Theodore Roosevelt

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Editor's Note

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Milestones

Selected Bibliography

Index

The American Presidents Series

Also by Louis Auchincloss

About the Author

Copyright

 

FOR JOHN AND TRACY

Editor's Note

THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY

The president is the central player in the American political order. That would seem to contradict the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Remembering the horrid example of the British monarchy, they invented a separation of powers in order, as Justice Brandeis later put it, “to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” Accordingly, they divided the government into three allegedly equal and coordinate branches—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

But a system based on the tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate. One of the three branches must take the initiative if the system is to move. The executive branch alone is structurally capable of taking that initiative. The Founders must have sensed this when they accepted Alexander Hamilton's proposition in the Seventieth Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” They thus envisaged a strong president—but within an equally strong system of constitutional accountability. (The term
imperial presidency
arose in the 1970s to describe the situation when the balance between power and accountability is upset in favor of the executive.)

The American system of self-government thus comes to focus in the presidency—“the vital place of action in the system,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Henry Adams, himself the great-grandson and grandson of presidents as well as the most brilliant of American historians, said that the American president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” The men in the White House (thus far only men, alas) in steering their chosen courses have shaped our destiny as a nation.

Biography offers an easy education in American history, rendering the past more human, more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves. Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen. They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time. Indeed, as Emerson contended, “There is properly no history; only biography.”

Presidents serve us as inspirations, and they also serve us as warnings. They provide bad examples as well as good. The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”

The men in the White House express the ideal and the values, the frailties and the flaws, of the voters who send them there. It is altogether natural that we should want to know more about the virtues and the vices of the fellows we have elected to govern us. As we know more about them, we will know more about ourselves. The French political philosopher Joseph de Maistre said, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”

At the start of the twenty-first century, forty-two men have made it to the Oval Office. (George W. Bush is counted our forty-third president, because Grover Cleveland, who served nonconsecutive terms, is counted twice.) Of the parade of presidents, a dozen or so lead the polls periodically conducted by historians and political scientists. What makes a great president?

Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion, as they grasp the helm, is to set the ship of state on the right course toward the port they seek. Great presidents also have a deep psychic connection with the needs, anxieties, dreams of people. “I do not believe,” said Wilson, “that any man can lead who does not act … under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”

“All of our great presidents,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington incarnated the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, said FDR, were both “moral leaders, each in his own way and his own time, who used the presidency as a pulpit.”

To succeed, presidents must not only have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking. Politics in a democracy is ultimately an educational process, an adventure in persuasion and consent. Every president stands in Theodore Roosevelt's bully pulpit.

The greatest presidents in the scholars' rankings, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, were leaders who confronted and overcame the republic's greatest crises. Crisis widens presidential opportunities for bold and imaginative action. But it does not guarantee presidential greatness. The crisis of secession did not spur Buchanan or the crisis of depression spur Hoover to creative leadership. Their inadequacies in the face of crisis allowed Lincoln and the second Roosevelt to show the difference individuals make to history. Still, even in the absence of first-order crisis, forceful and persuasive presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush—are able to impose their own priorities on the country.

The diverse drama of the presidency offers a fascinating set of tales. Biographies of American presidents constitute a chronicle of wisdom and folly, nobility and pettiness, courage and cunning, forthrightness and deceit, quarrel and consensus. The turmoil perennially swirling around the White House illuminates the heart of the American democracy.

It is the aim of the American Presidents series to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. Each volume offers a distillation of character and career. I hope that these lives will give readers some understanding of the pitfalls and potentialities of the presidency and also of the responsibilities of citizenship. Truman's famous sign—“The buck stops here”—tells only half the story. Citizens cannot escape the ultimate responsibility. It is in the voting booth, not on the presidential desk, that the buck finally stops.

—Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Introduction

Theodore Roosevelt is one of the few presidents whose life, or at least the public image of his life, is even more important historically than his accomplishments as our chief executive officer. This could also be said of Washington, whose image has been a national symbol to millions who know nothing of what he did in his two terms of office, and certainly of Grant, whose military glory (one hopes) outshines the scandals of his administrations, and possibly of Kennedy, who offered a kind of spiritual rebirth to the nation that seems to be something apart from what he accomplished in his thousand days at the White House. Lincoln, of course, is the great example of the leader whose image and performance are of equally mammoth significance, though in his case the noble image, however like its original, was created largely after his assassination.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of TR by his first marriage and survivor of all his offspring, remembered the father she loved with an admiration undimmed by sentimentality:

When I look back on it now, which I rarely do, I can feel a little mean about my father, especially as a politician rather than as a person. The eyebrows tend to lift and the canines to show. He was certainly right for the period he lived in. Absolutely perfect. It was a time when we needed large families and armies and expansion overseas. It was all in the great imperial tradition. But I tend to see it through the eyes of young people today, and one just can't have a prayerful attitude to it all.

It is true. What sounded right and inspiring to the cheering multitudes at the dawn of the twentieth century rings with a slightly tinny resonance today. And what survives in the panorama of history, even more than TR's trust-busting, or his building of the Panama Canal, or his negotiation of the Russo-Japanese War peace treaty, is the vision of the asthmatic youth who made a he-man of himself as a rancher in the Wild West, the intrepid Rough Rider who charged up San Juan Hill, the fearless antagonist of political vice and corruption, and the wielder of the “big stick” who sent his great white fleet around the globe to impress the alien powers with the spectacle of America's might. There is almost no aspect of his life that is not relevant to some chapter of our history.

But to return to Alice Longworth's reservation. The following quotations should adequately demonstrate why much of our contemporary culture is at odds with TR's most treasured views. Here, to begin with, he writes on the respective functions of the sexes:

I believe that men and women should stand on an equality of right, but I do not believe that equality of right means equality of function, and I am more and more convinced that the great field, the indispensable field for the usefulness of woman, is the mother of the family. It is her work in the household, in the home, her work in bearing and rearing her children, which is more important than any man's work, and it is that work which should be normally the woman's work, just as normally the man's work should be that of the breadwinner, the supporter of the home, and if necessary the soldier who will fight for the home.

As a Harvard student he recorded in his diary: “Thank Heaven I am at least perfectly pure.” Edmund Morris confirms this:

During his student years, nor indeed at any time in his life, did Theodore show the slightest tolerance for women, or for that matter men, who were anything but rigidly virtuous.… Sex to him was part of the mystical union of marriage, and, however pleasurable as an act of love, its function was to procreate. Outside marriage, as far as he was concerned, it simply did not exist.