President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt

CAPITOL PARK - Birmingham, Al

OCTOBER 24, 1905

Mr. Rhodes; and you, My Fellow-Citizens: I wish to say that I am stirred most deeply by this magnificent reception from what Mr. Rhodes has so well called the Magic City of the South. Alabama has made a wonderful record. At the close of the war, shattered, war-swept, it seemed that it was im possible for her people, in the grip of poverty as they were, to rally ; and any people less strong than you of Alabama would have failed ; but you had the stuff in you and you succeeded. About the year 1880 the tide turned, and the last quarter of a century has seen in Alabama a progress that would have been absolutely impossible in any other age or in any other nation than ours. The agriculture of the State went upward by leaps and bounds; but even more marvelous was your mechanical and industrial success. You have in this State coal and iron, the two basic elements in modern industrialism, and you have also a wealth of water power only partially used; and given that amount of natural resources and the right type of man to use them, the result will be what we have seen. But there is something that is ahead of any kind of natural resources, and that is the citizenship of the man on the soil. Proud though I am of your extraor dinary industrial prosperity, I am prouder yet of the men who have achieved it. Think what it means for our nation to have the President of the United States greeted as he has been today, with on his right and his left hand as the guard of honor the veterans of the Civil War, the men who wore the blue, the men who wore the gray, united forever. As I came up the street nothing pleased me as much as the sight of the school-children drawn up alongside the line of march. Remember that we shall leave this country in the hands of the children of today, and that the American of tomorrow will be what we train the boy or girl to be. If the children are not well educated, if they are not brought up as they should be, the State will go down. We of this generation have received a splendid heritage from you men of the years of 60 to 65. Honor to us if we treat your great deeds as spurring us onward; and shame to us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own idleness or folly. When I speak of education I do not mean only education in intelligence. That counts tremendously; but education in character counts more. It is character that determines the Nations progress in the long run. In the organizations of veterans after the Civil War each hails the other as comrade. It makes no difference whether the man was a lieutenant-general Or whether he was the youngest recruit that served at the very end of the war. All that is asked is, did he do his duty in the place in which he was. If he did, you are for him. If he did not, you have no comradeship with him. I ask that the same lesson that you of the Civil War applied practically in your own persons during and since that war be applied by the rest of us in civil life. I ask that we scorn alike the base arrogance of the rich man who would look down on his poorer brother and the equally base envy of the poor man who would hate his richer brother; and that you apply to every citizen of this Republic just this one test the test that gauges his worth as a man. Does he do his duty fairly by himself, his family, his neighbor, and the State and the Nation? If he does, be for him, whether he is rich or poor, because if you do not you are recreant in the spirit of Americanism.