At the Sorbonne in the Grand Amphitheater at the University of Paris on April 23, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt delivered one of his most famous and eloquent speeches. Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena” speech was originally called “Citizenship in a Republic” and expounded on how the preservation of the republic required active and virtuous citizens.
Roosevelt seemingly lived many lifetimes in one, starting out as a sickly boy in a prominent New York Family and ending the most famous American of his generation. The sickly Roosevelt boy turned himself into a vigorous, driven man of seemingly endless energy. He became a western frontiersman, a historian, a politician, a soldier, the president of the United States, and a big game hunter among many other things, leaving an incredible record for posterity.
In Candice Millard’s The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, she wrote that Roosevelt had “a voice that sounded as if he had just taken a sip of helium, but his outsized personality made him unforgettable—and utterly unresistable.” It was his outsized personality and incredible energy in the public sphere that made Roosevelt such and effective communicator and politician, and helped him become a character in the American imagination, culminating in his face being etched into Mt. Rushmore.
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