How to Find the Original Source of a Theodore Roosevelt Speech

When everyone else has it wrong // buy your very own, original copy from MNY

One of my favorite political speeches, and certainly my favorite Theodore Roosevelt speech, is “The Duties of American Citizenship” (1893).

I first encountered the speech online, and that’s pretty much the only place I ever saw it. Many of the well-known Theodore Roosevelt books and speech compilations don’t even mention it, and I was the only one I knew personally who’d even heard of it.

So when I decided to reproduce the speech in a separate post on this blog, I realized I needed to actually track down the original source. I couldn’t just copy and paste it without verifying its authenticity.¹

This might sound strange to some people—after all, who would make up a Theodore Roosevelt speech? But very few people verify primary sources on anything, and I’d previously seen that play out poorly with the concept of Gell-Mann Amnesia, which I tracked to its source. To me, it was not impossible that this speech, which I’d enjoyed for a while, could be fake.

So I set about verifying it. I was interested in verifying the following things:

• The text of the speech

• The year the speech was delivered (with someone like TR, this makes a big difference, since he did so many different things)

• The occasion/venue of the speech

Source samples

Here is a representative sample of sources that are wrong about this speech (even disagreeing amongst themselves about the date and the speech text), but populate essentially every internet result about it:

• The National Parks Service (a document download)

• The U.S. Embassy (in Germany)

• PBS’s American Experience

• Many libraries across the country

• The Intercollegiate Studies Institute Civic Literacy Program

• The Art of Manliness

• Every digital listing of the speech as an independent book, like this one on Goodreads

• Encyclopedia.com by Cengage

• The Program in Presidential Rhetoric (cited by PBS, and many others, as their source)

First suspicion: the year of the speech can’t be right

The speech itself certainly sounds like TR, and many of the small details correspond to things in his biography. If it was fake, it was good.

But my big clue that something was wrong was the fact that every source I could find pins the speech to 1883. TR would have been about 24 at that point and serving in the New York State Legislature. But this speech seemed to obliquely reference work he did after that point on the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and it also contained sentences like “When I was in the New York legislature…” TR left the legislature in 1884, which means the speech had to have been delivered after that point—not in 1883. And, frankly, the voice of the speech sounds more like an older TR.

So the text of the speech itself, combined with context clues and my own stylistic sensitivity to TR’s rhetorical development, led me to realize that everyone on the internet was wrong about this speech. It couldn’t possibly be from 1883—so what else was wrong about it?

[Side note: dates are a big deal. Many sources like this audiobook say the speech was delivered by “a young Theodore Roosevelt,” but it wasn’t! The context was very different!]

And where did the speech come from? Many sources on the internet just cite each other in a circle. I couldn’t get to the ground truth. PBS, which even claims to be displaying a “primary source,” immediately gets the date wrong, and doesn’t even cite the original source of the speech (instead linking to the The Program in Presidential Rhetoric, which also misdates and doesn’t fully cite the speech).

Source

To the library—where you will find the books have it wrong too (don’t panic)

When the internet fails, the only thing to do is get thee to the library. In this case, that meant The Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University. I consulted the library catalog first, using the only leads I’d gotten from sources on the internet: the speech title, its author, and that it was given in "Buffalo, NY.” Given the fiasco with the year citation, I wasn’t sure any of this would be reliable information, but it was all I had.

When I searched for “duties of american citizenship theodore roosevelt,” I got a long list of non-academic speech compilations that included it. However, like the internet sources, they were also all wrong about the date, and none of them cited the original occasion or venue of the speech. Again, as specific as any of them got was “Buffalo, NY.”

Here’s an example from 50 Inspirational Speeches: Collectable Edition:

Further into the library we go—to the archives (and salvation)!

At this point I realized I needed to call in reinforcements, so I emailed the staff at the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, told them of my troubles, and asked if they could help me validate the provenance of “The Duties of American Citizenship” (you will notice the book excerpt above leaves the article “the” off the title).

After a little back and forth, a librarian emailed me this:

There are a number of collections that hold Roosevelt addresses such as these bound addresses, additional papers, additional compositions, and more, but I can find nothing resembling this speech in their finding aids. I also consulted the shelf list and found an entry for "The duties of American citizenship" dated 1893 at the Liberal Club in Buffalo. I believe this item is held in Widener Library's collections with the call number Roosevelt 041.L61d3. If you haven't already, I would recommend consulting that volume.

So I followed call number Roosevelt 041.L61d3, and found multiple volumes of speeches delivered before this thing called the “Liberal Club of Buffalo.” That seemed like a good sign—Buffalo! And thankfully the HathiTrust had digitized the various volumes in this library record, so I wouldn’t need to request a scan or cart myself to Cambridge.

I looked through the volumes that held speeches from 1893, and FOUND THE ORIGINAL SOURCE OF THE SPEECH. It was delivered on January 26, 1893, before the Liberal Club of Buffalo, NY, and it begins on page 61 of that club's records here.

This source allowed me to validate the speech text, the year it was given, and its occasion/venue. Mission accomplished!

Wrap-up question 1: what was the Liberal Club?

I didn’t know about them before this. Founded October 26, 1891, it was a supper club that invited people to give speeches on potent ideas. A stenographer would take down the speeches, and they were compiled into volumes. Their motto was:

In thought, free;
In temper, reverent;
In method, scientific.

If you look through the available volumes of Liberal Club speeches, you’ll find a lot of important names and topics that are still relevant today.

Wrap-up question 2: why is everyone wrong about the year of the speech?

People don’t check primary sources, and they trust places like PBS or the National Parks Service to get things correct. For the record, I am not that trusting. If you look through my blog, you’ll see that the footnotes are filled with links to original sources, rather than someone else’s interpretation of them. It takes longer to write things with this standard, but if you keep it, you’ll be correct more often than not.

You’ll also elevate your favorite TR speech to public consciousness! I think “The Duties of American Citizenship” is far better than the “Man in the Arena” speech everyone else seems to like best.

Call to action: Buy the pamphlet, and spread superb political thought. Host a reading evening!

You can access the speech for free right here, but I’m also producing a saddle-stitched booklet of the speech, with an original historical introduction written by me.

My goal is to send 100+ of these all around New York and America—so tell all your friends to get one! If you’re a paid subscriber to this blog, expect to receive one as a gift.

1. I did, however, go ahead an publish it a few weeks ago before full verification! My gut said it was authentic, and I took a risk. But I still did the work to track it down, and would have issued a “mea cupla” in this post if something had been wildly wrong!