Four days after Roosevelt delivered his famous State Fair line, President William McKinley was shot. Twelve days after the speech, Roosevelt was president.
One of the most iconic phrases in American political history was uttered at the Minnesota State Fair 125 years ago this week. On Sept. 2, 1901, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt told a Grandstand crowd:
“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
The famous address took place at the Fair’s present Falcon Heights site, but the surroundings were quite different. The current Grandstand would not be built until 1909. The first carnival midway arrived in 1904, and the original Hippodrome was dedicated in 1906.
Teddy, or TR as he was widely known, came to Minnesota as vice president. He and Republican President William McKinley had won the 1900 election, McKinley’s second victory and Roosevelt’s first appearance on the national ticket. The vice presidency had been vacant since McKinley’s first vice president, Garret Hobart, died in office in 1899.
Roosevelt’s elevation dismayed some of McKinley’s conservative advisers. They regarded the former New York governor as unpredictable and beyond their control, a turn-of-the-20th-century loose cannon.
But he seemed to be adjusting well on that sultry Labor Day Monday, the opening day of the Fair back then and now its closing one.
Roosevelt was already a national celebrity. Who remembers Garret Hobart? TR had risen through the ranks as a reform-minded New York City police commissioner and governor of New York. He also had led the famed Rough Riders in the charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill during the brief Spanish-American War.
Aggressive Approach
TR was known for an aggressive approach, especially in foreign affairs. At the Fair, he described a muscular but measured view of national conduct. He had used the “big stick” phrase before and attributed it to a West African proverb.
Within days, history gave him an opportunity to put that policy into practice. Four days after Roosevelt’s speech, anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley lingered for eight days before dying on Sept. 14. Czolgosz was rushed through the legal system and executed in New York’s electric chair the following month.
Roosevelt became the nation’s youngest president at age 42. He served just over seven years as the 26th president, winning a landslide victory in 1904. His administration provided many examples of soft speaking backed by a “big stick.”
In foreign affairs, he helped broker the settlement that ended the Russo-Japanese War, earning the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first awarded to a U.S. president. He was also the driving force behind the Panama Canal. American warships supported Panama’s independence from Colombia, and the new nation granted the United States control of the Canal Zone. Roosevelt’s 1906 trip to inspect the project made him the first sitting president to leave the country.
Domestically, he cut a large swath, too. An aggressive “trust buster,” he breathed life into the relatively new Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. He famously fumed about Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., whom he had appointed in 1902, after Holmes voted against the administration in a major railroad trust-busting case. Roosevelt declared that he could “carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that.”
Roosevelt was a fifth cousin of another venerated president with the same surname, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both had a penchant for criticizing judges whose decisions went against them, although neither did so as consistently or viciously as the current occupant of the White House.
Food & Football
A month into his presidency, Roosevelt invited the nation’s most renowned Black advocate, Booker T. Washington, to dine with his family at the White House. Black visitors, including orator and advocate Frederick Douglass, had met with earlier presidents. Washington’s meal with the Roosevelts crossed a new social line.
At the time, Black voters who could overcome the barriers to casting ballots were still largely aligned with Roosevelt’s Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln. Yet the dinner led Southern politicians and newspapers to go apoplectic.
Mississippi Democrat James K. Vardaman complained that the White House was “so saturated with the odor of [racial slur] that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.” The Memphis Scimitar called the dinner “the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States.” A Missouri newspaper published a front-page poem whose title used the same racial slur to describe Black people “in the White House.”
And so it went.
Roosevelt also stepped into the scandalous and dangerous world of college football. After a 1905 season marked by numerous deaths and serious injuries, he summoned athletic leaders to two White House conferences and pressed them to reform the game. Those efforts helped spur creation of the organization that became the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Other achievements included his monumental conservation work. His administration protected roughly 230 million acres of public land and expanded national forests, wildlife refuges, monuments and parks.
