Why Theodore Roosevelt’s Library Belongs in the Badlands | American Enterprise Institute

The new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opened on July 4 in Medora, North Dakota.

The location may seem surprising because Roosevelt was a New Yorker: he was born in Manhattan, buried in Oyster Bay, has a memorial along Central Park, and spent most of his adult life at Sagamore Hill on Long Island. A presidential library almost anywhere in New York would have made sense. But his library sits on a mesa in the Badlands, overlooking the Little Missouri River. The building is beautifully designed to make you feel immersed in local, raw wilderness.

Understanding Roosevelt’s years in the Badlands explains why placing the library in Medora is such an inspired decision. It was here that the future public servant was formed.

This historical record reveals that Roosevelt returned to the Dakota Territory after one of the darkest days imaginable. In February of 1884, his wife and his mother died in the same house in Manhattan, hours apart. He marked the page of his diary with a large black X and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”

It was out west in the Badlands where Roosevelt gained focus while processing his grief. In the Dakotas, Roosevelt rode through difficult country, gathered cattle, lost a good deal of money, and endured winters that killed most of his herd.

His years in Medora were anything but easy. Roosevelt later said he never would have become president without them because it was there he learned what citizenship demanded.

Roosevelt arrived in Dakota an outsider. He was a wealthy Harvard graduate with thick glasses and a knife from Tiffany’s; the locals called him “Four Eyes” and none of his Harvard privilege transferred out west. Standing had to be earned, and this was done by staying in the saddle, working your share, and keeping one’s word. As Roosevelt did this, he was accepted, and his persona changed.

In Medora, Roosevelt learned about self-government. He helped organize the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association, with neighbors hammering out common rules on grazing and roundups with no state capital in sight. He also served as a deputy sheriff. When thieves stole his riverboat in 1886, he famously chased them down the icy Little Missouri, caught them, and marched them overland for trial rather than hanging them on the spot, which local custom would have forgiven. He believed in institutions even when they were absent.

Roosevelt spent the rest of his life drawing on those Dakota lessons and this becomes powerfully clear in his speeches, for Roosevelt would talk less about what government should do than about what citizens should be. He regularly spoke of the Constitution and elections, but his words powerfully demonstrated that neither worked unless the people underneath them were capable of self-government.

The well-known “Man in the Arena” speech captures Roosevelt’s understanding of citizenship and beliefs about the power of engagement perfectly. Notably, the speech is not actually called “Perseverance” or “Leadership;” it is called “Citizenship in a Republic,” and in the speech Roosevelt’s contempt falls not on the man who fails, but on the man who stays safely outside the arena altogether; a man he described as “cold and timid.”

Roosevelt had very little patience for spectators who sit on the sidelines. If he were alive today, he would not approve of so much of our civic life now happening from the margins. Millions comment, repost, react, and argue online yet comparatively few authentically participate in institutions that sustain our communities.

Roosevelt would encourage Americans to directly engage with our varied communities, and this means coach Little League, serve on the school board, and lead a Scout troop. He would declare that we should show up at our congregations and work to build institutions that outlast us, and that is the meaning of citizenship.

I had the privilege of serving on the library’s Academic Advisory Committee, and the decision to put the library in Medora always struck me as exactly right. Underneath practically every conversation about exhibits and artifacts sat one question: where does Roosevelt’s story actually start? I believe, and the museum shows, that it begins with his time in North Dakota.

Opening the Theodore Roosevelt library on the nation’s 250th anniversary invites Americans to ask what deserves remembering. Roosevelt’s Badlands years matter not because they make a good story, though they do, but because they explain who he became during his time out west. A grieving 25-year-old rode into rough country and slowly became the kind of man who could stand in Paris and tell the world what a republic requires of its citizens: being in the area and not a spectator. The library rightly celebrates Roosevelt’s moment of formation and very proudly shares that story with the nation. Go visit, you won’t be disappointed.