Go back to All
Presidents 985 words
The energetic Republican President had taken his first
oath of office upon the death of President McKinley, who died of an
assassin's gunshot wounds on September 14, 1901. Mr. Roosevelt had
been President himsel ffor three years at the election of 1904. The
inaugural celebration was the largest and most diverse of any in
memory--cowboys, Indians (including the Apache Chief Geronimo), coal
miners, soldiers, and students were some of the groups represented.
The oath of office was administered on the East Portico of the
Capitol by Chief Justice Melville Fuller.
My fellow-citizens, No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than
ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of
boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the
Giver of Good who has blessed us with the conditions which
have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of well-being
and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to
lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent.
We are the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few
of the penalties which in old countries are exacted by the
dead hand of a bygone civilization. We have not been obliged
to fight for our existence against any alien race; and yet
our life has called for the vigor and effort without which
the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under such
conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the
success which we have had in the past, the success which we
confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in
us no feeling of vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding
realization of all which life has offered us; a full
acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours; and a
fixed determination to show that under a free government a
mighty people can thrive best, alike as regards the things
of the body and the things of the soul. Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be
expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to
ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great
nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations
with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as
beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all
other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of
cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our
words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly desirous of
securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit
of just and generous recognition of all their rights. But
justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual,
count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong.
While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing others, we
must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves.
We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace
of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right
and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts
manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and
no strong power should ever be able to single us out as a
subject for insolent aggression. Our relations with the other powers of the world are
important; but still more important are our relations among
ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in
power as this nation has seen during the century and a
quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by a
like growth in the problems which are ever before every
nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both
responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced certain
perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the
very existence of which it was impossible that they should
foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the
tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial
development of the last half century are felt in every fiber
of our social and political being. Never before have men
tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of
administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of
a Democratic republic. The conditions which have told for
our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a
very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual
initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety
inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in
industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much
depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards
the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free
self-government throughout the world will rock to its
foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to
ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the
generations yet unborn. There is no good reason why we
should fear the future, but there is every reason why we
should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the
gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach
these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to
solve them aright. Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the
tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our
fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit
in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems
faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially
unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We
know that no people needs such high traits of character as
that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through
the freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But
we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories
of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they
left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn
have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave
this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our
children's children. To do so we must show, not merely in
great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the
qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of
hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of
devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who
founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made
great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of
Abraham Lincoln.
March 4, 1905