Five-minute digest
Inaugural Address (Theodore Roosevelt)
Summary
Theodore Roosevelt had been President since McKinley's assassination in September 1901, and on 4 March 1905 he took the oath for a term he had won in a landslide. His address from the East Portico is about a thousand words long, one of the shortest of the twentieth century, and it never mentions a specific policy, party, or program. He begins with thanks "to the Giver of Good" and with a warning against vainglory. Americans laid their foundations on a new continent and are "the heirs of the ages," spared many penalties of older nations, so failure would be "our own fault." The second paragraph turns on its most remembered sentence: "Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us." Duties run in two directions, abroad and at home, and neither can be shirked. Toward other nations Roosevelt promises friendship and justice, adding that "justice and generosity in a nation" matter most when the strong show them, and that America wants "the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness." The third paragraph turns inward. Industrial growth has brought wealth and also new anxieties, "the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers," and the country is running the largest experiment ever made in governing a continent democratically. If it fails, "the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations." The close insists that new problems do not need a new spirit. The virtues that made the founders and Lincoln's generation great—practical intelligence, courage, hardihood, endurance, and devotion to a lofty ideal—must be shown "not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life." The speech carries the vocabulary of manly vigor and racial difference common in 1905, which students should read in its period, and it compresses the strenuous ethic of Roosevelt's longer speeches into a ceremonial charge.
Top Lessons
Gratitude that forbids vainglory
Roosevelt opens by saying his thanks are offered "in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength." Because Americans received their advantages, he argues, their success should produce "a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours." Gratitude here becomes the ground of obligation rather than of pride.
Justice from the strong
Roosevelt claims that justice and generosity "count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong." He wants a nation no weak country need fear and no strong power can bully. The paragraph is a compact ethic of power that his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, announced weeks earlier, would put to the test in the Caribbean.
Everyday virtue for a complex age
The problems are new, Roosevelt says, but the spirit needed to meet them is unchanged. He asks for practical intelligence, courage, hardihood, endurance, and devotion to a lofty ideal, shown "in the everyday affairs of life" as well as in crises.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us”
“self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn”
“To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent”
“We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization”
“We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away”
“We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness”
“But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong”
Medical Lens
Presidential inaugurals concern constitutional politics and national crisis; they have no medical content for this library's lens.