In 1958, the year of the centennial of his birth, Carleton Putnam published Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, a superb piece of scholarship that was intended to be the first part of a four-volume biography. Only one small, significant omission marred the book’s narrative flow: the fact that the young Roosevelt, attending his first Republican convention in 1884, had sought to put a black man in the chair. Putnam proved to be a retired airline executive living in Virginia, whose racial views distracted him to such an extent that his book was not followed by any sequel.
Edward Wagenknecht’s The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt also came out in 1958. It was a revelatory character study that avoided psychobiography and presented only facts, culled from what seemed to be a reading of every book and manuscript in the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard. Viewing “T.R.” as a sort of solar system of linked but separate worlds (those of Action, Thought, Human Relations, Family, Spiritual Values, Public Affairs, and War and Peace), it compressed in fewer than three hundred pages the fundamentals of a polygonal personality.
Three years later, a major one-volume biography appeared. It was William Henry Harbaugh’s The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, a determinedly objective book that exposed the work of Henry Pringle as superficial. The ponderousness of Harbaugh’s prose lent weight to his concluding observation:
Whatever the Colonel’s ultimate place in the hearts of his countrymen—and it yearly grows warmer and warmer—there is no discounting those incisive perceptions and momentous actions that made him such a dynamic historical force.… Long after the rationalizations, the compromises, the infights, the intolerance and the rest have been forgotten, Theodore Roosevelt will be remembered as the first great President-reformer of the modern industrial era.
Signs of the warming trend that Harbaugh spoke of proliferated after Sagamore Hill was declared a National Historic Site in 1962. President Kennedy signed the act of acquisition. On 22 November 1963 he flew to Texas with a speech he intended to deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart, extensively quoting Theodore Roosevelt on foreign policy. The speech was not given, but subsequent presidents showed an increasing willingness to admire, and even identify with, the Republican Roosevelt.
Richard Nixon invoked the image of “the man in the arena” so often, and with such relish in its details of dust and sweat and blood, as to suggest that he found them masochistically agreeable. After resigning his office on 9 August 1974 he bade farewell to White House staffers with a moving, if irrelevant, quotation from In Memory of My Darling Wife, the eulogy Roosevelt had written for Alice Hathaway Lee ninety years before. Weeping, Nixon observed, “That was TR in his twenties. He thought the light had gone out of his life forever—but he went on.”
The Vietnam War era climaxing with Nixon’s debasement saw the rise of a presentist subculture among historians who, rejecting Harbaugh, continued to see Theodore Roosevelt as a bully, warmonger, and racist. He was castigated for being unaware of the civil rights movement, free sex, meditation, and mutually assured destruction. This revisionism nevertheless drew useful parallels, such as that between the massacres of My Lai in 1968 and Moro Crater in 1906—the latter inflicted on Filipino rebels by General Leonard Wood with no dissenting word from his commander in chief.
Although doubts on the New Left about Roosevelt’s imperialistic “Americanism” persisted through the decade, two biographies at the end of it marked the beginning of a more objective reassessment that steadily gathered force. This writer’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) and David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback (1981) won literary prizes, and reassured post-Watergate readers that whatever Roosevelt “went on” to, after his twenties, had not been an abuse of presidential power. They coincided with the appearance of Sylvia Jukes Morris’s Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (1980), which documented one of the great marriages in American history.
Three decades later, the shifting sands of historiography seem to have allowed the monolith of Theodore Roosevelt to settle. Sand being sand, nothing of his future reputation can be predicted. He is still buffeted by revisionist storms, some emanating from academe and obsessing on the latest idée fixe in that quarter, “masculinity.” But the prevailing breeze of popular opinion is favorable. A C-SPAN survey in 2009, rating the leadership of American presidents, placed “T. Roosevelt” at number four, after Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Substantial books on him continue to appear and are eagerly read. Three recent examples, by Kathleen Dalton, Candice Millard, and Patricia O’Toole, demonstrate that for all the Rough Rider’s machismo, fair-minded women feel no need to condescend to him. Douglas Brinkley’s study of the Rooseveltian conservation record, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009) became a national bestseller even though it was over nine hundred pages long.
THE EMPLACEMENT of Theodore Roosevelt Bridge across the Potomac River in Washington gives many commuters the impression that it, and not the forested island beneath, is the twenty-sixth President’s official memorial. Somewhere among those trees, however, he stands eighteen feet tall, one bronze fist upraised, eternally lecturing the doves and mockingbirds.
Solemn words are carved on granite tablets nearby. But they, and all the millions of others that have been published about him, come no closer to the truth than those of a small boy in Cove School, Oyster Bay, on June 16, 1922. As part of a class exercise paying tribute to the late Colonel, Thomas Maher wrote: “He was a fulfiller of good intentions.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE AUTHOR IS VARIOUSLY and often profoundly indebted to the following kind people: Terry C. Anderson; Kay Auchincloss; Lowell E. Baier; John M. Bell; Laurence Bergreen; Douglas Brinkley; Matthew J. Bruccoli; Robert B. Charles; Gleise Cruz; Wallace F. Dailey; Michelle Daniel; Judy Davidowitz; Jack Fisher; Josette Frank; John Allen Gable; Megan Gavin; David Gerstner; Matthew James Glover; Lewis L. Gould; Nan Graham; Francine du Plessis Gray; Susan Hannah; Ruth Hartley; George and Nanette Herrick; John Hutton; Gordon Hyatt; Joseph Kanon; Dodie Kazanjian; Patrick Kerwin; Simon Keynes; Elmer R. Koppelmann; Jennifer Kramer; Gary Lavergne; Mary LeCroy; Richard Lindsey; Alice Low; Andrew Marks; Paul Marks; Curt Meine; Timothy Mennel; Marc Miller; Sylvia Jukes Morris; Thomas R. Mountain; John Novogrod; Martin Obrentz; Joseph A. O’Brien; Allen Packwood; John Gray Peatman; Richard Pennington; Jacqueline Philomeno; Christina Rae; Frederick Roberts Rinehart II; Theodore and Connie Roosevelt IV; Tweed Roosevelt; Benjamin and Donna Rosen; Benjamin Steinberg; Joanna Sturm; Michael and Marcia Thomas; Keith Topley; John Frederick Walker; John D. Weaver; Sara Wheeler; Richard Derby Williams.
ARCHIVES
Papers denoted with an asterisk are located in the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (TRC). It and the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress (TRP) are the two main repositories of documents relating to the twenty-sixth President. Both collections are in the process of being electronically copied by the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, North Dakota. The aim of this institution is to create a unified digital archive of Roosevelt’s papers, freely accessible to researchers worldwide via the Internet.
ABB Lawrence Abbott Papers*
ABRP Archibald B. Roosevelt Papers*
AC Author’s Collection
AJB Arthur J. Balfour Papers, British Library, London
AL Arthur Lee Papers, Cortauld Institute, London
AMNH American Museum of Natural History, New York
ARC Anna Roosevelt Cowles Papers*
ASP Albert Shaw Papers, New York Public Library
BEV Albert J. Beveridge Papers, Library of Congress
CSR Cecil Spring Rice Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, UK
DUN Finley Peter Dunne Papers, Library of Congress
EAR Edwin Arlington Robinson Collection, New York Public Library
EMH Edwin M. Hood Papers, Library of Congress
ERDP Ethel Roosevelt Derby Papers*
EW Edi
th Wharton Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University
FWM Flora Whitney Miller Papers*
HCLP Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society,
Cambridge
HH Hermann Hagedorn Papers*
HKB Howard K. Beale Papers, Princeton University*
HP Henry Pringle Papers*
HW Henry White Papers, Library of Congress
JHMD James Herbert Morse Diaries, New-York Historical Society
JJJ Jean Jules Jusserand Papers, Quai d’Orsay, Paris
JJL John J. Leary Papers*
JRGP James R. Garfield Papers, Library of Congress
JS Julian Street Papers, Princeton University Library
KRP Kermit Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress
LBS Lucius Burrie Swift Papers, Indiana Historical Society
MLM Morgan Library and Museum, New York
OL John Callan O’Laughlin Papers*
OW Owen Wister Papers, Library of Congress
PAR Frances Theodora Smith Parsons Papers*
PCK Philander Chase Knox Papers, Library of Congress
RSB Ray Stannard Baker Papers, Library of Congress
SCR Charles Scribner’s Sons Papers, Princeton University Library
SHA Albert Shaw Papers, New York Public Library
STR Willard Straight Papers, Cornell University Library
SUL Mark Sullivan Papers, Library of Congress
SULH Mark Sullivan Papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
TRB Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site Collection, New York
TRBU Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Gotlieb Center, Boston University
TRC Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard
TRJP Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., Papers, Library of Congress
TRP Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress
WB Willard Bartlett Papers, Columbia University
WCF Walt Kuhn Family and Armory Show Records, Smithsonian Archives of American Art
WFP Williams Family Papers, privately held
WHTP William Howard Taft Papers, Library of Congress
WR Whitelaw Reid Papers, Library of Congress
WWP Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress
* This valuable collection of notes and interview transcripts relating to TR, made by Beale over the course of several decades, has been destroyed by its curators.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Only those sources that have multiple citations in the Notes are listed here. All others are cited where they relate to the text.
The most comprehensive bibliography of Theodore Roosevelt is the online catalogue of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, compiled by Wallace F. Dailey, curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University. It includes manuscripts and photographs, and expands on an earlier print version, Gregory C. Wilson, comp., Theodore Roosevelt Collection: Dictionary Catalogue and Shelflist, 5 vols., plus one-volume Supplement, Wallace F. Dailey, comp. (Cambridge, Mass., 1970, 1986).
BOOKS
Abbott, Lawrence F. Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt. New York, 1919.
Adams, Henry. The Letters of Henry Adams. J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, Viola Hopkins Winner, eds. 6 vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1988.
Amos, James E. Theodore Roosevelt: Hero to His Valet. New York, 1927.
Asquith, Margot. The Autobiography of Margot Asquith. Boston, 1963.
Bailey, Thomas A. A Diplomatic History of the American People. 8th ed. New York, 1969.
Baker, Ray Stannard. American Chronicle. New York, 1945.
Balfour, Michael. The Kaiser and His Time. New York, 1964, 1972.
[Begbie, Harold]. The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster. New York, 1921.
Bishop, Joseph Bucklin. Theodore Roosevelt and His Time: Shown in His Own Letters. 2 vols. New York, 1920.
Bourne, Kenneth, ed. British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part One, From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the First World War. Multiple vols. Frederick, Md., 1990.
Bull, Bartle. Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure. New York, 1988.
Butt, Archibald W. The Letters of Archie Butt: Personal Aide to President Roosevelt. Lawrence F. Abbott, ed. New York, 1924.*
———. Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide. 2 vols. New York, 1930.
Cherrie, George K. Dark Trails: Adventures of a Naturalist. New York, 1930.
Clemenceau, Georges. Discours de guerre. Paris, 1934, 1968.
Cooper, John Milton. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York, 2009.
Cordery, Stacy A. Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. New York, 2007.
Cowley, Robert, ed. The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War. New York, 2004.
Davis, Oscar King. Released for Publication: Some Inside Political History of Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, 1898–1918. Boston, 1925.
Dugdale, Edgar T., ed. German Diplomatic Documents 1871–1914. Vol. 3. London, 1930.
