Teddy’s Ten Commandments: The Core of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Approach to Life and Government

In 1899, New York Governor Teddy Roosevelt offered advice for the students at Mount Pleasant Military Academy. The legendary leader of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, known as the Rough Riders, drew from a rather surprising source—the revelation at the foot of another mountain, Sinai, three thousand years prior.

“I urge you to have the widest toleration in matters of opinion,” he told the assembly, “but to have no toleration at all when it comes to matters of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. These are fundamental, essential principles which must live in the heart of every American citizen and by which every man asking place or political power must be tested.”

A Life-long Affinity

Theodore Roosevelt’s citing the Decalogue, in fact, is not as surprising as it might seem. He had an affinity for citing it, and other passages from the Bible, throughout his career. The habit was a natural outgrowth of his upbringing. His parents were members of various Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed congregations. As historian Benjamin J. Wetzel has described, in their “household, prayers were regular, churchgoing was weekly, and little Teedie (as he was called) was often required to summarize the morning’s sermon.” Teedie even taught a Sunday school class for underprivileged children until he left to attend Harvard in the fall of 1876. There, he continued his Sunday school teaching at Christ Episcopal Church in Cambridge

As Carl J. Richard has detailed in his recent So Help Us, God: American Presidents and the Bible, in 1895, as police commissioner of New York City, Roosevelt responded to Comptroller Ashbel P. Fitch’s letter to the New York Tribune criticizing him for his strict enforcement of a Sunday closing law. According to Roosevelt, Fitch had misreported a conversation between the two men. Roosevelt wrote sarcastically, “Let me cordially commend him to Exodus, chapter xx, verses 2 to 17, inclusive. They contain the recital of certain archaic rules known as the Ten Commandments. The sixteenth verse is especially worth Mr. Finch’s attention.” Verse 16, the second-to-last of the Commandments, states, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”

The next year, Roosevelt called out William Jennings Bryan’s presidential platform promoting inflation through the coinage of silver as a violation of “Thou shall not steal.” He quipped:

“There is a certain difficulty in arguing the issue of the campaign, the question of free silver. It is always difficult to make an elaborate argument about the eighth commandment. When a man quotes, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and another promptly replies by asking, ‘Why not?’ really the best answer is to repeat the commandment again. If a man cannot at the first glance see that it is as immoral and vicious to repudiate debts as it is to steal, why, it becomes quite a hopeless task to try to convince him by the most elaborate arguments.”

In 1898, when he was encouraged to pursue the governorship of New York, Roosevelt confessed his concerns. He asserted “with anything touching the Eighth Commandment and general-decency, I could not allow any consideration of party to come in.” The next year, he stated his political philosophy by asserting: “I stand by the Ten Commandments; I stand by doing equal justice to the man of means and the man without means; I stand by saying that no man shall be stolen from and that no man shall steal from anyone else; I stand by saying that the corporations shall not be blackmailed on the one side and that the corporations shall not acquire any improper power by corruption on the other.”

In a December 30, 1900, address in Carnegie Hall to the Young Men’s Christian Association, he again called out “the Decalogue and the Golden Rule,” saying that they “must stand as the foundation of every successful effort to better either our social or our political life.”

In 1904, now seeking reelection as president, Roosevelt was advised to emphasize his devotion to the Constitution. Such loyalty, he thought, was so blatantly obvious, that he responded, “The only trouble is that I am ashamed to say it. It is a little like repeating my adherence to the Ten Commandments.”

Commitment and Creed

TR’s biblical literacy wasn’t limited to the famous list. In 1903 he quoted Proverbs 31:28, from the chapter that describes the “Woman of Valor,” in praise of good mothers. He declared, “The woman who has borne, and has reared as they should be reared, a family of children has in the most emphatic manner deserved well of the Republic. Her burden has been heavy, and she has been able to bear it worthily only by the possession of resolution, of good sense, of conscience, and of unselfishness. But if she has borne it well, then to her shall come the supreme blessing, for in the words of the oldest and greatest of all books, ‘Her children shall rise up and call her blessed.’”

He also drew inspiration from Micah 6:8. In 1916 he told the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John J. Leary Jr.,

“I wonder if you recall one verse of Micah that I am very fond of—‘to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy Lord’—that to me is the essence of religion. To be just with all men, to be merciful to those to whom should be shown, to realize that there are some things that must always remain a mystery to us, and when the time comes for us to enter the great blackness, to go smiling and unafraid. That is my religion, my faith. To me it sums up all religion; it is all the creed I need. It seems simple and easy, but there is more in that verse than in the involved rituals and confessions of faith of many creeds we know.”

Powered by the Prophets

Early in his career, while serving in the New York State Assembly, Roosevelt protested the Democratic majority’s refusal to seat the duly elected Henry L. Sprague as a modern-day iteration of the cities in Genesis who refused to obey God. “For the twelve or fourteen Democratic members who voted in favor of Mr. Sprague last night I have and shall always have a very sincere respect. They acted against the majority of their party; they acted as honest and manly men. But exactly as ten [righteous] men could have saved the ‘cities of the plains’ so these twelve men will not save the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Democracy.”

Following his presidency, Roosevelt argued, “It would be a great misfortune for our people if they ever lost the Bible as one of their habitual standards and guides in morality.” He later elaborated: “No democracy can afford to overlook the vital importance of the ethical and spiritual, the truly religious, element in life; and in practice the average good man grows clearly to understand this, and to express the need in concrete form by saying that no community can make much headway if it does not contain both a church and a school.”

A Hebraic Soul

The Bible was the first book Roosevelt listed as accompanying him on the African safari he took following the end of his presidency. In 1913 he wrote that he felt sorry for anyone who could not “enjoy the Hebrew prophets.” Five years later, in a letter to his son Quentin, he remarked, “My whole concern at this time is practically the same concern that Amos and Micah and Isaiah had for Jerusalem nearly three thousand years ago!”

In 1917, two years before his death, Roosevelt argued for the cultivation of the American spirit, inspired by ancient Israel. “The most perfect machinery of government could not keep us as a nation from destruction if there is not within us a soul,” he believed. “No abounding material prosperity shall avail us if our spiritual senses atrophy. The foes of our own household shall surely prevail against us unless there be in our people a morality not very widely different from that preached by the seers and prophets of Judea when the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome still lay in the future.”

While Teddy Roosevelt’s historic career will long be studied for its countless adventures and accomplishments, it is his dedication to the Decalogue and his bond to the Bible that will continue to be admired by all Americans of faith.

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern, MBA, is co-editor of Jewish Roots of American Liberty (Encounter, 2025) and editor of  The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada (Koren Publishers, 2024).