Teddy Roosevelt on the character of the American people

PLUS: Ken Burns on why the Republican Party completely changed on this week's edition of The Warning podcast

Thanks to everyone for your good wishes and recommendations for our father-son road trip! We’re having an incredible time together. Late last night, we made it to Nelson, British Columbia, following a 13-hour drive from Mount Shasta, California.

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The air was fresh, crisp and scented by pine when I emerged from Caboose 27 — my room — under a cobalt blue sky after a perfect night’s sleep in Dunsmuir, California, at the Railroad Park Resort.

Caboose 27 was my room for the past two nights

I walked to get some coffee, and passed some friendly people that included a young couple with a toddler and a couple in their 60s. The wife was dominating her husband in a game of corn hole as we all waited for the refurbished dining car to open for breakfast.

The dining car at the Railroad Park Resort

Nobody seemed particularly amped up, or wishing for civil war. It was a nice morning.

Dunsmuir is a small town founded in the late 1890s. It quickly became the railroad and logging hub of northern California. It was a vital link in the economy connecting the Canadian and American west coast. Fifty-seven miles north of Redding, Dunsmuir is a part of California where most Californians have never been, and don’t think about very often. In fact, there is a long-standing history of secessionist movements in what the locals call “Nor Cal.” There have been proposals since the 1930s that have argued that the forgotten rural counties of northern California and eastern Oregon lack sufficient representation in their far-away state capitols and should become a new American state called Jefferson. The seriousness and intensity of the proposals have ebbed and flowed over time, and according to Vinnie, who was running the dining car, it exists mostly as a merchandising and attention-seeking ploy now.

Vinnie was the manager of the dining car, who surprised me more than I did him when he greeted me by saying, “You’re Steve Schmidt.”

I admitted that I was and met a new friend. I was lucky enough to spend a few minutes talking to his wife Emily, and got a fascinating history lesson about a part of the country that is sublimely beautiful, ecologically fragile, economically stressed and filled with good people.

Vinnie toured me around the dining car. It is filled with black and white pictures, some dating from the 1860s, 70s and 80s. It told the story of California, the American West, manifest destiny, ecocide, environmental preservation, and the rise and fall and ebbs and flows of the industries that have sustained this region, made it prosperous in good days, and impoverished it in bad.

Before Europeans systematically arrived on the North American continent a mere 531 years ago, great Indigenous nations had lived in harmony with nature for 600 generations. They were the first to see what I was lucky enough to see again, and to show my son for the very first time. The mountain has always been there, or perhaps more accurately, it has been there for as long as there have been people awed by its magnificence.

Once, an American president came to the mountain, and like my son, was awestruck by it.

The view of Mount Shasta from Lake Siskiyou

Today, the mountain is known as Shasta, but the native people of the region called it “Withassa.” They regarded it as the center of the Earth and the beginning of creation.

When the president of the United States came to Dunsmuir on May 20, 1903 – 120 years ago – he was 43 years old.  He talked about character, and specifically, the character of the American people.

Compare the message of that day with the appalling spectacle of the FOX News MAGA debate 120 years later, where it has become commonplace for extremist politicians to insult California and degrade the dignity of citizenship. For the obtuse amongst us, the type of person who deserves public contempt that the president describes was in abundance on the debate stage. It was an unworthy event. “Freedom” is a nonsense word without duty and obligation attached to it. The American people do not deserve their politicians — or do they?

What would President Teddy Roosevelt say today? No doubt he would say the same thing. The times, not the people, have changed. Our failing politicians should remember the American people are as great as they ever were. Citizenship isn’t a burden. It’s a glorious heritage and privilege. Let’s all practice it.

Here is what Teddy Roosevelt said on that day 41 years before his eldest son would lead the first American combat troops ashore on D-Day:

My friends: It Is a great pleasure to greet you today. I have enjoyed the last two hours traveling up by this beautiful river and getting my first glimpses of Shasta. It has been a very great pleasure to come here to this state beside the Pacific Ocean and see your people. I think I can say that I came to California a pretty good American, and I go away a better one. (Applause.)

Glad though I have been to see your wonderful products, your plains and your mountains, your rivers, to see the great cities springing up, most of all have I enjoyed meeting the men and women to whom we owe what has been done with mine and railroad and lumbering camp and irrigated fields with the ranch and the counting-house, the men and women who have made California what she is.

Almost everywhere I have been greeted by men who are veterans of the Civil War, or else by men who came here in the early pioneer days; and where that has not been the case I have been met by those who are their worthy successors, who are doing now the kind of work that is worth doing. I pity no man because he has to work. If he is worth his salt he will work. I envy the man who has work worth doing and does it well; and surely no men alive are more worthy of admiration than those men to whom it is given to build up a giant commonwealth like this. It is the fact of doing the work well that counts, not the kind of work, as long as that
work is honorable.

I speak to citizens of a community which has reached its present pitch of prosperity because they have done each his duty as his lines were laid.

To the true American nothing can be more alien than the spirit of envy or of contempt for another who leading a life as a decent citizen should lead It. In this country you have room for every honest man who spends his life in honest effort; we have no room either for the man of means who in a spirit of arrogant baseness looks down upon the man less off, or for the other man who envies his neighbor because their neighbor happens to be better off.

I used the word envy myself just now, but I did not use it in a bad sense. If you use envy in the ordinary sense of the word Its existence implies a fooling of inferiority in the man who feels it, a feeling that a self-respecting man will be ashamed to have. If the man is a good American and is doing his work squarely he need not envy anybody, because he occupies a position as no one else in any other country, in any other age has occupied; and because we hold our citizenship so high, because we feel and have the right to feel satisfaction with what our people have done, we should also feel that the only spirit in which to regard any other man who does well, to a spirit of kindly regard and good will, it he set squarely; if he does not then I think but ill of you if you do not regard him as a man to fool at least the public scorn, public contempt.

It is of course a perfectly trite saying that in our country it is so necessary to have decency, honesty, self-restraint, in the average citizen as in a republic, in a democracy,* for successful self-government is founded upon that high average of citizenship among our people; and America has gone on as she has gone on because we have had that high average of citizenship. Our government is based upon the rule of a self-respecting majority. Our government has so far escaped the thin dangers of the elder republics, government by a plutocracy or government by a mob, either of them absolutely an affront to Americen Ideals. It has been a great pleasure to see you, I haven't any special word of preaching to say, because after all, men and women of California, I can only preach what in substance you have practiced, what our people have practiced in the making and carrying on of this government From the days of Washington to the days of Lincoln we went onward and upward because the average American was of the stuff that made the nation go onward and upward. To be dragged up, we have got to push ourselves up.

No law that was devised can give wisdom to the fool, courage to the coward, strength to the weakling. We must have those qualities in they are not in us they cannot be gotten out of us.

Of course all you have it to do is to compare what other nations have done with governments founded as ours, the same type of constitution, the same type of law, which nevertheless have failed, have produced chaos because they did not have the right type of citizen back of the law, the right type of citizen to work out the destiny of the nation under and through the law.

Of course we need the right law; we need even more the honest and fearless enforcement of the law, enforcement in a spirit of absolute fairplay to all men, showing favoritism to none, doing justice to each. We need such laws, such administration of the laws but most of all we need to keep up that for the lack of which nothing else can atone in any people -- the average standard of citizenship, so that the average man shall have certain fundamental qualities that come under many different heads, but under three especially in the first place, that he shall have at the foundation of his character the moral forces, the forces that make a man a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a man who deals fairly by his fellows, whether he works with them on the railroad or in the shops or in the factories, whether he deals with them as a doctor, whether he grows the products of the solid farmer, a miner, a lumberman, and fulfilled the first requisites of citizenship.

We cannot afford in our republic to draw distinctions between our citizens save on that line of conduct. There are good men and bad men everywhere. All of you know them in private life; all of you have met them. You have got to have decency and morality in the first place, and of course that is not enough. It does not begin to be enough. No matter how decent a man is, if he is afraid he is no good, in addition to the quality of self-mastery, self-restraint, decency you have got to have the quality of hard work, courage, manliness, the quality which if the people who founded this state had lacked there never would have been a state founded here. You have got to have the men who can hold their own in work, and if necessary in fighting. You have got to have those qualities in addition, and you have got to have others still. I do not care how brave a man is and how decent he is, if he is a natural born fool you can do very little with him.

In addition to decency, in addition to courage, you must have the saving grace of common sense; the quality that enables any man to tell what he can do for himself and what he can do for his neighbor, for the nation.

Sometimes each of us has the feeling that if he has to choose between the fool and the knave he will take the knave, because he can reform him perhaps, and he cannot reform the fool; and even hardness of heart is not much more destructive in the long run than softness of head.

In our life what we need is not so much genius, not so much brilliancy, as the ordinary commonplace everyday qualities which a man needs in private life, and which he needs just as much in public life, in coming across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the thing that has struck me most is that fundamentally wherever one goes in this broad country, a good American is a good American. (Applause.)

I thank you with all my heart for coming here, and I wish you all good fortune in the future as in the past. (Cheers and applause.)

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This week on The Warning podcast

It was an absolute honor to talk to Ken Burns, famed documentarian and national treasure, to talk about the importance of telling America’s story. In this brief clip, we discuss what changed in the Republican party in the last 10-15 years and how we can fix it.

If you’d like to listen to the full conversation ad-free, you can upgrade to the Premium podcast here: