Q&A with Humorous Keynote Speaker (Marketing, Cancer, Foodservice, Inspiration) Conor Cunneen about Teddy Roosevelt

Q: As a humorous keynote speaker on leadership and communications, you must have a sneaking regard for Teddy Roosevelt.

A: He was definitely an interesting character and one almost born to be a keynote speaker on leadership, communications or even self-promotion. His daughter said that he always wanted to be the life and soul of the party. He wanted to be ‘the corpse at the wake and the bride at the wedding.’ I think he would have made a magnificent humorous, inspirational, funny, motivational keynote business speaker. Given his personality, Roosevelt would probably have felt that description was underselling him.

Q: What made TR such an impactful personality?

A: He had unshakeable belief in himself. One visiting British politician said that the two things in the US that were extraordinary were Niagara Falls and President Roosevelt.  Speaker of the House Tom Reed said sardonically to TR – “If there is one thing more than another I admire you for it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” In a book that should be of real interest to any funny, humorous keynote speaker on communications and leadership, Bob Doles “Great President Wit,” the author notes that it was said after Roosevelt’s first address to Congress, that the Government Printing Office had exhausted its supply of the personal pronoun.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT INAUGURAL SPEECH 

SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 1905

Roosevelt had been President for more than three years prior to this inaugural speech. He took office following the assassination of William McKinley – Sept 14^th, 1901. McKinley lingered for eight days after being shot by anarchist Leon Szolgosz. Teddy Roosevelt was a vibrant man and in some ways the epitome of what a good humorous keynote speaker might look. Larger than life, his daughter said he wanted to be the center of every event “the bride at the wedding, the corpse at a wake!” Roosevelt  became President at 42 years of age and promised when elected in 1904, that he would not run again – a promise he later regretted as he left the White House at the age of 50. He did make a run at the presidency in 1912 which was won by Woodrow Wilson.

Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing others, we must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression.

Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power as this nation has seen during the century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a Democratic republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.

Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's children. To do so we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

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Are you seeking an inspirational, humorous, motivational, funny and energizing keynote speaker who has a true gift of gab?

Are you seeking a humorous keynote speaker, a funny keynote speaker, a keynote speaker for your next sales conference or association conference?

Then contact Chicago based keynote speaker and business humorist Conor Cunneen at 630 718 1643.

“In my close to thirty years of association work, I have never seen a speaker as well received as you.”       Incentive Marketing Association