“The more things change…..”
“I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.” (Theodore Roosevelt)
His colleagues in the New York State Assembly chose 23 year-old Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to be their minority leader in January, 1893.
“I rose like a rocket,” Roosevelt said, then admitted, “I proceeded to lose my perspective…I came an awful cropper, and had to pick myself up after learning by bitter experience the lesson that I was not all-important.”
“My head was swelled,” he said.
Roosevelt behaved like a spoiled child, deriding everybody and everything, disrupting the business of the Assembly in a crusade to have his way.
The quote in the first paragraph, above, deserves repetition:
“I thereby learned the invaluable lesson that in the practical activities of life no man can render the highest service unless he can act in combination with his fellows, which means a certain amount of give-and-take between him and them.”
Would that our present-day legislators could reach the same conclusion Teddy Roosevelt arrived at 121 years ago.
Sorry, I’m reading “The Bully Pulpit, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, on my Kindle. The only cite I can provide at the moment: 5% of the e-book on Kindle, at 1663 of 27687.
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