Progressive Politics
Extremely popular, Roosevelt stepped down after completing McKinley’s unexpired term and winning a full term of his own. He followed the two-term tradition established by George Washington and maintained until his cousin FDR won four elections.
Roosevelt’s public image also acquired a cuddlier dimension while he was president. During a 1902 hunting trip in Mississippi, he refused to shoot a black bear that had been cornered and tied to a tree. The incident inspired a political cartoon and, yes, the teddy bear.
TR returned to the political stage after becoming disappointed with his hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft. Denied the 1912 Republican nomination, Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the newly formed Progressive Party. It became known as the Bull Moose Party after Roosevelt declared himself “as fit as a bull moose.”
His party, which basically was him, ran a spirited campaign on a platform of progressive policies, including women’s suffrage, workers’ compensation, a living wage for working women, limits on working hours for women and young people, and tariff reductions.
During the campaign, Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt in Milwaukee and delivered his scheduled speech with the bullet still lodged in his chest. But he could not overcome Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, as well as the votes of independents. Women still could not vote nationally.
Wilson won with 41.8% of the popular vote, compared with Roosevelt’s 27.4%, Taft’s 23.2% and Socialist Eugene V. Debs’ 6%. Roosevelt carried six states, including Minnesota, which he also had won convincingly in his 1904 landslide.
He became a stern critic of Wilson’s presidency, urging stronger action in the lead-up to World War I. Roosevelt fully supported the war effort once the United States entered the conflict in 1917. He was devastated when his youngest son, Quentin, was killed in aerial combat in France in July 1918, a loss that may have worsened his already declining health.
Roosevelt died in January 1919 at age 60. A generation later, his eldest son, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., led troops ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day and earned the Medal of Honor. He died of a heart attack in France five weeks later.
Roosevelt’s legacy remains larger than life, with his visage among the four presidents on Mount Rushmore. Popular culture gave him another sort of immortality in Arsenic and Old Lace, whose play and film versions feature a lovable eccentric convinced that he is Theodore Roosevelt.
Presidential Panoply
TR was not the only man who served as president to visit the Great Minnesota Get-Together. A panoply of presidents and future presidents have appeared at the 141-year-old Falcon Heights site.
President William Howard Taft visited during the 1910 Fair, and Roosevelt returned the following day. For good measure, the Fair featured a six-foot butter sculpture of TR, perhaps “President TR of the Milky Way.” He returned a third time to campaign at the Fairgrounds during his 1912 Bull Moose run.
Warren G. Harding visited during his successful 1920 campaign. Two years later, Vice President Calvin Coolidge spoke for 45 minutes on a 90-degree day as the Grandstand crowd waited for the automobile races. Impatient spectators began clapping, stomping and calling out. Coolidge got the message, skipped several pages, read his final paragraph and received a standing ovation. The following year, he became president after Harding died in office.
Dwight Eisenhower came in 1947, after the Fair had been canceled because of World War II in 1945 and a polio epidemic in 1946. The former commander of Allied forces in Europe, and future president, spoke about maintaining world peace. He noted that it was the first State Fair he had attended, adding that if this was to be his first, he might as well attend the best.
In 1962, the first Democratic president came to the Fairgrounds. Although the Fair had ended, John F. Kennedy addressed a DFL “Bean Feed” at the Hippodrome on Oct. 6. He urged support for Democratic congressional candidates, including Don Fraser, whom he said “can be the Congressman from this District.” Fraser was elected the following month, served in the U.S. House from 1963 through 1978 and then served as mayor of Minneapolis for 14 years.
Kennedy’s Fairgrounds exhortation came little more than a week before American reconnaissance photographs revealed Soviet missile sites in Cuba. The ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war before the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles.
Theodore Roosevelt’s remarkable life, achievements and renown stretched around the globe. But his State Fair speech 125 years ago remains a signature theme of his career: a call for action moderated by restraint.
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