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T.R. The Last Romantic by H.W. Brands (New
York: Basic Books, 1997), 897 pages, $35.00 ISBN:
0-465-06958
 ou
don't need an excuse to read about Theodore Roosevelt.
Still the youngest president (he was just shy of 43 years
old when William McKinley's assassination catapulted him
from vice-presidential obscurity ), he was probably the
most knowledgeable person ever to hold that office, even
counting Thomas Jefferson. He was certainly the most
colorful. In fact, his volcanic stint in office from 1901
to 1909 was a comparatively drab interlude in his life.
If he had not existed, G. K. Chesterton would have had to
make him up. It would take an awfully bad biographer to
write a tedious life of this man, but this single-volume
work by H. W. Brand (who teaches history at Texas
A&M) is both solid history and a delight to read. The
only problem is that, at almost 900 pages, the book is
too short.
Nevertheless, the study of Theodore Roosevelt's
administration has become not just entertaining but
topical. Historical parallels are always tricky, but many
people (including President Clinton) have taken to
comparing the present era to the Progressive Era of the
first two decades of the 20th century. When Roosevelt
took office, the federal government was just coming out
of the coma it entered after the Civil War of 1861-65. In
the interim, the country had been covered with huge new
industries that the law simply did not address. Neither
Europe nor Asia were as far away as they had been a few
decades before, and for the first time in its history the
United States found that it needed a strategic doctrine.
At the same time, international capital flows were
becoming large enough to affect even the largest
economies, while immigration (in those days from eastern
and southern Europe) was threatening to change the
character of the country. Meanwhile, business and labor
united in the demand that tariff policy keep the growing
American domestic market all to themselves.
Roosevelt proposed to deal with this new environment
through what he called "large policy." In the cramped
intellectual universe of the post-Cold War, post-federal
deficit era, it is not unreasonable that people have
started to look to Roosevelt for a more expansive view of
government.
So who was this Roosevelt character? He was born in
1858 to a rich family of stolid Dutchmen that had lived
in Manhattan since it was Nieuw Amsterdam. As the whole
world knows, he was a scrawny specimen with a
life-threatening case of asthma, so he adopted a lifelong
program of indoor and outdoor exercise. (He died at 60,
battered and half-blind: there is such a thing as
overdoing it.) Roosevelt never went to a conventional
school until he entered Harvard, but by then he spoke the
major modern languages and was already on the way to
becoming a serious naturalist. He hunted big game in
Africa and the Americas, often at the expense of
institutions for which he supplied specimens. His chief
regular source of income was a stream of purple-prose
popular histories, supplemented by memoirs of his
adventures and by ferocious political invective. (He was
a distant cousin of Rudyard Kipling; it shows.) He was
widowed once and remarried, fathering six children in
all.
Just out of college, Theodore Roosevelt was elected to
the New York State Assembly as a Republican in 1881. (At
the same time he published his first book, on the naval
side of the War of 1812.) He was even briefly the
minority leader, until the Republicans unexpectedly
gained a majority and decided they did not want a kid
running the legislature. He divided his time between
politics and ranching in the Dakotas during the 1880s.
The latter enterprise, into which he had sunk much of his
considerable inheritance, lapsed when his herds were
wiped out in the severe winter of 1886-87. Still, he
continued to mount nearly annual hunting expeditions, and
it was in this period that he began his influential
multivolume history, "The Winning of the West." In the
1890s he served on (and dominated) the new federal Civil
Service Commission, and then on the New York City Police
Commission. (It was while serving in the latter post that
cartoonists fell in love with his spectacles, mustache
and teeth.) President McKinley made him Assistant
Secretary of the Navy in the period leading up to the
Spanish-American War of 1898. During that war he served
in Cuba with operatic distinction as lieutenant colonel
of a volunteer regiment (the "Rough Riders") in the
chaotic but successful American advance on Santiago. The
Battle of San Juan Hill did not for the most part occur
on San Juan Hill, which in any case is actually a ridge,
but Roosevelt really was stone courageous.
Roosevelt's war record, helped not least by his own
quickie book on his exploits, got him elected governor of
New York State. There he showed a disconcerting tendency
to make appointments for reasons other than patronage and
to try to regulate monopolies. It was actually in order
to restrain him that the Republican Party leaders made
him McKinley's second vice president. McKinley's
assassination by the self-described anarchist Leon
Czolgosz (pronounced "Tsholgosh") put him in the White
House.
Roosevelt in office exercised functions no one knew
the president had (and indeed didn't, until Roosevelt
made them up). He threatened to send in the Army to take
over the coal mines during a potentially catastrophic
strike, thereby forcing the owners to come to terms with
the union. He turned federally-owned land into the nature
preserves that became the National Park System, this with
only the flimsiest legislative authorization. At a time
when the Supreme Court tended to strike down new business
regulation, he got Congress to extend federal control
over the inspection of food and drugs. He managed to get
some real authority for the Interstate Commerce
Commission over the railroads , whose monopoly pricing he
remembered from his own days in the Dakotas. He acquired
the land to build the Panama Canal. (The transaction, as
his Attorney General delicately put it, was accomplished
"without the slightest taint of legality.") He sent
American forces to briefly occupy Havana without
Congressional authorization. In fact, he sent the whole
fleet on a round-the-world cruise and dared Congress not
to appropriate the money to bring it back. The rules for
American football were revised under White House
auspices. He also tried to reform English spelling by
executive order, but here Congress stopped him cold.
It is the measure of Roosevelt that, though he often
wrote and spoke of war as if it were a kind of extreme
sport, he started no war when pulling the trigger was his
own responsibility. In fact, he had a knack for
negotiation. He negotiated an end to the appalling
guerrilla war that had simmered in the Philippines since
the U.S. acquired the archipelago in the Spanish-American
War. He famously won the Nobel Peace Prize for hosting
the negotiations that ended the Russo-Japanese War. Less
famously, he was instrumental in defusing the Algeciras
Crisis in 1906, and he persuaded the Kaiser to take his
bad-debt claims against Latin American countries to the
Hague, instead of trying to settle them by sending German
battleships into the western hemisphere. Roosevelt was in
fact a great believer in international law and the
settlement of disputes by arbitration. He was far from
pacifism, of course. In his view, it was not the function
of international law to discourage war, but to regulate
it.
Roosevelt was an ideological imperialist. He did not
just want an American empire, he liked the idea of
empires in general. The reason for this was the same as
his reason for supporting labor unions: he supported
order for its own sake. Much the same motive probably
also lay behind his support of a rationalized spelling
for English. Put negatively, this means that he feared
disorder. He had a particular hatred for anarchists of
all descriptions, of course, but much the same sentiment
informed his support of business regulation. Laissez
faire economics made him nervous, because it appeared to
allow chaos.
One way to put it might be to say that Roosevelt liked
power, but power employed to build things. On the whole
he assumed that bigger was better . Canals, empires,
populations: he supported pronatalist policies against
the beginnings of the birth control movement. Even his
antitrust policy reflected this principle, since he much
preferred regulating monopolies to breaking them up. He
had mixed feelings about immigration, but for most of his
life he saw it as a good, provided there was no
multiculty nonsense about keeping the immigrants in
ethnic enclaves. In his mind, being a Lincoln Republican
also meant being a an anti-racist Republican, because
racism required leaving something unassimilated.
Roosevelt may have been the first American statesman
with a geostrategic sense. He understood that Eurasia has
two ends, and the U.S. is in trouble if anything goes
seriously wrong at either one. Whenever possible, the
U.S. should support the states of the periphery against
those of the interior. He had a genuine flash of
prescience regarding the peculiar susceptibility of
Russia to socialist revolution. In later years, he even
understood that, if it became necessary to go to war with
Germany, then thereafter it would become necessary to
support a weakened Germany against the Slavic threat.
This was the script for the 20th century, and he grasped
it 30 years before anyone else.
Roosevelt saw to it that his old friend and right-hand
man, William Howard Taft, would get the Republican
nomination in 1908. Taft was elected, and Roosevelt, just
50 years of age, left for a triumphal tour of Africa and
Europe. This tour made him the most famous man in the
world. At the end of it, he represented the U.S. at the
funeral of Edward VII, and he was the one the other
dignitaries wanted to see. (Roosevelt avoided seeing the
young Winston Churchill. He thought Churchill was a shady
self-promoter.) Then Roosevelt returned to the United
States and spent the rest of Taft's term stabbing his old
friend in the back.
The reason he did this is fundamentally mysterious.
Roosevelt had some real policy differences with his
successor. Taft was much more accommodating to big
business than Roosevelt ever was. (J.P. Morgan offered a
toast when Roosevelt left for Africa: "America expects
every lion to do its duty!") Still, Taft actually had a
more vigorous anti- monopoly program than Roosevelt had
had. Taft was friendlier with the Republican Party bosses
than Roosevelt was, but that was not much of an
accomplishment considering how much they distrusted
Roosevelt. The answer seems simply to have been that
Roosevelt was jealous. He was also incapable of
self-knowledge, so he ascribed incompetence and bad
motive to the people who excited his envy. Since there
was then no constitutional bar to a third term, Roosevelt
spent the rest of his life trying to get back into the
White House. In the process, he ensured that Woodrow
Wilson, a cerebral history professor of whom he would
really and truly have cause to be jealous in a few years,
would win the election of 1912.
That campaign was one of the odder episodes in the
history of electoral politics. Party candidates in those
days were chosen only in part through popular primaries,
so although Roosevelt got most of the elected delegates
to the Republican Party Convention, the party bosses
renominated Taft. Then Roosevelt's delegates walked out
of the Republican Convention to another hall where the
nascent Progressive Party was meeting. That Convention
then nominated Roosevelt for president.
Now the Progressive Party did not last long, but it
provided the political agenda of the next 40 years. It
had a moderate-liberal platform that included such things
as unemployment insurance, the direct election of U.S.
senators (who at the time were appointed by state
legislatures) and an eight-hour workday. They were also
the women's party, oddly enough for a body also known as
"The Bull Moose Party," since they supported women's
suffrage. Their convention, unlike the quadrennial
fraternity blow-outs the other two parties would continue
to hold until the 1960s, was a serious meeting of serious
professional people. They punctuated their deliberations
with the singing of serious songs, such as "Onward
Christian Soldiers" and "The Battle Hymn of the
Republic." This was the sort of Crusader politics for
which Roosevelt had waited all his life, and he made the
most of it.
"We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!"
Roosevelt told the Convention. Interrupted only by roars
of approval from the serious audience, he expanded at
length on the peril in which civilization itself would be
placed if the Progressive movement failed. In retrospect
, it is easy to make fun of this kind of apocalyptic
language, but the sense of impending apocalypse was quite
common throughout Western civilization at the time. We
see today that the intuition was correct, even if it
sometimes fastened on unlikely objects.
In the event, Roosevelt came in a distant second to
Wilson in the general election. Roosevelt was followed
even more distantly by Taft, who had remained in the race
only to ensure that Roosevelt would not be reelected.
Afterwards, Roosevelt abandoned the Progressives and went
on another of his scientific expeditions, this one to the
Amazon in the company of his son Kermit. Stricken with
various infections, Roosevelt barely survived this trip,
though the tributary the expedition mapped is still named
after him. (The "Teodoro," people call it locally).
Soon after his return the First World War broke out.
Roosevelt gnashed his famous teeth. He wanted the United
States to enter the war. He wanted to organize a
volunteer regiment like the "Rough Riders." Most of all,
he wanted to be president instead of "that creature"
(more specifically "that skunk," or "that lily-livered
skunk") Woodrow Wilson. That Wilson was as much a
Progressive in policy terms as Roosevelt had ever been
was irrelevent.
Roosevelt became a genuine fanatic in his latter days,
especially after the U.S. declared war on Germany in
1917. While previously he had always been able to
distinguish doubts about unrestricted immigration from
hostility to actual immigrants, in his stump speeches for
the war effort he began to speak as if German ancestry
were prima-facie evidence of disloyalty. Unable to
imagine that some people might hold sincere convictions
other than his own, he denounced pacifists and
conscientious objects as traitors pure and simple.
Neither was treason confined to private persons: his
criticism of public officials for the mishandling of
American logistics was so heated that the Justice
Department actually considered prosecuting him under the
era's generously interpreted laws against subversive
speech. When the youngest of his four sons, Quentin, died
in a dogfight over the Western Front, Roosevelt became if
anything even less restrained. Roosevelt corresponded
with Georges Clemenceau and Arthur Balfour, explaining as
an expert just how weak Wilson's domestic position was
after the Democrats did poorly in the congressional
elections of 1918. There are lots of reasons why Wilson
was unable to extract a moderate peace from the
Versailles Conference, but Roosevelt's private diplomacy
did not help.
It may be that Roosevelt's unexpected death from a
heart attack in early 1919 prevented him from achieving
an even more perfect revenge on Wilson . By the time of
his death, he was once again the most popular Republican
in America. Had he sought the Republican nomination, he
would almost certainly have gotten it, and had he been
nominated he would almost certainly have won. Theodore
Roosevelt's third term: now that is some alternative
history to think about.
If Roosevelt were alive today, he would have some
intemperate things to say about the "New Nationalist"
proposals to unplug his policies from the beginning of
the 20th century and install them again at the end. His
ideas, good and bad, were always forward-looking. He
understood that the 20th century was going to be about
socialism and world war, and he took the first steps to
prepare the nation accordingly. Now these issues have
been resolved, and the next century is going to be about
something else; you can take your pick about what these
things will be. The odds are, though, that we would be
well advised to adopt Roosevelt's guiding instincts: we
should fear disorder, and we should once again like
building things.
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