Citizenship, Character, and Leadership: Guidance from the Words of Theodore Roosevelt
Publication: Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 13, Issue 4
Abstract
Most people would agree that a good leader of the 21st century must first be a person of character and integrity. Too often, however, many do not follow through on the need of a leader to be a good citizen or realize that he or she practices in a profession that is ethically bound to promote the health, safety, and welfare of the public. One of the greatest speeches ever given on this subject, in the eyes of the author, is one delivered by Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in 1910 titled “Citizenship in a Republic.” This paper takes the words Roosevelt spoke in the early twentieth century and shows how they apply in the early 21st century. The civil engineer can learn from them.
Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character—character that does and dares as well as endures, character that is active in the performance of virtue no less than firm in the refusal to do aught that is vicious or degraded.—Theodore Roosevelt (1900)
Introduction
Theodore Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 27, 1858, just prior to the Civil War. As a child he was sickly and asthmatic. He was fascinated with the animal kingdom and natural history all around him. At the urging of his father, he started to build up his physique and began living what he called the “strenuous life.”
Roosevelt’s father, whom he admired greatly, died suddenly during Teddy’s sophomore year at Harvard. He graduated from Harvard in 1880. In 1882 he began a long career as a writer with his first book, The Naval War of 1812. Upon graduation he was elected an assemblyman for New York City, and he quickly thereafter rose to leadership in the Republican Party, then in the minority. He later wrote that he had risen “like a rocket.”
The second tragedy in Roosevelt’s life came when his wife and mother died on the same day in 1884. After this he went West. He purchased and ran a cattle ranch in North Dakota for a period, further living the strenuous life. In 1886 he married Edith Carow, a childhood friend. They had five children in addition to his daughter from his first marriage, Alice.
A few years after he remarried, Roosevelt took a seat on the Civil Service Commission. He then served as New York City police commissioner and, just prior to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, as undersecretary of the Navy. He was a prolific writer in this period and authored many acclaimed books, including a six-volume set titled The Winning of the West. He left the Navy position to raise and lead a cavalry unit, called the Rough Riders, in the Spanish-American War. His “crowded hour” came with the charge on San Juan Hill, for which he was many years later, in 2001, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
He returned to New York after the war, was elected governor in the fall of 1898, and promoted, among many things, the expansion of the Erie Canal into a barge canal. In 1899 he gave a well-known speech titled “The Strenuous Life” in which he stated,
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. (Roosevelt 1899)
Roosevelt was tapped to be President William McKinley’s vice president in 1902. After McKinley’s assassination in the fall of 1902, Roosevelt succeeded him as president. He was then the youngest man to occupy the White House. For the next 7 years he was a force in the national and international world. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for arbitrating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. He promoted the building of the Panama Canal and visited its construction site in 1906, making him the first president to travel outside of the United States during his term. He was called the “Conservation President” and set aside huge areas as national parks, historical parks, and forests. He declined to run for reelection in 1908.
He then took a tour of Africa hunting wild game and sent 11,397 specimens back to the Smithsonian Institution. He added on a tour of Europe, during which he met most of the leaders of England and the Continent and delivered his famous speech in Paris at the Sorbonne in April 1910.
The Sorbonne was one of the leading institutions of higher learning in the world, and its leadership had invited Roosevelt to give a talk on a topic of his choice. He chose as his topic “Citizenship in a Republic” because France and the United States were the only republics in the world at the time. Roosevelt’s entire life led him to the moment when he took the stage to deliver this talk on the importance of character, strength, and integrity. No person before him or after him played such a role in shaping the destiny of a country.
Roosevelt expressed in this speech the ideas he had preached for years in papers, such as “Character and Success,” published in The Outlook in 1900, and in talks, such as his “Strenuous Life” speech to the Hamilton Club in Chicago in 1899.
Citizenship in a Republic
Leadership is a skill learned by observing those who have shown by their actions that they are able to inspire and motivate others to bond together to achieve a desirable result. Leadership can also be learned by reading the words of historical leaders and studying their actions and the impact they have had on their community and country. One leader worth studying is Theodore Roosevelt, who, along with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, is enshrined at Mt. Rushmore. Having read most of what Roosevelt said and did, and many earlier biographies about him, the author is convinced that the 26th president is one of the leaders who made America both great and strong.
When reading Roosevelt’s Sorbonne speech, don’t forget that he was speaking to an audience of French people whose path to democracy had been far different from his and whose culture had developed over a much longer period. Although this is true, try to imagine that Roosevelt (pictured in Fig. 1) is speaking to you from across the kitchen table, telling you about your people, country, and values and urging you to pass those ideas and values along to anyone with whom you come in contact in your community and profession. Roosevelt’s presence among Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln on Mt. Rushmore (Fig. 2) indicates the key role he played in the development of the United States.
LM.1943-5630.0000237/asset/b0bed430-75b1-4976-bd4b-826a4601f4ff/assets/images/large/figure1.jpg)
LM.1943-5630.0000237/asset/6b79e80c-d8f6-4246-ae89-f61125c53f89/assets/images/large/figure2.jpg)
Following are the author’s comments on Roosevelt’s Sorbonne talk (Roosevelt 1910). Roosevelt’s speech is quoted in italics, and the author discusses how this great man’s words can serve as a guide to the practice of civil engineering and to being a better citizen in our republic.
Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thralldom of the Middle Ages.
One of the first rules of public speaking is to make a connection with your audience. In his opening, Roosevelt recalls the greatness of France over the centuries. He also emphasizes his awareness of the many individuals who made France what it was. When we make presentations to various clients and public agencies today, a knowledge of the history of those organizations will enable us to better understand their wants, goals, and values, and with that understanding, we will be better able to serve them and the public at large.
This was the most famous university of medieval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at a time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, woodchoppers, and fisher folk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which were once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by the primeval qualities, which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.
Here Roosevelt describes how, through hard work and perseverance, the United States arrived as a world power. He makes clear, however, that a different culture was required to convert the land from its primeval state to a successful, advanced industrial state. At the time of Roosevelt’s speech, education was not given a high priority. Our schools, colleges, and universities were slow to develop. Your clients and the public should be aware of where your company came from, how it became the going concern it is today, and how that growth—based upon what you learned during your early years—allows you to better meet their needs. In other words, know your history and the actions that made you successful. Pledge that you will act on the client’s behalf in the same manner. Marcus Garvey, a well-known twentieth-century Jamaican orator, reiterated this theme when he said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots” (Garvey 1907).
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farmland; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and their children and children’s children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.
With this paragraph, Roosevelt describes how the rapid change in environment and culture during the Industrial Revolution resulted in a mixed bag of vices and virtues. He points out that this change happened much more quickly in the United States than it did in Europe. You should be aware of the pluses and minuses of rapid growth in your company and of how, unless steps are taken to address the potential pitfalls of rapid change, your success can be fleeting. Consulting and contracting firms can lose sight of their values as they expand; new staff may not share the values that made the firm successful in the past. In other words, a culture of excellence can easily be replaced with a culture of profits at any cost.
As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is roundabout in the New World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this is where I speak today. It is a mistake for any nation to merely copy another; but it is even a greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from one another and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.
Here Roosevelt encourages his audience to build the future on “loftier ideals” and the wisdom of the past and its leaders and scholars, such as Gamaliel, a Jewish leader and teacher of the Sanhedrin, and Paul, a student of Gamaliel and apostle of Christ. He is quick to point out however, that while it is important to know the past, it is folly to blindly copy it in a different time and under different circumstances. Today this can be interpreted to mean that although it is important to know what you and others have done in the past to design and build great public improvements, that knowledge should not prevent a firm from reinventing itself and improving on the past. Some may be tempted, with the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) and a vast library of past drawings to copy, neither to look to the future nor to incorporate in their work recent changes that could—and should—shape the thinking of their firms and enable them to better serve clients, employees, and the general public.
Today I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are great citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as ours—an effort to realize its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with great responsibilities alike for good and evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure of despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or very few men, the quality of the leaders is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nations for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness.
In countries ruled by kings, emperors, and dictators (France had seen them all over the centuries), Roosevelt notes, greatness depends directly on the character and abilities of the leader. France, at the time of this speech, was in its Third Republic, which had begun in 1875. Since the founding of the Third Republic, France had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War and would, in only a few years, fight in World War I against the Germans and their allies. Leadership is the same in engineering. A firm can succeed upon skills of the chief executive officer (CEO) for a period in a “do as I say” and “here are your marching orders” manner. Long-term success, however, requires that the CEO, no matter how talented he or she is, to nurture, encourage, and challenge his or her colleagues to dream up and embrace new ideas. The CEO should create a collaborative culture in the firm.
But with you and us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, everyday affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.
Now Roosevelt emphasizes that each of us must be a good citizen if we want our republic to succeed. For average people to keep up their commitment to the country, they must have good leaders to aide them in their quest to become better citizens. In his 1961 inaugural address, President John Kennedy (2001) made a similar point: “In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty.” The same holds true for the civil engineering profession and for the culture that leaders of engineering firms foster among their employees or colleagues. Only through a propagation of strong values can a firm succeed. One of the greatest functions a leader must serve is to lead not only in knowledge but also in ethical behavior. What matters is not what leaders say but how they themselves adhere to a clearly stated code of values. In other words, it is important to maintain integrity at all times, even when it may not contribute to the bottom line of the company. To do this, a leader must focus on people, innovate, originate and develop ideas, inspire trust, have a long-term perspective, ask the questions what and why, and challenge the status quo. Surveys of companies performed over a long period have found that firms that have earned the trust of their employees outperformed other firms by a large margin. Our firms must have all their people, like the children in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, above average and all their leaders well above average.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience today; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special advantages; all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their—your—chances of useful service are at an end.
Here Roosevelt includes the famous words of St. Luke: “to whom much has been given, much is [or should be] expected.” He warns the people he is talking to, all of whom are highly educated, that if they use their education only to sneer at or criticize those who actually do the work, then they deserve the contempt of their fellow citizens. As engineers, through our education and training, we have been placed in a position of trust by our fellow citizens to ensure their health, safety, and welfare to the best of our ability. In other words, we should to do our absolute best, at all times and in all things that we undertake at home, in our community and in our work.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as a cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not as the possessor would feign to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
Roosevelt warns that there is a temptation for the academic, a person of “lettered leisure,” to become a critic of the work of others even though he has not attempted to accomplish what others are doing or trying to do. Once a person starts down this path, it becomes a way of thinking and reacting to the world. Roosevelt further warns that unless good citizens take the path of hard work and shun the life of leisure, they are not contributing to the community. Practicing engineers have taken the path of hard work in engineering school and licensing examinations; they have designed and built projects of extreme complexity. These achievements are not usually commended by the public and frequently go unnoticed. Engineers’ “noble efforts” result only in the satisfaction of knowing that they have done their best for their client, profession, company, and society.
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. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of 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. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”
The first part of this passage is perhaps the most quoted of all statements by Roosevelt. Throughout his career he faced naysayers, people who said things could not be done or who criticized him when he made big decisions, such as to build the Panama Canal. His comment about those who know “neither victory nor defeat,” however, is equally instructive. Here he places his shame on the person of cultivated taste who does little but criticize the work of others and who always chooses the path of inaction when times or conditions are not perfect for the task. He extols “the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.” Engineers and their work are frequently challenged by people who have made careers, not of doing something, but of keeping others from doing something. It is important that the engineer understands the character of this type of person and makes arguments so persuasive that clients and public officials can see beyond the shortsightedness of those who do not share the desire to “accomplish something.” No one likes to be criticized, but there is a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. The engineer must be able to accept constructive criticism while challenging the criticism for criticism’s sake. Let it never be said that engineers are among those “whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion.” Let us instead be the ones “who succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength.” Reading the words of successful early civil engineers leads us to appreciate the vision they had of a better future for all citizens and how that better future could come only by meeting, and overcoming, challenges they faced.
France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most important lessons is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the “freemasons of fashion” have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvelous instrument of precision, French prose, had turned toward France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland’s doom and the vengeance of Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish hosts where stricken at Roncesvalles. Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character—the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides book learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, everyday qualities and virtues.
After extolling the compatibility of learning, war, and statesmanship, Roosevelt gets into his “strenuous life” argument: it is important that good citizens keep both their bodies and minds strong. While commending those in the audience on their learning, he urges them to remember “that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution.” In other words, the greatest level of scholarship does not make a good citizen, unless that citizen also has virtues such as common sense. The engineer of the 21st century must—I repeat, must—also have these virtues, or solid qualities, to go along with his or her training in order to be a good citizen. Calvin Coolidge (1933) said,
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
These values, persistence and determination, were two that Roosevelt was speaking about.
Such ordinary, everyday qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision. In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is a war. The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this is whether the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be, Is it right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must be “Yes,” whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Roosevelt here emphasizes that good citizens must do their share of work and fight for their freedom and country when needed. He challenges peaceniks who are against war as a principle, asks some simple questions about war and peace, and also acknowledges that war is a dreadful thing, whether “it is right to prevail” in order for “the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled.” Although this paragraph is not directly applicable to engineering, it does seek to impress on us that our responsibility as citizens is to fight if otherwise our nation would be forced to submit to wrong. Like St. Augustine, Roosevelt believed that there is such a thing as a “just war.” In the practice of civil engineering, on an almost daily basis, we are required to fight “just wars” in order to provide our fellow citizens with the infrastructure they need to survive and prosper. Although we may not use conventional weapons in our fight, we do use knowledge and common sense. We must be able to say at the end of our lives, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” As an engineer, this means that you have done your best throughout your career and were guided by a code of ethics and a strong sense of service to others.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that chief of blessings for any nations is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in biblical times and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If that is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.
Roosevelt, with his six children, believed that having children was a responsibility of all good citizens and that “if the failure is due to the deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other.” He states, “Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state.” His thoughts are the thoughts of a nineteenth-century man and are out of step with those of many people of the 21st century, who are from the “me, me, me” generation rather than the “we, we, we” generation that Roosevelt speaks of with so much passion. The philosophy is the same as that expressed in the Boy Scout oath, in which the scout promises to do his best to keep himself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight so that he can help other people at all times. Today what has been called “the Greatest Generation,” the men and women who fought for freedom in World War II, is dying off. These people did not shrink from pain, effort, and risk but instead heeded Roosevelt’s call to be the Good Citizen. Engineers, to do their best, have to prioritize their time and effort to provide for their families, clients, employers, the public, and finally, themselves. At times they must endure pain and take risks for the greater good of the republic.
Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in his movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.
Using a structural engineer’s analogy, Roosevelt says that you cannot build a fine superstructure without having a firm foundation. This foundation is based upon the degree to which each person becomes a good parent as well as a good citizen. All engineers should be aware that their first responsibility is to their family. Although it may seem like a good idea to work many long hours each week to get ahead, as the old saying goes, no one on their deathbed has ever said, “I wish I had worked longer hours.” Balancing family, work, and service to others is difficult, but this balance is something we should all strive to accomplish.
Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him a real benefit, of real use, and such is often the case, why, then he does become an asset of real worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places cannot be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will only come from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things that can be done in life. 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. But the man who, having far surpassed the limits of providing for the wants; both of the body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community: that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.
Even though Roosevelt came from a well-to-do family and had many wealthy friends, he frequently went up against the wealthiest men in the country in support of what he considered the public good. Any person or engineer who is in it just for the money and not for the service he or she can provide for the general good, is in Roosevelt’s eyes, an unworthy citizen of the community. Engineers in their careers must strive to do as much good for as many people as possible. In so doing, they will, ultimately, be rewarded appropriately.
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property. In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts—the gift of moneymaking and the gift of oratory. Moneymaking, the money touch I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to put false values on things, it merely makes him power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not that gift at all, and must merely rely on their deeds to speak for them; and unless oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The phrasemaker, the phrasemonger, the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.
Roosevelt himself was a great and prolific writer and, according to the record, a great orator or public speaker. He knew that pretty words, well chosen, had the potential to sway people’s attitudes and lamented those who used persuasion without common sense and good values. Engineers, owing to their education and experience, frequently must make presentations to clients, public agencies, and others, and must, according to the code of ethics, use knowledge and skill to enhance human welfare and the environment and be honest and impartial, serving with fidelity the public, their employers, and their clients. To do this, they must develop their communication skills so that they can, with knowledge and thoroughness, explain technical and commonsense solutions to problems we all face. If the engineer fails in preparing to make the case, say, for infrastructure sustainability, someone less prepared to do so will make the case. Although many engineers do not consider themselves orators in Roosevelt’s sense, they must become effective public speakers. Their listeners should believe that they are speaking from the heart and in a commonsense manner, based upon education, knowledge, integrity, courage, sobriety, and right understanding.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the orator’s latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright. He can do, and often does, great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations. In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that they ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and that he also must have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.
Roosevelt had a lifelong love-hate relationship with journalists. He admired the so-called muckrakers who agreed with him and helped him advance his message and goals. However, he despised those who disagreed with him and even at times sued them for libel. Journalists in the 21st century are not much different from those in Roosevelt’s time, but the advent of television and the Internet has given them the potential to affect public attitudes to a much larger degree. Many present-day journalists, unfortunately, seem biased in their attitudes and positions and will go to great extremes to convince others that they are correct, even when their opinions are based upon surmise rather than facts. Engineers practice in an environment in which their works are subject to both positive and negative news articles and opinion pieces. Some examples of controversial topics that involve engineers are nuclear energy, fracking, mining, highway construction, and airport construction. Journalists have lined up against all these issues. It behooves engineers to lead a debate based on facts and test results. They should stress the positive impacts that would, or could, result from the adoption of projects for the public good. Everything engineers do has some negative impact on someone, and it is the responsibility of the engineer to acknowledge that fact while showing the far greater positive impact of the project for the many. It is important, however, that the engineer not sink to the depths of some journalists, and instead stick only to the facts and work all the harder to negate the slings and arrows of the media. As Roosevelt suggested, engineers must work hard, fight hard, and hold their own in the public arena to be an efficient citizen.
