It’s Character That Counts Most in the Arena

Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 speech has life lessons for all of us.

Theodore Roosevelt photographed in 1885 after arriving arriving in the Dakota Badlands in 1884, after the death of his first wife, Alice. Photo by T W Ingersoll. MPI/Getty Images

Search online for “the man in the arena,” and you’ll find dozens of sites, along with posters and wall plaques, referencing two sentences, one of them quite long, taken from a speech delivered in 1910 by Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne. This passage, with its dramatic metaphor about the man “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood ... who spends himself in a worthy cause,” has rightly captured the attention of journalists and bloggers.

“Citizenship in a Republic,” as Roosevelt titled his address, is nearly 9,000 words in length and still worthy of our attention today. Tucked into this long parade of the former president’s thoughts are some passing comments on a “sound mind” in a “sound body” and on the element never included in this prescription for well-being: a sound character.

‘There Is Need of a Sound Body’

So said Roosevelt in his Sorbonne address, and he had lived the truth of those words. As a boy, he was weak and sickly, stricken frequently with severe asthma. When these attacks were especially bad, his father, Theodore Senior, would take him on carriage rides to try to soothe his labored breathing with fresh air. As Roosevelt ripened into adolescence, his father one day charged him with a mission that changed his life: “You have the mind but you have not the body. You must make your body.”