Theodore Roosevelt was the first of the great 20th century presidents; Franklin Roosevelt was the second; and I personally think Harry Truman was the third.Edmund Morris’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt captures his fantastic energy, intellect, civility, high spirits and strong convictions. It is a book that begins just as TR assumes the presidency after President McKinley’s assassination and sees TR through his first tumultuous term of three years and second term of four.
During these 7+ years, TR was a whirlwind of initiative, both domestic and foreign. He settled the Russo-Japanese War, headed off a war that might have enveloped Venezuela, engineered the politics and chicanery that led to the United States building the Panama Canal, advanced workers’ rights, and many other important issues, none more important than setting aside vast tracts of the United States as national monuments and parks.
As with FDR, TR was loved or hated but almost everyone liked him whether they hated him or not. He seemed to have a decency, a bon homie, that drew everyone’s attention the moment he entered the room. He liked to laugh, play with children, and enjoy conversation with exceptional peers. I can’t think of anyone who read more books as president, certainly not in as many languages.
This likeability factor contributed a great deal to TR’s success. Wall Streeters mistrusted him,but he got along with them well enough; foreign sovereigns swallowed some of his tougher messages; and the common man (excepting white Southerners) thought he was a straight-talker, the man who offered them “a square deal.”
Morris captures all this in exuberant detail. It’s not his fault that TR is a great subject, and he only occasionally writes “over the top” in trying to explain the whirlwind (which Job wasn’t able to explain to God.)
A few insights in this book are invaluable. Overall it makes clear that the robber barons having made more money than Bill Gates, the time had come for reining them in. TR did that to an extent, but not as much as one might think. He was always a man of the middle, the golden mean. TR’s genius, as Morris puts it, was to understand knowledge as a platform for action, not for further introspection. The great writer Henry Adams captured this Rooseveltian quality with the word dynamo. He seemed to see in Roosevelt a major turn in history, a symbol of modern industrial/economic strength as capable of plotting quietly as roaring loudly.
Bill Clinton’s fundamental political thesis is that the candidate who is most positive about America will win the election. He may have been thinking about Reagan, but TR and FDR were even more convincing in their determination to prove that America, when it put its mind to it, could do anything.
TR’s diplomacy in mediating a final settlement of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905 is expertly rendered here. The trial of diplomacy (and it’s a trial in war, too) is making a move and then giving it time to ripen and take effect. TR had the kind of strategic mind necessary to play the diplomatic game. He was far-sighted and he was objective. He fundamental conclusion was that for the first time in history Asia had bested Europe. That’s a major development and one that Euro-centric Americans might not like to accept, but TR took the world as it was, not as it had been, or as he wished it were.
In the course of a year this safari-master of a hunter might also read dozens of books about ancient Rome, Persia, the Incas, and the Spanish empire at its height and depth (to which he contributed). One would think this propensity to be bookish and an outdoorsman would be almost impossible, but TR somehow managed it. In most photographs, he exhibits a quality of bursting at the seams. His smile bursts at the seams. His suits seem to burst at the seams. The crowds that surrounded him seem to burst at the seams. But this was a larger-than-life figure, determined to define the boundaries of his own seams, and they were distant boundaries, indeed.
Robert Earle
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