Theodore
Roosevelt
'Centennial Commencement'
President
Theodore Roosevelt delivered this speech during the
West Point Centennial commencement exercises on June
11, 1902.
Colonel
Mills, graduates of West Point, and you, the men and
women who are drawn to them by ties of kinship or by
the simple fact that you are Americans, and therefore
of necessity drawn to them:
I
am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you
today. There is little need for me to say how well your
performance has squared with the prophetic promise made
on your behalf by the greatest of Americans,
Washington. This institution has completed its first
hundred years of life. During that century, no other
educational institution in the land has contributed as
many names as West Point has contributed to the honor
roll of the nation’s greatest citizens.
Colonel
Mills, I claim to be a historian, and I speak simply in
the spirit of one, simply as a reciter of facts, when I
say what I have said. And more than that, not merely
has West Point contributed a greater number of the men
who stand highest on the nation’s honor roll, but I
think, beyond question, that, taken as a whole, the
average graduate of West Point during this hundred
years has given a greater sum of service to the country
through his life than has the average graduate of any
other institution in this broad land.
Now,
gentlemen, that is not surprising. It is what we had a
right to expect from this military university, founded
by the nation. It is what we had a right to expect, but
I am glad that the expectation has been made good. And
of all the institutions in this country, none is more
absolutely American; none, in the proper sense of the
word, more absolutely democratic than this. Here we
care nothing for the boy’s birthplace, nor his creed,
nor his social standing; here we care nothing save for
his worth as he is able to show it.
Here
you represent, with almost mathematical exactness, all
the country geographically. You are drawn from every
walk of life by a method of choice made to insure, and
which in the great majority of cases does insure, that
heed shall be paid to nothing save the boy’s aptitude
for the profession into which he seeks entrance.
Here
you come together as representatives of America in a
higher and more peculiar sense than can possibly be
true of any other institution in the land, save your
sister college that makes similar preparation for the
service of the country on the seas.
This
morning I have shaken hands with many of you, and I
have met the men who stand as representatives of every
great struggle, every great forward movement this
nation has made for the last 55 or 60 years.
‘‘And
of all the institutions in this country, none is
more absolutely American; none, in the proper sense
of the word, more absolutely democratic than this.
Here we care nothing for the boy’s birthplace,
nor his creed, nor his social standing; here we
care nothing save for his worth as he is able to
show it.’’
President
Theodore Roosevelt
speech during the centennial commencement in 1902
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The
oldest among you — there are some still left who took
part in the Mexican War, a struggle which added to this
country a territory vaster than has changed hands in
Europe as the result of all the wars of the last two
centuries. I meet, when I see any of the older men
among you, men who took part in the great civil war,
when this nation was tried as in a furnace; the men who
were called upon to do the one deed which had to be
done under penalty of making the memory of Washington
himself of little account, because if you had failed,
then failure would also have been written across the
record of his work.
Finally,
I see the younger men as well as the older ones; the
men whom I have seen myself taking part in a little war
— a war that was the merest skirmish compared with
the struggle in which you fought from ’61 to ’65,
and yet a war that has had most far-reaching effects;
not merely upon the destiny of this nation, but
therefore upon the destiny of the world — the war
with Spain.
It was my good fortune to see in the campaign in Cuba
how the graduates of West Point handled themselves; to
see and to endeavor to profit by their example. It is a
peculiar pleasure to come here today, because I was at
that time intimately associated with many of these,
your graduates, who are here.
On
the day before the San Juan fight, when we were marched
up into position, the officers with whom I was lost
connection with the baggage and food, and I for supper
that night had what Colonel Mills gave me. And the next
morning Colonel Mills was with another West Pointer,
gallant Shipp, of North Carolina. The next morning we
breakfasted together. I remember well congratulating
myself that my regiment, a raw volunteer regiment,
could have to set it an example, men like Mills and
Shipp, whose very presence made the men cool; made them
feel collected and at ease. Mills and Shipp went with
our regiment into action.
Shortly
after it begun Shipp was killed and Colonel Mills
received a wound from which no one of us at the time
dreamed that he would recover. I had at that time in my
regiment as acting second lieutenant a cadet from West
Point. He was having his holiday. He took his holiday
coming down with us, and just before the assault he was
shot, the bullet going in, I think into the stomach,
going out the other side. He fell over, and as we came
up I leaned over to him, he said ‘‘All right,
Colonel, I am going to get well.’’ I didn’t think
he was; but I said, ‘‘All right, I am sure you
will,’’ and he did; he is all right now.
There
was never a moment during that time, by day or by
night, that I was not an eyewitness to some performance
of duty, some bit of duty well done, by a West Pointer,
and I never saw a West Pointer failing in his duty. I
want to be perfectly frank, gentlemen. I heard of two
or three instances — you cannot get in any body of
men absolute uniformity of good conduct; but I am happy
to say that I never was an eyewitness to such
misconduct. It was my good fortune to see what is the
rule — what is the rule with only rarest exception
— the rule of duty done in a way that makes a man
proud to be an American, the fellow-citizen of such
Americans.
