It was April 1910, a year after he left the White House, when former President Teddy Roosevelt arrived at the Sorbonne in Paris to deliver a stem-winder of a speech that at once offered an implicit defense his own legacy and a challenge to the citizenry of democratic states to trade in “sneering” judgment for action and engagement.
“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,” Roosevelt said. “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.”
For more than a century now, political leaders and powerbrokers facing the headwinds of popular backlash have called on the words of the former president to defend and often glorify their actions — while also jabbing at the naysayers’ “timid souls.”
The words are as familiar now as then, and timely in a political season that features two of the most harshly rendered presidential candidates of the modern era. Over the past week in Philadelphia, two Democratic National Convention speakers have invoked Roosevelt’s speech, titled “Citizenship in a Republic” at its time of delivery, but now better known as “The Man in the Arena.”
President Barack Obama called on it Wednesday night during an impassioned argument for Hillary Clinton, which doubled as an attack on the very nature of the most frequent brand of criticism directed her way.
“She knows that sometimes during those 40 years (in the public eye) she’s made mistakes, just like I have, just like we all do,” he said. “That’s what happens when we try. That’s what happens when you’re the kind of citizen Teddy Roosevelt once described, not the timid souls who criticize from the sidelines, but someone ‘who is actually in the arena, who strives valiantly, who errs, but who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement.'”
Channeling Roosevelt, Obama argued that the broader concerns about his former secretary of state’s trustworthiness and history of scandal, real and imagined, are less an indictment of her character than the unavoidable by-product of a life spent treading the public stage.
“Hillary Clinton is that woman in the arena,” Obama said. “She’s been there for us, even if we haven’t always noticed. And if you’re serious about our democracy, you can’t afford to stay home just because she might not align with you on every issue. You’ve got to get in the arena with her, because democracy isn’t a spectator sport.”
With those words, he sought to imbue — as Roosevelt did in his own time — a valor and dignity into even Clinton’s failures. The credit, Roosevelt said more than 106 years ago, belonged to that “man in the arena,” who through endeavor alone “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.”
A day before Obama addressed a booming Wells Fargo Center, a lesser known Democrat, a New York congressman named Joe Crowley, who represents parts of New York City, tapped a similar theme in describing Clinton and applauding her work in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
“My friends, this is the Hillary Clinton I know. The doer of deeds — who I’ve stood and worked and fought alongside,” he said. “And this is the Hillary Clinton I support — the one who has been in the arena, demonstrating the leadership and determination we need in our next president.”
While the legacy of Roosevelt’s speech as a commentary on public life is undeniable its utility as a campaign hook is less certain.
Ironically, Roosevelt would run as a progressive third party alternative to the incumbent President William Howard Taft — his former deputy and ally — seeking to reclaim the White House after four years away in 1912. He finished a distant second to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, effectively splitting the vote with Taft in the process.
Clinton, who even with former rival Bernie Sanders’ backing faces competition on her left from the Green Party’s Jill Stein, will hope that when it comes her and Teddy Roosevelt, the comparisons only go so far.