The Man In The Arena

“In politics we have to do a great many things we ought not to do.”

Theodore Roosevelt

Buckle in, folks. This one is gonna take a while. 

Everyone knows Teddy Roosevelt. He’s on Mount Rushmore. He gave a ubiquitous stuffed animal its name. Even Bugs Bunny has a TR impression for crying out loud! I don’t think it’s possible to write a boring book about the 26th American President. I also don’t believe I have ever read about any individual with a more ferocious appetite to be alive, to work, to learn and to lead. Theodore Roosevelt is a fantastically interesting person and much more than a caricature on horseback. I’d never fit in everything there is to say in so short a summary, but as best I could wrangle it, I divvied up his legacy. Here I submit: The Good, The Bad and The Bull Moose. 

The Good

“I am old-fashioned, or sentimental, or something, about books! Whenever I read one I want, in the first place, to enjoy myself, and, in the next place, to feel that I am a little better and not a little worse for having read it.”

It is only fitting to start this essay with the fact that Teddy Roosevelt was both a voracious reader and a prolific writer. On a trip to Europe at age 11 he supposedly read more than 50 novels. He was well versed in hundreds of tomes and authors including Scandinavian sagas, Arabian tales and Rumanian literature. As further testament to his range, he earned an honorary presidency of the Gaelic Literature Association. By the time TR became president, he had read the bulk of American literature and knew personally most of its writers. Robert Frost once said of TR, “As I think of him, I remember him as the only President I ever met, as the only President who ever took that much interest in a poet. He quoted poetry to me. He knew poetry. Poetry was in his mind; that means a great deal to me.”

Roosevelt’s literary pursuits were no less accomplished. While in his last year of college, TR drafted the first two chapters of his Naval War of 1812, which was completed and published just two years after graduation. It was so well received in Britain he was asked to write the War of 1812 section for William Clowes’ definitive History of the Royal Navy. A life-long student of the outdoors, Roosevelt published Life Histories of African Game Animals, a two-volume work with naturalist Edmund Heller, which was commended by the American Geographic Society. In all, he would pen almost fifty books, numerous newspaper articles and supposedly tens of thousands of letters. Not to mention two epic, oft-quoted speeches, “The Strenuous Life” and “The Man in the Arena.”

“I intended to be one of the governing class.”

Theodore built a long and consistent reputation for himself as a reformer of all manner of policy at every level of governance. As New York City Police Commissioner he amassed a sterling record of rooting out corruption; even at the expense of the endless headaches it caused within his own party. He made so many inroads as Civil Service Commissioner under President Benjamin Harrison that he was kept on into the Cleveland Administration (even though he had repeatedly insulted and criticized Grover’s first term). While governor of New York, he signed a bill to prevent public school teachers across the state from not getting paid, hyping “the Republican party, which is pre-eminently the party of the public schools” over the Democrats who had instead ” increased the salaries of all the useless offices” rather than prioritize public education.

Also while governor, TR consulted experts to brush up on his economic policy knowledge. In a striking indictment to how little has changed over time, he concluded that farmers, mechanics and tradesmen bore a disproportionate share of the tax burden given the “evident injustice” of light taxation of corporations. Roosevelt raged against Oliver Wendell Holmes, his first and brightest appointee to the Supreme Court, when Holmes dissented in the Northern Securities case that paved the way for broad federal regulation of said corporations. While Teddy would awaken antitrust legislation that had been enacted (but scarcely used) before him, the author laments, “Long after Roosevelt left office big business continued to have a disproportionate voice in Congress, to dominate the regulatory agencies Roosevelt had devised to control it, and to send its political spokesmen to the White House, though never again with quite the same freedom to trample on the public interest as in the pre-Roosevelt era.” He put some dents in the armor, but Roosevelt couldn’t dismantle the hold business and money had established on politics.

In April 1897, before his name was on the top ticket, TR was nominated to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President McKinley. This was mainly at the urging of the party bosses to shut Teddy up and get him out of the way where he could make less of a ruckus. But, of course, he did everything he could there, often taking the helm when the Secretary was out on leave or abroad. Roosevelt, always the warhawk, lobbied hard for funds to build six battleships; four for the Atlantic where he foresaw issues with Germany and two for the growing Japanese threat. Keep in mind, this was over fifteen years prior to WWI and over forty years before the US would join the Allies in WWII. The man had foresight.

Roosevelt was far more than big talk and posturing. He got a boatload of watershed legislation passed. Take the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both passed on the same day. Hesitantly (and, conspicuously, not until after his 1904 reelection was secure) TR came out in favor of the decade long struggle to pass laws requiring accurate labels of foods, beverages and drugs. TR was more concerned with his railroad regulation bill and willing to sacrifice other measures for it, but Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle hit booksellers and blew the lid off. Within a month of it’s release TR demanded an investigation into the claims of tainted food supplies and filthy slaughterhouses.  Within eight months, both bills were law.

Roosevelt was still able to get his railroad bills through including the Hepburn Rate Act, which regulated railroad shipping rates, and the Federal Employer’s Liability Act, which guaranteed compensation for injured rail workers among other protections. Added to these were several other antitrust measures, the Panama Canal advancement, building up the Navy, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and diplomatic intervention in Europe and the Far East to establish peace. (That last one even netted TR the newly created Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his mediation of the Russo-Japanese War.)

Theodore Roosevelt preached a very progressive brand of Republicanism. He advocated things like aid to farmers, river valley developments, housing projects, reducing labor hours and social security measures including old age, sickness and unemployment insurance. Yet he may be best known for his major conservation efforts. With his right-hand man Gifford Pinchot, TR’s Administration would admit five National Parks, fifty-one wildlife refuges and, via the National Monuments Act of 1906, sixteen National Monuments.

TR would even use some clever procedural maneuvers to expand his green agenda. The commercial development-minded Senate amended the annual Agricultural Appropriations Bill stating that thereafter no forest reserve could be created in the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado or Wyoming. Any progress on the conservation movement relied on the funds in this bill, so TR had to sign it. In a gangster move by Pinchot, having already scouted the entire West and mapped out where he wanted future reserves, he sent the president a proclamation of twenty-one new forest reserves covering sixteen million acres in the standard ten days TR had to sign or veto the Ag bill. The new reserves were signed into law by the president just before he signed the appropriations bill. Pinchot would say of his conservation coup, “We knew precisely what we wanted. Our field force had already gathered practically all the facts. Speedily it supplied the rest. Our office force worked straight through, some of them for thirty-six and even forty-eight hours on end, to finish the job.” The January 1909 inventory report by Pinchot of the country’s natural resources is considered the most exhaustive survey ever made of the American interior.

The Bad

“There is no danger of having too many immigrants of the right kind”

Though he was a reformer, TR was a staunch imperialist in the mold of Rudyard Kipling. Roosevelt considered it the duty of the “civilized” nations to keep the “barbarous” ones in check. In all cases, his nationalism and protection of American interests came first. In response to Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations proposals at the end of WWI, Roosevelt said, “To substitute internationalism for nationalism means to do away with patriotism. The professional pacifist and the professional internationalist are alike undesirable citizens.”

On the domestic front, his views on Native Americans fighting for their own soil against oncoming settlers was equally unequivocal. “The conquest and settlement by the Whites on the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind. It was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable…all that can be asked is that they shall be judged as other slayers and quellers of savage people are judged.” Don’t worry. There’s plenty of judgment to spare.

When it came to race relations, Roosevelt thought slavery “a grossly anachronistic and un-American form of evil” but, like Thomas Jefferson, thought it could have been left alone and would have died out on its own. He did not care for abolitionists and considered them agitators. While governor of New York, he signed into law a ban on race discrimination in public schools and repealed previous authorizations of segregated schools on a local-option basis. However, he did not think that, on the whole, blacks were fundamentally equal to whites. He faced a significant controversy in 1906 when a group of black soldiers were accused of killing a white bartender and wounding a policeman near Fort Brown in Brownsville, TX. The men were not tried in a court of law, did not admit responsibility, were never positively identified and never proven guilty. Despite the lack of due process or evidence, Roosevelt dishonorably discharged almost every black solider in the camp (160+) and forever barred them from re-enlistment. This included six Medal of Honor winners and several near retirement. Outrage and applause came from the usual North/South divide. Though prominent African-Americans like Booker T Washington remained steadfast friends (and urged other blacks to do the same) Roosevelt would lose a bevy of supporters in the black community.

