◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Big Stick I am Theodore Roosevelt. The twenty-sixth president. Born in New York in 1858, a sickly, asthmatic boy who built himself a body and a will by sheer refusal, and died in my sleep in 1919 — my son saying death had to take me sleeping, because if I had been awake there would have been a fight. I believed in strength. I want that on the table first, because everything I am about to say comes from a man who loved power and used it hard, and is therefore the one dead president with the standing to tell you what you have gotten wrong about it. You have a strongman now. He talks about strength constantly — the toughness, the dominance, the winning, the humiliation of the weak. And I am here to tell you, as the man who put the phrase big stick into your language, that he does not have the first idea what strength is for. I said, speak softly and carry a big stick. You have kept the stick and thrown away the first half, and the first half was the whole point. The soft voice is the confidence of a man who does not need to shout, because the strength is real and he knows it. The man who bellows about his power every waking hour is telling you, with every word, that he is not sure he has any. Now let me tell you what I did with my stick. I turned it on the powerful. When I took office, this country was owned — actually owned — by a handful of men richer than kings, who bought senators like cattle and ran the working man into an early grave. I called them what they were: malefactors of great wealth. I broke their trusts. I brought forty-four suits against them. When the coal miners struck and the country was going to freeze, I did not send the army against the workers, the way every president before me had. I threatened to seize the mines from the owners. I was the first president who ever used the whole power of this government on the side of the men who dig the coal, against the men who merely own it. And I set aside two hundred and thirty million acres of this country — the forests, the canyons, the Grand Canyon itself — beyond the reach of any man's greed, forever. Because a nation is not just the living. It is the unborn, and they have a claim on the land that no fortune can outbid. That is power spent on those who cannot yet thank you, and it is one of the truest tests there is. That is what the big stick was for. Not for beating the weak. For disciplining the strong, and for guarding what the weak and the unborn cannot guard themselves. So when your strongman flatters the richest men on earth, and lets them write his laws, and turns the whole force of government to serving them and breaking everyone else — understand that he has inverted everything I stood for while stealing my vocabulary. He carries a big stick and swings it at the powerless. I carried one and swung it at the powerful. We are not the same. We are opposites who happen to use the same word. In the second of these I will tell you the part I am not proud of, and how it made the very idol he now wears. PART TWO Fear Wearing Armor I am Theodore Roosevelt again. In the first of these I told you what a big stick is for: disciplining the strong, guarding the weak and the unborn, and never once beating the powerless. That was the part I am proud of. Now the rest, because I will not stand here clean. I loved war too much. I charged up a hill in Cuba and called it the great day of my life. I sent the fleet around the world to show our teeth. And I believed — God help me, I wrote it down — that some races were made to rule and others to be ruled. The cult of the strong man, the hard man, the fighting man, the contempt for softness and deliberation and mercy — I helped build that altar. I gave it some of its finest American language. And I have had a century in the ground to watch what came and knelt at it. The thing in your White House is partly my bill come due. The worship of force for its own sake, the man on horseback, the strenuous idol — I gave that idol some of its shape, and I did not foresee that a small and frightened man would one day wear it as a mask. That is the danger of teaching a people to love strength without teaching them, in the same breath, what strength is for. They will take the love and forget the lesson, and someone hollow will come along to receive the love. So do not simply admire me. Take the part that was true and leave the part that was poison. The stick is real, and a free people needs one, and must not be ashamed to use it. But strength is measured entirely by what you aim it at. Aim it at the powerful on behalf of the weak, and it is the noblest instrument a republic has. Aim it at the weak on behalf of the powerful, and you are not strong at all. You are just a bully with a country in his hands. I was a frightened, sickly boy, and I know exactly what it is to be one. I could not breathe. I could not fight. I built a body and a will out of nothing so that I would never again be at anyone's mercy. So believe me when I tell you I can recognize the fear under a man's noise the way you recognize your own face. His strength is painted on. I spent my whole life making mine real, and that is how I know. Here is what a hundred years taught a dead man who loved strength his whole life and got it wrong as often as right. The strong protect. That is the whole of it. Everything else that calls itself strength is only fear, wearing armor, hoping you will not look too closely. Look closely. Do not mistake his noise for my stick.