But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in a career of moneymaker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and farseeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty. The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good citizenship is not good citizenship if only exhibited in the home. There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the State, and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where the effort is made to carry on the free government in a complex industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but noxious.
Here Roosevelt discusses the role the good citizen must play in the “state.” Involvement in the state is a responsibility of every citizen, and paraphrasing Roosevelt and others, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for the good citizen to do nothing. Involvement by engineers will require them to sometimes get out of their comfort zone of books, computers, and specifications and get into the political arena. Engineers can start at the local level, on town or city boards or committees. They will have the greatest impact, however, if they become involved in state legislatures or even at a national level. It is well known that the greatest numbers of legislators are lawyers who sometimes see public service as a means to advance their legal careers. Although they are competent in some areas, these lawyers are not trained to address many of the problems facing our country, such as energy, infrastructure, and transportation issues. If engineers continue to remain above the political fray, they are, by doing nothing, helping evil—or at least misguided legislators—to shape the future of the free government we as Americans desire.
The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impractical visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the embittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcoming, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrasemaker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him when he does work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called “practical” men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body of politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.
Roosevelt here invokes the adage “Never let the best be the enemy of the better.” In other words, a half loaf is sometimes better than no loaf. Roosevelt urges us to achieve the very best for our clients and the public but also notes that sometimes conditions are not ripe for the best. In those cases, we should accept something less than we would like. As engineers, we can design into a project means by which we can achieve a desired goal in the future, when conditions might be better. Our guide should be “Good, better, best, never let it rest until our good is better and our better best.”
We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This everyone who is not cursed with the pride of the closest philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our closet phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree, but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of the failure to agree on terminology. It is not good to be a slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the State, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of today should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool user more and more into the tool owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immortality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.
Roosevelt’s words of 1910 ring true in 2013 regarding the balance of individualism and collective actions. Roosevelt believed that the only thing the state should do for its citizens is what they absolutely cannot do for themselves. He acknowledges that it is difficult to find the point at which the state should step in to help. A quote by Ronald Reagan (1987) is of interest on this subject: “How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.” There may not be a direct link to engineering in the answer to the question, how much should the state do for its people? But there is little doubt that a shift toward socialism and away from free enterprise in the United States, at least in the author’s opinion, would move us toward “the ash heap of history,” where communism now resides. There is also little doubt that many of the projects engineers undertake, such as building roads, airports, water and sewage projects, and solid waste disposal, are at the behest of some level of government, and these government projects are what Roosevelt was referring to in his drainage and water supply example. Engineers also undertake projects funded by private enterprise and capital, such as housing, building, mining, and oil exploration. The country is still feeling its way in drawing the line between big government and individual effort and free enterprise. The words of Thomas Jefferson (1802) offer some guidance—or at least a warning as to what can happen when government assumes a large a role in our lives: “I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their blood, and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, at the end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):
“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all—constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.”
We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of right, opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes.
To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are farsighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of leveling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try and carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.
Lincoln, as Roosevelt, was quotable and is one of the most written-about individuals in our country’s history. Both men argued that the role of the state’s leaders was to create an environment where all have an equal opportunity to succeed by promoting the general welfare. It was not, in their opinion, the role of the state to make people equal by taking from the successful to give to the unsuccessful. Roosevelt warned of “the evil of leveling down.” Both he and Lincoln believed in a rugged, Yankee individualism, or a desire to succeed based upon education and hard work. Success in engineering should be based upon the quality and cost of our works, and any rewards that come from that work will separate the quality firms from those who think of short term and bottom line only. In the long term, only those engineers and engineering companies that embrace quality, service, and integrity will survive. All will not be equal, nor should they.
Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject it. There are plenty of good men calling themselves Socialists with whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it, without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it has been worthwhile to take one step, this does not in the least mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the extremists were wise.
