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Among US presidents, Teddy Roosevelt stands out. He's the only one to win both the Nobel Prize and the Medal of Honor. Plus, he busted up corporate trusts, fathered the Panama Canal, and set aside 230 million acres of land for public good, kickstarting the American conservation movement.
2014-09-24
Born in Manhattan in 1858, Roosevelt served as lieutenant colonel in the Spanish-American War, and then came back to New York to serve as governor.
In 1901, a 43-year-old Roosevelt became the youngest president after President McKinley was assassinated. He'd hold the office until 1909.
Roosevelt was also a master orator. We combed through his speeches, interviews, and letters for a few of his most blazing turns of phrase.
"To sit home, read one's favorite paper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men's doing."
"A soft, easy life is not worth living, if it impairs the fibre of brain and heart and muscle. We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage... For us is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out."
"I don't pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being."
"I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope — the door of opportunity — is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong."
"Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism ... We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth."
"... we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln."
"You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have avoided one gulf if you fall into the other."
[Address, May 1904]
On success
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"It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself."
"No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality."
"It is of little use for us to pay lip-loyalty to the mighty men of the past unless we sincerely endeavor to apply to the problems of the present precisely the qualities which in other crises enabled the men of that day to meet those crises."
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...
who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
Drake Baer was Business Insider's editor-at-large, working across the newsroom to help produce ambitious journalism. For two and a half years before that, Baer served as deputy editor, overseeing a team of 20+ reporters and editors who cover the future of work, real estate, and small business. The fast-paced team was behind some of Insider's major packages in the last few years, including a state-by-state look into unemployment during the first year of the pandemic and in-depth profiles of "niche famous" characters such as real estate media tycoon Brandon Turner and HR icon Johnny C Taylor. They shed new light on big names, like Joe Biden, America's imperfect leader. He also cultivated thesis-oriented ideas journalism, whether it be on why "'diversity' and 'inclusion' are the emptiest words in corporate America" or why it's actually a horrible time to buy a house. (No, really, it is.) Before editing, his byline as a reporter was on the masthead for Fast Company and New York Magazine, covering the many intersections of social science, business, and economics. Baer has interviewed some our time's leading minds, including philanthropist Bill Gates, FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver, NBA champion and investor Steph Curry, "growth mindset" psychologist Carol Dweck, the rapper Q-Tip, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, and the man who gave a name to "disruptive innovation," the late Clay Christensen.Baer has published two books, the most recent being Perception: How Our Bodies Shape Our Minds, with Dennis Proffitt. In 2014, New York Times bestselling author and Wharton professor Adam Grant highlighted his first book, Everything Connects, as one of the 12 business books to read that year. He has been featured as a speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, presented at TedX Princeton, and moderated many panels.
