciousness to Jesus Christ, which was published in 1909. (If you’re wondering—as we did—the person who ended up writing the introduction was Charles H. Brent, bishop of the Philippine Islands.)

We know that Roosevelt had previously received a copy of the elder Hall’s Barrows lectures, a series of lectures delivered in the East, in 1905. We believe the compilation Roosevelt received was entitled Christian Belief Interpreted by Christian Experience.

As Roosevelt told the elder Hall about the 1905 Barrows lectures, he planned to read them “and keep always,” so it’s a possibility Roosevelt also read Christ and the Eastern Soul, the posthumous book published from Hall’s 1906-1907 Barrows lectures.

We also know from other letters that Roosevelt called the elder Hall “a personal friend of mine” and “my personal friend” and met with him on occasion (for example in late 1904 when they talked about Japan, Russia, and Turkey), so we think it’s likely that Hall and Roosevelt talked about Eastern thought even if it isn’t captured in the written record.

In addition to the elder Hall, Roosevelt also talked with others about Eastern philosophy. In 1908, Roosevelt thanked William Sturgis Bigelow for his book, Buddhism and Immortality, writing, “I shall read it forthwith; I shall like it of course.” Four years later, Roosevelt encouraged him to write a book on Buddhism at the request of Frederick Cheever Shattuck.

Eastern Philosophies in the Modern World

As far as contemplative practices specifically, we didn’t find any mention of them. Unsurprisingly, Roosevelt highly valued Bushido—what he called “the fine Samurai spirit”—due to its emphasis on action.

Even so, he thought Bushido and other Eastern philosophies had to be adapted to the modern world, demonstrating the typical patriarchal response of the time. In other words, Roosevelt only valued Eastern philosophy and thought to the extent to which it could be “transformed to meet the needs of modern life.”

As Roosevelt wrote in a 1907 letter to Cecil Spring Rice, “More than almost anything else in your letter I was interested in what you said as to the growth in Persia among the Mohammedans of a belief in toleration. This seems to me to mark the possibility of an evolution which will make Mohammedanism a working creed for modern civilization, just as Buddhism could undoubtedly be made, and just as Shintuism could be made.”

Similarly, when discussing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Arthur Sewall’s opinion of free silver in “The Vice-Presidency and the Campaign of 1896,” Roosevelt wrote, “[I]t happens that he believes in free silver, just as other very respectable men believe in spirit rapping, or the faith-cure, or Buddhism, or pilgrimages to Lourdes, or the foot of a graveyard rabbit.”

(It is perhaps worth noting that Roosevelt himself would later accept rabbit’s foot charms as gifts. He would even carry a rabbit’s foot with him in Africa, given to him by prizefighter John L. Sullivan. They were also a popular souvenir in his later political campaigns, although he did not personally oversee merchandising.)

In other words, he grouped Buddhism with spiritualism, folklore, and support of free silver (which Roosevelt abhorred), categorizing Buddhism as an illogical belief system that an otherwise well-meaning and intelligent person could hold.

Thus, to answer the original question, Roosevelt corresponded and interacted with Western men who studied Eastern philosophy, and he appreciated the opportunity to learn from them about concepts like the Eastern soul, Bushido, and perhaps even yoga.

But as far as a belief system, Roosevelt believed Buddhism, Shintoism, and other Eastern philosophies had to evolve in order to make it a “working creed for modern civilization.”

As Roosevelt wrote in 1918 just a few months before his death, “[Japan] reached the level of her western neighbors in half a century. . . . Her appreciation of art and nature, her refinement of life, and many of her social conventions, together with her extraordinary and ennobling patriotism, convey lessons to us of America and Europe which we shall do well to learn.”

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About two months ago, President Donald Trump made news when the first UFC fight was hosted on White House grounds. Over 125 years earlier, President Theodore Roosevelt was making news by participating in martial arts matches at the White House himself.

While Roosevelt engaged in several types—boxing, jiu-jitsu, and wrestling—he particularly liked boxing. As he wrote in his Autobiography, “I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class sport . . .”

Since we get asked every so often about Roosevelt and boxing and in light of the aforementioned contemporary connection, we figured it was high time that we wrote a Substack post about it. So, without further ado, we present Theodore Roosevelt the boxer.

Roosevelt’s Early Boxing Days

Roosevelt first learned how to box after a group of boys made “life miserable” for Roosevelt while he was on a stagecoach ride to Moosehead Lake in Maine, as he recalled in his Autobiography.

And his first few years boxing weren’t easy. According to Roosevelt, “I was a painfully slow and awkward pupil, and certainly worked two or three years before I made any perceptible improvement whatever.”

His boxing master before college was John Long, “an ex-prize fighter” who occasionally held competitions, including one in which Roosevelt won the lightweight contest. In his Autobiography, Roosevelt called it “the only one of my exceedingly rare athletic triumphs which would be worth relating.”

When he got to Harvard, Roosevelt continued to box, although he noted in his Autobiography he “never attained to the first rank” even at his own weight.

According to an article in The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine in December 1901, “The only occasion when he ever entered a public match was in the Spring of his Junior year. Roosevelt defeated William W. Coolidge but lost in the championship bout to Charles Stedman Hanks, as reported in this March 1879 newspaper article in the Boston Globe.

In fact, it was this match that Roosevelt wrote about in a lengthy February 1909 letter to Thornton H. Simmons when the latter inquired if Roosevelt had been a lightweight boxing champion at Harvard and if so, what year.

As Roosevelt explained, the matter had come up a few years prior, and he had researched and discovered he had not been a lightweight champion at Harvard.

Boxing as an Adult—and the Men Roosevelt Boxed With

After college, Roosevelt continued to box, noting in his Autobiography, “When obliged to live in cities, I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form.”

One of the men Roosevelt boxed with—Michael “Mike” Joseph Donovan—even wrote an autobiography entitled The Roosevelt I Knew: Ten Years of Boxing with the President—And Other Memories of Famous Fighting Men.

In it Donovan described Roosevelt “the fighter” in great detail, including his “first fistic encounter” with him when Roosevelt was governor of New York. Donovan noted that when Roosevelt left to change, he was a governor. When he returned, he was a fighter. His boxing outfit was a sleeveless flannel shirt, his Rough Rider khaki uniform trousers, and “light canvas shoes without heels.”

