The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [220]
Addressing the Hamilton Club in Chicago on April 10, the thirty-fourth anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, Roosevelt pulled together all his “up from asthma” thoughts and presented them to the American public preparing to enter the twentieth century as the doctrine of the “strenuous life.” He was introduced by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. “In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant,” Roosevelt began, “men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, 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.”39
What immediately strikes one upon reading about Roosevelt’s promotion of the “strenuous life”—besides its overtones of recapitulation theory—was that he was preaching a philosophy of survival of the fittest that echoed Herbert Spencer. Roosevelt had larded his “strenuous life” doctrine with sociobiology, the misguided belief that Darwin’s evolutionary principles could best be expressed by humans through imperial expansionism, military hyperpreparedness, free-enterprise economics, and eugenics. Damning the “life of ease” and the hesitating manner, Roosevelt wanted Americans to engage in strenuous endeavors of every kind. Tiredness, he said, wasn’t fitting in a country of such natural vitality. Nation building, he believed, was undertaken by a population that shunned soft hands and conquered weakness and was engaged to the fullest in the consciousness of its times. Every healthy American man, if he was lucky enough to have leisure time, Roosevelt believed, should hike, camp, hunt, and fish. Men could find exhilaration in the wild. Rules were already available; just follow the sportsman’s code: “Let us, therefore, boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word, resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods.”40
The mere fact that Governor Roosevelt delivered this inspirational speech in Chicago instead of New York made his words newsworthy. New York’s governor was telling Americans in Illinois to go hard into whatever they believed in, whether it was farming, football, forestry, or factory work. Interestingly, Roosevelt never mentioned God in “The Strenuous Life” in many ways, in fact, the doctrine defied most Christian traditions by putting the obligation of personal power on the individual rather than in the otherworldly, mystical, or communal. Roosevelt’s doctrine not only smacked of Spencer—and Hall—but also had a heavy dose of Nietzsche’s superman. The saving grace of Roosevelt’s philosophy—which liberates him from what was later called fascism—was that he was democratic in spirit, believing anybody could rise to greatness in America. And there wasn’t an iota of cynicism in his doctrine: it was pure free-range optimism.
The following year, Roosevelt’s speech in Chicago had become so popular throughout America that it was published as a chapter in the appropriately titled book The Strenuous Life. Remembering how he had wisely disregarded the advice of a Massachusetts heart doctor in 1880 who had told him to never climb mountains, Roosevelt now touted exertion and physical education as national imperatives. As governor he wrestled, boxed, practiced jujitsu, and swam in the Hudson River just for the bracing