He gave us the words for the arena, then lost the last fight of his life.
* * *
This begins a new series, In the Arena, about failure — the one thing that comes for everyone, and the one thing we are taught to fear most. The wager of these pages is that failure, taken rightly, is a gift, and that the proof is written in the lives of the people who were broken in the arena and refused to stay down.
Failure.
It comes for everyone.
It came for me and it will come for you, and it does not much care who you are or how hard you worked or how good your reasons were.
You set out to do a thing. You do not do it. That is failure, and there is no life long enough to avoid it.
What I have learned, in eighty-some years of watching it happen to myself and to better men than me, is that failure does one of two things.
It destroys, or it gives. It is the same event either way. The difference is not in the failure. The difference is in the man who receives it.
I have seen it destroy. A man fails once and decides the failing is the truth about him. He stops. He grows careful. He keeps his hands in his pockets the rest of his life so they will never again be marked by the dust. He calls this wisdom. It is not wisdom. It is surrender wearing a quiet coat, and it is the most common way a life goes small.
I have also seen it give. The same blow lands, and the man turns it over in his hands and finds in it the one thing success could never have taught him. Humility, maybe. Or clarity about what he is for. Or a hardness in the right place that lets him stand the next time the ground gives way. He does not pretend the failure did not hurt. He just refuses to waste it.
That is the whole of what I want to say.
Failure is a gift, if you will take it as one.
Not a comfortable gift, not one you would have chosen, but a gift, with something inside it you cannot get any other way. The taking is the work of a lifetime, and it is the only work that matters when the thing you tried to do lies broken at your feet.
I did not come to this idea alone.
A man said it better than I ever could, more than a hundred years ago, in Paris, and he said it because he had earned the right.
This is a series about people who were marked by the arena. People who tried and fell. Some got up and some did not. Every one of them has something to teach about the gift. And the man who gave us the words for all of it is where any honest accounting has to start.
The Words
On the twenty-third of April, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt stood at the Sorbonne in Paris and gave a speech called “Citizenship in a Republic.” Most of it is forgotten. One passage is not. It is the most quoted thing he ever said, and it is the cornerstone of everything that follows here.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Read that last clause again.
Who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.
He is not promising you will win. He is telling you the winning was never the point. That is the gift, stated plain, by the one man best qualified to state it. Because he was about to live the hard half of his own words.
The Setup
Roosevelt was no stranger to the arena when he spoke in Paris. He had been the youngest president in the country’s history. He had run cattle in the Dakota Badlands and lost most of a fortune in a single killing winter. He had buried a wife and a mother on the same day, in the same house, when he was twenty-five, and gone west to the cold country to keep from going under. He knew the dust. He had spent himself in worthy causes for thirty years.
When he left the presidency in 1909, he handed the office to his chosen successor and friend, William Howard Taft, and sailed for Africa to shoot game and stay out of the way. He believed he was finished with the arena. He was wrong about that, the way men are usually wrong about being finished.
By the time he came home he was sick at heart over what Taft had done with the office. He thought the man had given away the progressive ground they had fought for. And a disappointed Roosevelt was not a man who kept his hands in his pockets. He decided to take the thing back.
The Striving
In 1912 he tried to wrest the Republican nomination from a sitting president. He won primaries. He did not win the convention. The machinery belonged to Taft, and the machinery held. So Roosevelt walked out and built his own party in the open air, the Progressives, and the country came to call it the Bull Moose, after the animal he liked to compare himself to. Strong. Vigorous. Hard to bring down.
He campaigned like a man half his age. And on the fourteenth of October, in Milwaukee, on his way to give a speech, a man stepped out of the crowd and shot him in the chest with a revolver.
Here is the part you should not forget.
The bullet went through his overcoat, through a steel eyeglasses case, and through the folded fifty-page text of the speech in his breast pocket. The words he was about to give slowed the bullet enough to save his life. Then he went on to the hall and gave the speech anyway, an hour of it, with the bullet still in him. “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible,” he told them. “I do not know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”
That is the arena. A man with a bullet in his chest, finishing the speech, because the cause was greater than the wound.
The Fall
He lost. For all of it, he lost. He and Taft split the Republican vote between them, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson came up the middle and took the presidency. Roosevelt finished second. It was the best showing any third party had ever made, and it would not matter, because second is not first, and the arena does not hand out ribbons for daring.
He had dared greatly, exactly as he had told the world a man should, and he had fallen. The words from the Sorbonne had become his own biography. He was a man who failed, and this time he did not come back.
And he did what the destroyed do not do. He refused to sit in the failure. He went looking for a river. In the winter of 1913 he sailed for Brazil to descend an uncharted tributary of the Amazon, a black water the locals called the River of Doubt. It nearly finished what the bullet had not. He gashed his leg on a boulder, the wound went septic, the fever climbed past a hundred and five. Three men on the expedition died. There came a night in the jungle when he told his son Kermit to go on without him, to leave him to die so the others might live. Kermit would not. The boy got his father out.
Roosevelt came home a smaller man in body. He called the ailments that never left him his “old Brazilian trouble.” Then the war came, and he lost his youngest son, Quentin, shot down over France, and that was a wound he never healed from at all. On the sixth of January, 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep. He was sixty. He looked far older. He had not won the last fight, nor the one before it, and had paid for both with most of what was left of his body.
The Gift
So what did the failure give him? Not a comeback. There was no third act where the country saw its error and called him back. He died out of office, out of favor with the men in power, his party dissolving behind him.
The gift was not for him.
That is the thing about gifts of this kind; they often are not. The gift was the words, and the words were true because he had lived them all the way to the bottom. When Roosevelt stood at the Sorbonne and said the credit belongs to the man in the arena, who at the worst fails while daring greatly, he was not yet that man. The 1912 had not happened. The river had not happened. Quentin was alive. He spoke the creed before he had paid its full price.
Then he paid it.
He failed while daring greatly, in front of everyone, and he did not recant a word of what he had said about the worth of failing that way. He let his own life become the proof. And because he did, the words outlived the man by a hundred years and counting. They get read at the Naval Academy and taped over the desks of people who never cast a vote for him and never could have, because he was gone before they were born.
Every striver who ever took heart from that passage took it from a man who lost. That is the gift. He showed that the creed holds even when the man who preaches it is the one lying in the dust. Especially then.
A success could not have given that gift. Only the failure could. If Roosevelt had won in 1912, the speech would be a victor’s speech, and victors are cheap and easy to doubt. Because he lost, it became something else. A promise that the trying counts on its own, redeemable by anyone, in any arena, win or lose. He could only leave us that because he did not get to keep it for himself.
The Reckoning
When he died, his vice president from the old days, Thomas Marshall, said the truest thing anyone said about him.
“Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
There would have been a fight. That is the whole man. Not the wins, of which there were many, but the readiness to be in the arena right up to the last hour, marked and bleeding and game. The country put him on a mountain in the end, carved into the rock beside Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln. That is fitting, but it is not why he belongs at the head of this series. He belongs here because he failed, hard, at the close, and gave us the reason it did not matter.
Take the gift. That is all he is asking, across a hundred years. When you are knocked down in your own arena, and you will be, do not read the failing as the truth about you.
Read it as the thing handed to you, with something inside it you could get no other way.
He spent his life in the arena and died still wanting back in.
The score was never the point.
He told us so, and proved it the hard way, which is the only way it can be proved.
The credit belongs to Theodore Roosevelt.
Sources
• Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910 (Theodore Roosevelt Center; American Presidency Project).
• Assassination attempt, Milwaukee, October 14, 1912 (Smithsonian National Museum of American History; Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library).
• 1912 election results; Bull Moose / Progressive Party (Encyclopaedia Britannica; National Museum of American History).
• Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition / River of Doubt, 1913–14 (HISTORY; Time; Filson Historical Society; Candice Millard, The River of Doubt).
• Death, January 6, 1919; Thomas Marshall quotation (HISTORY; The Rational Walk).
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