This was the first of many fights between Donovan and Roosevelt throughout his political career. In late 1904, Roosevelt invited him to visit the White House and box with him. When Donovan replied to accept Roosevelt’s invitation, he informed Roosevelt that he had contacted his glove maker to make two sets for Roosevelt.

When Roosevelt replied on November 19, 1904, he told Donovan to wait before coming to the White House since he wanted to “get Congress fairly going before I begin the boxing.” After that, he looked forward to Donovan coming down with gloves and putting “them on with the President in the White House!”

Initially, Roosevelt had hoped for Donovan to come in early December but had to delay his visit after Roosevelt wrenched his thigh and broke a blood vessel in one eye while sparring and playing singlestick with Ted and some young army officers. But Roosevelt still wanted Donovan to come, “I want to have you in the White House and put on the gloves with you myself, and see Ted do so.”

Even though Roosevelt told Donovan to come, he worried about whether or not he could keep boxing, writing to Kermit, “I am rather reluctantly coming to the conclusion that boxing, like wrestling, is somewhat too violent a sport for me. I have been trying it with Ted and his fellow football player, Church, as well as Roly Fortesque, and Dan Moore, and wrenched my thigh again.”

However, his concerns didn’t seem to last too long, as Roosevelt had quite an energetic fight when Donovan finally made it to the White House. As Joseph Bucklin Bishop wrote in a January 1905 letter to Roosevelt, “I heard a piece of news yesterday which I suspect will give you as deep, if not deeper, joy than you experienced on the night of the Election.”

One of Bishop’s friend’s sons received boxing lessons from Donovan and also knew Donovan’s son. Apparently, Donovan’s son called Roosevelt “a pretty hard hitter.” Bishop thought that would give Roosevelt joy, but he also cautioned him to go easier on Donovan “for you may have a dead pugilist on your hands presently if you are not careful,” he warned.

Donovan continued to box with Roosevelt in the White House, including the night before Roosevelt’s second inauguration between five and six in the evening, as Donovan mentioned in his autobiography.

Boxing had become a habit for Roosevelt, as it was around this time in 1905 that Roosevelt wrote to Kermit “I box three afternoons a week.” (Time management expert Laura Vanderkam considers three times a week a habit, so she would consider Roosevelt’s boxing a habit.)

In addition to Donovan, Roosevelt boxed with all kinds of people, including his cousin, Roly Fortescue, as he related in a February 1905 letter to Kermit that he didn’t want to box with him because he was afraid of hurting him: “[A]nd I did, giving him a most gorgeous pair of black eyes.”

Roosevelt also mentioned in a January 19, 1905 letter to Kermit, he permitted a new wrestler in the White House named simply “Grant.” He told Kermit that two days prior to his letter, he “bloodied Grant’s nose,” which bothered Roosevelt since he thought Grant wasn’t hitting him hard although the president requested him to do so.

Roosevelt’s sons also took up boxing, which delighted him. Ted had taken up boxing around the beginning of 1905, although a doctor later told him to stop after he broke his nose “again boxing.”

And Kermit took up boxing in 1907 when he was eighteen years old. As Roosevelt wrote in a November 7, 1907 letter to Kermit, “I am glad you are going to take up boxing. It is certainly a fine thing to know. I learned to box with great difficulty; but it was most useful to me when I did know how to defend myself.”

Giving Up Boxing

As for Roosevelt, his boxing days waned after Colonel Daniel T. Moore, his military aide—called only “a captain of artillery” in his Autobiography—hit his left eye during a bout, leaving Roosevelt almost totally blind in that eye. We believe it may have been in December 1904 when Roosevelt wrote to Donovan about breaking a blood vessel in one eye (mentioned above).

According to Moore, he didn’t learn he blinded Roosevelt for close to a decade until Roosevelt’s injury became public news in late 1917 after Roosevelt told some journalists about it.

Newspapers across the country jumped on the story and featured articles like “How Colonel Roosevelt Lost His Eye” that detailed the accident and the science behind it (see below).

But for those who had read Roosevelt’s Autobiography, which came out in 1913, they would have already known since he mentioned the incident in it. As Roosevelt explained in his Autobiography describing the injury, he decided to “acknowledge that I had become an elderly man” and traded boxing for jiu-jitsu. (See this letter where he compares wrestling and jiu-jitsu.)

But Roosevelt wasn’t completely done boxing, as there are multiple examples of him boxing after late 1904 in the digital library—even as he was insisting that he was “too old” for boxing!

For example, in February 1909, Roosevelt sent his friend, Leonard Wood, a letter of introduction to William Sikamith, with whom Roosevelt notes he “has been doing a little boxing.” Roosevelt especially enjoyed his “system of physical exercise” and hoped Wood would as well.

Moreover, Wood wasn’t the only person Roosevelt reached out to about Sikamith. He also asked Commissioner Henry Litchfield West to look into incorporating the regimen, including boxing, into schools in Washington, DC.

However, it does seem to be true that Roosevelt boxed less after the incident with Moore although that didn’t stop the press from depicting Roosevelt as a boxer in political cartoons. We included just two examples from 1907 below, although there are plenty of others in the digital library.

Even as he boxed less, Roosevelt continued to support the sport, brushing aside common concerns about ruthlessness in boxing that had started to become more prominent in the 1910s. As Roosevelt wrote in a 1915 letter to E.E. Keevin, his views of boxing remained the same as he had written in his Autobiography.

Final Thoughts on Roosevelt and Boxing

We’ll close with correcting an error we’ve seen related to Roosevelt and boxing. It is sometimes stated that Roosevelt boxed wearing glasses, but that is inaccurate. In fact, the error goes back to a December 1901 article written by Curtis Guild, a fellow Harvard graduate, about Roosevelt at Harvard published in The Harvard Graduates’ Magazine: “He sparred with a pair of large glasses literally lashed to his head.”

Guild even suggested that Roosevelt’s glasses were the reason Hanks bested him in the championship bout in 1879: “As Hanks good naturedly said himself, a lucky blow of his that knocked off Roosevelt’s glasses settled the matter.” Only it wasn’t true. If you read the 1879 newspaper article we mentioned above about the match carefully, nothing is mentioned about glasses.

Moreover, Roosevelt himself wrote to Guild after the article was published correcting the error: “I liked that article very much, but just let me say one thing! You are a fencer and so you naturally forget about boxing. I did not wear glasses while I sparred – could not have. My great difficulty came from the resulting nearsightedness.”

But the image of Roosevelt boxing in glasses was too compelling and soon became a part of public memory. Another friend from Harvard, Charles G. Washburn, even added it in an original draft of his biography about Roosevelt.

When Washburn passed along a copy to Roosevelt for review in 1916, Roosevelt praised Washburn for the biography but noted the error about him boxing in glasses: “Curtis Guild used to say this and quite a number of people firmly believed that they saw me so box. . . . Now, Charlie, no human being could box with spectacles or glasses on. It would be absolutely certain that he would have them broken in the first minute or two and in all human probability he would then be blinded permanently.”

Washburn took Roosevelt’s correction to heart, removing the offending information and adding several sentences from Roosevelt’s 1916 letter about not boxing in glasses in the published version of his biography, Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of His Career.

With that, we’ll throw in the towel and conclude this deep dive about Roosevelt and boxing with two sentences from Washburn: “He was fond of athletics, but never greatly excelled; he never claimed to: he did the best he could. Boxing was his favorite sport . . .”

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Near the very end of his life, Theodore Roosevelt wrote a piece for the American Museum Journal titled simply, “My Life as a Naturalist.” As we’ve mentioned in a previous Substack post, Roosevelt saw himself as an old-school naturalist his entire life. (He refused to use the modern-day word of biologist.)

Roosevelt’s entire article is worth reading, as it captures his love of nature in his own words. We could have chosen a number of lines from it for today’s #WednesdayWisdom but ultimately selected the following.

“What is needed most is not the ability to see what few people can see, but to see what almost anybody can see but nobody takes the trouble to look at.”

Roosevelt penned this line in the context of talking about how although he never lost his love for natural history, he regretted that he didn’t describe more about the big game he encountered in the Badlands of North Dakota when he had the opportunity to do so. He then followed up with examples of when he did describe animals in his travels.

Even though Roosevelt was a man of action who took the next step rather than theorizing about the 200th step, he also believed in taking the time to pause and observe. While his reflections about observation are certainly true of science, we think it is also more broadly applicable in life.

Roosevelt was able to see things that others didn’t because he paid attention and he cared about the small things. There are countless examples in his letters to his children when he mentioned something minute that he knew would interest them and sometimes even drew pictures of the scene.

For example, as Roosevelt wrote in a January 29, 1901 letter to his nine-year-old daughter Ethel from Keystone Ranch, “You would be much amused with the animals round the ranch. The most thoroughly independent of them is a large white pig which we have christened Maud.”

Although we don’t often call Roosevelt a man of observation, we think it’s a description that should be more associated with him.

Read the entire article here and find other gems like Roosevelt’s last line of the article in which he wrote, “[W]hile my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life.”

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On April 10, 1899, Theodore Roosevel…

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Get ready for a deep dive into the mind of Theodore Roosevelt.

In the months leading up to the 1912 presidential election and the first state primaries for the Republican Party, Theodore Roosevelt kept an eclectic publishing routine. Along with many articles and speeches on nationalism, he wrote reviews about popular books and intellectual debates. One piece, published in the Outlook in the December 1911 issue, took on the intersection of religion and science. The scientific method displaced ancient metaphysical philosophy, but it could not displace the idea of God, religion, and the origin of humankind from philosophy. Many thinkers still relied on faith to define rationale.

In Roosevelt’s considerations of religion and science, he recognized the need to use the scientific method to understand physics, biology, and chemistry. In the piece, he dissects the philosophies of materialism and creationism through the ideas of Charles Darwin – the prevailing evolutionary theorist of his day. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, one year after Roosevelt’s birth. It became the singularly most important breakthrough for natural science and the social sciences.

When Roosevelt penned this article, he had considered evolutionary theory for more than thirty years. That made the essay a personal one for Roosevelt. He grappled with two sides of his own being: the spiritual and the scientific. In a response to leading thinkers of the day, Roosevelt sides with popular philosopher Henri Bergson and his writings on “creative evolution,” which makes a distinction between the measurable parts of life and those that necessarily cannot be measured. Time is Bergson’s best example. Lived time is entirely different from recorded time. An hour of pleasure passes swiftly whereas an hour of pain can last excruciatingly long. Roosevelt addresses Bergson’s point through the scientific advancements of Darwin’s evolutionary theories. He rejects “pure” genetic evolution as the basis for human progress. If everything was reduced to scientific evolution and the random fate of genetic material, there is no free will; there is no learning; there is no morality. Yet Roosevelt could not ignore the evidence of science, either. Genetics and human evolution certainly relied on the reproductive process.

Rather than choosing between materialism and spiritualism, Roosevelt adopted both in the same way that Bergson imagined time in two different ways. For Roosevelt, “nature” played a role in human evolution and “nurture” had its place in human learning and ingenuity. It is likely that this conclusion prompted him to change the title of the article from “The Search for Truth in Science and Religion” to “The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit.” This paradox, Roosevelt believed, had beguiled thinkers before him, during his time, and would continue to perplex the greatest minds long after he passed.

July has been a busy month inside the Theodore Roosevelt Center! We started off the month with a huge amount of activity thanks to all the celebrations surrounding July 4. Most notable on campus was the hugely successful production of Teddy and Alice, put on as a collaboration between the Blue Hawk Theater Guild, Badlands Opera Project, DSU Music, the Theodore Roosevelt Center, and other community partners. Dr. Hansard, Public Historian and Outreach Coordinator stepped out of the office to take the leading role as Theodore Roosevelt, while other members of the Theodore Roosevelt Center staff were able to support the performance through the creation of some exhibit cases and the sale of Theodore Roosevelt related merchandise during the performances. The month additionally saw increased visitors to our public gallery and exhibit, and it has been great to welcome so many visitors from the area and further abroad.

Dr. Hansard had a further busy month by representing the Theodore Roosevelt Center elsewhere in the nation as well, speaking at the Tannery Pond Community Center in New York state for their “Many Lives of Theodore Roosevelt” speaker series, the annual Badlands Chautauqua here in North Dakota, as well as at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum’s MaryLou and John D. Turner Summer Teacher Conference Teacher’s Conference in Missouri.

Inside the TRC, we continue to work to gain better intellectual and physical control over our holdings, both newly donated collections and those that have accumulated over the history of the Center. Archivist Ally Hecht has undertaken an effort to bring the TRC’s physical archives in line, ensuring all paperwork and items are accounted for and moving records of our holdings into our digital library for internal preservation. We recently received a shipment of archival processing materials – boxes and folders – that we had been waiting on, and are looking forward to rehousing materials to more archivally-stable homes. As an additional part of this effort, we have begun catching up on our backlog of digitizing newly-donated materials, thanks in part to the work of DSU library employee Sarah Griffis. We hope to be able to add these to our digital library and catalog them in the near future so that we can share these interesting new collections with our audience.

Looking to our annual summer internship, now closing out the second of the three months they join us for, our cohort of interns continues to work well, guided largely by Ally Hecht and digital library cataloger Gemma Koontz. Most interns have been making good progress working through lists of items to catalog, giving them hands-on experience with item level cataloging. They have additionally been able to begin thinking about some digital humanities projects, which we hope to be able to share with you following the conclusion of the internship season. These planned projects range from improving the quality of some of the data in our digital library to conducting research and adding articles to our TR Encyclopedia, so we are looking forward to seeing what they produce.

This month we would also like to officially welcome a new staff member to the TRC Team. Rachel Lane has worked as a contractor with the TRC for the last several months, contributing her efforts and expertise to our Substack, among other areas. We have recently been able to have her join officially as a part-time researcher to continue helping the Center, and we’re delighted to be able to have her continue to support our efforts. Rachel’s arrival comes as Dr. Hansard prepares to move into a faculty role here at Dickinson State University. While many of his duties will shift towards teaching, he will continue to work with the TRC on its social media and public outreach efforts, for which we are thankful!

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In honor of #SharkWeek, we’re devoting this Friday Fun post to Theodore Roosevelt and sharks. In case you missed them, we’ve also covered Roosevelt and other animals in previous posts, including guinea pigs, bees, alligators, and our personal favorite, snakes.

Perhaps one of Roosevelt’s earliest encounters with a shark (if not the earliest) was when he was ten years old and headed to Europe with his family in 1869. As he noted in his diary when they were at sea on May 19, “Warmer. Read and played. We saw two ships one shark [several] gulls and the boatswain (sea bird) so named because its tail feathers are supposed to resemble the warlike spike with which a boatswain (man) is usually represented.”

The next example we found of Roosevelt encountering sharks came from his time as a Rough Rider. While he and his men waited to depart for Cuba in Tampa Bay, Roosevelt mentioned a close encounter his men had with a shark in a letter to his then six-year-old daughter Ethel on June 10, 1898: “This afternoon we let the men swim, and hundreds went into the water; but there are a great many sharks here, and finally one big fellow came so close that the men got hastily back into the boats.”

Twenty years later, Roosevelt wrote to his son Quentin from Aden, Arabia (now Yemen) in 1909 right before departing on his African expedition about several men who had more than a close encounter with sharks. (As a side note, the entire letter is worth reading, as Roosevelt delightfully describes feeding a baby gazelle with a bottle!)

“We passed two boys each of whom had lost an arm, and a man who had lost a leg. I made inquiries and found that the sharks were very bold and fierce in the harbor and carried off a good number of people; and as there were plenty of sharks in the fish market it was evident that the people of Aden in their turn ate many of their enemies!”

One of Roosevelt’s last personal encounters with a shark was in 1915 when he visited one of the bird reserves he helped to establish as president. When describing the shallows of the channel, Roosevelt wrote, “When a swim was proposed as our boat swung at mid-anchor in mid-channel under the burning midday sun, Captain Sprinkle warned us against it because he had just seen a large shark.” Although Sprinkle knew of very few men killed by sharks, he knew of two in the Mississippi Sound and didn’t think it was safe.

While we don’t know if Roosevelt personally encountered any sharks after this 1915 trip, we do know he corresponded and later went hunting for manta rays with Russell J. Coles, a well-known ichthyologist, late in his life.

And unsuprisingly, sharks were a common topic of conversation between Coles and Roosevelt. In one of Roosevelt’s first letters to Coles, written in 1916, he expressed his desire for Coles to write a book about sharks. We’ve included Roosevelt’s quotation in full below.

“Nobody has given us anything worth while about sharks, whereas the Salmon and Tuna and other ordinary fish have been written to death. You have the gift of expression, and the gift of narration. Why will you not write a book known by some such title as ‘Dangerous Game of the Sea’, giving us your full experience with sharks, their habits, about the danger of fishing for them, and about everything concerning them. . . . A book of this kind would be the best contribution to both sport and natural history than any human being could now write.”

Although he never wrote the book Roosevelt wanted, Coles did write to him two months after the United States joined World War I about his proposal to use shark meat as food to assist with the war effort. The proposal even made it to the federal food administrator, later president Herbert Hoover, as one newspaper article noted.

As far as Roosevelt’s manta ray—what he called “devilfish”—hunt with Coles in March 1917, Roosevelt talked about shark behavior with his fellow fishermen, including Coles. (If you missed our previous post about the manta ray hunt, you can check it out here.)

As Roosevelt reported in an appendix to A Book-Lovers Holidays in the Open, the fishermen told Roosevelt that sharks would attack adult loggerhead turtles and green turtles. As Roosevelt wrote, “I knew that sharks gulped down small turtles whenever they met them, but I had not realized that they attacked big ones.”

Coles gave a specific example of one adult turtle he had found that had been attacked by a shark, which he believed to be a white shark. There was a semicircle two feet long and one foot deep torn out of the side of the turtle. (The shells of loggerhead turtles typically measure three feet although some large ones can reach four feet.) As Roosevelt said, “[That] gives a good idea of the width and depth of the shark’s bite.”

Roosevelt had such a good time with Coles and the other fishermen that he planned a trip the following year to go shark hunting. Initially, Coles hoped Roosevelt could join him at Cape Lookout, North Carolina in June 1918, but the month finally decided upon was March 1919, as Roosevelt confirmed in an October 1918 letter.

Of course that trip never happened since Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919. And one of the very last letters Roosevelt likely received before his death was a letter dated January 2, 1919 from Coles discussing more details about the trip, including his hope that Roosevelt’s wife Edith could join as well. (One of the last letters Roosevelt wrote was to Coles on January 1, 1919, and he mentioned the March trip.)

We’ll close with one of our favorite examples of Roosevelt’s mention of sharks in his writings, one that we think is particularly apt for Shark Week. As he wrote in what is considered American Ideals II, also called Administration—Civil Service, “Even the most enthusiastic naturalist, if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark.”

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As we’ve mentioned in previous Wednesday Wisdom posts, Theodore Roosevelt had several phrases that he used over and over again in his writing and speeches, such as “eyes on the stars,” “work worth doing,” and “the man that counts.”

And today we’re featuring yet another we’ve discovered: “worth his salt.” Likely the most notable usage of this phrase comes from Roosevelt’s speech, “The Right of the People to Rule,” in 1912, but we’re aware of at least three other instances in prior writing or speeches.

“Courage and honesty – no man is worth his salt as a citizen unless he has both. And both of them together aren’t enough. I don’t care how brave and how honest a man is, if he is a natural born fool you can do little with him.” ~Remarks at Lexington, Kentucky, September 6, 1902 (speech)

“Each one of us that is worth his salt is trying to do his share in working out the problems that are before all of us now at the beginning of the twentieth century.” ~ Address before the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, November 5, 1902 (speech)

“[T]he father . . . if he is worth his salt, must in every way back up the mother in helping bring up the children.” ~ Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Mrs. E. H. Merrell, January 31, 1907 (letter)

“The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watchword for all of us is spend and be spent.” ~“The Right of the People to Rule,” 1912 (sound recording)

Although we could have chosen any of these, we ultimately selected another example for today’s #WednesdayWisdom: “I pity no man because he has to work. If he is worth his salt he will work.”

This usage of “worth his salt” comes from a brief speech Roosevelt delivered in Dunsmuir, California on May 20, 1903 on his whistle-stop tour across the United States. (The image we selected also was taken during Roosevelt’s stop at Dunsmuir.)

While the quotation sounds like other things Roosevelt said about work throughout his whistle-stop tour, the setting for this particular quotation was unique. Dunsmuir was a mountainous town in northern California near Mount Shasta, a stratovolcano at the southern end of the Cascade Range that is the second-highest peak of the Cascades.

Although the people of Dunsmuir faced unique challenges due to the environment around them, Roosevelt emphasized the commonality they shared with all Americans—the need for courage, honesty, decency, and drive.

In Roosevelt’s short speech of less than ten minutes (he only stopped from 11:40 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. in Dunsmuir), he remarked on the beauty of the area, praised the citizens of California for their work in making the state “what she is,” and encouraged them to continue working hard and acting “squarely.”

Apparently, Roosevelt made enough of an impression that the citizens of Dunsmuir wanted to hear him speak again eight years later in 1911 when they sent a telegram to Roosevelt requesting that he stop and deliver a short address.

We weren’t able to find a copy of his remarks in 1911, so we think if he did speak, it was a very brief address. Although Roosevelt would return to California two more times during his life in 1912 and 1915, he didn’t go back to Dunsmuir, making his 1903 visit all the more significant to the people of Dunsmuir.

Read Roosevelt’s entire 1903 speech praising the people of California and Dunsmuir and their work here.

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In a May 28, 1904 letter to his son Kermit, Roosevelt mentioned burying his children’s pet rabbit named Peter Rabbit. Given that Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit with Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902, we think it’s very likely that the Roosevelt children named their rabbit in honor of Potter’s literary character.

The Roosevelts also enjoyed other children’s animal stories like Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. And in his letters to his children, Roosevelt often made reference to literary characters from such stories.

For example, in a June 1904 letter to his youngest son Quentin, who was then six years old, Roosevelt mentioned coming across a rabbit and a terrapin while he was out riding that reminded him of the stories in Br’er Rabbit. (He even drew a picture of the rabbit and the terrapin at the bottom of the letter.)

Similarly, Roosevelt mentioned one of Grahame’s famous four characters in an April 14, 1909 letter to his daughter Ethel just a week before landing in British East Africa (now Kenya). He talked about enjoying the “brief aftermath of Presidential glory,” but also wrote, “But I have the example of popular Mr. Toad before me, and shall try to avoid his fate.”

Roosevelt also communicated with Harris and Grahame directly to express his appreciation for their work. For example, in a 1902 letter to Harris, Roosevelt noted, “Mrs. Roosevelt and I have I think read all your stories to the children, and some of them over and over again.”

In an earlier 1901 letter to Harris just after Roosevelt had become president, he also noted that his aunt, Anna Bulloch, told him the stories of Br’er Rabbit growing up when he was younger than his daughter Ethel, who was ten at the time.

When Roosevelt wrote to Grahame in January 1909 about The Wind in the Willows, he noted he had initially been unsure about the book, but after Edith and his two oldest sons, Ted and Kermit, read it and enjoyed it, Roosevelt decided to try reading it. And he was dee-lighted!

As he told Grahame, “Now I have read it and reread it, and have come to accept the characters as old friends; and I am almost more fond of it than of your previous books.”

Roosevelt’s children even enjoyed animal stories like those written by Potter, Harris, and Grahame when they became adults. For example, as a seventy-seven-year-old, Ethel wrote to her daughter Edith on December 29, 1968 about reading a biography of Harris. She told Edith she didn’t think the Uncle Remus stories would ever be lost: “They are the best of that kind of story telling and glimpses into a past which has been utterly swept away.”

But while Roosevelt loved the fictional animal stories of Potter, Harris, and Grahame, he abhorred books that he considered dishonest science—what he called “nature faker” or “nature fakir” stories—because he felt like they misrepresented actual animal behavior.

Roosevelt felt so strongly about “nature faker” stories that he spoke out against them in an interview with journalist Edward B. Clark, who published the president’s views in a June 1907 article in Everybody’s Magazine entitled “Roosevelt on the Nature Fakirs.”

