Things Worth Remembering: The Man in the Arena

 At a time of widespread discontent with our elected officials, it’s worth recalling Theodore Roosevelt’s speech—about those with the courage to run for high office.

In just four- (now one) days, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will take part in the first presidential debate of 2024, in Atlanta.

A few days later, there will be elections in France, where President Emmanuel Macron will probably be humiliated; and the week after that, in the United Kingdom, where Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces a similar fate.

All of these events will be analyzed by people—reporters, commentators, pundits of varying intelligence—who are, in the main, utterly unqualified to judge the actions of the people in question. Unless you have seen or experienced the challenges of elected office up close, almost nobody can understand how lonely and different it all looks from there.

It was always like that, of course. But today, the often-overbearing amount of commentary and analysis that pours from the media and social media sometimes risks hollowing out the political process. Like a strangling fig, it seems almost at risk of destroying the tree itself.

Think of how unappealing we have made politics across the West. Who would want to live under such scrutiny or put up with the day-to-day brickbats that most of our elected leaders must endure? How much easier, by contrast, to sit on the sidelines and judge? 

(It’s easy to scoff at this and quip, “Those who seek power deserve to be scrutinized.” True! But when we make the process insufferable, when we debase and demean, and not simply scrutinize, those who run for office, we inevitably weed out promising would-be leaders for whom the opportunity cost is simply too great.)

One man who knew all about this was Theodore Roosevelt.

The then–vice president remains the youngest person ever to become president of the United States—in 1901, after President William McKinley was assassinated. 

T.R. went on to run in and win the 1904 election, but he chose not to run in 1908, leaving the door open for William Howard Taft to run on the Republican ticket.

Roosevelt’s political legacy is still fought over, as almost everybody’s is. But what cannot be doubted is that he was a brilliant campaigner and a superb orator as well as a great traveler. 

After leaving office, he embarked on an expedition to Africa and then a tour of Europe where, among much else, he met the Emperor Franz Joseph I in Vienna. Then, in April 1910, he arrived in Paris, where he gave the speech I want to focus on today.

I sometimes wonder how T.R. would have come across in our current media era. His vocal pitch was slightly higher than normal, and people would have more fun with this in our day than they did in his. He had a number of other strange mannerisms as a speaker. His voice (as some surviving recordings show) had a certain jerkiness, and sometimes veered into an unfortunate falsetto. 

But this was accompanied by his characteristic gesticulations—including his forceful punching of his right fist into his left palm. His audiences in Europe were spellbound.

By the time he arrived in Paris, he was probably the most famous man in the world. One journalist at the time observed: “When he appears, the windows shake for three miles around. He has the gift, nay the genius of being sensational.”

Besides possessing great fame, he was also capable of a remarkably profound rhetorical style. 

His speech, delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910, was entitled “Citizenship in a Republic,” but it has become known as “The Man in the Arena” speech ever since.

The speech was packed with important points. For instance, T.R. described how the United States and France were sister republics in a world of monarchical rule. The two countries, he said, represented “the most gigantic of all possible social experiments.” 

And he touched on French fears of German expansionism—fears that had been building since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and German unification in 1871, which made it clear the balance of power that had persisted in Europe for the better part of the nineteenth century was in grave danger of collapsing on itself. 

War, Roosevelt agreed, is a “dreadful thing.” But he added that, if that which is right and just is in question, then a strong nation must defend it “whatever the cost.”

However, it is not the former president’s discussion of foreign affairs or his theory of just war for which this speech is remembered. Rather, it is his very pointed and incisive dismantling of the “sneering” critic. These skeptics “of lettered leisure,” he notes, were found, most often, on campus. Strange how some things never change.

Then he had this to say: “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.”

And then he delivered this banger of a sentence, which should provide some consolation to those who have spent some time duking it out in the arena, whatever slings and arrows may have come their way:

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, and 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 the 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 know neither victory nor defeat.

 

It is worth recalling this while doom-scrolling images of furious protesters in Paris or London or across the whole of America—all of them heaping scorn on their elected representatives, denouncing the other side, evoking images of death and destruction.

Yes, there is plenty of criticism that can and should be directed at those with the ambition and ego to govern us. But we should be thankful that, for now, there are still people willing to run for office. We should be thankful that there are offices to run for, that elections matter, that the democratic process matters—its many illiberal critics, on the left and right, notwithstanding. 

What’s more, we might give some thought to what happens in the absence of that process—what happens when our discourse, our politics, succumb to the ugliness and violence of the street, and all that’s left is the mob and the “sneering” critic in his newsroom or ivory tower.

“There is little use,” T.R. observes in his speech, “for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.”