Obama’s modern man in the arena
In his speech to the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night, U.S. President Barack Obama became about the 6,000th public speaker to cite the famous “man in the arena” passage from Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 address at the Sorbonne in Paris. “Man in the arena” is unusual among oratorical ornaments, because it survives as a whole paragraph, a long one, rather than as a phrase or a sentence. Obama did no more than refer briefly to it, but he was counting on his audience being familiar with the whole thing:
“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 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.”
Obama, to his credit, did put a new wrinkle on the man in the arena; it being the current year, the man he was referring to is a woman. (She errs! She comes short again and again! Because there is no effort without error! …)
Under normal circumstances, Arena Man is trotted out, like the unfree Roman gladiator he evokes, to deflect criticism from the speaker — to discredit all critics as wine-sipping sideline sloths. Arena Man is rarely called upon to dignify the activity of a football coach or an opera director. He is almost always a politician. The provincial agriculture minister or school board candidate is always ready to think of himself as a warrior of antiquity, laying low enemies in the noonday sun.
And, of course, no one ever reads Roosevelt’s whole address. As we learned this week when Michelle Obama mentioned that the White House had been built by slaves, Americans can sometimes benefit from gentle reminders of their history. A good rule of thumb is to become curious when an American from long ago is cited in passing by a contemporary politician. So you shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the chief topic of Roosevelt’s 1910 speech was racial greatness.
At that time, people, instinctively and without much doubt, thought and spoke in racial categories. Roosevelt was probably the least racially prejudiced American president in a 50-year band of U.S. history, but he believed the world was an interplay of racial groups with fixed qualities, and he thought highly of the “Anglo-Saxon,” though he himself was only a Dutch cousin. He was, as most of us would now classify him, a “racist”: he would have made a distinction between racial hatred and merely acknow- ledging race, which we have discarded altogether.
So you may blanch at Roosevelt’s full speech, which also has a prologue exalting white pioneers who defied “the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land.” Roosevelt came before an audience of French intellectuals, as a spokesman for the world’s other republican superpower, to warn them that when dreamers and theoreticians become supreme, a people is on the way out. France, he suggested, needs to cultivate the “everyday qualities and virtues,” chief among these being “the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children.”
A society must despise idleness: “To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true.” It must urge and train its citizens to be “strong and virile” to face the event of just war. And the ladies should not forget that “chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land;” of the great virtues, “the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.”
Hey, he was a Republican (well, in 1910 he was). And we cannot fault good, old Teddy for saying things that would exclude him from polite society now. What is interesting is that, after quoting Roosevelt, President Obama reminded us that he has never thought of himself as a “post-racial” figure. His reference to the man in the arena was followed by a brief portrait of stolid maternal ancestors “from the heartland … ScotchIrish mostly;” people who “didn’t like show-offs, didn’t admire braggarts or bullies.” Most people only saw the hip-check on Donald Trump; they did not notice Obama contributing new lines to Roosevelt’s stanzas.
AFTER QUOTING ROOSEVELT, PRESIDENT OBAMA REMINDED US THAT HE HAS NEVER THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS A ‘POST-RACIAL’ FIGURE. — COLUMNIST COLBY COSH