|
You will find here a series of book reviews of books about Theodore Roosevelt and, sometimes, books by Theodore Roosevelt. Partly because he is regarded as one of the nation's best presidents and most colorful historical figures, partly because this is the 150th anniversary of Roosevelt's birth and the continuing bicentennial of his presidency, this is a time when many new books about Roosevelt are being published. You'll find reviews of these new contributions to Roosevelt studies here as well as reviews of classics. We welcome guest reviews. If you wish to make a contribution, contact our site manager: Lion in the White House Basic Books This is a relatively short book about a big subject. It’s also a general book rather than a specific study of some aspect of Roosevelt’s life, such as his governorship of New York or his time in Cuba. The question I always ask in reading a book like this is, to what extent is it merely a journeyman-like review of what we already have in greater detail and scrutiny in other books, and to what extent does it have anything new to say. Aida Donald admits in her acknowledgements that the book is not based on original research but a careful study of the letters of Roosevelt (edited by Elting E. Morrison) and secondary sources. In other words, it is not meant to break new ground or offer a bold new view of Roosevelt. It is meant to cover the ground in an intelligent way. Not every book has to break new ground. The eighteenth century literary dictator Samuel Johnson said, “mankind requires more often to be reminded than informed.” In other words, if Donald has written a solid book that will enliven Roosevelt for thousands of Americans, it will have accomplished its goal. Lion in the White House is a good read. It reminded me of things I had forgotten. It offered some fresh perspectives and made me think anew about what I thought I understood. It provoked me to go back to the original letters and to other biographies to see how they handled the same subjects. Lion in the White House joins several other short treatments of Roosevelt: Louis Auchincloss’ Theodore Roosevelt in the American Presidents Series (2001), and Stacy A. Cordery’s Theodore Roosevelt: In the Vanguard of the Modern (2003). Auchincloss is a distinguished guest biographer, but his book, in my opinion, is not as interesting as Donald’s. I’m a big fan of Cordery’s densely packed study, which quotes extensively from Roosevelt’s writings. If you are looking for a one-volume biography of Roosevelt, my favorite is Kathleen Dalton’s Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. Among its other virtues, it pays attention to the women in Roosevelt’s life. Given Roosevelt’s strenuous masculinity and search for manly adventure, it is easy for biographers to pay too little attention to the role of women and the women’s movement in Roosevelt’s life. Dalton corrects that deficiency without distorting the biographer’s lens. Unfortunately, Lion in the White House is marred by some serious factual errors. Donald says that Roosevelt spent 133 days in Cuba. Actually it was 47. That’s a huge difference. He arrived in Cuba on June 22, 1898 and he was gone by August 8. Those 47 days (well less than two months) had an enormous impact on Roosevelt’s life. Whatever else was true, for the rest of his life Roosevelt was a bonafide war hero, a man who had put his money where his mouth was, a man who was not afraid to take risks—to risk his life—on behalf of his core principles. It is astonishing how completely Roosevelt “appropriated” the Spanish American War as his own private arena for heroism. Compared to the war experiences of, say, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, or Dwight W. Eisenhower, it was a remarkably short interlude (“my crowded hour”). It would be a mistake to exaggerate its duration. Donald asserts, page 252, that Theodore Roosevelt “was shot by an unknown assailant” in October, 1912, during the Bull Moose insurgency. How she could make such a mistake is hard to fathom. We not only know who shot Roosevelt, but we know a good deal about why he tried to assassinate the former president. The assailant was a man named John Schrank of New York City. He had been following Roosevelt on the campaign trail. He explained that he had been visited in a dream by martyred president William McKinley, who had instructed Schrank to kill Roosevelt. Schrank told investigators that he was opposed to a president seeking a third term. Schrank was confined to an insane asylum. He died in 1940. Donald writes (page 256) that the River of Doubt (the Rio Roosevelt) lies north of the Amazon. Actually, the Rio Roosevelt lies on the south side of the Amazon. It is a north flowing tributary of the Madeira, which in turn flows north into the Amazon. Mistakes like this one are admittedly minor, but they immediately inform readers that the author has never been to the River of Doubt, and they call into question the general credibility of the biography. Donald implies (page 126) that Senator Thomas Platt of New York coined the phrase “bull in a china shop” to characterize Roosevelt’s political style. That would have been sometime between 1898 and 1900. In fact, the phrase was recorded at least as early as 1834 and not by Platt. Donald says that Roosevelt’s conservation program protected an acreage “almost equal to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803.” This is wildly misleading. Roosevelt added no acreage to the American landmass, but he did designate some 230,000,000 acres for protection from adverse economic activity. This was a remarkable achievement. Roosevelt easily stands as the greatest conservationist of any president in American history. But the Louisiana Purchase involved approximately 575,000,000 acres, which does not make it “almost equal” to the Roosevelt conservation achievement. Donald asserts that Roosevelt killed a Spanish soldier “with his bare hands” in Cuba. I know of no such incident. If you think about it for even a moment, such a claim is patently absurd. Whomever Roosevelt killed in Cuba, he shot with a pistol or rifle. There is also a good deal of awkward and imprecise writing in the book that suggest hasty composition. Just one short example will serve. On page 49, Donald writes, “He thought that, if he moved fast, Black Care might not catch up to him.” There were two types of depression in Roosevelt’s life. Throughout his life, and particularly in the first half of it, he experienced a low level but nevertheless steady melancholy that indicated a fundamental uncertainty about his identity. The hectic level of activity in his life had something to do with his preference for running away from the shadows rather than turning to face them squarely. This is a bit ironic given his strenuous calls for courage in every situation. The second source of depression for Roosevelt was the death of his first wife on Valentine’s Day 1884. When he wrote that the light had gone out of his