As Roosevelt said, “As for the matter of giving these books to the children for the purpose of teaching them the facts of natural history – why it’s an outrage. If the stories that are given to the children were written as fables, published as fables and put into the children’s hands as fables, all would be well and good.”

To contrast nature writing that was clearly fairy tales with the works of “nature fakers,” Roosevelt turned to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, saying, “We don’t in the least mind impossibilities in avowed fairy tales; and Bagheera and Baloo and Kaa are simply delightful variants of Prince Charming and Jack the Slayer of Giants.”

At the end of Clark’s article, the quotation he included from Roosevelt explained why the president felt so strongly about the so-called nature fakers. Roosevelt was concerned about the proper presentation of science—what he called natural history. (As we mentioned in a previous Substack post, Roosevelt considered himself an old-school naturalist his entire life.)

In these final lines, Roosevelt seems almost worried, perhaps reflecting back on his own childhood: “The preservation of the useful and beautiful animal and bird life of the country depends largely upon creating in the young an interest in the life of the woods and fields. If the child mind is fed with stories that are false to nature, the children will go to the haunts of the animal only to meet with disappointment. The result will be disbelief, and the death of interest.”

Roosevelt felt particularly strongly about one “nature faker,” William J. Long, who had previously taken the pen name of “Peter Rabbit”—fitting for today’s post! But in response to Clark’s article in 1907, Long went on the offensive with his own name, writing an open letter demanding that Roosevelt retract his statements about Long’s writings.

Long specifically wanted Roosevelt to revise his incredulity about the example of a wolf killing a caribou, for which Long provided an affidavit that it actually occurred. (He also wrote Roosevelt privately as well, advising him about the open letter.)

Several months later, Roosevelt spoke for himself in a short article published in the September 1907 issue of Everybody’s Magazine entitled simply “Nature Fakers.” In it, Roosevelt still criticized the nature fakers but focused more on what he considered good nature writing, distinguishing between nature writers who were “true nature lovers” from those he considered to be writing only falsehoods.

But that didn’t stop him from still lambasting Long: “Of all these ‘nature fakers,’ the reckless and least responsible is Mr. Long but there are others who run him close in the ‘yellow journalism of the woods,’ as John Burroughs has aptly called it.”

We will conclude this article as Roosevelt concluded his article , which he considered his “final word” on the controversy: “We who believe in the study of nature feel that a real knowledge and appreciation of wild things, of trees, flowers, birds, and of the grim and crafty creatures of the wilderness, give an added beauty and health to life. Therefore we abhor deliberate or reckless untruth in this study as much as in any other; and therefore we feel that a grave wrong is committed by all who, holding a position that entitles them to respect, yet condone and encourage such untruth.”

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There were others that we wished we could have included, but Roosevelt didn’t have any known interactions with them. What women would you have added to the list? Let us know in the comments below!

Jane Addams

Well-known for her social reform work, Jane Addams regularly corresponded with Roosevelt. The earliest record in the digital library is a 1906 letter from Roosevelt to Addams in which he praises her work as a reformer, distinguishing her from the “reformers of the hysterical and sensational stamp”: “Will you let me say a word of very sincere thanks to you for the eminent sanity, good-humor and judgment you always display in pushing matters you have at heart?”

Addams even seconded Roosevelt’s nomination as the Progressive Party candidate at the National Convention in 1912, which he thanked her for in a telegram since he had not been able to do so in person. (It’s also one of the longest telegrams we’ve ever seen!) Addams, in turn, thanked Roosevelt for the telegrams he sent to the female delegates at the National Progressive Convention.

Roosevelt’s Progressive Party candidacy was the peak of their collaboration, as they differed greatly in their thoughts about World War I. Roosevelt did not mince words speaking about Addams’s pacificist beliefs, calling her “one of a shrieking sisterhood” and “poor bleeding Jane.”

Despite this rift, Addams wrote a tribute after Roosevelt’s death in January 1919 in honor of his impact on social work, mentioning “his open mind, his quick apprehension of social needs, [and] his will to social righteousness.”

Susan B. Anthony

By the time Roosevelt was president, Susan B. Anthony was an older woman who had spent years as a women’s rights activist and proponent of women’s suffrage. There is only one letter in the digital library related to Anthony from Roosevelt, but it wasn’t written directly to her.

Instead, it was written to Anna Howard Shaw, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, wishing Susan B. Anthony a happy eighty-sixth birthday in 1906.

Anthony wasn’t particularly impressed with the president’s reply, responding in turn, “I wish the men would do something besides extend congratulations. I have asked President Roosevelt to push the matter of a constitutional amendment allowing suffrage to women by a recommendation to Congress. I would rather have him say a word to Congress for the cause than to praise me endlessly.”

Her biting reply was quickly picked up by newspapers across the country, including in this one in North Carolina, which included the illustration of Anthony below.

Clara Barton

Perhaps one of the most well-known women living during the American Civil War and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era was Clara Barton. But unlike other women of the era, Roosevelt had a less positive view of Barton.

As he wrote in a 1916 letter to Mrs. John A. Logan, “I understand that Miss Barton did great work before I was brought into contact with her; but I was by no means favorably impressed by the type of work she did during the Spanish-American War.”

Roosevelt added that he didn’t intend to say anything against Barton in public and asked Logan to keep his letter confidential, but he could not write the letter Logan desired—presumably something about Barton.

Roosevelt also had strong words to say about Barton while he was president in 1906, writing to Henry L. Einstein of The New York Press, “As regards the Red Cross, you are evidently ignorant of the fact that all the scandals were connected with the regime of poor Miss Clara Barton. But that regime has long been at an end . . .”

Other correspondence in the digital library related to Barton includes a 1902 letter from Secretary of State John Hay to Roosevelt regarding the attendees to the St. Petersburg conference he knew, which included Barton, and a 1905 letter from Roosevelt’s sister Anna “Bye” Cowles regarding Red Cross matters, including mentioning Barton who “hastily resigned.”

Despite his harsh words in private for Barton, we know that Roosevelt attended one major public event that Barton also attended: an event for Spanish-War veterans held in Detroit in September 1902. In addition to escorting Barton to her seat on the stage prior to his address, Roosevelt also sat with Barton at the president’s table at a banquet.

Ida Tarbell

A famous muckraking journalist, Ida Tarbell corresponded with Roosevelt about journalism and plans to meet in person. They didn’t always see eye-to-eye, as is evidenced in a 1911 letter from Roosevelt to Tarbell in which he lambasts her for her assessment of the New York Herald.

Roosevelt could not believe she equated the Herald, known for its sensational journalism, with the Tribune, a paper known for its conservative approach that some called as dull as the grocer’s bill.

But in other correspondence with Tarbell, Roosevelt was much more positive, as in a February 1912 letter in which he expressed his interest in seeing Tarbell the next time she was in New York and noting that her letter “pleased and interested” him.

As for Tarbell, in her autobiography, All in a Day’s Work, she recalled a conversation with Roosevelt in which they disagreed about journalistic methods: “I once argued with Mr. Roosevelt that we on McClure’s were concerned only with facts, not with stirring up revolt. ‘I don’t object to the facts,’ he cried, ‘but you and Baker’—Baker at that time was carrying on an able series of articles on the manipulations of the railroads—‘but you and Baker are not practical.’

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton was a well-known woman of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who was good friends with Roosevelt and his wife Edith. She was also in fact a distant relative to the other Edith. Wharton was also the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1921 for her book, The Age of Innocence, two years after Roosevelt’s death.

It is unknown exactly when Roosevelt and Wharton became acquainted, but the earliest archival record of their correspondence is dated May 1897. After that time, Wharton and Roosevelt corresponded occasionally, sometimes talking about literature, planning visits, and later discussing World War I. (See letters from Wharton to Roosevelt here and from Roosevelt to Wharton here.)

In fact, Wharton was one of the first people Roosevelt invited to the White House after he became president in 1901. What Roosevelt and the rest of his family valued about Wharton was her appreciation of literature, which is likely why she was so high on the guest list for the White House.

We know that Roosevelt read some of Wharton’s work, including most notably, her 1911 book, Ethan Frome, which he enjoyed and called “a really great story.” Based on Roosevelt’s correspondence with Wharton and mentioning the family loving her “story of the worthy ladies who hunted culture gregariously,” we believe Roosevelt also read “Xingu,” a short story by Wharton published in Scribner’s Magazine in December 1911.

In addition to reading her work, Roosevelt even wrote the introduction to a collection she edited called The Book of the Homeless in 1916, which he considered “not only a pleasure but a duty” to fulfill Wharton’s request for an introduction.

Wharton had a high regard for the entire Roosevelt family and visited with several of Roosevelt’s children after they became adults, including his youngest son Quentin just two months before he died. (See this photograph of Wharton with several American soldiers in France in 1918, including Roosevelt’s two sons, Archie and Quentin.)

Wharton even considered Roosevelt’s younger daughter Ethel one of the leading Americans of her era, even when she often had disdain for American culture and civilization as compared to that in Europe.

However, when a friend defended American civilization with the example of Ethel Roosevelt Derby, Wharton agreed: “Of course there are green isles in that sea of misery—but they’re so far apart . . . . Alas, there are not enough to go round.”

After Roosevelt’s death in 1919, Wharton wrote a poem in his honor, “With the Tide,” which celebrated Roosevelt’s achievements and life.

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If you’ve been studying Theodore Roosevelt for a while, you’ve likely come across one of our personal favorite Roosevelt quotations—“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing”—which comes from his 1916 pamphlet, The Keys of Success in Life.

In this instance, Roosevelt focused on the work, rather than the worker, so we were delighted to find another instance in his writings about “work worth doing” that focused on the individual behind the work, which is today’s #WednesdayWisdom.

Today’s quotation comes from a November 22, 1902 speech that Roosevelt delivered at the dedication of a new high school building in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: “The man or woman who does work worth doing is the man or woman who lives, who breathes that work; with whom it is ever present in his or her soul; whose ambition is to do it well and to feel rewarded by the thought of having done it well.”

We like this quotation because it describes Roosevelt himself so well—and what many admire most about him—his joie de vivre, as the French would say, or joy of life. Throughout his life, Roosevelt pursued his work with endless energy and passion.

Whatever he set his mind to, Roosevelt focused his full attention on that. He believed in working hard and playing hard, and many of our previous Wednesday Wisdom posts have dealt with work in some way like Roosevelt’s thoughts on honest work and really great work.

But what we see as unique about today’s Wednesday Wisdom is Roosevelt’s emphasis on the environment in which good work or work worth doing takes place. It reminds us of the concept of flow, popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970s long after Roosevelt’s death.

Someone who is in a state of flow is so entuned with the task at hand that it becomes a part of them. This description of flow was certainly true of Roosevelt, who spent the majority of his life in a state of flow. By making the activity in front of him autotelic, or its own intrinsic reward, Roosevelt experienced deepened happiness and what makes life worth living.

And in his speech in Philadelphia, he expresses the need for others to approach work in the same way. And if they didn’t, their work would suffer: “The man or woman in public or private life who ever works only for the sake of the reward that comes outside of the work, will in the long run do poor work.”

Today if we want to do meaningful work like Roosevelt did, we need to see our work in the same way he did: as part of our soul and as an intrinsic reward for doing it well.

Read Roosevelt’s entire speech in Philadelphia in which he praises the American education system and the development of future citizens here.

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While the speech is likely his most well-known instance of using the word “nationalism,” Roosevelt actually only used the word “nationalism” just four times, all in the span of two paragraphs near the end of the roughly six-thousand-word speech.

In three of those instances, Roosevelt used the word “new” before nationalism, arguing that the United States needed a “new nationalism” that put “national need before sectional or personal advantage.” As part of this new nationalism, Roosevelt emphasized the executive power “as the steward of public welfare.”

But Osawatomie, Kansas, was hardly the only time Roosevelt spoke or wrote about nationalism, although it was one of his more sensational speeches, at least from the perspective of the press. (You can read his handwritten response to various criticisms here in the digital library.)

Rather, Roosevelt reflected on nationalism and patriotism throughout his political career. And in this Monday’s Substack post, we’re going to delve into his conception of nationalism, looking at examples from other Roosevelt speeches and letters about national identity that are less well-known than his “New Nationalism” speech.

