Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris Random House, 864 pp., $35 IN 1903, in the midst of his struggles to build the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt was asked by Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, for a list of recommended books. The list, which Roosevelt wrote out during a train ride, is classic TR–demonstrating at once his omnivorous reading and his little boy’s desire to show off: “Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius, a little of Plutarch, Sophocles’ Orestean trilogy and “Seven Against Thebes,” Euripides’ “Hippolytus” and “Bacchae;” Aristophanes’ “Frogs.” Parts of the “Politics” of Aristotle. . . . ” As the train bounced southward, Roosevelt toted up his favorites. He listed “Macbeth” and “Twelfth Night” along with Macaulay’s essays, Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great,” Mahan’s “Types of Naval Officers,” Tolstoy’s “Sebastopol” as well as “Tom Sawyer,” “The Pickwick Papers,” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The White Company.” In all, he listed 114 authors–adding, “Of course I have forgotten a great many.” No president before or since could have poured out such a roster (not withstanding that “Seven Against Thebes” was actually written by Aeschylus) or would have made time, while president, to continue this sort of reading. Fresh from the public-relations disaster of “Dutch,” his widely panned postmodern memoir of Ronald Reagan, Edmund Morris has finally produced “Theodore Rex,” the second volume of the biography that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” in 1979. That first volume from Morris was nothing short of brilliant. It put me off reading biographies for nearly a year because every other one I picked up seemed pale in comparison. This new installment, covering Roosevelt’s presidency from 1901 to 1909, is less gripping to read, but captures Roosevelt’s growing sophistication as well as all the endearing and exasperating vitality of the man. Covering the presidency, Morris does not have the benefit of the sort of dramatic and varied scenery he had for the first part of Roosevelt’s life: Fifth Avenue, Harvard, the badlands of South Dakota, San Juan Hill. But amidst the volumes of official White House papers and the century-old policy debates, Morris hasn’t lost touch with Roosevelt the man. The effect of this book is surprisingly political. Morris depicts TR as the president who was able to create something that has often been dreamed about but almost never realized: a vital center. By temperament TR was a dervish, and yet, Morris emphasizes, his instinct was to seek political equilibrium. He balanced opposing forces and embodied the middling current of American opinion without ever being wishy-washy or passive, as most centrists are. The vitality is what makes this fun reading. Roosevelt ate about twice as much as a normal man, and swallowed a river of coffee each day (one doctor astutely observed that he was driving his machine so hard it would surely conk out prematurely). He dragged his guests on forced marches through Rock Creek Park and would lead them wading through streams in winter without even breaking his flow of conversation. He would speed through meetings, barking, “Tell me what you have to say. Quickly! Quickly!” He amused himself while president with exuberant tennis matches (no cameras allowed) and a game in which he and his trainers would don helmets and chest protectors and beat each other with singlesticks. His closest friends and admirers were well aware that at one level he had never really grown up. “You must always remember that the president is about six,” noted Cecil Spring-Rice, the best man at his first wedding. On his birthday, Elihu Root sent him a note which read, “I congratulate you on attaining the respectable age of forty-six. You have made a very good start in life and your friends have great hopes for you when you grow up.” BUT THERE WAS another side to the man. Roosevelt had lost his first wife, Alice, when he was twenty-five; burdened by an unceasing grief, he could barely bring himself to mention her as long as he lived. He could experience fierce internal turmoil. In “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” Morris showed him pacing his bedroom at night, fiercely berating himself, slamming his fist into his palm, for betraying her memory by falling in love again. He was many things and their opposite: a rich boy who felt more at home with the middle class; a weak asthmatic who forced himself to be strong and courageous; an imperious man who could bore a dinner table with his monologues but also a considerate man who interrupted a cabinet meeting when he noticed some of his older secretaries were cold and built a fire for them himself. As Morris observes, “He struggled to reconcile his love of strong language with the need for dignified expression. It had always been thus with him: conflict between belligerence and dignified restraint, between animal brutality and human decency, between pessimism and optimism, or, as his perceptive friend Owen Wister put it, ‘between what he knew and his wish not to know it.'” The things that were pure in him were his lust for action of any sort (and his corresponding contempt for people who did not share that lust) and the complete identification he felt between himself and his country. “Personal and patriotic pride throbbed as one in his breast,” as Morris puts it. At a time when America was emerging