PREVIEW: Nine Lives of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

nine lives of theod ore roos evelt

NINE LIVES OF T H E O D O R E R O O S E V E LT Edited and Introduced by edmund morris

tho rn w i llo w p r e s s 2 013

first edition copyright © 2013 edmund morris

c o nte nts Introdu^ion 11 1: The Politician 23 2 : The Westerner 55 3 : The President 95 4 : The Conservationist 113 5 : The Reader 127 6 : The Hunter/Naturalist 139 7 : The Orator 159 8 : The Cosmopolitan 167 9 : The Intelle^ual 187 Epilogue 205

the roosevelt homecoming parade rolls up fifth avenue, 18 june 1910.

INTRODUCTION

T

h at s u n ny s atu r d ay in June, 1910 , a million New Yorkers turned out to welcome a distinguished delegation that had been away from home for more than a year. At 8:20 AM, the travelers began to come down the gangplank of the Kaiserin Auguste Vi^oria in single file. They were an ornthologist; a taxidermist; a paleontologist; a Nobel Prize winner; three or four historians, equally eminent in their respe^ive fields; a state assemblyman; a ranchman and a deputy sheri<; a biographer; a civil service commissioner; a police commissioner; a biggame hunter and a conservationist; a military hero; an assistant secretary of the navy; a governor of New York; a international peace mediator; a former vice-president; a former president; a safari leader; an ambassador; and a surefire GOP candidate for the presidency in 1912.

All these men were called Theodore Roosevelt.

With the possible exception of Thomas Je<erson, TR— he hated the nickname “Teddy”— remains the most multitalented Chief Executive we have ever had. (And by the way, the list of chara^ers above does not include the extra self-transformations he achieved before his death in 1919.) Like a giant, cuddly, but occasionally dangerous Cheshire Cat, he floats grinning in our folk memory. I remember the impa^ of those famous teeth upon me as a ten-year-old boy, when I saw them reproduced in an illustrated history of Nairobi, Kenya. The caption said something about “Colonel” Theodore Roosevelt being a famous American who had visited Nairobi (my birthplace) forty years before, and severely reduced the big game population of East Africa before heading down the Nile in a barge heavy with hides and ivory. I had never heard of him, and

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he remained more or less a stranger to me for the next quarter century, but that blurry old photograph exuded a mysterious fascination. TR looked, to put it simply, like a man a small boy could have fun with. And as his later chronicler, with three fat volumes of biography published, I still find him the most entertaining company imaginable.

Entertaining — but at the same time intimidating, and not altogether lovable in some of his aspe^s. His blood lust and bellicosity in pursuit of what he called “The Strenuous Life,” not to mention his ill-concealed hope that all four of his sons would be casualties of World War I, are hard to reconcile with the richness of his intelle^, his irresistibly humorous charm, and the almost pagan love of nature that emanates from every page of his books on the wilderness. Brander Matthews once sagely remarked that Theodore Roosevelt was a polygon. It is a chara^eristic of that volumetric form that no viewer can see more than a sele^ion of facets at a time. Some may shine and others flash blindingly, a few may be black or dull; but in no way can every one of them be reconciled.

Taking as its theme TR’s boast, “I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know,” this anthology presents nine autobiographical pieces by him (even his political writings may be considered self-portraiture, given the force of the personality they discharge). I could have chosen nine more, or even nine times nine. The Memorial Edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt runs to twenty-four volumes, and Harvard University’s eight-volume sele^ion of his correspondence prints only a tenth of the estimated 150,0 0 0 letters he dashed o< in moments of alleged “leisure.” In all, he published some forty books, and so many newspaper and magazine articles that no bibliographer has attempted the task of cataloguing them. Indeed it is hardly possible to calculate TR’s total produ^ion of words. Lawrence Abbott tried to once, and reckoned it at

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18 million, equal to about thirty years in the life of a full-time professional author.

In view of such a staggering output, readers might wonder why one of the “lives” on the following pages is not that of Theodore Roosevelt the Writer. The reason is that his essentially literary way of expressing himself — every bit as fundamental as his need to lead — is manifest in all of them. He was already in print at age nineteen, and was still scribbling, and corre^ing proofs, on his deathbed. That does not mean that TR was a writer of the first rank, or even, at times, a good one. The bulk of his political prose is unreadable now, since the issues that concerned Americans a century ago — railroad rates reform, disenfranchisement, reciprocity, temperance —are no longer high on our agenda (although he still has salutory things to say about corporate arrogance, and conservation). However, at his inspired best, when he allowed his humor to flow freely, and especially when he described the workings of nature, he wrote so well as to make at least some readers —this one included—regret that he did not not spend more time at his desk, and less in the “bully pulpit.”

Perhaps the most noticable quality of Theodore Roosevelt’s literary style is its deliberate unstylishness. Like George Orwell after him, he put clarity above elegance, believing that words should fun^ion as clear glass between perception and understanding. And whenever he focussed his lens on something, he did so with authority. His descriptions of birds and animals were those of an expert who had studied their life histories since boyhood, had shot them, drawn them, catalogued them in Latin, stu<ed them, and even in some cases invented a phonetic language to convey the way they sounded. His histories were the work of a scrupulous scholar. While still a Harvard undergraduate, TR began a statistical and ta^ical history, The Naval War of 1812 (New York, 1882),

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remarkable for its cold obje^ivity. His self-described “magnum opus,” The Winning of the West (4 vols., New York 1889-1896) was regarded as a work of major originality in its time, not least because of its exhaustive research in frontier archives. He wrote about Albany from the point of view of a young politician who had almost literally fought his way to a position of power in the New York Assembly. The Rough Riders, his famous account of service in the Spanish-American War, may have overused the personal pronoun (Finley Peter Dunne wisecracked that it should have been titled “Alone in Cuba”), but when TR wrote about leading men uphill in a hail of Mauser bullets, he was not inventing the experience. Other presidents have written about their terms of o<ice and travels abroad, but none with his e<ortless command of detail, breadth of cultural reference, and sense of humor—this last a grace virtually absent from the memoirs of our other chief executives.

He never wrote poetry (although he could recite it by the hour), nor did he attempt fi^ion. However, his imagery was often memorably idiosyncratic. At midwinter, a North Dakota river stands in its bed “as if turned to frosted steel.” An assistant secretary of state “hunts through the departments for patronage as a pig hunts tru<les.” An Oyster Bay fishmonger arrives at Sagamore Hill to present his bill, “looking like a queer sea-growth from among his own clams.” In The Rough Riders we read about cavalry trumpets that “tore the tropic dawn,” and there’s a description somewhere of six-year-old Quentin Roosevelt and a group of gap-toothed schoolmates looking “like a class of ruminants, varied by an occasional narwhal.” As president, TR once hauntingly— albeit inscrutably— remarked, “Envy and arrogance are the two opposite sides of the same black crystal.” Just as haunting is a line he wrote late in life: “Wings of myriads of sea-fowl make a kind of shifting cuneiform script in the air.”

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