American Nationalism, or What Roosevelt Called “Americanism”

Many of the instances of Roosevelt’s other references to nationalism occur in the context of what he called “Americanism.” Roosevelt himself was staunchly American and argued against hyphenated Americans throughout his entire political career, in his own estimation. (He believed in only one kind of hyphenated American: American-American!)

Roosevelt thought immigrants should focus on their identity as Americans, rather than on the identity of their country of origin. As he argued in a 1918 manuscript later published in the Metropolitan, “We must all of us be Americans, and nothing but Americans . . .”

While this might be one of Roosevelt’s more succinct lines about Americanism, it was hardly his first, as can be seen by the examples below.

“We want to make our children feel, as they ought to feel, that the mere fact of being American citizens makes them better off than if they were citizens of any European country. This is not to blind us at all to our own shortcomings; we ought steadily to try to correct them; but we have absolutely no ground to work on if we don’t have a firm and ardent Americanism at the bottom of everything.” ~Letter to Osborne Howes on May 5, 1892

“We welcome the German or the Irishman who becomes an American. We have no use for the German or Irishman who remains such. We do not wish German-Americans and Irish-Americans who figure as such in our social and political life; we want only Americans, and, provided they are such, we do not care whether they are of native or of Irish or of German ancestry.” ~Article in The Forum, 1894

“Americanism is a question of spirit, conviction, and purpose, not of creed or birthplace.”~American Ideals, 1897

“[T]he one absolutely essential quality which we must bring to every problem and to every deed and without which true success is impossible, is intense Americanism – to be American in heart, in soul, in spirit, and in purpose.” ~Letter to Charles M. Howe on November 25, 1903

“Either a man is an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.” ~Speech delivered at Forest Hills, Long Island, July 4, 1917

Roosevelt’s promotion of Americanism is one of his most enduring legacies. As depicted in a memorial cartoon below, the American public viewed him first and foremost as an American.

Nationalism in Other Countries

But Roosevelt also discussed nationalism in other countries like in Japan and Greece. As he noted in a January 1907 letter to Anna Cabot Lodge, wife of his friend, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “The Japanese, unlike the Greeks, were able to transform their spirit of intense but particularistic patriotism into broad national patriotism, and so they have been formidable as a nationality in a way in which it was wholly impossible for the Greeks ever to be.”

Roosevelt even delivered an entire speech about nationalism in 1916 entitled “Nationalism in Literature and Art.” In this speech, Roosevelt examined the literature and art the French people had created by being “content to be a Frenchman and nothing else” and believed American creatives should approach their art in the same way.

As Roosevelt said, “France has helped humanity because France has remained French. There is no more hopeless creature from the point of view of humanity than the person calls himself a cosmopolitan, who spreads himself out over the whole world, with the result that spreads himself out so thin that he comes through in large spots.”

Although many times Roosevelt focused on political nationalism, here he emphasized cultural and social nationalism, arguing in favor of the unique gifts that different nations can provide by focusing on their identity, rather than on a more global perspective.

Roosevelt even said that a mere political nationalism wasn’t sufficient, and that Americans needed a cultural and social nationalism as well: “This means that here in America, if we do not develop a serious art and literature of our own, we shall have a warped national life.”

As Roosevelt concluded his speech by saying, “American work must smack of our own soil, mental and moral, no less than physical, or it will have little of permanent value.”

Nationalism as It Related to Internationalism

While Roosevelt often focused on Americanism and patriotism, he did occasionally comment on the connection between nationalism and internationalism, particularly in contexts like the Monroe Doctrine.

In 1896, he gave a speech about the Monroe Doctrine as police commissioner in which he stated, “The nation that is not imbued with nationalism is not going to do much toward elevating the standard of mankind in general.”

After the outbreak of World War I, however, Roosevelt mentioned the connection between nationalism and internationalism much more frequently.

In Roosevelt’s mind, a country had to focus on its nationalism first to order to be able to aid other nations. As he wrote in Fear God and Take Your Part, published in 1916, “Patriotism, so far from being incompatible with performance of duty to other nations, is an indispensable prerequisite to doing one’s duty toward other nations.”

Roosevelt likewise gave a speech in Lewiston, Maine, in 1916 where he made a similar argument, as his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson mentioned in her book, My Brother, Theodore Roosevelt: “The policies of Americanism and preparedness taken together mean applied patriotism. Our first duty as citizens of the nation is owed to the United States, but if we are true to our principles, we must also think of serving the interests of mankind at large.”

Countries and Peoples Excluded from Nationalism

Although Roosevelt is revered by both left and right for being distinctly American and promoting American values, his concept of nationalism also had a dark underbelly. Like other social Darwinists of the time, Roosevelt believed some people weren’t “ready” to self-govern and exist as a nation.

He felt this way in particular about the Philippines, which he delineated in a 1904 letter to Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot. As Roosevelt wrote, “The Filipino does not need in the least to be taught that he is to aspire to a national government.” Rather, in Roosevelt’s mind, the Filipinos needed to “practice justice to himself and to others.”

Roosevelt even believed that the Filipinos should be discouraged from trying to establish a nation or focusing on self-government. In fact, he considered discouraging self-government among the Filipinos as the best example of “American statesmanship in the islands.”

Roosevelt had similar beliefs about the Indigenous tribes in the United States and even tied American nationalism to frontier expansion, arguing in The Winning of the West, “Thus the Americans began their work of western conquest as a separate and individual people, at the moment when they sprang into national life.”

A Lifelong Passion to Promote Undivided American Nationalism

Although some aspects of Roosevelt’s understanding of nationalism don’t age well in the twenty-first century, there can be no doubt that he cared about American nationalism. And it was something he thought about until the day he died.

Just a month before his death, Roosevelt wrote George Haven Putnam in December 1918, “I do not care to go on any board or into any organization of any kind at present, more especially as I am spending all my endeavors to secure in this country a spirit of undivided American nationalism, based on an Americanism which disregards all questions of national origin and which treats this as a new nation . . .”

We’ll conclude with this memorial photograph from 1919 below that encapsulates Roosevelt’s sentiments about nationalism well: “Keep up the fight for Americanism.”

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