Address of President Roosevelt at Cairo, Illinois, October 3, 1907

Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created from the title page by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1907

Men of Illinois, and You, Men of Kentucky and Missouri:
I am glad to have the chance to speak to you to-day. This is the heart of what may be called the Old West, which we now call the Middle West, using the term to denote that great group of rich and powerful States which literally forms the heart of the country. It is a region whose people are distinctively American in all their thoughts, in all their ways of looking at life; and in its past and its present alike it is typical of our country. The oldest men present can still remember the pioneer days, the days of the white-tilted ox wagon, of the emigrant, and of the log cabin in which that emigrant first lived when he settled to his task as a pioneer farmer. They were rough days, days of hard work, and the people who did that work seemed themselves uncouth and forbidding to visitors who could not look below the surface. It is curious and amusing to think that even as genuine a lover of his kind, a man normally so free from national prejudices as Charles Dickens, should have selected the region where we are now standing as the seat of his forlorn “Eden” in Martin Chuzzlewit. The country he so bitterly assailed is now one of the most fertile and productive portions of one of the most fertile and productive agricultural territories in all the world, and the dwellers in this territory represent a higher average of comfort, intelligence, and sturdy capacity for self-government than the people in any tract of like extent in any other continent. The land teems with beauty and fertility, and but a score of years after Dickens wrote it was shown to be a nursery and breeding ground of heroes, of soldiers and statesmen of the highest rank, while the rugged worth of the rank and file of the citizenship rendered possible the deeds of the mighty men who led in council and in battle. This was the region that brought forth mighty Abraham Lincoln, the incarnation of all that is best in democratic life; and from the loins of the same people, living only a little farther south, sprang another of our greatest Presidents, Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory”—a man who made mistakes, like most strong men, but a man of iron will and incorruptible integrity, fearless, upright, devoted to the welfare of his countrymen, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, a typical American if ever there was one.