President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt
CAPITOL PARK - Birmingham, Al
OCTOBER 24, 1905

Mr. Rhodes; and you, My Fellow-Citizens:  I wish to say that I am stirred most deeply by this  magnificent reception from what Mr. Rhodes has so  well called the Magic City of the South. Alabama  has made a wonderful record. At the close of the  war, shattered, war-swept, it seemed that it was im  possible for her people, in the grip of poverty as  they were, to rally ; and any people less strong than  you of Alabama would have failed ; but you had the  stuff in you and you succeeded. About the year  1880 the tide turned, and the last quarter of a  century has seen in Alabama a progress that would  have been absolutely impossible in any other age or  in any other nation than ours. The agriculture of  the State went upward by leaps and bounds; but  even more marvelous was your mechanical and industrial success. You have in this State coal and  iron, the two basic elements in modern industrialism, and you have also a wealth of water power  only partially used; and given that amount of natural resources and the right type of man to use  them, the result will be what we have seen. But  there is something that is ahead of any kind of  natural resources, and that is the citizenship of the man  on the soil. Proud though I am of your extraor  dinary industrial prosperity, I am prouder yet of  the men who have achieved it.  Think what it means for our nation to have the  President of the United States greeted as he has  been today, with on his right and his left hand as  the guard of honor the veterans of the Civil War,  the men who wore the blue, the men who wore the  gray, united forever.  As I came up the street nothing pleased me as  much as the sight of the school-children drawn up  alongside the line of march. Remember that we  shall leave this country in the hands of the children  of today, and that the American of tomorrow  will be what we train the boy or girl to be. If the  children are not well educated, if they are not  brought up as they should be, the State will go down.  We of this generation have received a splendid heritage from you men of the years of 60 to 65.  Honor to us if we treat your great deeds as spurring us onward; and shame to us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own idleness or folly.  When I speak of education I do not mean only education in intelligence. That counts tremendously; but education in character counts more. It is character that determines the Nations progress in the long run.  In the organizations of veterans after the Civil  War each hails the other as comrade. It makes  no difference whether the man was a  lieutenant-general Or whether he was the youngest recruit that  served at the very end of the war. All that is asked  is, did he do his duty in the place in which he was.  If he did, you are for him. If he did not, you have  no comradeship with him. I ask that the same  lesson that you of the Civil War applied practically  in your own persons during and since that war be  applied by the rest of us in civil life. I ask that  we scorn alike the base arrogance of the rich man  who would look down on his poorer brother and the  equally base envy of the poor man who would hate  his richer brother; and that you apply to every citizen of this Republic just this one test the test that  gauges his worth as a man. Does he do his duty  fairly by himself, his family, his neighbor, and the  State and the Nation? If he does, be for him,  whether he is rich or poor, because if you do not you  are recreant in the spirit of Americanism.