Larger Than Life

The end of American innocence is not an innocent notion. It suggests a nation permanently swaddled in amiable memories of the past. Each time America experiences a crisis, whether World War I, Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate or Sept. 11, it is said to have been jolted into the roiling present. But this is quite wrong. The striking thing is not how pacific but how volatile the U.S. has been. Domestically, the country’s past could be described as a series of economic booms and busts with successive waves of immigration ensuring ethnic and class conflict.

Nor has the U.S. been a shrinking violet abroad. From the outset, the United States relentlessly expanded, whether it was during the Mexican War or the conquest of Indian territories. The North’s victory in the Civil War prompted Herman Melville to write in his “Battle Pieces” that the U.S. now wore empire on its brow. A new superpower had emerged from the conflict intent on increasing its power and influence abroad. Indeed, the turn of the century was the hinge of fate for the United States. No one did more to turn the republic into an empire than Theodore Roosevelt.

Edmund Morris and Louis Auchincloss provide a welcome opportunity to take a fresh look at Roosevelt. “Theodore Rex” (the name is Henry James’) is the sequel to Morris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.” (A third volume is planned.) No, Morris does not appear as a fictitious character, as in his biography of Ronald Reagan. Here, Morris draws on the documents at hand, although in his zeal to create vivid drama, he sometimes embellishes historical fact with his own fanciful visions. He minutely traces Roosevelt’s two tumultuous terms as president, beginning with his unexpected ascension in 1901 following the assassination of William McKinley.

It’s all there, more or less: Roosevelt’s views on race, his famous dinner in the White House with Booker T. Washington, his trust-busting, his grab of the Panama Canal, his negotiation of the 1905 Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty and his buildup of the Navy come in for close scrutiny.

Alas, for all its comprehensiveness, Morris’ book ends up being something of a cartoon. Each chapter is broken into short scenes; some sections are only two or three sentences long. Morris has created a film script, not a history. There is, for a start, the perfumed prose which draws attention to itself. Morris offers a Walt Disney view of the high and mighty; the rumbustious Roosevelt, the conniving Sen. Mark Hanna, the retrograde industrialists.

Despite its length, Morris’ work is curiously perfunctory when it comes to describing the politics of the era. The problem may be revealed by a note at the book’s outset: “Expectations or intimations of ‘coming events’ are those of the period. Historical hindsights are confined to the notes.” But the job of the historian is not to suspend judgment completely but to weigh and assess. The suspicion arises that Morris indulges in no “hindsights” because he has none. As in his biography of Reagan, “Dutch,” he is patently bored by politics. Instead, he indulges in hero worship.

Roosevelt deserves better treatment. Auchincloss provides it. In a little more than 150 pages, he brilliantly analyzes Roosevelt and his presidency. His book is filled with penetrating observations. A graceful writer, Auchincloss explains why Roosevelt became a progressive and sets him in the wider context of his time. It would be hard to think of a better introduction. H.W. Brands’ “The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt” admirably supplements Auchincloss. The letters provide a vivid reminder of Roosevelt’s forceful prose and the depth of his reading. For comprehending Roosevelt’s volcanic and shrewd temperament, nothing can match reading his correspondence.

It would have been hard to think of a more unlikely future candidate for high office than the young “Teedie,” as he was known. Bookish and sickly, he suffered repeated asthma attacks and devoted himself to studying natural history. But a talk with his father prompted him to undertake a strenuous course in calisthenics at age 12, from which he never deviated. The martial spirit seems to have been present from the outset; his great disappointment as a lad was that his father did not fight in the Civil War but paid someone to take his place. Auchincloss believes this left a lasting mark on Roosevelt. Ever after, he was determined to efface this stain on the family escutcheon: In Auchincloss’ view, “Theodore Jr.’s throwing up of his assistant secretaryship of the navy in 1898 to become a Rough Rider when duty would have seemed to point to his staying at his post, his violent efforts as an ill and elderly man to get to the trenches of World War I, and his posting of his sons to battle all seem to stem from a barely rational compulsion.”

Yet he never lost his boyishness. He was boisterous, completely devoted to his wife and family and often played games on the White House grounds with his children and their friends.

Roosevelt saw politics as a form of combat. Upon election to the New York state Assembly in 1882, he violently denounced the Democrats and assailed a state judge who had assisted Jay Gould in obtaining control of the Manhattan Elevated Railway Co. After a stint out West as a rancher, Roosevelt returned to politics as a delegate to the Republican convention in 1884. It was a decisive moment.

After the party nominated the corrupt James G. Blaine, he stayed with the party rather than bolting. His loyalty was rewarded: Roosevelt was appointed to the Civil Service Commission, enabling him to attack various panjandrums and push through civil service reform.

