In consequence there tends to grow up a feeling of estrangement between different groups, of forgetfulness of the great primal needs and primal passions that are common to all of us.
Teddy Roosevelt
The Public Record
Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909. A member of the Republican Party, he was born on October 27, 1858, in New York. Roosevelt was a prominent leader of the Progressive Movement, advocating for domestic policies that included trust-busting, regulation of corporations, and conservation of natural resources. His administration is noted for significant reforms and the establishment of national parks and forests.
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In the cities the divergence of real interests is nothing like as great as is commonly supposed; but it does exist, and, above all, there is a tendency to forget or ignore the community of interest.
In most country districts at the present day not only have the people many feelings in common, but, what is quite as important, they are perfectly aware that they have these feelings in common.
In our old American life, and in the country districts where to-day the old conditions still largely obtain, there was and is no such sharp and rigid demarcation between different groups of citizens.
Chief among the latter is the way in which, in great industrial centres, the segregation of interests invites a segregation of sympathies.
You have taught us both by what you did on the tented fields, and by what you have done since in civic life, how this spirit of brotherhood can be made a living, a vital force.
You have taught us many lessons, and none more important than the lesson of brotherhood.
In our history there have been other victorious struggles for right, on the field of battle and in civic strife.
Other men by their lives or their deaths have kept unstained our honor, have wrought marvels for our interest, have led us forward to triumph, or warded off disaster from us; other men have marshaled our ranks upward across the stony…
It is well to gather here to show that we remember what has been done in the past by the Western pioneers of our people, and that we glory in the greatness for which they prepared the way.
It is a record of men who greatly dared and greatly did; a record of wanderings wider and more dangerous than those of the Vikings; a record of endless feats of arms, of victory after victory in the ceaseless strife waged against wild man…
More and more as the years go by this Republic will find its guidance in the thought and action of the West, because the conditions of development in the West have steadily tended to accentuate the peculiarly American characteristics of…
You and your fathers who built up the West did more even than you thought; for you shaped thereby the destiny of the whole Republic, and as a necessary corollary profoundly influenced the course of events throughout the world.
And of all this marvelous history perhaps the most wonderful portion is that which deals with the way in which the Pacific Coast and the Rocky Mountains were settled.
All the great colonizing powers, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Russia, managed their colonies primarily in the interest of the home country.
Even the most far-seeing statesmen, those most gifted with the imagination needed by really great statesmen, could not at first grasp what the process really meant.
As Lowell finely said, on this continent we have made new States as Old World men pitch tents.
When our people had began to settle in the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson himself accepted with equanimity the view that probably it would not be possible to keep regions so infinitely remote as the Mississippi and the Atlantic Coast in the…
Grave Senators and Representatives expressed dire foreboding as to the ruin which would result from admitting the communities growing up along the Ohio to a full equality with the older States; and when Louisiana was given Statehood, they…
More extraordinary still, even after independence was achieved, and a firm Union accomplished under that wonderful document, the Constitution adopted in 1789, we still see traces of the same feeling lingering here and there in our own…
It is our own success here in America that has brought about the complete alteration in feeling.
This is a task for which we need the finest abilities of the statesman, the student, the patriot, and the far-seeing lover of mankind.
Yet it is equally true that, while this power should exist, it should be used sparingly and with self-restraint.
If we can ensure the prosperity of these two classes we need not trouble ourselves about the prosperity of the rest, for that will follow as a matter of course.
In our eager, restless life of effort but little can be done by that cloistered virtue of which Milton spoke with such fine contempt.
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