The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  The book begins with three brief chapters which explain, in prose hard and clear as glass, the evolution of “a peculiar and characteristically American type” in the West of Benton’s boyhood. Since these “tall, gaunt men, with strongly marked faces and saturnine, resolute eyes” were the recent ancestors of his own cowboys, he is able to describe them with unsentimental accuracy.

  They had narrow, bitter prejudices and dislikes; the hard and dangerous lives they had led had run their character into a stern and almost forbidding mould … They felt an intense, although perhaps ignorant pride in and love for their country, and looked upon all the lands hemming in the United States as territory which they or their children should one day inherit; for they were a race of masterful spirit, and accustomed to regard with easy tolerance any but the most flagrant violations of law. They prized highly such qualities as courage, loyalty, truth and patriotism, but they were, as a whole, poor, and not over-scrupulous of the rights of others.… Their passions, once roused, were intense … There was little that was soft or outwardly attractive in their character: it was stern, rude, and hard, like the lives they led, but it was the character of those who were every inch men, and were Americans through to the very heart’s core.59

  When young Senator Benton emerges as the spokesman for these people, the parallels between his own and Roosevelt’s character grow clear. They are both politicians born to articulate the longings of the inarticulate; scholars able to interpret current events in the light of ancient and modern history; men of “peculiar uprightness,” of “abounding vitality and marvelous memory,” who stick to their policies with “all the tenacity of a snapping turtle.”60 Yet there are enough psychological dissimilarities between author and subject to keep the tone of the biography healthily critical. Benton is mocked for his humorlessness and pomposity, and sharply reprimanded (along with Thomas Jefferson) for hypocrisy on questions of color. “Like his fellow statesmen he failed to see the curious absurdity of supporting black slavery, and yet claiming universal suffrage for whites as a divine right, not as a mere matter of expediency … He had not learned that the majority in a democracy has no more right to tyrannize over a minority than, under a different system, the latter would to oppress the former.”61

  Whenever Roosevelt, in the course of tracing Benton’s thirty years in Congress, comes upon one of his own bêtes noires, the text fairly crackles with verbal fireworks. Some of these pop-pop harmlessly, as when he castigates President Jefferson as a “scholarly, timid, and shifty doctrinaire,” and President Tyler as “a politician of monumental littleness.” Others, however, are (or were) genuinely explosive, for example his assertion that “there is no more ‘natural right’ why a man over twenty-one should vote than there is why a negro woman under eighteen should not.”62

  The most controversial chapter of the book is that devoted to Benton’s doctrine of westward expansion, which Roosevelt defines as “our manifest destiny to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.”63 The “Oregon” of the 1840s—an enormous wilderness stretching west from the Rockies, and north from California to Alaska—was a prize that both the United States and Britain were entitled to share. But the “arrogant attitude” of Senator Benton, in claiming most of it, “was more than justified by the destiny of the great Republic; and it would have been well for all America if we had insisted even more than we did upon the extension northward of our boundaries.” Warming to his theme, Roosevelt declares that “Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba would, as States of the American Union, hold positions incomparably more important, grander and more dignified than … as provincial dependencies of a foreign power … No foot of soil to which we had any title in the Northwest should have been given up; we were the people who could use it best, and we ought to have taken it all.”64

  Roosevelt acknowledged, with an almost audible sigh, that the concept of an American Pacifica stretching from Baja California to the Bering Straits was academic in 1886. But this did not detract from Benton’s visionary greatness. In attempting to summarize it, the twenty-seven-year-old author became something of a visionary too. He could have been writing about himself, as future President of the United States, rather than the long-dead Senator from Missouri:

  Many of his expressions, when talking of the greatness of our country … not only were grandiloquent in manner, but also seemed exaggerated and overwrought even as regards matter. But when we think of the interests for which he contended, as they were to become, and not as they at the moment were, the appearance of exaggeration is lost, and the intense feeling of his speeches no longer seems out of place or disproportionate … While sometimes prone to attribute to his country a greatness she was not to possess for two or three generations to come, he, nevertheless, had engrained in his very marrow and fiber the knowledge that inevitably and beyond all doubt, the coming years were to be hers. He knew that, while other nations held the past, and shared with his own the present, yet that to her belonged the still formless and unshaped future. More clearly than almost any other statesman he beheld the grandeur of the nation loom up, vast and shadowy, through the advancing years.65

  ROOSEVELT PENNED THE LAST pages of Benton at Elkhorn between 29 June and 2 July 1886. He rose every day at dawn, and would stand for a moment or two on the piazza, watching the sun rise through a filter of glossy cottonwood leaves.66 Then he sat down at his desk, writing as fast as he could while the morning was still cool.67 By noon the log-cabin was too stuffy to bear, for a crippling heat-wave had struck Dakota. The grass outside, weakened by the late frosts of spring, turned prematurely brown. Mrs. Sewall’s vegetable garden began to wilt, despite frantic watering. On 4 July the temperature reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit, and an oven-like wind blew through the Badlands, killing every green thing except for a few riverside trees.68

  Roosevelt was not on his ranch that morning. Along with half the cowboy population of Billings County, he “jumped” the early freight-train out of Medora, and sped east across the prairie to Dickinson.69 The little town was celebrating the 110th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and he had been chosen as Orator of the Day.

  As he neared his destination, he could see people converging upon it from all points of the compass, on foot, on horseback, and in white-topped wagons. The streets of Dickinson itself were filled with “the largest crowd ever assembled in Stark County,” most of whom were already very drunk.70

  At ten o’clock the parade got under way. So many spectators decided to join in that the sidewalks were soon deserted. The Declaration was read aloud in the public square, followed by mass singing of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” The crowd then adjourned to Town Hall for a free lunch. When every cowboy had eaten his considerable fill, the master of ceremonies, Dr. Stickney, introduced the afternoon’s speakers. “The Honorable Theodore Roosevelt” stood up last, looking surprisingly awkward and nervous.71

  With all his boyish soul, he loved and revered the Fourth of July. The flags, the floats, the brass bands—even Thomas Jefferson’s prose somehow thrilled him. This particular Independence Day (the first ever held in Western Dakota) found him feeling especially patriotic. He was filled, not only with the spirit of Manifest Destiny, but with “the real and healthy democracy of the round-up.” The completion of another book, the modest success of his two ranches, his fame as the captor of Redhead Finnegan, the joyful thought of his impending remarriage, all conspired further to elevate his mood. These things, plus the sight of hundreds of serious, sunburned faces turned his way, brought out the best and the worst in him—his genuine love for America and Americans, and his vainglorious tendency to preach. To one sophisticated member of the audience, Roosevelt’s oration was a cliché-ridden “failure”; yet the majority of those present were profoundly affected by it. Regular roars of applause bolstered the straining, squeaky rhetoric:

  Like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads, and herds of
cattle too, big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue … each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. Here we are not ruled over by others, as is the case in Europe; here we rule ourselves.…

  Arthur Packard, who was listening intently, noticed that Roosevelt’s high voice became almost a shriek as passion took him.72

  When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them. In a new portion of the country, especially here in the Far West, it is peculiarly important to do so … I am, myself, at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner; I am proud, indeed, to be considered one of yourselves, and I address you in this rather solemn strain today, only because of my pride in you, and because your welfare, moral as well as material, is so near my heart.73

  He sat down to a voluntary from the brass band. The audience cheered heartily, but briefly. Everybody was anxious to adjourn to the racecourse and watch the Cowboys take on the Indians.74

  MUCH LATER THAT DAY Roosevelt and Arthur Packard sat rocking on the westbound freight to Medora, while fireworks popped in the darkening sky behind them. For a while they discussed the speech, which had greatly inspired Packard, and Roosevelt confessed his longings to return to public life. “It was during this talk,” Packard said years afterward, “that I first realized the potential bigness of the man. One could not help believing he was in deadly earnest in his consecration to the highest ideals of citizenship.”

  Roosevelt told Packard that he was thinking of accepting a minor appointment which had been offered him in New York—the presidency of the Board of Health. Henry Cabot Lodge thought the job infra dig, but he was not so sure: he felt he could do his best work “in a public and political way.”

  The young editor’s reaction was immediate. “Then you will become President of the United States.”75

  Roosevelt did not seem in the least surprised by this remark. Indeed, Packard got the impression that he had already thought the matter over and come to the same conclusion. “If your prophecy comes true,” he said at last, “I will do my part to make a good one.”76

  THREE DAYS LATER, Roosevelt left unexpectedly for New York. If he hoped to find the Board of Health job open to him, he was disappointed: the incumbent had simply refused to resign, despite an indictment for official corruption.77 Clearly little had changed for the better in municipal politics.

  He spent three weeks checking the manuscript of Benton in the Astor Library, then—yet again—kissed “cunning little yellow headed Baby Lee” good-bye, and headed back to the Badlands in a mood of restless melancholy.78 It was ironic that at this time of resurgent political ambition he could see “nothing whatever ahead.”79 The city of his birth, his child, his home, his future wife, all lay behind him, pulling his thoughts back East, even as the train hauled him West. Much as he loved Dakota, he knew now that his destiny lay elsewhere: it must have been difficult to escape the feeling that he was traveling in altogether the wrong direction.

  Arriving at Medora on 5 August, he found letters from Edith confirming a December wedding in London.80 From now on he could only count the days that separated him from her.

  THE CRIES OF A NEWBORN BABY greeted Roosevelt at Elkhorn next day. Mrs. Sewall had just presented her husband with a son. Mrs. Dow, not to be outdone, produced a son of her own less than a week later.81 “The population of my ranch,” Roosevelt informed Bamie, “is increasing in a rather alarming manner.”82 The squalling of these two new arrivals, not to mention the jam-smeared face of little Kitty Sewall, and Elkhorn’s growing air of alien domesticity, seemed to emphasize his bachelor status and growing sense of misplacement. It was as if the house were no longer his own, and he merely the guest of his social inferiors.

  Still restless, he hurried off to Mandan, where he witnessed the conviction and sentencing to three years in prison of Redhead Finnegan and the half-breed Burnsted. He withdrew his charge against Pfaffenbach, saying “he did not have enough sense to do anything good or bad.” The old man expressed fervent gratitude, and Roosevelt said that was the first time he had ever been thanked for calling somebody a fool.83

  Notwithstanding his legal triumph, Roosevelt seemed to be under considerable nervous strain during the several days he spent in Mandan. A reporter from the Bismarck Tribune remarked on his “facial contortions and rapid succession of squints and gestures.”84 His hosts were surprised to hear him pacing the floor of his room and groaning over and over again, “I have no constancy! I have no constancy!”85 Evidently Edith’s recent letter had evoked once again the guilty memory of Alice Lee.

  About this time Roosevelt heard reports of a border clash with Mexico which, in his fertile imagination, seemed likely to lead to major hostilities.86 Instantly he conceived the idea of raising “an entire regiment of cowboys,” and wrote to Secretary of War William C. Endicott notifying him that he was “at the service of the government.” From Mandan he beseeched Lodge: “Will you tell me at once if war becomes inevitable? Out here things are so much behind hand that I might not hear the news for a week … as my chance of doing anything in the future worth doing seems to grow continually smaller I intend to grasp at every opportunity that turns up.” But Secretary Endicott decided to settle the dispute diplomatically, to Roosevelt’s obvious disappointment. “If a war had come off,” he mused wistfully, “I would surely have had behind me as utterly reckless a set of desperadoes as ever sat in the saddle.”87

  THE HOT AUGUST DAYS dragged on. Plagued by a recurrent “caged wolf feeling,” Roosevelt also began to worry about Dakota’s continuing drought. It happened to coincide with record new immigrations of cattle, which his Stockmen’s Association had tried in vain to prevent. Three years before, when he first came West, the range had been overgrassed and undergrazed; now the situation was reversed.88 He began to wonder if Sewall’s forebodings about the Badlands as “not much of a cattle country” might have been justified.

  Between 21 August and 18 September, Roosevelt went with Bill Merrifield on a shooting expedition to the Coeur d’Alene mountains of northern Idaho. His prey this time was “problematic bear and visionary white goat.”89 Although he managed to kill two of the latter—America’s rarest and most difficult game—he confessed that he “never felt less enthusiastic over a hunting trip.”90

  On returning to Medora, Roosevelt was “savagely irritated” to read newspaper gossip that he was engaged to Edith Carow. How the secret got out is to this day a mystery. He was forced to write an embarrassed letter of confirmation to Bamie. “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean and marry her. You are the first person to whom I have breathed a word on this subject … I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there was a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead.”91

  HE WAS ANXIOUS NOW to hurry East and console Bamie, who was in agony over the prospect of losing her surrogate daughter. But an urgent matter at Elkhorn detained him. Sewall and Dow had decided, in his absence, that they wanted to terminate their contract and go back to Maine. They had been unable to sell the fall shipment of beeves profitably: the best price Chicago would offer was ten dollars less than the cost of raising and transporting each animal. Both men felt that they were “throwing away his money,” and that “the quicker he got out of there the less he would lose.”92

  Roosevelt, as it happened, had reached much the same conclusion. Although he was no businessman, simple figuring told him that his $85,000 investment in the Badlands was eroding away as i
nexorably as the grass on the range. In any case, he was fast losing his enthusiasm for ranching. Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris could take the Elkhorn herd over; in future he would use the ranch house only as a stopover when checking on his cattle, or as a hunting base. His reaction to Sewall’s ultimatum, therefore, was mild. “How soon can you go?”93

  While the three friends sat squaring their accounts that last week of September, a strange, soft haze settled over the Badlands, reducing trees and cattle to pale blue silhouettes.94 Weathermen dismissed the haze as an accumulation of fumes from the grass-fires that had smoldered all summer on the tinder-dry plains. Yet its strangeness made cowboys and animals uneasy. Although the heat was still tremendous, old-timers began to lay in six months’ supply of winter provisions, muttering that “nature was fixin’ up her folks for hard times.”95 Beavers worked double shifts cutting and storing their lengths of willow brush; muskrats grew extra-thick coats and built their reed houses twice the usual height. Roosevelt, casting his ornithologist’s eye out of the window, noticed that the wild geese and songsters were hurrying south weeks earlier than usual. He may have heard rumors that the white Arctic owl had been seen in Montana, but only the Indians knew what that sign portended.96