Courage Under Fire: Theodore Roosevelt’s Triumph Over an Assassin
“The poorest way to face life is with a sneer.”
On the 23rd of April 1910, a man with a walrus mustache and pince-nez glasses burst onto the stage of the Sorbonne College. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, known for his accomplishments as a cattle rancher, author, and political leader, was in Paris on a profound mission.
His bulging shoulders and taught muscularity of expression hardly revealed the sad errand that brought him to Paris. The former president, a cattle rancher in North Dakota and author of 32 books was about to deliver a sorrowful message as it was heartfelt. He believed the problem his audience in Paris faced was not living in the past but hiding from the future.
World War I had ended, but for the French, it was never-ending.
More than 52% of French males who fought were killed or wounded. Prosthetics became a growth industry. An entire generation perished but for the bronze plaques in French villages that served to remind, as Churchill put it — of the futile and indiscriminate slaughter in the trenches of the Somme, where over three million fought and over one million perished.
The country was struggling to recover, and Roosevelt’s presence offered a glimmer of hope. Despite personal tragedies, including the deaths of his wife and mother on the same day, Roosevelt persevered. He understood suffering also the danger of letting it define one’s life. Roosevelt’s relationship with death was no ordinary thing.
As a child, he was not expected to survive infancy. He watched Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 from his grandfather’s balcony. As a young husband and father, his wife and mother died on Valentine’s Day in 1884, leaving him empty and responsible for Alice, their infant daughter. He wrote, “the light has gone out of my life.”
While a Harvard student, his doctor warned Roosevelt that he must take it easy or risk dying from a heart attack. “Doctor, I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do,” Roosevelt responded. “If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.” A year later, Roosevelt scaled the 15,000-foot Matterhorn.
Later in life, on October 14, 1912, he would give an 84-minute talk without notes because he had left them in his pocket. It saved his life. As he began speaking, an assassin’s bullet rang out. It hit him in the chest. Roosevelt continued and paused only to say, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible.” Then, he added, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.” (see photo below)
Roosevelt’s speech at the Sorbonne, known as “Citizenship in a Republic,” emphasized the importance of striving and courage under great adversity. “It is not the critic who counts,” he declared, urging his listeners to become active participants in their own lives, to dare greatly, and to embrace the future with resolve. His words, then and now, resonate as a call to action against pessimism and victimhood, encouraging all to find purpose and fulfillment in striving for greatness.
His 140-word speech was entitled “Citizenship.” more commonly referred to as “The Man in the Arena,” and continues to have the same spellbinding effect today:
“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. 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; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who 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.”
The Sorbonne gathering was mesmerized by his fervor and lust for life. Roosevelt reassured his listeners that the war was over. And the adventure was ahead. An inner quality in him inspired them. Roosevelt could have been called ‘soleil liquide’ or liquid sunshine because his words did more than light up the room. They lit up the imagination, if only they would step into what he called “the arena” as he had done. That spirit took him to the governorship of New York, the United States presidency, the Nobel Prize, and finally, on a worldwide trip that ended that day in Paris on April 23rd with a powerful message:
“If not now — never. If not you — someone else”