Equally (or perhaps more) damning was Roosevelt’s approach to immigration. The Chinese Exclusion Treaty of 1882 was up for renewal near the end of TR’s first term. He opposed Chinese laborers on economic grounds as well as social. “There is no danger of having too many immigrants of the right kind…we should not admit masses of men whose standards of living and whose personal customs and habits are such that they tend to lower the level of the American wage-worker.” The rather Trumpian clamps put on Chinese immigration were so pronounced that naturalization was refused to ALL Chinese, prompting Secretary of State John Hay to remark to Roosevelt, “Congress has done its work so well that even Confucius could not become an American.” Even though TR wanted to extend rather than redact interaction with China, he let politics override his principles and signed the exclusions into law, lest he lose the support of the West Coast electorate. (Ed. note: To compound this, California’s legislature in 1905 debated an Oriental exclusion bill with growing resentment also of Japanese immigrants. In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered all 93 Japanese, Chinese and Korean students in public schools to attend a segregated school; much to TR’s dismay, as he feared the growing Japanese naval threat.)

Lastly, Roosevelt had an oftentimes contentious relationship with the press. When going after robber baron millionaire Jay Gould, TR commented that the New York World (then owned by Gould) was “a local stock-jobbing sheet of limited circulation and versatile mendacity, owned by the arch thief of Wall Street, and edited by a rancorous kleptomaniac with a penchant for trousers.” Roosevelt would use his bully pulpit often to make headlines and get public support roaring. But his feelings towards the muckrakers and journalists of the day became strained. “The more I see of the Czar, the Kaiser, and the Mikado the better I am content with democracy, even if we have to include the American newspaper as one of its assets.”

The Bull Moose

“No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.”

Teddy Roosevelt loved the idea of war. For him, it meant everything manly and glorious. It defined one’s legacy. As early as 1895 (three years before the fight) TR was asking the governor of New York for a captaincy should war break out with Spain over Cuba. So greedy for battlefield glory was Teddy that, when an American battleship exploded in a Cuban port, he urged the Secretary of the Navy not to pursue an investigation into the actual causes of the sinking of the USS Maine for fear it would turn out not to be a deliberate Spanish attack! (Ed. note: The study happened anyway. It said the ship hit a submerged mine but could not then, or ever since, determine who was to blame. Spain even agreed to a last-minute armistice but the war drums were already banging too loudly.)

Years after the Spanish-American War (the one that made him a national hero, the one the Rough Riders rode to glory) Roosevelt wrote to his military aide about how he felt going to Cuba to fight.  “You know what my wife and children mean to me, and yet I made up my mind that I would not allow even a death to stand in my way, that it was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and for my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring-rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to have answered that call.” Wow.

As a public servant, TR advocated for preparedness (and war in general) for years in the Navy Department. He itched for a chance to fight Mexico, Germany, and others he considered a threat to American supremacy. He mused things like, “the burning of New York and a few other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson on the need of an adequate system of coast defenses; and I think it would have a good effect on our large german population to force them to an ostentatiously patriotic display of anger against Germany.”

TR felt you either had to expand your influence by peace and, failing that, by force. “If our population decreases; if we lose the virile, manly qualities, and sink into a nation of mere hucksters, putting gain above national honor, and subordinating everything to mere ease of life; then we shall indeed reach a condition worse than that of the ancient civilizations in the years of their decay.” When WWI erupted in Europe, Roosevelt pushed President Wilson to enter the fray (writing to a close friend, “I am as yet holding in, but if he does not go to war with Germany I shall skin him alive”) and pressed for a commission should the US enter the conflict. Both because he was a loose cannon and well into his 50s, Teddy’s request was repeatedly denied.

Theodore Roosevelt did not believe in “the Buchanan principle of striving to find some constitutional reason for inaction” and rather espoused what “I have called the Jackson-Lincoln theory of the presidency! – that is, that occasionally great national crises arise which call for immediate and vigorous executive action, and…he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.” TR figured out how to get shit done for the public interest, but it sometimes required serious political parsing. To ensure his party nomination in 1904, he made amends with the Republican party bosses his strident progressive agenda had for years offended; despite the fact that he despised most of them.

Forgoing his reformer reputation, $2.2 million flowed to the Republican war chest for said 1904 election, 72.5% of it from corporations and magnates. Historians argue about why, but the money flowed in regardless. In a decidedly direct appraisal, the author notes, “Roosevelt might even have emerged as a violent demagogue, for he had not a few of the attributes, among them the ability to oversimplify, smear his opponents, and stir the masses.” No wonder people still quote that “speak softly and carry a big stick” speech.

