Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library The official page of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. Theodore Roosevelt is one of the four presidents commemorated on Mount Rushmore.

It has been a long time coming–but very soon, Theodore Roosevelt will finally have a Presidential Library. Historians and citizens alike consider him among the greatest Presidents of the United States. His homes at Sagamore Hill and in New York City are vivid testaments to his life–as are our National Parks, our position in the world, and our sense of what it means to be Americans. And yet, he sti

ll has no Presidential Library. The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation is building one for him. In addition to being home to the first fully-digital Presidential archive, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library will provide visitors, students, scholars, and enthusiasts with unforgettable experiences and unexpected insights into our 26th President.

How does national political strategy hold up against the daily work of running a state?Karl Rove and Governor Kelly Arms...
09/02/2026

How does national political strategy hold up against the daily work of running a state?

Karl Rove and Governor Kelly Armstrong sit down for a wide-ranging public conversation on campaigns, coalitions, and what it actually takes to turn political priorities into governing results. Moderated by Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Executive Director Robbie Lauf.

Rove served as Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush and writes for The Wall Street Journal. Armstrong, a Dickinson native and North Dakota's 34th governor, came to the office by way of the State Senate and the U.S. House.

October 9 · Founders Hall, University of Mary, Bismarck
Tickets $26 · https://ow.ly/33bc50ZIqVB

A hundred and twenty-five years ago today, at the Minnesota State Fair, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt quoted the lin...
09/02/2026

A hundred and twenty-five years ago today, at the Minnesota State Fair, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt quoted the line he is still quoted for.

"A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.'"

Three things about it are not what people assume.

The first is that he had been using it for more than a year and a half, and not about foreign policy. He wrote it down in January 1900, in a letter to Henry Sprague, in a good mood after forcing the New York Republican machine to drop a corrupt state insurance superintendent: "I have always been fond of the West African proverb." The most famous line in the history of American foreign policy started life as a comment on a patronage fight in Albany.

The second is that nobody has found the proverb. No earlier use of it has ever turned up, and Roosevelt never said where he had heard it.

The third is the part that gets left off. The line is not a boast, and the rest of the same paragraph says so:

"If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power. In private life there are few beings more obnoxious than the man who is always loudly boasting; and if the boaster is not prepared to back up his words his position becomes absolutely contemptible. So it is with the nation. It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples."

The big stick without the soft speech, in other words, is just a man shouting.

The speech is called "National Duties," and the rest of it is harder going: a defense of American rule in the Philippines in the language of civilization and barbarism, and of the taking of Dakota from the people who lived there. Both things are in the same address.

Twelve days later William McKinley was dead and Roosevelt was President of the United States.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/quotes/leadership

in 1878, a nineteen-year-old about to start his junior year at Harvard sat down and admitted he had no idea what to do...
09/01/2026

in 1878, a nineteen-year-old about to start his junior year at Harvard sat down and admitted he had no idea what to do with his life.

"I had a long talk with Uncle Jim about my future life; I have absolutely no idea what I shall do when I leave college."

His father had been dead nearly seven months. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. — the man his son called the best he ever knew — had died in February at forty-six of a malignant tumor of the bowel, after months in which the family watched and could do nothing. The son had not been there at the end.

The next line of the diary is not a plan. It is grief:

"Oh, Father, my Father, no words can tell how I shall miss your counsel and advice!"

And then, immediately, the only thing he can think of to do about it:

"However, for the next two years my duty is clear—to study well and live like a brave Christian gentleman."

That is the whole entry. A boy with no direction, no father, and one rule he has decided to follow until something better arrives.

Uncle Jim was James Alfred Roosevelt, his father's brother, a New York banker, and now the man with the final say over the family's money.

Worth remembering what happens next, and how little of it he could see coming. Within six years he would be a published historian, a state assemblyman, a widower and a rancher. Twenty-three years later he would be president. On this day in 1878 the plan was to study well and behave decently, and that was all of it.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/early-life/harvard

in 1910, out of office nearly eighteen months, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to 30,000 people at Osawatomie, Kansas, at the...
08/31/2026

in 1910, out of office nearly eighteen months, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to 30,000 people at Osawatomie, Kansas, at the dedication of a park honoring John Brown. Grand Army veterans were in the crowd and he spoke straight at them, quoting Lincoln. What he set out became the manifesto of the Republican insurgency.

