Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt was born sickly, with severe asthma, and spent his childhood being told what he couldn’t do. His response was to build himself through deliberate physical challenge — boxing, riding, hiking, rowing — and to carry that approach into everything else. When his first wife Alice and his mother died on the same day in February 1884, he left for the Dakota Badlands and spent two years working cattle. He came back. He became the youngest president in American history, ascending at forty-two, and used the office to protect over 230 million acres of public land — more than any president before or since.

• Born: October 27, 1858, New York City, New York
• Died: January 6, 1919, Oyster Bay, New York (age 60)
• Era: Progressive Era; American imperialism; early conservation movement
• Major works: The Naval War of 1812 (1882), The Rough Riders (1899), The Winning of the West (1889–1896), “Citizenship in a Republic” (speech, Sorbonne, 1910)
• Twenty-sixth President of the United States, 1901–1909; Nobel Peace Prize, 1906

The speech that produced the “Man in the Arena” passage — “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910 — was given a year after he returned from fourteen months hunting in East Africa. He had nothing left to prove. He was fifty-one, out of office, one of the most famous men in the world. He gave one of the most quoted speeches in American history: a sustained argument for the person who tries and fails over the critic who never enters the arena at all.

He established the Forest Service, created five national parks, and genuinely loved the natural world with the scientific credentials to prove it — a serious naturalist and ornithologist from childhood. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, making him the first American to win the prize.

On October 14, 1912, he was shot in the chest at close range in Milwaukee while campaigning on the Bull Moose ticket. The bullet passed through his glasses case and a folded fifty-page speech manuscript. He reached into his jacket, checked his fingers for blood, concluded the bullet had not reached his lung, and took the stage. He delivered a ninety-minute speech before allowing himself to be taken to the hospital. He opened: “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” The bullet stayed in his chest for the rest of his life.

For the ones in the arena — the people trying things that might not work, who need to hear from someone who tried and got shot and kept going anyway.