life, he meant it. As Donald rightly indicates later in the same section of her book, Roosevelt’s almost incredible burst of (often violent) adventure in Dakota Territory between 1884 and 1887 had a great deal to do with his grief and political and social disappointments (see below). He understood himself accurately, if somewhat impersonally, when he wrote, “black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” By removing the famous sentence from its context, and paraphrasing it in a way that removes its metaphoric trenchancy, Donald loses a great opportunity to get to the core of Roosevelt. There are a number of examples of such awkwardness in Lion in the White House. On the other hand, the book is especially strong and interesting on three episodes of Roosevelt’s life: his governorship of New York, his work as a man of letters, and his experiences in Dakota Territory. I don’t know if Donald visited the badlands of North Dakota in writing her book, but she writes like someone who, at the very least, has carefully assimilated the literature on the subject. In so short a book, there is no time for all the stories that people of North Dakota would want to hear about Roosevelt’s adventures on the cattle frontier. For example, she is able, in very short compass, to indicate accurately Roosevelt’s relationship with his two Dakota Territory ranches. “At first he was a financial partner in the Maltese Cross ranch at Chimney Butte. Then he became the owner of the Elkhorn ranch” (page 49). This is precisely right. Roosevelt never owned his two badlands ranches. Like virtually everyone else, he was running cattle on the public domain. The Maltese Cross already existed when he first visited the badlands in 1883. But he created his second ranch, the Elkhorn, 35 miles north of the Northern Pacific Railroad track in a remote place on the Little Missouri River. Donald also understands the significance of Roosevelt’s sojourn in what became North Dakota. “Some of the most vivid stories that began to give Roosevelt a mythic quality come from his western experiences. He was his own public relations expert and portrayed himself as a cowboy” (pages 50-51). Roosevelt came to the American West not merely to shoot buffalo and other big game or to seek strenuous adventures. He came to get a dose of the American frontier before it disappeared forever. He believed, as did his friend Frederick Jackson Turner, that the frontier experience was the formative dynamic of the American character and the most important event of the first great phase of American history. Roosevelt wanted to get a transfusion of that! He also came west to remake or (as the cultural historians put it) re-fashion himself. He metamorphosed himself from eastern blueblood dude into authentic westerner. He chose to transform himself into what his detractor Mark Hanna would later call “that damned cowboy.” It was a brilliant career move, among other things, and it fundamentally altered Roosevelt physically and spiritually. Roosevelt was our first (but not last) cowboy president. Perhaps most interesting of all, Donald suggests that Roosevelt punished the West for the death of his first wife Alice (February 14, 1884) and the political disappointments of his life in the establishment sector of New York, Boston, and Albany. “He experienced perfect freedom as a cowboy and hunter,” she writes. “But he took revenge on the land for his misfortunes in the East. He killed scores of animals in a kind of orgy of violent easing of his tensions. Hunting was an ordinary activity of westerners, but Roosevelt seemed beyond normal” (page 50). This is pretty strong, and some will object to it, particularly because of the word “orgy.” But it may be true, or there may at least be some truth in it. Even if we don’t finally agree with Donald’s argument, it serves two important purposes. First, it integrates Roosevelt’s activities in the West into his character. In other words, Donald does not see the Dakota interlude as a kind of lark or a series of deee-lightful adventures in wild country. She sees Roosevelt working out his destiny out in the vast treeless country on the edge of American civilization. For Donald, the western interlude is not the stuff of a dime novel, however much Roosevelt presented it as such in his colorful writings. It is the stuff of a man seeking the meaning of his life, and working out the unresolved energies in his character in a faraway and paradigmatic landscape. Second, it makes all of us think in a new way about Roosevelt’s life in the West, particularly his activities as a big game hunter and exemplar of law and order. More generally, Donald has an interesting understanding of the role of violence in Roosevelt’s life. After he and his childhood sweetheart (and eventual second wife) Edith Carow miscarried, Donald says “He was so distraught that he went off on wild rides on his horse and even shot a neighbor’s dog for a small transgression. Aside from the personal hurt he undoubtedly suffered, it is the first recorded episode of how violently Roosevelt could behave when he was thwarted” (page 31). The mix of insecurity and hypermasculinity in Roosevelt’s character, and their effect on American history, has been thoroughly explored by Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House, and Kristin Hoganson in Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. Lion in the White House is worth reading merely for Donald’s analysis of Roosevelt in North Dakota, though she spends no more than a page or two on the subject. Here and there in the narrative, Donald provides some real insights into Roosevelt’s character. They are not necessarily original, but they are stated with confidence and clarity. “He was,” she writes on page 20, “totally self-possessed, knew himself well, and never had an identity crisis.” One might quibble with the claim that Roosevelt “knew himself well,” but he certainly was not given to self-examination or what we would call an identity crisis. Donald calls Roosevelt “a human steam engine in a pince-nez” (page 40). The book on Roosevelt’s life as an intellectual and man of letters has yet to be written. It is much needed, because as Donald rightly states, Roosevelt was “the most literary of all America’s presidents” (page 56). The principal weakness of Edmund Morris’ otherwise masterful volumes on Roosevelt is that he undervalues Roosevelt’s life as a reader, writer, and intellectual. In fact, both The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex provide a sustained contempt for Roosevelt’s intellectual life. Donald spends what time she can in so short a book appreciating Roosevelt’s achievement as the writingest and possibly the readingest of American presidents. The passages in which she assesses his books, particularly the masterful Autobiography (1913) and insists that they help us understand the man and statesman, leave the reader wanting more. What could be better than that? Clay S. Jenkinson
|
