Last night, I discovered the text of Theodore Roosevelt’s speech, “Man in the Arena,” given on April 23, 1910 to an audience at the Sorbonne in France. About halfway through the speech, Roosevelt states, “The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character.”
While the “homely virtues of the household” are now carried out in more complex forms than those of woman, housewife and housemother; and man, worker, husband and soldier-at-need, Roosevelt’s point applies today. In essence, the above statement is a key to how the United States can approach the civic reconstruction it now needs to move forward.
Most people I know have committed themselves to the causes they have in response to the conditions of their own lives. One friend entered a social work career after going to a religiously affiliated college and observing there the social numbness that dogmatic religious practice can engender. Another who is recovering from emotional trauma works at a community farm - an environment to which she can contribute without being exposed to direct interpersonal conflict.
I am passionate about connecting individuals with the healing arts as a result of my frustration with creative silence. As a shy middle child of three, I've always struggled to voice my inner experience. In high school, I came up against my own silence more concretely; the leadership of the school denied funding for and stifled my and a female friend's effort to start a school newspaper. More recently, a professional writing mentor twice my age made a advance upon me. I don't put faith in creative authority as I did before these events, and my community work - at a puppet theater, as an ESL tutor, with an arts and community service organization - centers around getting people to tear down the artistic and linguistic barriers that keep them from asserting themselves in public.
In 2005 and 2007 respectively, I studied abroad in England and Spain. This time outside of the US allowed me a deeper appreciation for the receptivity the US offers to individual humanity. While being in Europe demonstrated that loyalty to cultural tradition makes room for self expression, it also opened my awareness to American citizenship's distinct quality of shared exploration.
The United States has throughout its history grown stronger by rejecting tradition in favor of the dignity of self expression. In no particular order, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, women, children, Hispanic Americans, Irish Americans, the LGBT community, the physically and mentally handicapped, and others have all experienced shame, social exclusion and labor enslavement to an established upper class.
They have not, however, accepted these limitations, and neither did the founders of the country accept the social and religious restrictions placed upon them by the European establishment. In the place of tradition, the US responds to identity dissent with an invitation into the legal discussion that is democracy. Each person changes the ideals of the country by being in it.
Roosevelt also said in his address at the Sorbonne, “We should abhor the so-called ‘practical’ men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct...only less desirable as a citizen is the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.” With a shared, and therefore constantly changing, concept of “ideal citizen” after which to model him or herself, the average American might understandably get lost in the intertia of an obscure desire to serve the public; a fantastic and untouched vision is attractive when it prolongs a comfortable, isolating realism.
As the United States seeks to redefine itself in the global eye, its citizens should ally themselves with homely virtues as well as possible good. Let’s not follow patriotic cynics into taking action before having developed tolerance for failure, but instead realize that service - and this country’s character - are an experiential dialogue with emerging moral definitions. If everyone voices their convictions through action at the same time, there will be chaos but also a revival of our best tradition: social evolution.
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