The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “I … have the profound gratification of knowing that there is no man more bitterly disliked by many of the men in my own party,” he told a fellow reformer. “When I leave on March 5th, I shall at least have the knowledge that I have certainly not flinched from trying to enforce the law during these four years, even if my progress has been at times a little disheartening.”129

  ANOTHER DEATH SHOOK HIM on 7 December, and plunged the whole family into official mourning. Anna Roosevelt, her frail health broken by two years of humiliation, succumbed to diphtheria at the age of twenty-nine. The last message to Elliott in Virginia was a telegraphed “DO NOT COME.”130 One wonders if this gave any momentary pang to Theodore, who more than anyone else was responsible for their separation.

  DURING ITS LAST few months in power, the Harrison Administration was possessed of immortal longings. A robe and a crown, of sorts, became available in the Pacific, and the President hastened to put them on.131 They belonged to Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii, who early in the New Year had proclaimed a policy of “Hawaii for the Hawaiians,” in an attempt to end half a century of economic domination by the United States. She was immediately deposed in an uprising of native sugar growers, aided by some American marines, and abetted by the American Minister. Within weeks, representatives of the revolutionaries arrived in Washington to negotiate a treaty of annexation. President Harrison complied, although it was unlikely the incoming Democratic Administration would allow the document to get very far in Congress.132

  Washington society, meanwhile, embraced Hawaii as the theme of the season. Hostesses served lavish luaus to their guests, to the whine of native guitars. Fashionable couples, hurrying in furs from one party to another, hummed the latest hit, a serenade to the deposed island Queen:

  Come, Liliu-o-kalani,

  Give Uncle Sam

  Your little yellow hannie …133

  Henry Adams proudly introduced the latest addition to his circle, a four-hundred-pound Polynesian chief named Tati Salmon. “A polished gentleman,” Roosevelt noted approvingly, “of easy manners, with an interesting undertone of queer barbarism.”134

  As the season wore on, a delicious fragrance filled the air, of pineapples and Pacific ozone, of warm dusky flesh and spices. It was the smell of Empire, and none sniffed it more eagerly than Roosevelt. With all his soul, he longed to remain in Washington, where the future of his country was blossoming like some brilliant tropical flower. Amazingly, it seemed that the President-elect bore him no grudge, and might invite him to stay on as Civil Service Commissioner. Benjamin F. Tracy, outgoing Secretary of the Navy, urged him to accept, and in doing so, bestowed a compliment which delighted Roosevelt more than any other he had ever received. “Well, my boy,” said Tracy, “you have been a thorn in our side during four years. I earnestly hope that you will remain to be a thorn in the side of the next Administration.”135

  CHAPTER 18

  The Universe Spinner

  Force rules the world still,

  Has ruled it, shall rule it;

  Meekness is weakness,

  Strength is triumphant!

  “WE HAVE BUILT these splendid edifices,” roared Grover Cleveland, “but we have also built the magnificent fabric of a popular government, whose grand proportions are seen throughout the world.”1 His eyes flickered back and forth: he was trying to read his notes, seek out an ivory button, and address two hundred thousand people simultaneously. The eyes of the crowd, too, were restless. They shifted from the President’s fat forefinger, as it hovered over the button, to the inert fountains, the furled flags, the motionless wheels in the Palace of Mechanic Arts, and the enshrouded statue looming against the fogbanks of Lake Michigan.

  “As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in time to come”—Maestro Thomas raised his baton over seven hundred musicians, and for the first moment that morning a hush descended on the Grand Court—“shall influence the welfare, the dignity, and the freedom of mankind,” Cleveland intoned, and pressed the button. It was eight minutes past noon, Chicago time, on 1 May 1893.

  “The fair by no means matched the splendor of his own dreams for America.”

  The Grand Court of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. (Illustration 18.1)

  From the flagstaff crowning the gold-domed Administration Building, three hundred feet above the President’s head, Old Glory broke forth, a split second before the lower banners of Christopher Columbus and Spain.2 Seven hundred other ensigns exploded brilliantly over the White City. The great Allis engine coughed into life, and seven thousand feet of shafting began to move. Fountains gushed so high that umbrellas popped up everywhere; and the folds fell from the Statue of the Republic, revealing a gilt goddess facing west, her arms extended toward the frontier.

  The noise accompanying this cataclysmic moment—the first demonstration, on a massive scale, of the generative powers of electricity—was appropriately tremendous. From the lake came the thunder of naval artillery and the shriek of countless steam whistles. Carillons pealed, the orchestra crashed out Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, and louder than everything else rose the roaring of the crowd. The war-whooping of seventy-five Sioux added savage overtones. This bedlam continued for ten full minutes; then “America” sounded on massed trombones, and the roaring turned to singing. Even the stolid Cleveland was moved to join in, to the embarrassment of his guest of honor, Cristóbal, duke of Veragua, Columbus’s senior living descendant. The little Spaniard stood bowed under the weight of his inherited epaulets, silent in the universal chorus:

  Let music swell the breeze,

  And ring from all the trees

  Sweet freedom’s song!

  Theodore Roosevelt did not arrive in Chicago for another ten days3—his own modest contribution to the World’s Fair was a Boone & Crockett Club cabin, dedicated 15 May4—but he had little need of music and artillery to swell his love of country. Indeed, this stupendous exposition, whose combination of classical architecture and modern technology so bewildered Henry Adams that he felt the universe was tottering,5 was to Roosevelt an entirely natural and logical product of American civilization. He was conventionally moved by its grandeur (“the most beautiful architectural exhibit the world has ever seen”),6 but the Fair by no means matched the splendor of his own dreams for America. These palaces, after all, were carved out of plaster, and would survive, at most, for a couple of seasons; his Columbia would burgeon for centuries.

  To Adams, sitting with spinning head on the steps of the Administration Building, the World’s Fair asked for the first time “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” He suspected they did not, “but that they might still be driving or drifting unconsciously to some point in thought, as their solar system was said to be drifting towards some point in space; and that, possibly, if relations enough could be observed, this point might be fixed. Chicago was the first expression of American thought as a unity; one must start there.”7

  Roosevelt felt no need to ask, or answer, such questions. He had long known exactly where the United States was drifting, just as he had throughout life known where he was driving. He came to the White City, gazed cheerfully upon it, then hurried off to Indianapolis on Civil Service Commission business.8 There was no need to stop and ponder the dynamos, the “new powers” which so mystified Henry Adams, for he felt their energy whirring within himself. Theodore Roosevelt, as the British M.P. John Morley later observed, “was” America9—the America that grew to maturity after the Civil War, marshaled its resources at Chicago, and exploded into world power at the turn of the century.

  Grover Cleveland’s adjectives on Opening Day—splendid, magnificent, grand, vast—were no different from those Roosevelt himself had lavished on America in all his books. The symbolism of the flags, and of the little Spanish admiral dwarfed by a three-hundred-pound American President, was pleasing to him, but not revelatory. N
ine years before, in his Fourth of July oration to the cowboys of Dickinson, he had hoped “to see the day when not a foot of American soil will be held by any European power,” and instinct told him that that day was fast approaching. When it came, it would bring out what some consider the best, what others consider the worst in him. This overriding impulse has been given many names: Jingoism, Nationalism, Imperialism, Chauvinism, even Fascism and Racism. Roosevelt preferred to use the simple and to him beautiful word Americanism.

  THE WINNING OF THE WEST, which occupied Roosevelt, on and off, for nearly nine years, was the first comprehensive statement of his Americanism, and, by extension (since he “was” America), of himself. All his previous books had been, in a sense, sketches for this one, just as his subsequent books were postscripts to it, of diminishing historical and psychological interest. One by one, themes he had touched on in the past came up for synthesis and review: the importance of naval preparedness, and effect of ethnic derivations on fighting blood (The Naval War of 1812); the identity of native Americans with their own flora and fauna (Hunting Trips of a Ranchman); the doctrine of Manifest Destiny (Thomas Hart Benton); the need for law and order in a savage environment (Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail); the significance of the United States Constitution (Gouverneur Morris); the problems of free government (Essays in Practical Politics); and the social dynamics of immigration (New York).

  Nothing written prior to Roosevelt’s Presidency shows the breadth of his mind to greater advantage than the introduction to The Winning of the West, which makes it clear that his specific subject—white settlement of Indian lands west of the Alleghenies in the late eighteenth century—is but a chapter in the unfolding of an epic racial saga, covering thousands of years and millions of square miles. The erudition with which he traces the “perfectly continuous history” of Anglo-Saxons from the days of King Alfred to those of George Washington is impressive. He draws effortless parallels between the Romanticization of the Celto-Iberians in the second century B.C. and the capture of Mexico and Peru by the conquistadores; between the Punic Wars and the War of the American Revolution; even between the future of whites in South Africa and the fate of Greek colonists in the Tauric Chersonese.

  “During the past three centuries,” Roosevelt begins, “the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its importance.”10 What else but destiny—a destiny yet to be fully realized—can explain the remorseless advance of Anglo-Saxon civilization? The language of what was, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, “a relatively unimportant insular kingdom … now holds sway over worlds whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of three great oceans.” Never in history has a race expanded over so wide an area in so short a time; and the winning of the American West may be counted as “the crowning and greatest achievement” of that mighty movement.11

  The narrative proper begins in chapter 6 with the first trickle of settlement following Daniel Boone’s penetration of the Cumberland Gap in 1765. Roosevelt uses a striking flood metaphor: “The American backswoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghenies, ready to flood the continent beyond.”12 As the flood gathers volume, he achieves the effect of ever-widening waves by making his chapters overlap, every one moving farther afield geographically, and further ahead in time. So intoxicated is Roosevelt as he rides these waves that he sweeps uncaring past such solid obstructions as Institutional Analysis and Land Company Proceedings. (“I have always been more interested in the men themselves than the institutions through which they worked,” he confessed.)13 He might have added, “and in action rather than theory.” Far and away the best parts of The Winning of the West are the fighting chapters. In describing border battles, Roosevelt reveals himself with the utter unself-consciousness which was always part of his charm. He makes no secret of his boyish identification with those gaunt, fierce warriors of the frontier, who were “strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very heart’s core.”14

  Here is Roosevelt the aggressor, single-handedly killing or crippling seven Indians in the pitch darkness of his pioneer log cabin; wrenching himself from the stake and running naked for five days through mosquito country; trying consecutively to shoot, knife, throttle, and drown a reluctant Chief Bigfoot, while his own brother puts a bullet in his back; advancing upon Vincennes through mile after mile of freezing, waist-deep water; and, in a moment of supreme ecstasy, spurring a white horse over a sheer, three-hundred-foot cliff:

  There was a crash, the shock of a heavy body, half-springing, half-falling, a scramble among loose rocks, and the snapping of saplings and bushes; and in another moment the awestruck Indians above saw their unarmed foe, galloping his white horse in safety across the plain.15

  Here, too, is Roosevelt the righteous, assailing the “warped, perverse, and silly morality” that would preserve the American continent “for the use of a few scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.”16 He pours scorn on “selfish and indolent” Easterners who fail to see the “race-importance” of the work done by Western pioneers.17 Yet Roosevelt is not sentimental about the latter. He shows the tendency of the frontier to barbarize both conqueror and conquered, until such civilized issues as good v. evil, law v. anarchy, are forgotten in the age-old struggle of Man against Man.18

  It is a primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished are maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality.19

  Yet, says Roosevelt, this kind of struggle is “elemental in its consequences to the future of the world.” In a paragraph which will return to haunt him, he proclaims:

  The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people … it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.20

  Roosevelt the proud saw no reason to retract this passage in later life, for the overall context of The Winning of the West makes plain that he regarded any such race-struggle as ephemeral. Once civilization was established, the aborigine must be raised and refined as quickly as possible, so that he may partake of every opportunity available to the master race—in other words, become master of himself, free to challenge and beat the white man in any field of endeavor. Nothing could give Roosevelt more satisfaction than to see such a reversal, for he admired individual achievement above all things. Any black or red man who could win admission to “the fellowship of the doers” was superior to the white man who failed.21 Roosevelt’s long-term dream was nothing more or less than the general, steady, self-betterment of the multicolored American nation.22

  Of Roosevelt the military man, as revealed in The Winning of the West, little need be said. Chapter after chapter, volume after volume, demonstrates his ability to analyze the motives that drive men to battle, to define the mysterious powers of leadership, and weigh the relative strengths of armies. His accounts of the Battle of King’s Mountain and the defeat of St. Clair are so full of vi
sual and auditory detail, and exhibit such an uncanny sense of terrain, that it is hard to believe the author himself has never felt the shock of arms. One can only infer from the power and brilliance of the prose that such passages are the sublimation of his most intense desires, and that until he can charge, like Colonel William Campbell, up an enemy-held ridge at the head of a thousand wiry horse-riflemen, he will never be fulfilled.23

  ROOSEVELT WAS NOT ALONE in his efforts during the early 1890s to define and explore the origins of Americanism. Long before the final volume of The Winning of the West was published, other young intellectuals took up and developed his theme that the true American identity was to be found only in the West. The most brilliant of these was Frederick Jackson Turner, who came to the Chicago World’s Fair in July 1893 to deliver his seminal address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” before an audience of aging, puzzled academics.24

  Turner had admiringly reviewed Roosevelt’s first two volumes in 1889, and had marked in his personal copy a passage describing the “true significance” of “the vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled.”25 His thesis—that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advancement of American settlement westward explain American development”—was identical with that of The Winning of the West, albeit expressed more succinctly.26 But Turner refined away much of the crudity of Roosevelt’s ethnic thinking. It was not “blood,” but environment that made the American frontiersman unique: he was shaped by the challenge of his situation “at the meeting-point between savagery and civilization.” Forced continually to adapt himself to new dangers and new opportunities, as the frontier moved West, he was “Americanized” at a much quicker rate than the sedentary, Europe-influenced Easterner. Consequently, said Turner, it was “to the frontier that the American intellect owes its most striking characteristics.”27 And in listing those characteristics, Turner painted an accurate portrait of somebody not unfamiliar to readers of this biography: