Quote of the Week: Theodore Roosevelt
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
But for all the pugnaciousness attached to Theodore Roosevelt, he was able to settle one war and prevent another.
He got the Nobel Peace Prize for settling the Russo-Japanese War on 1905. The peace treaty was signed at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine. About a month of negotiation.
And Roosevelt was never physically at the conference. All his work was behind the scenes.
He had done it before, settling the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902. We almost went to war with Germany over this, we would have had World War One in 1902. Roosevelt did it so quietly some historians didn’t even believe he’d done what he did.
Here’s the best paper I’ve seen on the subject.
https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2419&context=nwc-review
The Naval War College Review is free, just ask for it. I find it good reading, and I’m not military.
I really wish Theodore Roosevelt had won the Presidential election of 1912. I bet Roosevelt could have prevented World War One from happening in the first place. Easy to say “what if’s” with history, but heck, Roosevelt had done it twice.
I bet he could have done the hat trick.
He also considered banning college football due to an increase of fatal head injuries as the sport popularity grew in the pre-helmet days.
An earlier example of clumsy government overreach under the rationale of “public health.”
I don’t know that in particular, not disputing it at all.
He had his faults. He had guts, but not enough to stand up for the black soldiers in the Brownsville Incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville_affair
Dear God but I love this quote Doug. THANK YOU!
Cutting out and framing for my desk.
This is the genesis of the Vince Lombardi philosophy.
On February 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt’s wife, and his mother, both died on the same day.
Here’s his diary entry for that day.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/d9/e3/5fd9e3ffb8d195176bdb9513bf8bd5ab.jpg
Looking for a change, he went west. Sometime in the summer of 1884, he was in a town called (at the time) Mingusvile, Montana. He entered a barroom, where there was a local tough guy with a gun in each hand. He’d been shooting up the bar. When Roosevelt came in, the tough guy proclaimed Roosevelt was going to buy the next round of drinks. By report, Roosevelt was drinking coffee. The tough guy called Roosevelt “Four Eyes”, saying “Four Eyes is going to treat”.
Roosevelt tried to sort of hide inconspicuously in the room, hoping it would blow over. The tough guy followed him. Roosevelt tried to pass it off as a joke. The guy persisted with the “four eyes” and profanities, insisting that Roosevelt buy the next round.
Roosevelt stood up and gave the guy a right to the jaw, followed by a left, and another right.
The guy went down like a sack of potatoes. The guy had a cocked gun in each hand, and they went off as he went down, but no one was hit.
The locals carried the guy out of the bar, and the guy left town on a freight train the next day.
Roosevelt was on the Harvard Boxing Team, back when they had such a thing, I guess.
Ya gotta like a President that was in a bar fight.
Even better, a President who was in a bar fight, and won.