“NEVER YET WAS A COUNTRY WORTH LIVING IN UNLESS ITS SONS AND DAUGHTERS WERE OF THAT STERN STUFF WHICH BADE THEM DIE FOR IT AT NEED”: THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S MANUSCRIPT DRAFT OF HIS ESSAY “THE GREAT ADVENTURE,” SIGNED BY HIM

ROOSEVELT, Theodore. Autograph manuscript signed, “The Great Adventure.” No place: circa August 1918. ix manuscript pages, each measuring 8 1/2 x 11 inches, mounted, matted and framed; entire piece measures 32 x 28 inches. WITH: Broadside reprint framed, circa November 1918; entire piece measures 11 1/2 x 16 inches. Together, two framed pieces.    $60,000.

Autograph manuscript draft of his essay “The Great Adventure,” signed by Theodore Roosevelt and with many additions and corrections in his hand that were incorporated into the final printed essay. Handsomely framed, and accompanied by a framed contemporary broadside edition of the essay.

“The Great Adventure” was frequently reprinted during WWI as an inspirational broadsheet. All of Roosevelt’s four sons served in WWI: Quentin, the youngest, was killed at age 21 in air combat over German-occupied France in July 1918. Roosevelt noted, “It is very dreadful that he should have been killed; it would have been worse if he had not gone.” Many consider “The Great Adventure,” with its call to sacrifice and to national duty, to be his eulogy for his son: “The torches whose flame is brightest are borne by the gallant men at the front, and by the gallant women whose husbands and lovers, whose sons and brothers are at the front. These men are high of soul, as they face their fate on the shell-shattered earth, or in the skies above or in the waters beneath; and no less high of soul are the women with torn hearts and shining eyes; the girls whose boy lovers have been struck down in their golden morning, and the mothers and wives to whom word has been brought that henceforth they must walk in the shadow.”

Roosevelt proclaimed his solidarity with the Allies early, denouncing Woodrow Wilson’s neutrality policy and calling Wilson himself a coward. “For Roosevelt, Germany’s warning in February 1915 that neutral ships risked destruction in the war zone around the British Isles completed the metamorphosis of the war from a strategic to a moral struggle. National character and American rights now became the transcendent issue. ‘We owe it not only to humanity but to our national self respect’ to act, [Roosevelt] declared when the British liner Lusitania was torpedoed in the war zone with the loss of 124 Americans. Hence his searing indictments of peace-at-any-price pacifists, his insistent demands for universal military service… With good cause, he blasted the Wilson administration for its demoralizing delays in industrial mobilization after the United States entered the war” (ANB). Not merely a call to arms, “The Great Adventure” is also a call to motherhood: “Unless men are willing to fight and die for great ideals, including love of country, ideals will vanish… And unless the women of ideals bring forth the men who are ready thus to live and die, the world of the future will be filled by the spawn of the unfit. Alone of human beings the good and wise mother stands on a plane of equal honor with the bravest soldier.” Roosevelt lived long enough to see the war’s armistice in November 1918; he died in January 1919. First published as an article in The Metropolitan Magazine in October, 1918, and then as the first essay in Roosevelt’s last book, The Great Adventure: Present-Day Studies in American Nationalism, one month later.

Manuscript pages about-fine with light toning at fold lines; signature only slightly faded. A fine, unique piece of WWI history.