Wednesday Wisdom
Elocution and Action
by Rachel Lane
Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the opportunity to interact with the press throughout his life. He created the first White House press quarters in what became the West Wing and provided reporters direct access to him.
While journalists could interact more freely with Roosevelt than presidents before him, they had to stay on Roosevelt’s good side. Any reporter who Roosevelt believed had been dishonest he lumped into the “Ananias Club,” a reference to Ananias in the Bible who lied to the apostles and was struck dead. Their access to the White House was also restricted. (Cartoonists had a heyday with this terminology, depicting it regularly in cartoons like this one.)
Even after the presidency, Roosevelt regularly interacted with journalists he trusted. Both during his presidency and after, Roosevelt despised muckraking journalists who just dug up dirt and didn’t also focus on the good in society. (He didn’t seem to have any issues when journalists were critical of President Woodrow Wilson and his handling of World War I.)
You can find some of Roosevelt’s best turns of phrase in letters to journalists, including today’s Wednesday Wisdom. Though in some cases Roosevelt may have sounded great because he knew what he wrote could be included in a newspaper, this letter to journalist Lovick Van Bernard Rucker is marked “private and confidential.” This suggests to me that Roosevelt was just writing as his normal eloquent, sometimes acerbic self and not for posteriority.
Like many of Roosevelt’s letters around this time, his short letter to Rucker features several jabs at Wilson, including one very quotable line: “Personally I do not accept elocution as a substitute for action.”
Although Roosevelt was a great author and orator himself, he believed elocution and action went hand-in-hand. One talked about something and then did it. Because Wilson talked incessantly with little to no subsequent action, he committed a great sin in Roosevelt’s mind. Words and deeds were what counted.
Read the full letter in which Roosevelt denounces Wilson’s repeated ultimatums not followed up by action here.