as the world’s leading power, perhaps he was right to link his own manic energy with his nation’s. To achieve American greatness, Roosevelt pursued a few policies unambiguously: preserving national forests, building up the Navy, exerting American power in the global policeman’s role (he practically used the phrase) so that world order could be preserved. At home, however, he mostly restrained himself. He despised theorists who pushed grand schemes, and he was too much a conservative to embrace radical change. He used his power to balance interests, Morris argues. His speeches could sometimes devolve into a mess of equivocations because every time he stated a strong belief, he would follow it with a series of counterarguments to placate the people he had just offended. HIS POLICY TOWARD the trusts was typical. Though he had absolutely no interest in money himself (it was one of the few subjects that bored him), he understood that the free-enterprise system produced the wealth that was the root of the nation’s greatness. He despised the muckrakers (he coined the word, in fact), who saw only the dark and corrupt side of capitalism. He distrusted populist cries to redistribute wealth. “Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own hearts,” he declared. And he thought socialist schemes to have the government, say, take over the railroads were absurd. You have no idea how “inefficient and undependable” federal workers are, he lectured one proponent of nationalization. To have government workers run private enterprise would be “a disaster.” Yet, when he saw the John D. Rockefellers and the J.P. Morgans and the great titans of Wall Street in action, he was massively unimpressed. “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses.” Sometimes ennui turned to anger when he saw men of his own class putting their money interest before the national interest. His greatest intra-party battles were with the Wall Street wing of the Republican party. He lashed out at “the most dangerous members of the criminal class–the criminals of great wealth.” In the midst of one of his fights with the money wing of the GOP, he attended a Gridiron dinner. He noticed one of his chief opponents, Senator Joseph Foraker, had been placed just in front of him, at a table perpendicular to the main table. Then he looked in the dinner program, which had caricatures
of prominent guests and jokey captions. The one underneath Foraker’s read, “All coons look alike to me.” Roosevelt’s anger boiled over. As soon as the fish course was served, Roosevelt announced he would like to speak immediately. He rose and delivered a harsh lecture to “Millionaires Row” (J.P. Morgan was three places to his left). Corporations were going to have to get used to the fact that they would be policed by federal power, he said, to snuff out their deceptive practices. Then he turned to Foraker, a plutocrat spokesman on Capitol Hill, and held up the program. “‘All coons look alike to me,'” he read. Then he threw down the program in disgust. “Well all coons do not look alike to me!” he nearly shouted. The Gridiron event was a shambles. The other courses could not be served. Food grew cold on the plates. The regular program was scrapped. Foraker was given a chance to respond and Roosevelt responded to his response. The episode is a far cry from the pre-scripted presidential appearances we have today, but its ferocity was typical of the battles that sometimes raged between TR and Wall Street. THEY WERE battles Roosevelt won. Foraker left Washington in disgrace after it was discovered he was accepting a form of lavish bribes. The titans of Wall Street ended up backing Roosevelt to such an extent that he was embarrassed by the size of their campaign contributions. “Corporate cunning has developed faster than the laws of the nation and state,” he said after reviewing the fund-raising scene. “Sooner or later, unless there is a readjustment, there will come a riotous, wicked, murderous day of atonement.” And yet through it all, his policies were temperate. Faced with a coal strike, he tried to mediate between the two sides. In foreign policy, Morris emphasizes, Roosevelt’s approach was much the same. He did not hesitate to assert American power when it was called for, but he won his Nobel prize for his neutrality in settling the Russo-Japanese war by a series of subtle pressures designed to maneuver the two sides to an equal peace. “What none of the diplomats appreciated,” Morris writes, “as they obeyed his instructions, was Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong obsession with balance. He loved the poised spin of the big globe in his office, the rhythm of neither-nor sentences, the give and take of boxing, the ebb and flow of political power play. His initial tilt in the Russo-Japanese war . . . had straightened like the needle of a stepped-off scale.” Morris’s theme nicely corrects the stereotypical depiction of TR as an overgrown blusterer perpetually heading off on self-glorifying causes. But I wonder if Morris tidies him up too much. Roosevelt knew how to choose an enemy and exploit a political moment, and once he had selected a foe, he launched his attack with a vigor that upset equilibriums and transformed the status quo. Moreover, he was a fiercely moral fighter, not a balance-of-power cynic. His policies stand in stark contrast to those of the European realpolitik school. If he thought he was pursuing a just cause (and every one of his causes was also God’s cause), he would pursue it with the fervor of an evangelist. He was more a subtle crusader than a cagey diplomat or an aspiring Metternich. In one of the most interesting episodes of the book, Morris describes how Roosevelt averted war with Germany in 1902. The crisis started because Venezuela owed $62 billion to an international consortium of lenders headed by Great Britain and Germany, but had no means to pay the money back. Concluding that the only thing Venezuela had of any value was land, the Kaiser’s Germany began preparations to blockade and then occupy part of the country. The Germans anticipated that this plan might be considered by the American as an affront to the Monroe Doctrine, a doctrine which, for Roosevelt, had the status of holy writ. So military planners on the Wilhelmstrasse began work on contingency plans to invade the United States. Roosevelt called in the German ambassador and told him that the United States would “be obliged to interfere, by force if necessary,” if the Germans took any action against Venezuela. He gave the Germans ten days to back down. The Germans and their allies seized four Venezuelan gunboats anyway. “We will do whatever is necessary for our navy, even if it displeases the Yankees. Never fear!” the Kaiser scoffed. Roosevelt dispatched Admiral Dewey with a squadron of battleships to the region, and used diplomatic pressure to peel Britain away from Germany. Finally, on the night before Roosevelt’s ultimatum was to expire, Germany, faced with the newly strengthened U.S. Navy, backed down, announcing it would accept American arbitration in the dispute. It was a small Cuban Missile Crisis moment, won with a show of military muscle. Surely the Germans concluded that Theodore Roosevelt, the man who was fired to the core with visions of America’s historical greatness, was not to be messed with in his own hemisphere. MORRIS SPENDS LITTLE TIME on Roosevelt’s religious ideas, or on what you might call the moral foundations of his various indignations. But time after time, Roosevelt was motivated by an electrically charged sense of righteousness. His political decisions were shaped by a profoundly felt vision of God’s plan for mankind and America’s role in that plan, not by a merely secular view of what the correlation of forces should be. Morris mentions that his speeches often consisted of a series of thumping clich s, but those clich s were attempts to articulate principles to which he was fiercely committed but which he couldn’t express in prosaic terms. He wasn’t omnidirectional, as he sometimes seemed to be. His moral sense channeled his energy along consistent tracks. One of the wonderful motifs in “Theodore Rex” is Morris’s use of two nineteenth-century figures, John Hay and Henry Adams, as foils for Roosevelt. They come in and out of the book as admiring, dyspeptic, or wise observers, popping up in times of triumph and defeat, always less active and spiritually driven than the president himself. Hay, who had worked with Lincoln, could joke with Roosevelt: “If there is one thing for which I admire you more than anything else, Theodore, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.” Behind his back, he also recognized that TR had “plenty of brains and a heart of gold,” and paid him the highest compliment by asking him to wear a ring that contained a strand of Lincoln’s hair during his inauguration in 1905, with the comment that Hay considered Roosevelt one of the men who truly understood the Great Emancipator. Henry Adams appears in the book mostly as an acrid critic. “Theodore is a total, abject, and hopeless failure,” he wrote with satisfaction early in the administration. “At this rate he will bring the government to a standstill in a year.” He complained when invited to dine at the White House, and then afterwards described what a miserable time he had had. Yet even he softened toward Roosevelt, when he realized that the man he had ridiculed so long would soon be leaving office. “The old house will seem dull and sad,” Adams wrote, “when my Theodore has gone.” Morris’s third volume will presumably cover the post-presidential years, when Roosevelt’s enthusiasms swung wildly, when he was a more desperate and sadder figure. But in this book Morris has shown Roosevelt at the top of his powers, not just the big talker, but the masterful executive, pulling at the strings of government with enormous skill but without ever losing sight of his high ideals. IN JUNE 1904 he was nominated at the Republican convention by Frank S. Black, the former governor of New York. It’s a speech that resonates at the present moment in our history. “The nation basking today in the quiet of contentment and repose may be still on the deadly circuit and tomorrow writhing in the turmoil of war. This is the time when great figures must be kept in front. If the pressure is great, the material to resist it must be granite and iron. Whether we wish it or not, America is abroad in this world. Her interests are on every street, her name is on every tongue. Those
interests so sacred and stupendous should be trusted only to the care of those whose power and skill and courage have been tested and approved.” Our leaders could do worse than infuse themselves with the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, who was unshaking in his courage, balanced in his tactics, and righteous in his cause. David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. November 19, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 10
