November 17, 2019 • 24 mins
Shakespeare might be the most prolific English phrase-maker, but Theodore Roosevelt coined a few iconic phrases of his own, including “like nailing jelly to a wall.” He could read in French, German, Italian, and Latin, but thought English should be the only language taught in schools. He also advocated for simplified spelling—altho instead of although, for example. In this episode, we’ll explore TR’s complicated relationship with language.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Floss. Have you ever looked at a word like although,
for example, and thought there are just too many letters
in this word? If so, congratulations, you have a little
something in common with Theodore Roosevelt, author of more than
(00:22):
thirty books and a hundred and fifty thousand letters. You
know who else thought that there were just too many
letters in English words philanthropist and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
In six Carnegie created and financially supported the Simplified Spelling Board.
According to The New York Times, Carnegie thought that English
had the potential to be the world language of the future,
(00:44):
and that would help lead to world peace. But according
to the board, English was handicapped by one thing, and
one only. It's intricate and disordered spelling, which makes it
a puzzle to the stranger within our gates and a
mystery to the stranger beyond the seas. The board decided
to pursue a course of reform by omission drop letters
that were unpronounced or deemed unnecessary. Teaching would be made easier,
(01:07):
Written correspondence would be faster, Printing would be more efficient.
Not to mention cheaper. One publisher estimated that using simplified
spelling in the publishing business would save up to forty
million dollars, which is over a billion dollars in today's money.
The Board's proposed reforms were published and somehow found their
way to President Theodore Roosevelt, who thought that what the
(01:28):
Board was proposing made a lot of sense. He threw
his support behind their reforms, which included chopping although from
A l t h O U g h t a
l t h o, and knocking the extra s and
e d s from words like missed and kissed so
that they were spelled m I s T and k
I s t respectively. P h A n t O
(01:52):
M became f A n t O M cats when
p u r r, they'd pu r, and so on.
But in August, when tr signed an executive order that
made the Board's spelling reforms required in government documents, he
never could have predicted how controversial his actions would be.
(02:12):
Simplified spelling wasn't the only way tr took on language
in his life. He warped the pronunciation of words to
get noticed, coined iconic phrases, and use the English language
as a political tool. Just how did he use language
to achieve his desired ends? We're about to find out.
From Mental Flaws and I Heart Radio. This is History Versus,
(02:35):
a podcast about how your favorite historical figures faced off
against their greatest foes. I'm your host, Aaron McCarthy, and
this week's episode is tr versus Language. By the time
he became president, Theodore Roosevelt was a master of many languages.
He could read in French, German, Italian, and Latin, though
he called reading in Latin dreary labor. He also spoke
(02:56):
French and German, although his French was in the words
for Secretary of Stage John hay Lawless As to grammar,
he also had a very unusual speaking style, so unusual that,
according to Edmund Morris, it has the effect of burying
his remarks like shrapnel in the memory of the listener.
Once they hear what he said to them, they don't
forget it. It seems like you did have a very
(03:17):
distinctive way of talking, since it was remarked upon by
people who wrote about it, and they noticed it, so
it must have been seemed a little odd or strange.
That's erka O Grant linguist and mental thought contributor, and
the person I call whenever I have a question about
language responsible. And there are some recordings of Roosevelt's speaking,
(03:38):
but as Okrant notes, most of what we know about
how he spoke is through other people writing about it.
And whenever they talked about how he spoke, they also
usually talked about his teeth. So we'll continue that fine
tradition here. According to Marris, Roosevelt's white and even teeth
would chop every word into neat syllables, sending them forth
perfectly foreigned, but separate, in a jerky stacatissimo that has
(04:00):
no relation to the normal rhythms of speech. One of
TR's colleagues summed it up by saying, I always think
of a man biting tenpenny nails when I think of
Roosevelt making a speech. His manner of speaking led some
to believe that he'd had a speech impediment as a kid.
A college classmate noted that when they deliberately riled him up,
he would sometimes lose all together the power of articulation,
(04:23):
and according to a colleague in the New York State Assembly,
he would open his mouth and run out his tongue,
and it was hard for him to speak. Maris notes
that his diction was syncopated sibilants hiss out like escaping
steam plosives, drive the lips apart with an audible puffed
plosive p would, I imagine, would be like an extreme
build us up. You know, a lot of air coming out,
(04:44):
maybe some spit, you know, very forceful, powerful. Whatever the
reason for how he spoke, Roosevelt leaned into it. As
a young assemblyman, he'd warped the pronunciation of the words speaker,
yelling Mr Speaker, Mr Speaker, over and over, sometimes for
forty minutes, to get the speaker's attention. This is what
(05:05):
everyone else in Congress sounds like, or this is what
everyone else in New York high society sounds like. I
guess he was. He would be picking up on that.
But he used these devices to get attention. And maybe
he also bristled against these elocution training that they did
back then. And if you went to school and they
did this at Harvard, you had elocution lessons where they
(05:27):
taught you how to pronounce things and give do public speaking,
and the right gestures to make when you do public speaking,
and the right way to breathe and hold your body,
and maybe he bristled against that, or maybe thought it
was too British, or I don't know. Interestingly, when he
was out in the Dakotas in the mid eighteen eighties,
tr changed his way of speaking too. In his book
(05:49):
Theater Roosevelt in the Badlands, Roger L. D. Silvestro quotes
the Pioneer press Is, writing that the slow, exasperating drawl
and the unique accent the New Yorker feels he must
use when visiting a less blessed portion of civilization have disappeared,
and in their place is a nervous, energetic matter of
talking with the flat accent of the West. Whether or
(06:09):
not Roosevelt was a good public speaker is up for debate.
In the nineteen forties, a grad student named William Auburn
Bell put that question to those who had known him,
and the reviews were not favorable. Jeremy C. Young, author
of the book The Age of Charisma, put these reviews
together in a blog post. One person called TR's gesticulations
in his high pitched voice terrible, while another said he
(06:31):
wasn't a great speaker, but one felt the force and
magnetism of his personality and his great honesty and genuineness,
as one journalist noted in Theodore Roosevelt is a marvel
as a campaigner, more from his tremendous strength, energy, force,
and endurance them from Finnish and grace of delivery or addiction.
Young notes that in Roosevelt's era, most public figures like
(06:52):
William Jennings Bryan used an emotional style of speaking called
personal magnetism, but this was precisely the opposite sit of
what Roosevelt learned at Harvard from his rhetoric teacher Adams
Sherman Hill, who said that our feelings ought to be
regulated by the facts which excite them. Young says that
Roosevelt's speeches were often dry, equivocal, and monotonous because he
revised them over and over and then read the type
(07:15):
speeches rather than speaking off the cuff as Brian did.
But make no mistake, even if his speeches could be dull,
ti are definitely had a way with words. He coined
terms and phrases that we still use today, like bully pulpit,
nailing jelly to a wall. He actually said they might
just as well ask me why I do not nail current,
jelly to the wall, and the political usage of my
(07:37):
hat is in the ring. Supposedly he's the one who
called Maxwell House coffee good to the last drop. One
phrase we all think of when we think of tr
is speak softly and carry a big stick, you will
go far. He said it was a West African proverb
he was fond of, but according to the Oxford Dictionary Proverbs,
there doesn't seem to be evidence that it was actually
(07:58):
a West African proverb. He popularized many other words and
phrases like strong as a bull, moose, lunatic, fringe, mollycoddle,
and pussyfooting. He also popularized the phrase weasel words, which
originally referenced the legend that a weasel can suck the
contents out of an egg while leaving the shell intact.
He said he heard a friend's brother use it in
reference to another person who could, in the brother's words,
(08:20):
take a word and weasel it around and suck the
meat out of it, like a weasel sucks the meat
out of an egg. Until it don't mean anything at all,
no matter what it sounds like it means. It's a
favorite phrase of oak Rents it's a metal linguistic look
at language. So that this person is speaking this way
and the things they are doing with their words are
(08:42):
weasel e or the words aren't bearing meaning in the
way they should, And that's interesting in a sort of
the pre orwell way of looking at what people do
with words and how they work with the words and
manipulate with words. We'll be right back. TR also used
(09:04):
language to craft devastatingly colorful insults. One Supreme Court justice
was an amiable old fuzzy wuzzy with sweetbread brains, while
frequent presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson Secretary of State William
Jennings Bryan was a professional yodeler a human trombone. Roosevelt
called novelist Henry James a little emasculated massive inanity, while
(09:26):
Mississippi Congressman John Sharp Williams was a true old style
Jeffersonian of the barbaric blatherskite variety. A blatherskite, by the way,
is someone who talks a lot without making a lot
of sense. Burn This mastery of language may not have
been evident in all of tr speeches, but it was
definitely present in some of them. There's a reason why
(09:47):
his nineteen ten speech Citizenship in a Republic, or as
it's more commonly known, the Man in the Arena, is
still quoted more than a century after it was delivered.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man
who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where
the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
(10:11):
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,
who strives valiantly, who errs and comes shore to gain
it again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.
But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who
knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself
(10:32):
in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in
the end the triumph of high achievement, And who, at
the worst, if he fails, at least hate fails while
daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with
those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
But it can all be eloquent speeches and delightful insults
(10:54):
and catchy phrases. In his correspondence, Roosevelt used derogatory language
and ors in regards to other races and nationalities. Thomas G.
Dyer addresses TR's use of language like this in his
book Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, noting that
while TR seemed to derive considerable pleasure from the frequent
private use of racial and ethnic epithets, he rarely used
(11:17):
the terms in public. The extent of this language and
the frequency of its usage indicates the preoccupation with racial
differences that Roosevelt and his contemporaries had, but it also
suggests Roosevelt's professed objectivity in matters of race should not
always be taken at face value. Henry Cabot Lodge, TR's mentor,
sometimes scrubbed that language, along with some of TR's insults,
(11:39):
from their published correspondence, so Lodge must have known that
its use would not have painted TR in the best light.
Roosevelt also felt, in his words that we have room
for but one language here, and that is the English language.
He believed that immigrants loyal to America should assimilate completely
and be required to learn English, and that only English
should be taught in schools. In a nineteen sixteen speech
(12:02):
to the National Americanization Committee, Roosevelt said that immigrants should
become fully Americanized by learning English. This, he said, would
give them more opportunities in America and they wouldn't be
seen only as an industrial asset. Let us say to
the immigrant, not that we hope he will learn English,
but that he has got to learn it, Roosevelt said.
(12:24):
Let the immigrant who does not learn it go back.
This type of attitude, according to Okran, doesn't reflect the
reality of what actually happens when immigrants come to America.
It does look kind of scary. I guess when there's
a lot of immigrants coming in at once, which there
wasn't the turn of the century, and you go to
(12:45):
neighborhoods where everyone's speaking Italian, or you go to towns
in Wisconsin or everyone's speaking German, and you think, oh no,
what is this going to do to our national identity?
But you know, looking at one snapshot like that doesn't
show the whole picture, which is from generation to generation
things change very rapidly, and it's in the direction towards English,
(13:07):
and don't have to do much to make that happen.
The first generation, the old folks, they might never really
learn English, and then their kids will be bilingual, and
then their kids will be fully English speakers and even
forget the original language. And that's these days. That's even
frustrating for families that their kids, their grandkids don't keep
(13:28):
up the old language and then they lose it. Um.
The pressures of English are so great, and kids are
so adept at learning language and giving over to the
whatever the majority culture is, that they learn it, and
it seems unnecessary to to mandate it or make it
some sort of requirement or law. Um. Even today, it's
(13:50):
a great thing about our country that we have access
to a lot of people who speak a lot of languages,
and that's useful. And when we need native speakers of
a language, we we have them their citizens, and there's
no reason to try to stamp that out. Not to
mention the fact that English is a frequent borrower of
words from other languages. English is not picky about what
(14:10):
it will let in or except we don't have an academy.
We don't have you know, we don't have to vote
on whether we want to let this word in or not.
People just start using it and that makes the language
really robust. In fact, one of t R's favorite words
was borrowed from another language. We're talking, of course, about
bully that apparently comes from a Dutch word. Originally um
(14:34):
that meaning like mate or brother, my buddy, my friend
was first first distermined endearment, and then and then it
meant sort of a ruffian, and then it was specifically
the guy who protects prostitutes and uh, and eventually to
what we have today. But it didn't come from English.
And then there are languages like German, which has so
(14:55):
many words for which there's no English equivalent. My favorite
is coomber spec, a term for the weight you gain
from emotional overeating that literally translates to grief, bacon and
angst and you know all of that, schadenfreud, all those
things we totally make good use of. Yeah, we just
gotta keep letting those words come in before we get
(15:18):
back to simplified spelling, the system by which words are
reduced to their most basic expression in spelling, a system
that TR championed. I want to take one quick diversion
in TR went to Springfield, Massachusetts on a mission to
honor those boy scouts of Troupe thirteen who had sold
a thousand dollars worth of war bonds. It was there
that he, a current Titan of Language, had an encounter
(15:41):
with a future Titan of language. There were ten boys
being honored that May afternoon in the town's municipal auditorium.
As Donald EPs writes, Roosevelt went down the line, congratulating
each of the young men, repeating a laudatory statement, praising
each boy's accomplishment, and putting a medal on the honoree's chest.
Each presentation was met with thunder us applause. There was
(16:01):
a problem, though, tier only had nine medals, So when
Roosevelt came upon the tenth boy on stage and had
no metal to pin to his lapel, the understandably confused
former President Bellow to the scout master, what's this little
boy doing here? The boy scout master didn't stop to
explain the situation, just whisked young Theodore Geisel off stage.
(16:22):
The incident gave the future doctor SU's terrible stage fright,
and honestly, who can blame him? T R wasn't the
first person to support a phonetic spelling system. Benjamin Franklin,
Noah Webster, and Brigham Young had all advocated for spelling reform.
Noah Webster, for example, is probably the main reason the
letter you was removed from spellings of American words, and
(16:43):
the c's were replaced with ss, which are distinguishing features
between American and British English. Then again, he also suggested
we spell machine m A S H E N and
women w I M M E N. So you know,
they can't all be winners. So when THEO Or Roosevelt
issued an executive order in August directing the Government Printing
(17:03):
Office to use the Board's proposed spelling system, what he
called an effort to make our spelling a little less
foolish and fantastic, he was a pretty good company. The
Simplified Spelling Board was thrilled, for sure. They even released
a Roosevelt Phonetic spelling book that's fonetic with an F
after the order. And here's the thing, the Simplified Spelling Board, Webster, Roosevelt,
(17:25):
they all may have been onto something kind of You know,
if you ever meet Dutch people or German people, they
speak such good English. It can't be that difficult because
people do manage it um. But it does have a
reputation of certain parts of it being difficult and I'm
a big one is the spelling, and you have to
learn it. You can't just get a few rules of
(17:47):
some and then follow that like you can with most
other languages. You just have to memorize all these spellings.
In some other languages, like Italian, for example, you learn
how to sound out the letters, put them together, and bam,
you have a word. And according to Oakrand, even if
the spelling system has a different alphabet, it doesn't take
that long to grasp. But English with all its extra
(18:09):
letters is much tougher. Your engineering mind goes like, we
could do this over, we could make this so much better.
Why not, Well, here's why not. Simplified spelling looks ridiculous.
If you already know how to read and write, you're
just you're never gonna accept the simplified spellings. It looks
(18:30):
so funny. It looks like, um, you know, like a
cat wrote it or something. You know, our spelling is
just embedded in in our education and we're used to it.
And sure, you know, four year olds and five year
olds might be able to do better with phonetic spelling.
They probably would, But our educational process is the process
(18:55):
of bringing children into what we already do. And it's
just it's it's really hard to get over the just
the comic look of it. And that's exactly what the
press and critics latched onto after Roosevelt signed the executive order,
the backlash was immediate. We're gonna take a quick break.
(19:20):
After Roosevelt signed his executive order mandating simplified spelling and
government documents, everyone freaked out. A paper in Kentucky wrote,
in barely legible spelling, nothing and you th h i
n g escapes, Mr Roosevelt, Are you c e v
e lt. No subject is too high for that's tu
(19:45):
h I f r him to tackle t a k
l e nor too low. That's t u l o
for him to notice spelled tu n O t I s.
He makes treaties t r e t I s without
the consent of the Senate, s e n i t
(20:07):
He enforces such laws as meet his approval, and fails
f A l e s to c s e. Those
that do not suit do spelled du suit spelled s
O O T him. He now a sails a s
s A l e s. The English language, l A
(20:27):
n g g w I d G constitutes himself as
a sort of French Academy and will reform the spelling
in a way to suit t U S O O
T himself. The reaction overseas wasn't any better. One English
paper wrote, here is the language of eighty millions suddenly
(20:49):
altered by a mere administrative ukse. That's a Russian word
for arbitrary command, by the way, and it's usually reserved
to describe the actions of a zar. The paper went
on to say, could any other ruler on earth do
this thing? While another raged, how dare this Roosevelt fellow
dictate to us how to spell a language which was
ours while America was still a savage and undiscovered country.
(21:12):
Amidst the bruhaha, the New York Times said that roosevelt
spelling order has done him more harm than perhaps any
other act of his since he became president. So actually
harder to read a long text and simplified spelling because
you have to stop and sound it out, and we
don't do that when we read after after you know,
first second grade. It's no wonder that tr wanted to
(21:35):
simplify spelling. Though he supposedly had a photographic memory, he
was a notoriously bad speller in fact, his wife Edith
joked that he supported the system because he didn't know
how to spell anything. Roosevelt spun the order as an experiment,
writing that if the slight changes to the three words
garnered popular approval, they would become permanent, without any reference
(21:56):
to what public officials or individual citizens may feel if
they were not popular. He said the spellings would be
dropped spelled D R O P T, concluding, and that
is all there is about it. But in the end
what Roosevelt wanted didn't really matter. No one was having
his strange spellings. The Supreme Court refused to follow his order,
(22:17):
and in December nineteen six, Congress voted to get rid
of simplified spelling, writing in normal spelling that the government's
documents should observe and adhere to the standard of orthography
prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language. Clearly defeated,
tr withdrew his executive order, writing to simplified spelling proponent
Brander Matthews, I could not, by fighting, have kept the
(22:38):
news spelling in and it was evidently worse than useless
to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten.
But I am mighty glad I did the thing. Anyhow,
spelling finally returned to normal. But if you think about
it in a way, Roosevelt was ahead of his time.
The proof is in your text messages, where th h
(23:01):
O U g h is almost certainly shortened to th
h O. So if you're looking to get noticed, here's
a t R pro tip. Play aroun with pitch. Punch
those plosives and instead of a demure, excuse me to
get someone's attention, allowed, excuse me might do And on
that note, t T Y L History Versus is hosted
(23:26):
by me Aeron McCarthy. This episode was written by me,
with fact checking by Austin Thompson. Joe weigand voiced Theodore
Roosevelt in this episode. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy,
Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan.
The show is edited by Dylan Fagan and Low Berlante.
Special thanks to Eric Okrant. To learn more about this
(23:47):
episode and Theodore Roosevelt, visit Mental flass dot com Slash
History Versus, That's Mental Flaws dot com, slash h I
S t O R Y vs. History Versus is a
production of I heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Floss. Have you ever looked at a word like although,
for example, and thought there are just too many letters
in this word? If so, congratulations, you have a little
something in common with Theodore Roosevelt, author of more than
(00:22):
thirty books and a hundred and fifty thousand letters. You
know who else thought that there were just too many
letters in English words philanthropist and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.
In six Carnegie created and financially supported the Simplified Spelling Board.
According to The New York Times, Carnegie thought that English
had the potential to be the world language of the future,
(00:44):
and that would help lead to world peace. But according
to the board, English was handicapped by one thing, and
one only. It's intricate and disordered spelling, which makes it
a puzzle to the stranger within our gates and a
mystery to the stranger beyond the seas. The board decided
to pursue a course of reform by omission drop letters
that were unpronounced or deemed unnecessary. Teaching would be made easier,
(01:07):
Written correspondence would be faster, Printing would be more efficient.
Not to mention cheaper. One publisher estimated that using simplified
spelling in the publishing business would save up to forty
million dollars, which is over a billion dollars in today's money.
The Board's proposed reforms were published and somehow found their
way to President Theodore Roosevelt, who thought that what the
(01:28):
Board was proposing made a lot of sense. He threw
his support behind their reforms, which included chopping although from
A l t h O U g h t a
l t h o, and knocking the extra s and
e d s from words like missed and kissed so
that they were spelled m I s T and k
I s t respectively. P h A n t O
(01:52):
M became f A n t O M cats when
p u r r, they'd pu r, and so on.
But in August, when tr signed an executive order that
made the Board's spelling reforms required in government documents, he
never could have predicted how controversial his actions would be.
(02:12):
Simplified spelling wasn't the only way tr took on language
in his life. He warped the pronunciation of words to
get noticed, coined iconic phrases, and use the English language
as a political tool. Just how did he use language
to achieve his desired ends? We're about to find out.
From Mental Flaws and I Heart Radio. This is History Versus,
(02:35):
a podcast about how your favorite historical figures faced off
against their greatest foes. I'm your host, Aaron McCarthy, and
this week's episode is tr versus Language. By the time
he became president, Theodore Roosevelt was a master of many languages.
He could read in French, German, Italian, and Latin, though
he called reading in Latin dreary labor. He also spoke
(02:56):
French and German, although his French was in the words
for Secretary of Stage John hay Lawless As to grammar,
he also had a very unusual speaking style, so unusual that,
according to Edmund Morris, it has the effect of burying
his remarks like shrapnel in the memory of the listener.
Once they hear what he said to them, they don't
forget it. It seems like you did have a very
(03:17):
distinctive way of talking, since it was remarked upon by
people who wrote about it, and they noticed it, so
it must have been seemed a little odd or strange.
That's erka O Grant linguist and mental thought contributor, and
the person I call whenever I have a question about
language responsible. And there are some recordings of Roosevelt's speaking,
(03:38):
but as Okrant notes, most of what we know about
how he spoke is through other people writing about it.
And whenever they talked about how he spoke, they also
usually talked about his teeth. So we'll continue that fine
tradition here. According to Marris, Roosevelt's white and even teeth
would chop every word into neat syllables, sending them forth
perfectly foreigned, but separate, in a jerky stacatissimo that has
(04:00):
no relation to the normal rhythms of speech. One of
TR's colleagues summed it up by saying, I always think
of a man biting tenpenny nails when I think of
Roosevelt making a speech. His manner of speaking led some
to believe that he'd had a speech impediment as a kid.
A college classmate noted that when they deliberately riled him up,
he would sometimes lose all together the power of articulation,
(04:23):
and according to a colleague in the New York State Assembly,
he would open his mouth and run out his tongue,
and it was hard for him to speak. Maris notes
that his diction was syncopated sibilants hiss out like escaping
steam plosives, drive the lips apart with an audible puffed
plosive p would, I imagine, would be like an extreme
build us up. You know, a lot of air coming out,
(04:44):
maybe some spit, you know, very forceful, powerful. Whatever the
reason for how he spoke, Roosevelt leaned into it. As
a young assemblyman, he'd warped the pronunciation of the words speaker,
yelling Mr Speaker, Mr Speaker, over and over, sometimes for
forty minutes, to get the speaker's attention. This is what
(05:05):
everyone else in Congress sounds like, or this is what
everyone else in New York high society sounds like. I
guess he was. He would be picking up on that.
But he used these devices to get attention. And maybe
he also bristled against these elocution training that they did
back then. And if you went to school and they
did this at Harvard, you had elocution lessons where they
(05:27):
taught you how to pronounce things and give do public speaking,
and the right gestures to make when you do public speaking,
and the right way to breathe and hold your body,
and maybe he bristled against that, or maybe thought it
was too British, or I don't know. Interestingly, when he
was out in the Dakotas in the mid eighteen eighties,
tr changed his way of speaking too. In his book
(05:49):
Theater Roosevelt in the Badlands, Roger L. D. Silvestro quotes
the Pioneer press Is, writing that the slow, exasperating drawl
and the unique accent the New Yorker feels he must
use when visiting a less blessed portion of civilization have disappeared,
and in their place is a nervous, energetic matter of
talking with the flat accent of the West. Whether or
(06:09):
not Roosevelt was a good public speaker is up for debate.
In the nineteen forties, a grad student named William Auburn
Bell put that question to those who had known him,
and the reviews were not favorable. Jeremy C. Young, author
of the book The Age of Charisma, put these reviews
together in a blog post. One person called TR's gesticulations
in his high pitched voice terrible, while another said he
(06:31):
wasn't a great speaker, but one felt the force and
magnetism of his personality and his great honesty and genuineness,
as one journalist noted in Theodore Roosevelt is a marvel
as a campaigner, more from his tremendous strength, energy, force,
and endurance them from Finnish and grace of delivery or addiction.
Young notes that in Roosevelt's era, most public figures like
(06:52):
William Jennings Bryan used an emotional style of speaking called
personal magnetism, but this was precisely the opposite sit of
what Roosevelt learned at Harvard from his rhetoric teacher Adams
Sherman Hill, who said that our feelings ought to be
regulated by the facts which excite them. Young says that
Roosevelt's speeches were often dry, equivocal, and monotonous because he
revised them over and over and then read the type
(07:15):
speeches rather than speaking off the cuff as Brian did.
But make no mistake, even if his speeches could be dull,
ti are definitely had a way with words. He coined
terms and phrases that we still use today, like bully pulpit,
nailing jelly to a wall. He actually said they might
just as well ask me why I do not nail current,
jelly to the wall, and the political usage of my
(07:37):
hat is in the ring. Supposedly he's the one who
called Maxwell House coffee good to the last drop. One
phrase we all think of when we think of tr
is speak softly and carry a big stick, you will
go far. He said it was a West African proverb
he was fond of, but according to the Oxford Dictionary Proverbs,
there doesn't seem to be evidence that it was actually
(07:58):
a West African proverb. He popularized many other words and
phrases like strong as a bull, moose, lunatic, fringe, mollycoddle,
and pussyfooting. He also popularized the phrase weasel words, which
originally referenced the legend that a weasel can suck the
contents out of an egg while leaving the shell intact.
He said he heard a friend's brother use it in
reference to another person who could, in the brother's words,
(08:20):
take a word and weasel it around and suck the
meat out of it, like a weasel sucks the meat
out of an egg. Until it don't mean anything at all,
no matter what it sounds like it means. It's a
favorite phrase of oak Rents it's a metal linguistic look
at language. So that this person is speaking this way
and the things they are doing with their words are
(08:42):
weasel e or the words aren't bearing meaning in the
way they should, And that's interesting in a sort of
the pre orwell way of looking at what people do
with words and how they work with the words and
manipulate with words. We'll be right back. TR also used
(09:04):
language to craft devastatingly colorful insults. One Supreme Court justice
was an amiable old fuzzy wuzzy with sweetbread brains, while
frequent presidential candidate and Woodrow Wilson Secretary of State William
Jennings Bryan was a professional yodeler a human trombone. Roosevelt
called novelist Henry James a little emasculated massive inanity, while
(09:26):
Mississippi Congressman John Sharp Williams was a true old style
Jeffersonian of the barbaric blatherskite variety. A blatherskite, by the way,
is someone who talks a lot without making a lot
of sense. Burn This mastery of language may not have
been evident in all of tr speeches, but it was
definitely present in some of them. There's a reason why
(09:47):
his nineteen ten speech Citizenship in a Republic, or as
it's more commonly known, the Man in the Arena, is
still quoted more than a century after it was delivered.
It is not the critic who counts, not the man
who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where
the doer of deeds could have done them better. The
credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
(10:11):
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,
who strives valiantly, who errs and comes shore to gain
it again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.
But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who
knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself
(10:32):
in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in
the end the triumph of high achievement, And who, at
the worst, if he fails, at least hate fails while
daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with
those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
But it can all be eloquent speeches and delightful insults
(10:54):
and catchy phrases. In his correspondence, Roosevelt used derogatory language
and ors in regards to other races and nationalities. Thomas G.
Dyer addresses TR's use of language like this in his
book Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, noting that
while TR seemed to derive considerable pleasure from the frequent
private use of racial and ethnic epithets, he rarely used
(11:17):
the terms in public. The extent of this language and
the frequency of its usage indicates the preoccupation with racial
differences that Roosevelt and his contemporaries had, but it also
suggests Roosevelt's professed objectivity in matters of race should not
always be taken at face value. Henry Cabot Lodge, TR's mentor,
sometimes scrubbed that language, along with some of TR's insults,
(11:39):
from their published correspondence, so Lodge must have known that
its use would not have painted TR in the best light.
Roosevelt also felt, in his words that we have room
for but one language here, and that is the English language.
He believed that immigrants loyal to America should assimilate completely
and be required to learn English, and that only English
should be taught in schools. In a nineteen sixteen speech
(12:02):
to the National Americanization Committee, Roosevelt said that immigrants should
become fully Americanized by learning English. This, he said, would
give them more opportunities in America and they wouldn't be
seen only as an industrial asset. Let us say to
the immigrant, not that we hope he will learn English,
but that he has got to learn it, Roosevelt said.
(12:24):
Let the immigrant who does not learn it go back.
This type of attitude, according to Okran, doesn't reflect the
reality of what actually happens when immigrants come to America.
It does look kind of scary. I guess when there's
a lot of immigrants coming in at once, which there
wasn't the turn of the century, and you go to
(12:45):
neighborhoods where everyone's speaking Italian, or you go to towns
in Wisconsin or everyone's speaking German, and you think, oh no,
what is this going to do to our national identity?
But you know, looking at one snapshot like that doesn't
show the whole picture, which is from generation to generation
things change very rapidly, and it's in the direction towards English,
(13:07):
and don't have to do much to make that happen.
The first generation, the old folks, they might never really
learn English, and then their kids will be bilingual, and
then their kids will be fully English speakers and even
forget the original language. And that's these days. That's even
frustrating for families that their kids, their grandkids don't keep
(13:28):
up the old language and then they lose it. Um.
The pressures of English are so great, and kids are
so adept at learning language and giving over to the
whatever the majority culture is, that they learn it, and
it seems unnecessary to to mandate it or make it
some sort of requirement or law. Um. Even today, it's
(13:50):
a great thing about our country that we have access
to a lot of people who speak a lot of languages,
and that's useful. And when we need native speakers of
a language, we we have them their citizens, and there's
no reason to try to stamp that out. Not to
mention the fact that English is a frequent borrower of
words from other languages. English is not picky about what
(14:10):
it will let in or except we don't have an academy.
We don't have you know, we don't have to vote
on whether we want to let this word in or not.
People just start using it and that makes the language
really robust. In fact, one of t R's favorite words
was borrowed from another language. We're talking, of course, about
bully that apparently comes from a Dutch word. Originally um
(14:34):
that meaning like mate or brother, my buddy, my friend
was first first distermined endearment, and then and then it
meant sort of a ruffian, and then it was specifically
the guy who protects prostitutes and uh, and eventually to
what we have today. But it didn't come from English.
And then there are languages like German, which has so
(14:55):
many words for which there's no English equivalent. My favorite
is coomber spec, a term for the weight you gain
from emotional overeating that literally translates to grief, bacon and
angst and you know all of that, schadenfreud, all those
things we totally make good use of. Yeah, we just
gotta keep letting those words come in before we get
(15:18):
back to simplified spelling, the system by which words are
reduced to their most basic expression in spelling, a system
that TR championed. I want to take one quick diversion
in TR went to Springfield, Massachusetts on a mission to
honor those boy scouts of Troupe thirteen who had sold
a thousand dollars worth of war bonds. It was there
that he, a current Titan of Language, had an encounter
(15:41):
with a future Titan of language. There were ten boys
being honored that May afternoon in the town's municipal auditorium.
As Donald EPs writes, Roosevelt went down the line, congratulating
each of the young men, repeating a laudatory statement, praising
each boy's accomplishment, and putting a medal on the honoree's chest.
Each presentation was met with thunder us applause. There was
(16:01):
a problem, though, tier only had nine medals, So when
Roosevelt came upon the tenth boy on stage and had
no metal to pin to his lapel, the understandably confused
former President Bellow to the scout master, what's this little
boy doing here? The boy scout master didn't stop to
explain the situation, just whisked young Theodore Geisel off stage.
(16:22):
The incident gave the future doctor SU's terrible stage fright,
and honestly, who can blame him? T R wasn't the
first person to support a phonetic spelling system. Benjamin Franklin,
Noah Webster, and Brigham Young had all advocated for spelling reform.
Noah Webster, for example, is probably the main reason the
letter you was removed from spellings of American words, and
(16:43):
the c's were replaced with ss, which are distinguishing features
between American and British English. Then again, he also suggested
we spell machine m A S H E N and
women w I M M E N. So you know,
they can't all be winners. So when THEO Or Roosevelt
issued an executive order in August directing the Government Printing
(17:03):
Office to use the Board's proposed spelling system, what he
called an effort to make our spelling a little less
foolish and fantastic, he was a pretty good company. The
Simplified Spelling Board was thrilled, for sure. They even released
a Roosevelt Phonetic spelling book that's fonetic with an F
after the order. And here's the thing, the Simplified Spelling Board, Webster, Roosevelt,
(17:25):
they all may have been onto something kind of You know,
if you ever meet Dutch people or German people, they
speak such good English. It can't be that difficult because
people do manage it um. But it does have a
reputation of certain parts of it being difficult and I'm
a big one is the spelling, and you have to
learn it. You can't just get a few rules of
(17:47):
some and then follow that like you can with most
other languages. You just have to memorize all these spellings.
In some other languages, like Italian, for example, you learn
how to sound out the letters, put them together, and bam,
you have a word. And according to Oakrand, even if
the spelling system has a different alphabet, it doesn't take
that long to grasp. But English with all its extra
(18:09):
letters is much tougher. Your engineering mind goes like, we
could do this over, we could make this so much better.
Why not, Well, here's why not. Simplified spelling looks ridiculous.
If you already know how to read and write, you're
just you're never gonna accept the simplified spellings. It looks
(18:30):
so funny. It looks like, um, you know, like a
cat wrote it or something. You know, our spelling is
just embedded in in our education and we're used to it.
And sure, you know, four year olds and five year
olds might be able to do better with phonetic spelling.
They probably would, But our educational process is the process
(18:55):
of bringing children into what we already do. And it's
just it's it's really hard to get over the just
the comic look of it. And that's exactly what the
press and critics latched onto after Roosevelt signed the executive order,
the backlash was immediate. We're gonna take a quick break.
(19:20):
After Roosevelt signed his executive order mandating simplified spelling and
government documents, everyone freaked out. A paper in Kentucky wrote,
in barely legible spelling, nothing and you th h i
n g escapes, Mr Roosevelt, Are you c e v
e lt. No subject is too high for that's tu
(19:45):
h I f r him to tackle t a k
l e nor too low. That's t u l o
for him to notice spelled tu n O t I s.
He makes treaties t r e t I s without
the consent of the Senate, s e n i t
(20:07):
He enforces such laws as meet his approval, and fails
f A l e s to c s e. Those
that do not suit do spelled du suit spelled s
O O T him. He now a sails a s
s A l e s. The English language, l A
(20:27):
n g g w I d G constitutes himself as
a sort of French Academy and will reform the spelling
in a way to suit t U S O O
T himself. The reaction overseas wasn't any better. One English
paper wrote, here is the language of eighty millions suddenly
(20:49):
altered by a mere administrative ukse. That's a Russian word
for arbitrary command, by the way, and it's usually reserved
to describe the actions of a zar. The paper went
on to say, could any other ruler on earth do
this thing? While another raged, how dare this Roosevelt fellow
dictate to us how to spell a language which was
ours while America was still a savage and undiscovered country.
(21:12):
Amidst the bruhaha, the New York Times said that roosevelt
spelling order has done him more harm than perhaps any
other act of his since he became president. So actually
harder to read a long text and simplified spelling because
you have to stop and sound it out, and we
don't do that when we read after after you know,
first second grade. It's no wonder that tr wanted to
(21:35):
simplify spelling. Though he supposedly had a photographic memory, he
was a notoriously bad speller in fact, his wife Edith
joked that he supported the system because he didn't know
how to spell anything. Roosevelt spun the order as an experiment,
writing that if the slight changes to the three words
garnered popular approval, they would become permanent, without any reference
(21:56):
to what public officials or individual citizens may feel if
they were not popular. He said the spellings would be
dropped spelled D R O P T, concluding, and that
is all there is about it. But in the end
what Roosevelt wanted didn't really matter. No one was having
his strange spellings. The Supreme Court refused to follow his order,
(22:17):
and in December nineteen six, Congress voted to get rid
of simplified spelling, writing in normal spelling that the government's
documents should observe and adhere to the standard of orthography
prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language. Clearly defeated,
tr withdrew his executive order, writing to simplified spelling proponent
Brander Matthews, I could not, by fighting, have kept the
(22:38):
news spelling in and it was evidently worse than useless
to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten.
But I am mighty glad I did the thing. Anyhow,
spelling finally returned to normal. But if you think about
it in a way, Roosevelt was ahead of his time.
The proof is in your text messages, where th h
(23:01):
O U g h is almost certainly shortened to th
h O. So if you're looking to get noticed, here's
a t R pro tip. Play aroun with pitch. Punch
those plosives and instead of a demure, excuse me to
get someone's attention, allowed, excuse me might do And on
that note, t T Y L History Versus is hosted
(23:26):
by me Aeron McCarthy. This episode was written by me,
with fact checking by Austin Thompson. Joe weigand voiced Theodore
Roosevelt in this episode. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy,
Julie Douglas, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan.
The show is edited by Dylan Fagan and Low Berlante.
Special thanks to Eric Okrant. To learn more about this
(23:47):
episode and Theodore Roosevelt, visit Mental flass dot com Slash
History Versus, That's Mental Flaws dot com, slash h I
S t O R Y vs. History Versus is a
production of I heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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