By any measure of 1910 it was radical: federal supervision of every corporation doing interstate business, a graduated income tax, an inheritance tax on big fortunes, workmen's compensation, child labor limits. He did not pretend it was small:

"This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary."

Then he turned on the reformers:

"If I could ask but one thing of my fellow countrymen, my request would be that, whenever they go in for reform, they remember the two sides, and that they always exact justice from one side as much as from the other. I have small use for the public servant who can always see and denounce the corruption of the capitalist, but who cannot persuade himself, especially before election, to say a word about lawless mob-violence. And I have equally small use for the man, be he a judge on the bench or editor of a great paper, or wealthy and influential private citizen, who can see clearly enough and denounce the lawlessness of mob-violence, but whose eyes are closed so that he is blind when the question is one of corruption of business on a gigantic scale."

He knew how he was being read:

"Here in Kansas there is one paper which habitually denounces me as the tool of Wall Street, and at the same time frantically repudiates the statement that I am a Socialist on the ground that that is an unwarranted slander of the Socialists."

The country divided. Some called it socialistic; others, among the greatest speeches ever delivered. Two years later it was the platform he ran on against the man he had put in the White House.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/speeches/new-nationalism

in 1897, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt mailed the President of the United States a pamphlet, and ...
08/30/2026

in 1897, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt mailed the President of the United States a pamphlet, and quietly told on his own boss in the covering note.

He had spent his "spare hours" that summer assembling every passage he could find in which a previous president had argued for a stronger navy. Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant. Read back to back it struck him as a powerful piece of propaganda, so he decided to publish it. Thomas Jefferson did not make the cut.

Protocol required showing it to his actual superior first. Secretary of the Navy John D. Long — who was already tired of his deputy's loud enthusiasm for battleships — approved it on one condition: that Roosevelt insert the words "in my own opinion" into the introduction, so nobody mistook it for department policy.

Roosevelt agreed, in writing, with every appearance of humility: "Hereafter I shall adopt exactly the rule you suggest about my official publications, and about my general utterances also."

Then he sent an advance copy to President McKinley with a note pointing out this:

"On the first page, where I speak of the need of strengthening the Navy, the words 'in my own opinion,' were put in at the suggestion of the Secretary."

Which is to say: the hedge you are about to read is not mine. It is the Secretary's.

It appeared that year in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, and the Government Printing Office issued it as a pamphlet in September: The Naval Policy of America as Outlined in Messages of the Presidents of the United States from the Beginning to the Present Day. By Edmund Morris's account it drew admiring notice, "timely" being the adjective most often used. Eight months later the United States was at war with Spain, and within weeks the man who compiled it had resigned to go and fight in it.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/rise-to-power/assistant-navy-secretary

An honor to welcome U.S. Secretary of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondar...
08/29/2026

An honor to welcome U.S. Secretary of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education Kirsten Baesler , and North Dakota Lt. Governor Michelle Strinden to the Library.

Theodore Roosevelt believed a republic depends on citizens who know its story and are willing to do the work of keeping it. That conviction shapes every gallery here — and it made for a good conversation about what young Americans learn, and why it matters.

Thank you for making the trip to Medora.

in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt made what he called the best shot he had ever made, paced out the distance to prove it, an...
08/29/2026

in 1884, Theodore Roosevelt made what he called the best shot he had ever made, paced out the distance to prove it, and kept the bullet.

It had been a miserable day. Up Clear Creek in what is now Wyoming, in country he called "very barren; broken, rolling, treeless, and covered with sage brush." Deep washouts across the road. The wagon stuck three times, and they had to help the team out with ropes hitched to the saddle trees of the riding horses. "Team nearly done out."

Then, in the afternoon:

"Roused three blacktail bucks; shot three times with Wi******er at them running, going close but a little high, finally stopping them; two stood side by side; taking careful aim I broke the backs of both with one bullet; distance 431 paces (near 400 yards) actual walking. Best shot I ever made. Kept bullet."

Two deer with one bullet, at a distance he put at close to four hundred yards. It is his own account, in his own diary, and it is the only account we have.

The detail that gives it away is "actual walking." He did not estimate the range. He walked it, counting — 431 paces — because he wanted the number to be right. He knew his own limits. Four years earlier, hunting with his brother Elliott, he had written flatly in the same diary: "Elliott is a good shot; I am not. But I am improving steadily."

So he kept the bullet. Somewhere in the accounting of a life that would include a war, a presidency and a Nobel Prize, a twenty-five-year-old put a piece of lead in his pocket because he wanted to remember.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/badlands/frontier-life

This Sunday (8/30), Jenny and Joe Wiegand return for a lighthearted yoga class in the Breezeway. Downward Bull Moose: Yo...
08/28/2026

This Sunday (8/30), Jenny and Joe Wiegand return for a lighthearted yoga class in the Breezeway. Downward Bull Moose: Yoga with T.R. begins at 9 AM; beginners all welcome, mats provided. Sign up before Sunday at https://ow.ly/iCUv50ZGijY.

in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt signed an order protecting a shallow alkali lake in Stutsman County, North Dakota. There w...
08/28/2026

in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt signed an order protecting a shallow alkali lake in Stutsman County, North Dakota. There were about fifty pelicans left on it.

American white pelicans had nested at Chase Lake in great numbers through the middle of the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century their numbers had fallen sharply, for a reason the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service still states plainly: people "made a regular practice of going to Chase Lake on Sunday afternoons to see how many pelicans they could kill."

The man who stopped it was not a president. H. H. McCumber came to the area in 1905, found only about 500 birds, watched the number keep falling, and petitioned the U.S. Biological Survey — the ancestor of today's Fish and Wildlife Service — to make the lake a refuge. By the time the order came, the count was down to fifty.

Roosevelt signed. Chase Lake became the fifteenth federal wildlife refuge in the country and the second of the two federal bird reservations he created in North Dakota, after Stump Lake in 1905. McCumber was made its first federal game warden.

When he left in 1918, he reported between 2,500 and 3,000 pelicans on the lake.

In 2000, a record 35,466 breeding pelicans were counted.

That is what the signature was for. A settler who could see what was happening, a government office that listened, and a president willing to sign — and a hundred and eighteen years later Chase Lake still holds one of the largest American white pelican nesting colonies in North America.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/conservation/by-the-numbers

in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt ordered the United States government to change how it spelled.The instruction went to Char...
08/27/2026

in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt ordered the United States government to change how it spelled.

The instruction went to Charles A. Stillings, the Public Printer: every document coming out of the executive branch would adopt 300 respelled words drawn up by the Simplified Spelling Board, a body funded by Andrew Carnegie. Thru for through. Dropt for dropped. Kist for kissed.

Roosevelt thought he was doing something modest, and said so:

"It is not an attempt to do anything far-reaching or sudden or violent; or indeed anything very great at all. It is merely an attempt to cast what slight weight can properly be cast on the side of the popular forces which are endeavoring to make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic."

His argument was that English spelling had always been in motion. Nobody, he pointed out, still wrote batte, sette, dimme, summe and fysshe, as the Elizabethans had. He was not inventing a change; he was declining to lag behind one.

The country disagreed, loudly. Newspapers mocked him for months. Congress was angrier still — and notably, the objection in Congress had less to do with spelling than with a president rewriting the language by executive order. In December the House resolved that its documents would use the spelling found in the dictionary. Roosevelt withdrew the order.

He was a good loser about it, in a letter that same month:

"I could not by fighting have kept the new spelling in, and it was evidently worse than useless to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten. Do you know that the one word as to which I thought the new spelling was wrong — thru — was more responsible than anything else for our discomfiture? But I am mighty glad I did the thing anyhow. In my own correspondence I shall continue using the new spelling."

He kept his word — simplified spellings turn up in his letters for years afterward.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/presidency/executive-power

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3410 Chateau Road
Medora, ND
58645

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