Theodore Roosevelt called it 'the strenuous life.' Let's take a bigger view of toughness
Theodore Roosevelt in 1885, during a visit to the Badlands of Dakota after the death of his first wife. Credit: Getty Images/MPI
The log cabin seems modest by modern standards. Stout when built in 1883, it looks smallish now, especially when one imagines it against the vast and rugged backdrop of the North Dakota Badlands.
The cabin was home to Theodore Roosevelt during a critical time in the life of Long Island’s only U.S. president. Then 24, Roosevelt first came to those badlands to hunt bison but returned in the summer of 1884 a broken man seeking refuge a few months after the deaths of his wife, Alice, and mother, Mittie, on the same awful February day.
Enamored of the ranchers he had met and their vigorous life outdoors, Roosevelt bought his own ranch and threw himself into that lifestyle — one that bore no resemblance to the comfort memorialized in his Sagamore Hill home in Cove Neck near Oyster Bay. When you roam the region in the national park in western North Dakota that holds that cabin and bears his name, it’s not hard to see how he was enchanted by its austere beauty and challenged by its topography, remoteness and climate.
It is a land of canyons and gullies and towering ridges, abundant wildlife and persistent plants. You can stand on a bluff that overlooks the Little Missouri River at twilight and watch as bison come to the water to drink, wild horses cavort just above the banks, and elk traverse a distant hillside, still grazing by the dying light.
Roosevelt lived there for several years, and transformed himself. Frail and sickly as a child, somewhat snobby and thoroughly citified, Roosevelt returned to New York as a larger-than-life character, filled with purpose.
Years later, he would say he never would have become president had it not been for his time in North Dakota. He called his experiences there “the strenuous life,” in a speech of the same name he gave in Chicago in 1899. His theme struck a universal chord: that we as individuals and our nation as a whole would be better if we worked diligently to overcome hardship. Success, Roosevelt said, comes to “the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil ...”
That makes sense as far as it goes. It certainly echoes America’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps ethos. But it doesn’t account for those who don’t shrink from hardship, who toil as hard as they can, and still don’t taste success.
To be fair, Roosevelt was far from alone — in his time and in the years to come — in tying together concepts of masculinity, patriotism, nationalism and achievement. Consider the recent challenge from our nation’s defense and health secretaries to do 100 pushups and 50 pullups in 10 minutes.
In this view, toughness is a physical thing and life is a proving ground. Our sports are suffused with the need to be tough. Street culture is built on a foundation of tough. Politicians talk tough. Parents preach being tough to their kids.
But it seems to me that real toughness is something quieter, more like Ernest Hemingway than Norman Mailer. More stoic resilience than hot-wired pugilism. More a matter of proving oneself by maintaining one’s dignity while battling adversity than pushing, shoving and throwing haymakers, real or rhetorical, at one’s perceived enemies.
Tough is the person who starts a business and never stops hustling and innovating to keep the doors open. Tough is the person who works three jobs to provide for their family and never stops hoping that life will get better. Tough is the person who spends years working their craft — whatever their craft — and never stops pursuing the dream because a passion is a passion.
Roosevelt was right to extol the strenuous life. But we would be wise to recognize its many faces.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