Above all, Roosevelt was sharpening his connections to official Washington; Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay and others became close friends. They formed an elite political and social caste that fervently believed that America had to expand into Asia and Central America or it would be crushed and gobbled up by outside powers.

Roosevelt was a force to be reckoned with; Henry James called him “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.” Roosevelt’s big break came when McKinley was assassinated; to the consternation of most of the Republican Party, he was now president. “Look what we’ve got! That damned cowboy is president of the United States,” complained Hanna, the kingmaker of the Republican Party.

All his life, TR was seen as a dangerous radical. Even during the New Deal, Endicott Peabody, headmaster of Groton, read aloud to a group of right-wing graduates a letter from another graduate denouncing “Roosevelt.”

The audience, assuming it referred to FDR, lustily cheered. “But wait!” the chuckling headmaster cautioned. “This letter was written in 1905!” Certainly, Roosevelt wasted little time in going after the trusts and in seeking to ameliorate the plight of the poor. He pushed for the imposition of income and inheritance taxes, promotion of the eight-hour day, control of campaign contributions, regulation of the railroads and supervision of food and drugs.

Roosevelt’s record toward American blacks was not impeccable, but he despised the South’s racism: He wrote that the Charleston aristocrats “shriek in public about miscegenation, but they leer as they talk to me privately of the colored mistresses and colored children of white men whom they know.”

He was also the first Green president: Early in his presidency he went tramping through Yosemite with John Muir for three days. Despite congressional attempts to stymie him, he increased the size of our national forests from 42 million acres to 172 million and created 51 national wildlife refuges. In another of his sparkling assessments, Auchincloss notes that the progressive Republicanism embodied by Roosevelt went by the wayside after he bolted from the party in 1912 to lead the Bull Moose movement. Auchincloss speculates that moderate Republicans have never recovered from that act.

What inspired Roosevelt’s actions? In part, he simply thought that businessmen were terribly parochial: In a letter to a British friend, he observed, “I do not dislike, but I certainly have no especial respect or admiration for and no trust in, the typical big moneyed men of my country.”

His deep reading in the classics undoubtedly shaped his actions. The last president who understood the ancient world as well was Harry S Truman, who wrote a sturdy history of the Roman Empire after he left office. Roosevelt believed that big business was running amok and that, if not curbed, a radical mob, as in ancient Athens or Renaissance Italy, would rise to depose the corrupt ruling class.

Auchincloss also shrewdly points out that, at heart, Roosevelt was a policeman: “He detested bullies: the foul-mouthed gunmen he had seen terrifying customers in western bars, the backroom machine politicians who milked the urban poor, the Pennsylvania mining tycoons who exploited their ignorant immigrant laborers. Like a Byronic hero he wanted not so much to raise the poor as to lower the proud.”

If Roosevelt modernized the United States at home, he also worked to buttress its security abroad. Auchincloss takes a rather benevolent view of his foreign policy. He points out that Roosevelt never advocated an empire for the United States in the mold of Great Britain, France or Holland. He favored independence for Cuba and the Philippines. According to Auchincloss, the naval bases he wanted in Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Panama and Puerto Rico were not the “bastions of empire but the necessary fueling spots for the warships that guaranteed the security of his country as preached by his mentor, Admiral Mahan.” Indeed, Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 for his successful mediation of a peace treaty between Russia and Japan. For all his bluff and bombast, he was able to conduct the negotiations with great aplomb. It is hard not to believe, however, that in his snatching of the Panama Canal Roosevelt was setting up the U.S. for a century of unhappy intervention in Central America.

Still, Roosevelt knew that the United States had to pay a price to become and remain an empire. In a stirring May 1915 letter to his son Archibald, he deplored Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to intervene in World War I, viewing it as “abject cowardice and weakness.” The United States was letting the Germans wage terrorism against it as they blew up passenger ships such as the Lusitania. How different has the United States been over the last decade? It took Sept. 11 to rouse it to action. Ever since the Roosevelt era, the United States has been an empire but has not wished to acknowledge it. This is not innocence; it is self-delusion. Roosevelt knew better. He ably maneuvered this country between hubris and appeasement. As George W. Bush seeks to revive U.S. leadership around the globe and revive bipartisanship at home, he could do worse than to take a leaf from the leader of progressive Republicanism and the creator of the American imperium.

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A Family Man

“It is bitter that the young should die, but there are things worse than death; for nothing under heaven would I have had my sons act otherwise than as they acted. They have done pretty well, haven’t they? Quentin killed, dying as a war hawk should ... over the enemy’s lines. Archie crippled, and given the French war cross for gallantry. Ted gassed once ... and cited for conspicuous gallantry. Kermit with the British military cross, and now under Pershing.”

--Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to fellow Rough Rider, Robert Ferguson, shortly before the end of World War I

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Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for The Times.