President Theodore Roosevelt’s Creed: His Guiding Principles Are Based on Justice

The finest letter on TR’s fundamental beliefs that we have ever seen

 

Theodore Roosevelt believed that as President, he had a unique relationship with and responsibility to the people. Putting this tenet into action, he became a leader of the progressive movement and championed his “Square Deal” domestic policies, promising the average citizen fairness and action. His presidency endowed the progressives with credibility, lending the prestige of the White House to welfare legislation, government regulation, and the conservation movement. The desire to make society more fair and equitable, with economic possibilities for all Americans, lay behind much of Roosevelt’s program. Roosevelt also believed that the government had the right and the responsibility to regulate big business so that its actions did not negatively affect the general public.

TR acted to make justice a reality in the White House. He invited black educator Booker T. Washington to dine with his family at the White House, breaking that color barrier. He opined, “The only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each Black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man.” He was the first president to appoint a Jew to a Cabinet position and was a champion of Jewish rights at home and abroad; he published articles and speeches denouncing anti-Catholic bigotry.
This letter lays out, better than any other we have ever seen, Roosevelt’s creed. Typed letter signed, as President, two pages, on White House letterhead, Washington, August 10, 1904, to Captain John E. Keys, a life-long Quaker and farmer in Indiana. Kets had written him concerned that TR had questioned the courage of Quakers during the Civil War, a charge TR here denied. He respected the Quakers’ principles, and compares them to his own, continuing on to make clear what his administration stands for. “Your letter pleased me very much…the statement that I attacked the Quakers as a class is absurd and untrue. Nothing is better known than the fact that the tens of thousands of Quakers and sons of Quakers who went into the army in 1861 to take part in the great war for righteousness, for union, and for liberty, made soldiers than whom, even in that brilliant army, there were none better. These men have exactly my creed in such matters. They abhor brawling; they abhor fighting in any unrighteous cause. They will never in any way condone iniquity, especially when it seeks to accomplish its design by a strong hand; and yet they are ready to make any sacrifice for, and in every way to support, the cause of freedom and of eternal right, when once it is evident to them that there is such demand for their services.

“Without any reference to my own personality, I feel that the party that I represent has an absolute right to ask the support at this time of every sincere Friend in the country; for no sincere Friend can condone the wrong and the folly at home and abroad for which our antagonists stand. Here at home we have proved by deed, not by word only – by what we have done throughout the last seven years we have been in power – that we stand for justice toward the humble, the lowly, and the weak, just as we stand for justice toward the strong. We try to help every man who is in his turn striving to act in a spirit of justice to others. North and south, east and west, whatever a man’s creed or his color, whether he is a wage-worker or an employer, a poor man or a man of means, wherever he was born, or whatever his occupation, we have striven to act toward him, and to encourage him to act toward others, in a spirit of broad charity and honest endeavor.”

It is impossible to conceive of a better statement of what an American should stand for, and thoroughly illuminates why the name Theodore Roosevelt remains iconic a century after his death.