Dunne, Finley Peter. Mr. Dooley Remembers: The Informal Memoirs of Finley Peter Dunne [1936]. Philip Dunne, ed. Boston, 1963.
Dyer, Thomas G. Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. Baton Rouge, La., 1980.
Ecksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston, 1989.
Gable, John Allen. The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party. Port Washington, N.Y., 1978.
Garland, Hamlin. Companions on the Trail: A Literary Chronicle. New York, 1931.
———. My Friendly Contemporaries: A Literary Log. New York, 1932.
———. Roadside Meetings. New York, 1930.
Gerard, James W. Face to Face with Kaiserism. New York, 1918.
———. My Four Years in Germany. New York, 1917.
[Gilbert, Clinton W.]. The Mirrors of Washington: With Fourteen Cartoons by Cesare. New York, 1922.
Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1, 1900–1933. Toronto, 1997.
Goetsch, Charles C. Essays on Simeon Baldwin. West Hartford, Conn., 1981.
Gould, Lewis L., ed. Bull Moose on the Stump: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt. Lawrence, Kan., 2008.
———, ed. Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics. Lawrence, Kan., 2008.
Grey, Edward, Viscount. Twenty-five Years: 1892–1916. Vol. 2. New York, 1925.
Hagedorn, Hermann. Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Biography. New York, 1938.
———. The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill. New York, 1954.
Harbaugh, William H. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Rev. ed. New York, 1975.
Hechler, Kenneth W. Insurgency: Personalities and Politics of the Taft Era. New York, 1964.
Heckscher, August. Woodrow Wilson: A Biography. New York, 1991.
House, Edward M. The Intimate Papers of Colonel House. 4 vols. Charles Seymour, ed. Cambridge, Mass., 1926.
Karp, Walter. The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic. New York, 1979.
La Follette, Belle and Fola. Robert M. La Follette. 2 vols. New York, 1953.
La Follette, Robert M. La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences. Madison, Wis., 1913.
Leary, John J., Jr. Talks with T.R.: From the Diaries of John J. Leary, Jr. Boston, 1920.
Lee, Dwight E., ed. The Outbreak of the First World War: Causes and Responsibilities. Lexington, Mass., 1970, 1975.
Lee of Fareham, Viscount. A Good Innings. Vol. 1. Privately printed, London, 1939.
———. “A Good Innings”: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, P.C., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.B.E. Alan Clark, ed. London, 1974.
Link, Arthur S., ed. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Princeton, N.J., 1966–1990.
�
�——. Wilson: The Road to the White House. Princeton, N.J., 1947.
Longworth, Alice Roosevelt. Crowded Hours: Reminiscences of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. New York, 1933.
Looker, Earle. Colonel Roosevelt, Private Citizen. New York, 1932.
Lorant, Stefan. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Garden City, N.Y., 1959.
MacDonogh, Giles. The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II. New York, 2000.
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York, 2003.
Marks, Frederick J., III. Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Lincoln, Neb., 1979.
Millard, Candice. The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey. New York, 2005.
Miller, Char. Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. Washington, D.C., 2001.
Miller, Leo E. In the Wilds of South America. New York, 1918.
Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Rev. ed. New York, 1979, 2001.
———. Theodore Rex. New York, 2001.
Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady. New York, 1980.
Mowry, George E. Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement. New York, 1946, 1960.
Naylor, Natalie, et al., eds. Theodore Roosevelt: Many-Sided American. Interlaken, N.Y., 1992.
Nevins, Allan. Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy. New York, 1930.
New York (State) Supreme Court. William Barnes, Plaintiff-Appellant, Against Theodore Roosevelt, Defendant-Respondent. Walton, N.Y., 1917.
O’Laughlin, John C. From the Jungle Through Europe with Roosevelt. Boston, 1910.
O’Toole, Patricia. When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House. New York, 2005.
Papen, Franz von. Memoirs. Brian Connell, trans. London, 1952.
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