Theodore Roosevelt: An AutobiographyRoosevelt, Theodore
History
Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
Roosevelt, Theodore
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
tenderness there must go dauntless bravery and grim acceptance of labor
and hardship and peril. All for each, and each for all, is a good motto;
but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain
himself as not to be a burden to others.
We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our
several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can
live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live
dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge
rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not
on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and
vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off
and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits
the man with whom life has gone hard.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL, October 1, 1913.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
My grandfather on my father's side was of almost purely Dutch blood.
When he was young he still spoke some Dutch, and Dutch was last used
in the services of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York while he was a
small boy.
About 1644 his ancestor Klaes Martensen van Roosevelt came to New
Amsterdam as a "settler"--the euphemistic name for an immigrant who
came over in the steerage of a sailing ship in the seventeenth century
instead of the steerage of a steamer in the nineteenth century. From
that time for the next seven generations from father to son every one of
us was born on Manhattan Island.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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