Your
duty here at West Point has been to fit men to do well
in war. But it is a noteworthy fact that you also have
fitted them to do singularly well in peace. The highest
positions in the land have been held, not
exceptionally, but again and again by West Pointers.
West Pointers have risen to the first rank in all the
occupations of civil life.
Colonel
Mills, I make the answer that a man who answers the
question must make when I say that while we had a right
to expect that West Point would do well, we could not
have expected that she would have done so well as she
has done.
And
now, in closing, I want to say one word to those who
are graduating here, and to the undergraduates as well.
I was greatly struck the other day by an article by one
of your instructors, himself a West Pointer, in which
he dwelt upon the changed conditions of warfare, and
the absolute need that the man who was to be a good
officer should meet those changed conditions. I think
it is going to be a great deal harder to be a
first-class officer in the future than it has been in
the past.
In
addition to the courage and steadfastness that have
always been the prime requirements in a soldier, you
have to show far greater fertility of resource and far
greater power of individual initiative than has ever
been necessary before if you are to come up to the
highest level of officer-like performance of duty. As
has been well said, the developments of war during the
last few years have shown that in the future the unit
will not be the regiment nor the company nor troop; the
unit will be the individual man.
The
Army is to a very great extent going to do well or ill
according to the average of that individual man. If he
does not know how to shoot, how to shift for himself,
how both to obey orders and to accept responsibility
when the emergency comes where he won’t have any
orders to obey, if he is not able to do all of that,
and if in addition he has not got the fighting edge,
you had better have him out of the Army; he will be a
damage in it.
In
a battle hereafter each man is going to be to a
considerable extent alone. The formation will be so
open that the youngest officer will have to take much
of the responsibility that in former wars fell on his
seniors, and many of the enlisted men will have to do
most of their work without any supervision from any
officer whatsoever.
The
man will have to act largely alone, and if he shows a
tendency to huddle up to somebody else his usefulness
is pretty near at an end. He must draw on his own
courage and resourcefulness to meet the emergencies as
they come up. It will be more difficult in the future
than ever before to know your profession, and more
essential also; and you officers, and you who are about
to become officers, if you are going to do well, have
got to learn how to perform the duty which, while
become more essential, has become harder to perform.
You
want to face the fact and realize more than ever before
that the honor or the shame of the country may depend
upon the high average of character and capacity of the
officers and enlisted men and that a high average of
character and capacity in the enlisted men can to a
large degree only be obtained through you, the
officers; that you have got to devote your time in
peace to bringing up the standard of fighting
efficiency of the men under you, not merely in doing
your duty so that you can’t be called to account for
failure to perform it, but doing it in a way that will
make any man under you abler to perform his.
I
noticed throughout the time that we were in Cuba that
the orders given and executed were of the simplest kind
and that there was very little maneuvering, practically
none of the maneuvering of the parade ground. Now I
want you to weigh what I say, for if you take only half
of it, you will invert it. I found out very soon in my
regiment that the best man was the man who had been in
the Regular Army in actual service, out in the West,
campaigning on the Plains. If he had been a good man in
the Regular Army in actual service on the Plains, he
was the best man that I could get hold of. On the other
hand, if he had merely served in time of peace a couple
of years in an Eastern garrison, where he did
practically nothing outside of parade grounds and
barracks, or if he had been in an ordinary national
guard regiment, then one of two things was true; if he
understood that he had only learned 5 percent of war,
he was 5 percent better than anyone else, and that was
a big advance; but if he thought he had also learned
the other 95 percent, he was worse than anything else.
I
recollect perfectly one man who had been a corporal in
the regular Army; this young fellow joined us sure he
knew everything, confident that war consisted in nice
parade-ground maneuvers. It was almost impossible to
turn his attention from trying the very difficult task
of making my cowpunchers keep in a straight line to the
easier task of training them so that they could do the
most efficient fighting when the occasion arose. He
confused the essentials and the non-essentials. The
non-essentials are so pretty and so easy that it is a
great temptation to think that your duty lies in
perfecting yourself and the men under you in them. You
have got to do that too, but if you only do that you
won’t be worth your salt when the day of trial comes.
Now
gentlemen, I do not intend to try to preach upon the
performance of your duties here to you. It has been
your special business to learn to do that. I do ask you
to remember the difference there is in the military
profession now from what it has been in past time; to
remember that the final test of soldiership is not
excellence in parade-ground formation, but efficiency
in actual service in the field, and that the
usefulness, the real and great usefulness, in the
parade ground and barracks works comes in its being
used not as an end, but as one of the means to an end.
I ask you to remember that. I do not have to ask you to
remember what you can not forget — the lessons of
loyalty, of courage, of steadfast adherence to the
highest standards of honor and uprightness which all
men draw in when they breathe the atmosphere of this
great institution.
—
U.S. Military Academy Archives
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