What seems to be uncommon and really distinguished about Mr. Roosevelt is the way he feels about his goodness, and the way he grips hold of it, and the way he makes it grip hold of other people—practically anybody almost, who is standing by. Even if they are merely going by in automobiles, sometimes they catch some. I do not imagine that his worst enemies, however seriously they may question the general desirability or safety of having so much goodness roosevelting around, would fail to admit his own real enthusiasm about goodness anywhere he finds it indiscriminately, whether it is his own or other people's. He grips hold of it, and grips like a cable car—instantly.
His enthusiasm is so great that many people are nonplussed by it. The enthusiasm must really be in spite of appearances about something else, something wicked in behind, they think, and not really about goodness. An entire stranger would not quite believe it. It would be too original in him, they would say, or in anybody, to care so about goodness.
If one could watch the expression in Mr. Roosevelt's face or his manner while he is in the act of having a virtue and if one could not see plainly from where one was, just what it was he was doing, one would at once conclude that it must be some vice he is having. He looks happy and as if it were some stolen secret. There is always that manner of his when he is caught doing right, as if one were to say "Now, at last, I have got it!" He does right like a boy with his mouth full of jam, and this seems to be true not only when, with a whole public following and two or three nations besides, and all the newspapers, he goes off on an orgy of righteousness, makes the grand tour of Europe, and has the time of his life. It is the steady-burning under enthusiasm with him all the while. The spectacle of a good man doing a tremendous good thing affects Theodore Roosevelt like one of the great forces of nature, like Niagara Falls, like the screws of the Mauritania, or any other huge, happy thing that is having its way against fear; against weakness, or against small terrified goodness.
Mr. Roosevelt in doing right conveys the sense of enjoying it so himself that he has made almost an art form of public righteousness. He has found his most complete, his most naïve, instinctive self-expression in it, and while we have had goodness in public men before, we have had no man who has been such an international chromo for goodness, who has made such a big, comfortable "He-who-runs-may-read" bill-poster for doing right as Roosevelt. Other men have done things that were good to do, but the very inmost muscle and marrow of goodness itself, goodness with teeth, with a fist, goodness that smiled, that ha-ha'd, and that leaped and danced—perpetual motion of goodness, goodness that reeked—has been reserved for Theodore Roosevelt. We have had goodness that was bland or proper, and goodness that was pious or sentimental and sang, "Nearer My God to Thee," or goodness that was kind and mushy, but this goodness with a glad look and bounding heart, goodness with an iron hand, we have not had before. It is Mr. Roosevelt's goodness that has made him interesting in Cairo, Paris, Rome, and Berlin. He has been conducting a grand tour of goodness. He has been a colossal drummer of goodness, conducting an advertising campaign. He has proved himself a master salesman for moral values. And he has put the American character, its hope, its energy, on the markets and on the credits of the world.
With all his faults, those big, daring, yawning fissures in him, he is news about us, faults and all. Though I may be, as I certainly am much of the time, standing and looking across at him, across an abyss of temperament that God cut down between us thousands of years ago, and while he may have a score of traits I would not like and others that no one would like in any one else, there he is storming out at me with his goodness! It is his way—God help him!—God be praised for him! There he is!
I know an American when I see one. He is a man who is singing.
A man who is singing is a man who is so shrewd about people that he sees more in them than they see in themselves and who does things so shrewdly in behalf of God, that when God looks upon him he delights in him. Then God falls to of course and helps him do them.
When American men saw that there was a man among them who was taking a thing like the Presidency of the United States (that most people never run risks with) and putting it up before everybody, and using it grimly as a magnificent bet on the people, they looked up. Millions of men leaped in their hearts and as they saw him they knew that they were like him!
So did Theodore Roosevelt become news about Us.