The political landscape in 1910 was not much different from that in 2013. Republicans and Democrats then, as well as now, are firmly dug in to their positions, and true bipartisanship is, and was, rare. Too many are thinking only about the next election and which lobby they can stroke to get financial support. Roosevelt advocates a true bipartisanship, in which all ideas can be explored and, when they promote the general welfare, tried. He is quick to point out, however, that even ideas that have been tried should be terminated if they do not promote the general welfare. Too many politicians and executives today fear admitting that they made a mistake and, based upon experience, changing course. Engineers have made many mistakes in the past, and like most humans, they are reluctant to admit those mistakes. Examples include urban highways, bridges that failed, tunnels that collapsed or leaked, landfills that polluted groundwater supplies, and urban sprawl. In the early part of the 21st century, there is still an adversarial relationship between environmentalists and preservationists and civil engineers. As long as this continues, the greater good will not be achieved. Compromise is needed, but that compromise should not result in a do-nothing action. The engineer must strive to understand the motivations and arguments of adversaries and explain plans clearly and truthfully, while also listening to find any possible points of agreement. Capitulation is not compromise and should be avoided at all costs in order to promote the public good. We have the responsibility to fight the good fight and not let the best be the enemy of the better.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the most to be the persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to a nation, or substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily in the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide primarily along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need today than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.
It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same, as the chasm between those who have and those who have less, despite Roosevelt’s words, has widened over time. Roosevelt implores us to strive to achieve on our own merits, to admire those who have achieved more, and to help those who need our help in advancing their success. It has been said, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Most engineers have achieved a degree of success and are members of one of the most respected professions. Because, as mentioned earlier, we have received much, much is expected of us to promote programs that help others help themselves. If we contribute to an us-against-them (whomever “them” might be) atmosphere, Roosevelt says, our republic is doomed. Martin Luther King (1963) expressed the same sentiment in his “I Have Dream” speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We should all respect others on the basis of the content of their character. President Calvin Coolidge (1912) said on this subject, “Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.”
In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or antireligious, democratic or antidemocratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.
Today this “gloomy bigotry” is being acted out in the Middle East, where Sunni Muslims are at constant war with Shia Muslims and the radical jihadists are at war with all who are not Muslims. Many past wars were triggered by similar beliefs. Engineers are now engaged in a global economy. They have offices around the world that are staffed by men and women of all faiths and beliefs. The good leader is, or should be, able to recognize differing social, religious, and political beliefs and maximize the contributions each team member makes toward the success of the firm. When cliques based upon any belief other than the promotion of the general good and welfare are allowed to exist, internal conflicts will result and will prevent both the success of the firm and the promotion of the general welfare.
Of one man in especial, beyond anyone else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or antireligious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says that he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number of years ago I was engaged in cattle ranching on the great plains of the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each one was determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on a roundup an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a fire, took out a cinch ring, heated it in the fire; and then the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to him, “It So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.” In another moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!” To which he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.” I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.” He jumped up and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.” And I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal from me.”
Here Roosevelt makes the point that if you are not honorable in your dealings with others and do not adhere to your integrity in small matters, chances are you will not be fair and moral in larger matters. Integrity has been defined as a rigid adherence to a code of ethics or values. In other words, if you believe it is okay to steal small things from your company, you might easily take the next step and steal big things, not only from your company but from your associates or family. President John Kennedy’s famous command, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” (Kennedy 2001), is a follow-up to Roosevelt’s words. Both Roosevelt and Kennedy emphasized the importance of giving back to your country rather than trying only to get as much as you can from your country. This type of behavior has a new name—situational ethics. The theory of situational ethics says there are no absolutes about right or wrong; rather, what is right or wrong depends upon the conditions at the time and sometimes the end will justify the means. In other words, it is OK to lie as long as no one, in your opinion, will be hurt by that lie. Roosevelt’s story about the cowboy calls to mind the Golden Rule—”do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—and how it should be used in guiding your behavior. Roosevelt lived by the Golden Rule and recommended that all citizens of a republic live by it as well.
Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.
Continuing his thoughts, Roosevelt here warns against judging a man by his affiliation rather than his conduct. Banding together to get more for oneself at the expense of another is another step on the slippery slope. Roosevelt’s final thought in this passage advocates adhering to a value system that respects the rights and property of others, even if a certain action may result in a gain to you.
So much for the citizenship to the individual in his relations to his family, to his neighbor, to the State. There remain duties of citizenship which the State, the aggregation of all the individuals, owes in connection with other States, with other nations. Let me say at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is the citizen of the world, is in fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all others countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.
Roosevelt was a true patriot and was never at a loss for words to express that patriotism, but he was as well a citizen of the world. He traveled extensively as a child and as an adult. As noted previously, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War. On his tour of Europe that included the Sorbonne speech, he visited the leaders of most European countries. He made a great point of hating what he called “hyphenated Americans,” such as Irish-Americans, because he believed we were all Americans. At the time all immigrants were required to renounce their citizenship in their parent country and pledge allegiance to America. The world is geographically the same size today as it was in 1910, but with enhanced communication and travel opportunities, it seems much smaller. We are now members of a global community, but that does not mean that all forms of government are equal or that Americans must give up our hard-won freedom, wealth, or value system. The United States is an exceptional country with an exceptional history and should continue its post–World War II tradition of advancing world civilization by helping other countries to help themselves.
With the advent of computers and the Internet, engineering has truly become global. Americans now compete for jobs around the world and have offices throughout the world, where they work with engineers from other countries. But we are still Americans, who abide by a rule of law and ethical standards that are not dependent on geography. Roosevelt would have been proud of how much the United States has advanced as a nation and how we, generally, have maintained our national identity. Any steps taken by our government or businesses to surrender American values as a condition of becoming a part of a global community can only hurt—or as Roosevelt would say, “level down”—the United States while not helping the global community.
Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nations neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealing with other nations, any more than he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.
The United States in the early twentieth century, after Roosevelt’s term as president, became more isolationist and resisted entering World Wars I and II. It had to be dragged into both. Roosevelt, while in retirement, had urged an early entrance to World War I and tried to obtain a commission to serve once again. All his sons were in the military in World War I, and one, Quentin, died in action. His son Theodore received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his leadership in the invasion of Normandy on D-day in World War II. (The only other father/son team to win the medal was the two Douglas MacArthurs.) The United States entered World War II only after it was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Here Roosevelt is saying that an honorable person is honorable at all times, with all people, and with all countries. The code of behavior is independent of locale, or in other words, honor and integrity are independent of geography.
In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account. We speak of international law; but international law is something wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience as regards to the other. International law will, I believe, as the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity to judge for itself in matters of vital importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must be of necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of a wise statesman, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep in mind that in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent wrongdoings from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals should be so high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.
The debate on the extent to which the United States should surrender its sovereignty to an international law continues in the 21st century. Roosevelt suggests a body like the United Nations as the agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. He repeats his desire for peace, but it is trumped by his desire for justice. He emphasizes once again the need for high ideals, both for the country and its citizens. Those ideals are self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, individual responsibility, courage, determination, persistence, and resolution. He held these ideals dear throughout his life, and they are woven throughout this speech.
And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom of strength, which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing of the time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for it. You have had a great past. I believe you will have a great future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.
Like any good public speaker, Roosevelt follows the dictum that the speaker should tell his audience what he is going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what he told them. He concludes by congratulating his audience on their history and culture, saying that they are, and have been, like the city on the hill, serving as a light to the world.
Summary
Roosevelt’s words, spoken so long ago, ring true more than 100 years later. Although “critics,” as he would call them, would question some of his statements, his words could not but make one think about what it means to be good citizen in a republic. Coming from a man who accomplished so much, in so many fields, these words should be read and used as a guiding light for us and our fellow engineers.
For engineers, Roosevelt’s Sorbonne speech should be a rallying call, to get out from behind our desks and computers and get involved in activities and affairs of our community, using our engineering skills to enhance the quality of life of the public. If, as discussed earlier, engineers leave the task of lawmaking to others, such as lawyers, they are shirking their responsibilities as good citizens. Support of, and membership in, the ASCE Legislative Affairs Committee may be a place to start. This committee has been charged with monitoring national government affairs as they relate to the engineering profession and to the welfare of the public and the environment. If no such committee exists at your local section level, start one that works with your state government. In so doing, remember that your goal is the enhancement of the public good.
In the public arena, local boards and commissions, such as school boards, boards of selectmen, city councils, planning boards, and conservation commissions, all need the skills and knowledge of engineers to guide them. Similar government organizations at the state level could also use engineers’ help. Ultimately, what is needed are more engineers in Congress and even in the presidency. Herbert Hoover was the last engineer to be president. He loved his profession, but after practicing for many years, he decided to enter politics. He believed strongly in the efficiency movement, which held that the government and the economy were riddled with inefficiency and waste and could be improved by experts who could identify problems and solve them. He also believed in the importance of volunteerism and the role of individuals in American society and the economy. In this he was on the same page as Roosevelt. In his 1951 memoir, following a discussion of mining engineering, Hoover wrote,
It is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.On the other hand, unlike the doctor, his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolade he wants.The engineer performs many public functions from which he gets only philosophical satisfactions. Most people do not know it, but he is an economic and social force. Every time he discovers a new application of science, thereby creating a new industry, providing new jobs, adding to the standards of living, he also disturbs everything that is. New laws and regulations have to be made and new sorts of wickedness curbed. (Hoover 1951, pp. 132–133)
Will we, as a learned profession, step up to the plate and assume our role of good citizens as Roosevelt urges and Hoover implies? Or, will we “rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” The author, for one, would rather “dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure.” William Jarvis McAlpine, president of ASCE in 1868, wrote,
I need hardly remind you, gentlemen, that our society [ASCE and the community at large] cannot continue prosperous by the exertion of any small number of its members, however zealous or influential they may be. If we are to succeed, it must be by the united, cordial, earnest efforts of considerable numbers. (McAlpine 1868)
McAlpine’s call to involvement in ASCE affairs applies equally to involvement in community, state, and federal affairs. Don’t be a “let someone else do it” person, as you may not like what someone else does. Many civil engineers have probably thought that they could do many things in the public arena better than those who are actually in the arena but have not stepped up to the challenge for professional or personal reasons. Maybe “now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country [or, in this case, profession].”
And finally, consider these statements by Roosevelt: “Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood—the virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.” Also, “In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” Greg DiLoreto repeated this theme in his 2012 inaugural presidential address to ASCE:
As citizens of our communities and leaders in infrastructure, we must participate in the process. We must show up at city council meetings and town hall meetings, sit down for coffee with elected officials and provide our insights. The world is run by those who show up. If we fail to show up, the world’s infrastructure will be taken care of by those less knowledgeable—or not taken care of at all. That is not a future I want to be a part of. (DiLoreto 2012)
What will it be my fellow civil engineers? Leading, following, or doing nothing?
References
Coolidge, C. (1912). “Quotations by author: Calvin Coolidge, 1872–1933.” The Quotations Page, 〈http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Calvin_Coolidge〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Coolidge, C. (1933). “Calvin Coolidge quotes.” Notable Quotes, 〈http://www.notable-quotes.com/c/coolidge_calvin.html〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
DiLoreto, G. (2012). “Inaugural address.” 〈http://www.asce.org/About-ASCE/Presidents-Page/2013/Gregory-E--DiLoreto,-2013-ASCE-President-%E2%80%93-Video-Profile,-Inaugural-Address/〉 (Jun. 4, 2013).
Garvey, M. (1907). “Marcus Garvey quotes.” Good Reads, 〈http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/28955.Marcus_Garvey〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Hoover, H. (1951). “The profession of engineering.” Chapter 11, Years of Adventure, 1874–1929, Vol. 2, Memoirs, Macmillan, New York.
Jefferson, T. (1802). “Wasting the labors of people (quotation).” Monticello.org, Charlottesville, VA, 〈http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/wasting-labours-people-quotation〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Kennedy, J. F. (2001). “Inaugural address: Friday, January 20, 1961.” Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States: From George Washington to Barack Obama, Bartleby.com, 〈http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres56.html〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
King, M. L., Jr. (1963). “Martin Luther King’s speech: ‘I have a dream.’” ABC News, 〈http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/martin-luther-kings-speech-dream-full-text/story?id=14358231〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
McAlpine, W. J. (1868). “Presidential address.” Transactions, 1868 (Vol. 1), ASCE, New York.
Reagan, R. (1987). “Ronald Reagan quote.” Liberty-Tree.ca, 〈http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Ronald.Reagan.Quote.717A〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Roosevelt, T. (1899). “Strenuous life, 1899.” Voice of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project, 〈http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Roosevelt, T. (1900). “Character and success.” Foundations magazine, 〈http://www.foundationsmag.com/tr-character.html〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Roosevelt, T. (1910). “Citizenship in a republic.” Speech delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris. 〈http://design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Citizenship_in_a_Republic.pdf〉 (Jun. 17, 2013).
Biographies
Francis E. Griggs Jr. is professor emeritus, Merrimack College, Civil Engineering, Turnpike Street, North Andover, MA 01845. He can be reached at [email protected].
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Leadership and Management in Engineering
Volume 13 • Issue 4 • October 2013
Pages: 230 - 248
Copyright
© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 8, 2012
Accepted: Feb 25, 2013
Published online: Sep 16, 2013
Published in print: Oct 1, 2013
Discussion open until: Feb 16, 2014
ASCE Technical Topics:
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.