• Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, New York: Random House, 2010, 784 pages, $35.
Theodore Roosevelt was called many things during his lifetime and in the years since. Biographer Edmund Morris observes at one point that Roosevelt is “easier to document than explain,” and as “The Most Interesting American” (an earlier historian’s title), he is difficult even to document in a short compass.
After leaving the White House in 1909, Roosevelt resumed the military title he earned in Cuba, and Colonel Roosevelt is the final volume of Morris’ Pulitzer-winning trilogy, a hefty but entertaining conclusion to a 20-year project totaling more than 2,500 pages. Covering just the last 10 years of the subject’s life, this 784-page book reads like a Greek tragedy, portraying the amazing influence Roosevelt wielded, his hunger to play an active role again, and his frustration as he was denied even the chance to die in battle. It’s a story worth reading in full, endnotes and all.
At the height of his presidential power, Roosevelt declined a run for a second full term, stepping aside in favor of his devoted vice president, the loyal but flaccid William Howard Taft. To let his successor win his spurs, Roosevelt departed for Africa to hunt big game, but during his journey, word trickled in from adherents at home: Taft was bungling it, and Roosevelt’s agenda of progressive reforms was slipping through his successor’s inept fingers. Yet Roosevelt was determined to finish his safari and honor the commitments afterward — a tour of European capitals as the guest of emperors, kings, academicians, and the pope.
Returning from months of popular acclaim and whispered confidences from heads of state, he received a hero’s welcome — and calls to do something to get the president either back on track or out of the way. Roosevelt is one of the few American presidents who realistically could have staged a coup d’etat, but as Morris notes, he was intrigued by power but never corrupted by it.
Morris traces the rise and fall and rise again of Roosevelt’s popularity, through the fortunes of the Progressive Party, a pair of court cases, and a Brazilian expedition that nearly killed the aging adventurer. He continued his legendarily strenuous life — at one point, giving a campaign speech in 1912 from blood-stained notes with a would-be assassin’s bullet still lodged in his chest.
As the decade wore on and Europe collapsed into war, Roosevelt’s writing and speaking moved from his earlier social progressive stance to militarism, calling with increasing stridency for President Wilson to stand against the German threat to American lives. He even fought to recruit and lead a division of volunteers into France, promising to die in battle (surely a temptation to administration officials he badgered), but he was denied.
Roosevelt called for historians to abandon their dust-dry styles for a more lively narrative, and Morris follows his subject’s advice in detail. He draws on Roosevelt’s own autobiographical work and correspondence to paint vivid scenes of inner thoughts and feelings, a creative method which drew deserved criticism for Morris’ biography of Ronald Reagan, though he seems to stay close to the emotions documented by onlookers and the subject himself this time.
As in previous volumes, Morris again is too dismissive of the spiritual side of Roosevelt, though. As a paragon of the “muscular Christianity” popular at the turn of his century, and an exemplar of “family values” in high positions, Roosevelt is a favorite in evangelical circles, but was he one himself? Morris thinks not. “Apart from a few clichés of Protestant rhetoric, the gospel he preached had always been political and pragmatic,” he writes, saying he lacked the piety of his wife Edith and any capacity for devotion, and seizing on any remark which suggests a humanistic outlook.
On the other hand, our views of what public religion looks like are shaped by several events since Roosevelt’s death, such as the fundamentalist movement, the charismatic awakening, and Moral Majority. Where Morris is skeptical, others hear faith, though it’s expressed in conventional terms more common to TR’s Dutch Reformed upbringing.
Oddly, Morris gives little space to the legacy of the 26th president. Is it the Panama Canal? The National Park System? Expanded executive powers or America as the world’s peacekeeper? Morris is mum. For conservatives, much of Roosevelt’s political power was exerted in the wrong direction, and while he correctly predicted our future troubles with Marxist socialism, Islamic terrorism, and Prussian militarism, he seemed unaware of the likely impact of his domestic agenda. As charismatic leaders often do, he failed to provide an adequate successor and structure to continue his program once he left the stage.
Still, Theodore Roosevelt managed to capture and embody the most diverse collection of American traits seen in one man. Morris ends the text with a pretty feeble encomium of the massive subject, “a fulfiller of good intentions.” Much better, if slightly inaccurate, was the governor of Martinique, who called him a rare, almost unique example of a political person who is not a politician, of a man of action who is at the same time a man of thought, of a public speaker who does not speak unless he has something to say; of a writer who knows how to fight and a warrior who knows how to write. And all this with a frank gaiety, a lack of pomposity that seduces the humblest and impresses the most powerful.
In some ways, that seems to capture the best of the country he served, too.