Teddy Roosevelt

Then I happened to have dealings with certain carpenters’ unions, and grew to have a great respect for the carpenter, for the mechanic type.

Then I was thrown much with farmers, and I made up my mind that it was the farmer upon whom the foundations of the commonwealth really rested—that the farmer was the archetypical good American.

Outside of college boys and politicians my first intimate associates were ranchmen, cow-punchers, and game-hunters, and I speedily became convinced that there were no other men in the country who were their equals.

It represents the ideal toward which it would be a good thing to approximate everywhere.

The greater the share they have in directing the national life, the better it will be for all of us.

To it more than to any other among the many causes which, in our American life, tell for religious toleration is due the impossibility of persecution of a particular creed.

When one of these professional impracticables denounces the attitude of decent men as “a hodge-podge of the ideal and the practicable,” he is amusingly unaware that he is writing his own condemnation, showing his own inability to do good…

In public life we need not only men who are able to work in and through their parties, but also upright, fearless, rational independents, who will deal impartial justice to all men and all parties.

We need the sound and healthy idealist; the theoretic writer, preacher, or teacher; the Emerson or Phillips Brooks, who helps to create the atmosphere of enthusiasm and practical endeavor.

We need men who try to be their poorer brothers’ keepers to the extent of befriending them and working with them so far as they are willing; men who work in charitable associations, or, what is even better, strive to get into touch with…

We need upright politicians, who will take the time and trouble, and who possess the capacity, to manage caucuses, conventions, and public assemblies.

We need clean, healthy newspapers, with clean, healthy criticism which shall be fearless and truthful.

We need the worker in the fields of social and civic reform; the man who is keenly interested in some university settlement, some civic club or citizens’ association which is striving to elevate the standard of life.

The analogues of the men whom Macaulay condemns exist in numbers in New York, and work evil in our public life for the very reason that Macaulay gives.

We see in New York sodden masses of voters manipulated by clever, unscrupulous, and utterly selfish masters of machine politics.

What he says of Scotland in the time of King James and King William is true, word for word, of civic life in New York two centuries later.

Macaulay’s eminently sane and wholesome spirit and his knowledge of practical affairs give him a peculiar value among historians of political thought.

Other decent men are so alienated by such conduct that in their turn they abandon all effort to fight for reform, believing reformers to be either hypocrites or fools.

They affect for evil a certain number of decent men in one way and a certain number of equally decent men in an entirely different way.

Neither did he advance the cause of human freedom.

He is not more virtuous; he is less virtuous.

It is not necessary to argue its iniquity with those who have advanced any great distance beyond the brigand theory of political life.

The abler he is, the more dangerous he is to the community.

But, in either case, his usefulness to the community has ceased.

What is far more serious, his power of doing useful service to the public is at an end.