No essay on Teddy Roosevelt would be complete without a nod to the Armageddon of the 1912 presidential election. Without term limits on the presidency (which wouldn’t come into play until after his cousin Franklin was elected four times) Teddy could have run again in 1908. For whatever reason, he chose to step down and hand-picked William Howard Taft as his successor. Not only did Taft not really want to be president – preferring a seat on the Supreme Court, which he later got – he had substantially different ideas than Roosevelt on how to govern. Over time, these differences would sour TR on his protégé and would cause the Rough Rider to self-righteously try to correct his mistake of handing off the baton.

Unable to dislodge the Republican Party nomination from the incumbent Taft, TR created the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party. He toured the country on a populist campaign, stumping ideas like courtroom results the American people didn’t like being overturned by popular vote. This installation of the idea of mob rule terrified the judicious Taft. But TR kept the rhetoric roaring. “If the American people are not fit for popular government, and if they should of right be the servants and not the masters of the men whom they themselves put in office, then Lincoln’s work was wasted and the whole system of government upon which this great democratic Republic rests is a failure.” As was predictable, Republican votes split and the Democrats won in a landslide, taking the White House, both houses of Congress and several governorships. 

“I believe in a strong executive; I believe in power; but I believe that responsibility should go with power and that it is not well that the strong executive should be a perpetual executive.” Theodore Roosevelt loved being president. Like, jump-up-and-down-and-tell-all-your-friends loved it. It’s so confounding why he gave it up when he could have held on, just to come raging back to a campaign fight he knew he would probably lose. “I have had the best time of any man of my age in all the world…I have enjoyed myself in the White House more than I have ever known any other President to enjoy himself, and…I am going to enjoy myself thoroly when I leave the White House, and what is more, continue just as long as I possibly can to do some kind of work that will count.”

Pick up any book on Teddy Roosevelt’s life and you will find an adventure story layered with complexity, inexhaustible energy and not a few head scratchers. No matter which book you choose, it will be well worth the time.

Trivia

• Once sent a note to Herbert Putnam, the Librarian of Congress, saying, “I owe you so much!…It has been such a delight to drop everything useful”
• “I’ll make my body” – born sickly and asthmatic, he worked out daily until he so improved his health that he never had bad bouts with these illnesses again.
• Harvard graduate
• Tragedy – his mother and his wife died on the same day in the same house!! His wife had Bright’s disease (as did Chester Arthur) and died at 22. His mother died of typhoid.
• Nominated in fall of 1881 as Republican candidate for assemblyman from the 21st district, his first election.
• Best pals with Henry Cabot Lodge.
• Great quote on state’s rights once he was president: “When the Constitution was adopted, at the end of the eighteenth century no human wisdom could foretell the sweeping changes, alike in industrial and political conditions, which were to take place at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time is was accepted as a matter of course that the several States were the proper authorities to regulate, so far as was then necessary, the comparatively insignificant and strictly localized corporate bodies of the day. The conditions are now wholly different and wholly different action is called for.”
• In an entrepreneurial twist to his conservation agenda, he set aside the Dismal River and Niobrara Forest Reserves for a controlled experiment to grow marketable trees in the Nebraska sand hills. 
• Negotiated peace between the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. This was a high wire act of diplomacy with huge stakes and he pulled it off. He was awarded the relatively newly created Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his efforts.
• Panic of 1907 – JP Morgan helped save the day by making huge personal deposits into NY banks. This lead to the “gracious” JP’s offer to buy the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company’s stock so it wouldn’t put a major brokerage firm out of business. It undoubtedly lead to a near monopoly trust, but TR had to either let it happen or potentially let the financial panic get worse. Most historians think TR got played like a fiddle. Writing to Hoover years later he noted, “while I may not share any other quality with Abraham Lincoln, I do share his lack of intimate acquaintance with finance.” 
• Was SHOT IN THE CHEST on his way to give a speech while campaigning for president in 1912. Straight out of a Hollywood cliché, the folded speech and glasses case in his chest pocket slowed the bullet down enough that it didn’t do much damage. He refused to go to the hospital and still gave the speech, saying in part, “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose!”
• Died: January 6, 1919 at Sagamore Hill in Cove Neck, NY “James, please put out the light.” last words were to his Negro servant. 

Follow-up Reading

• Edmund Morris Trilogy
  • The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 
  • Theodore Rex
  • Colonel Roosevelt
• Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
• The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard