On September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath of office as the twenty-sixth president of the United States, the youngest man ever to assume that office. To that point, Roosevelt, following his graduation from Harvard, had spent all but five years of his adult life in public service. As a young man he served three terms in the New York state legislature, following which he owned and operated a cattle ranch in North Dakota; lost a bid for mayor of New York City; and continued a lucrative writing career as a historian and essayist, which included authoring a respected four-volume history of American westward expansion and biographies of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell. From 1889 he served consecutively as Civil Service Commissioner; New York City Police Commissioner; Assistant Secretary of the Navy; Commander of the Rough Riders; governor of New York; and vice president of the United States. Consistently progressive in public service, Roosevelt has nonetheless been appreciated by conservatives for his prudent foreign policy, unabashed nationalism, opposition to socialism and anarchism, and his forthright advocacy of individual virtue.

Roosevelt’s politics and political thought are bounded by the twin principles of promise and performance. For individual and country alike, promise is bound to an understanding of civilization and virtue. The educated, civilized individual has a duty to engage in public service for the advancement of society toward greater development of its civilized life. This requires individual virtue, or character, as Roosevelt would often refer to it, and the premier virtue was courage. It is courage that inspires the individual to throw his hat in the ring to do his duty, and which supports him through the challenges that such public service presents. Likewise, the country is also to fulfill its duty in the service of civilization or else suffer the justifiable and deserved reprobation of those countries made of sterner stuff. The country, like the individual, brings to its task the fruits of its ancestry. The race characteristics, as Roosevelt termed them, of any country, are of great importance to its effort to fulfill its duty and to shoulder its share of worldly burdens. The dissolute individual and country will both face the prospect of losing ground absolutely as well as in relation to those that strenuously pursue their duty to civilization.