Theodore Roosevelt

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Editor’s Note

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Milestones

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  The American Presidents Series

  Also by Louis Auchincloss

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOR JOHN AND TRACY

  Editor’s Note

  THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY

  The president is the central player in the American political order. That would seem to contradict the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Remembering the horrid example of the British monarchy, they invented a separation of powers in order, as Justice Brandeis later put it, “to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power.” Accordingly, they divided the government into three allegedly equal and coordinate branches—the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

  But a system based on the tripartite separation of powers has an inherent tendency toward inertia and stalemate. One of the three branches must take the initiative if the system is to move. The executive branch alone is structurally capable of taking that initiative. The Founders must have sensed this when they accepted Alexander Hamilton’s proposition in the Seventieth Federalist that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” They thus envisaged a strong president—but within an equally strong system of constitutional accountability. (The term imperial presidency arose in the 1970s to describe the situation when the balance between power and accountability is upset in favor of the executive.)

  The American system of self-government thus comes to focus in the presidency—“the vital place of action in the system,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. Henry Adams, himself the great-grandson and grandson of presidents as well as the most brilliant of American historians, said that the American president “resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.” The men in the White House (thus far only men, alas) in steering their chosen courses have shaped our destiny as a nation.

  Biography offers an easy education in American history, rendering the past more human, more vivid, more intimate, more accessible, more connected to ourselves. Biography reminds us that presidents are not supermen. They are human beings too, worrying about decisions, attending to wives and children, juggling balls in the air, and putting on their pants one leg at a time. Indeed, as Emerson contended, “There is properly no history; only biography.”

  Presidents serve us as inspirations, and they also serve us as warnings. They provide bad examples as well as good. The nation, the Supreme Court has said, has “no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln.”

  The men in the White House express the ideal and the values, the frailties and the flaws, of the voters who send them there. It is altogether natural that we should want to know more about the virtues and the vices of the fellows we have elected to govern us. As we know more about them, we will know more about ourselves. The French political philosopher Joseph de Maistre said, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”

  At the start of the twenty-first century, forty-two men have made it to the Oval Office. (George W. Bush is counted our forty-third president, because Grover Cleveland, who served nonconsecutive terms, is counted twice.) Of the parade of presidents, a dozen or so lead the polls periodically conducted by historians and political scientists. What makes a great president?

  Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America. Their passion, as they grasp the helm, is to set the ship of state on the right course toward the port they seek. Great presidents also have a deep psychic connection with the needs, anxieties, dreams of people. “I do not believe,” said Wilson, “that any man can lead who does not act … under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads—a sympathy which is insight—an insight which is of the heart rather than of the intellect.”

  “All of our great presidents,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt, “were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington incarnated the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson, said FDR, were both “moral leaders, each in his own way and his own time, who used the presidency as a pulpit.”

  To succeed, presidents must not only have a port to seek but they must convince Congress and the electorate that it is a port worth seeking. Politics in a democracy is ultimately an educational process, an adventure in persuasion and consent. Every president stands in Theodore Roosevelt’s bully pulpit.

  The greatest presidents in the scholars’ rankings, Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, were leaders who confronted and overcame the republic’s greatest crises. Crisis widens presidential opportunities for bold and imaginative action. But it does not guarantee presidential greatness. The crisis of secession did not spur Buchanan or the crisis of depression spur Hoover to creative leadership. Their inadequacies in the face of crisis allowed Lincoln and the second Roosevelt to show the difference individuals make to history. Still, even in the absence of first-order crisis, forceful and persuasive presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, James K. Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush—are able to impose their own priorities on the country.

  The diverse drama of the presidency offers a fascinating set of tales. Biographies of American presidents constitute a chronicle of wisdom and folly, nobility and pettiness, courage and cunning, forthrightness and deceit, quarrel and consensus. The turmoil perennially swirling around the White House illuminates the heart of the American democracy.

  It is the aim of the American Presidents series to present the grand panorama of our chief executives in volumes compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. Each volume offers a distillation of character and career. I hope that these lives will give readers some understanding of the pitfalls and potentialities of the presidency and also of the responsibilities of citizenship. Truman’s famous sign—“The buck stops here”—tells only half the story. Citizens cannot escape the ultimate responsibility. It is in the voting booth, not on the presidential desk, that the buck finally stops.

  —Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Introduction

  Theodore Roosevelt is one of the few presidents whose life, or at least the public image of his life, is even more important historically than his accomplishments as our chief executive officer. This could also be said of Washington, whose image has been a national symbol to millions who know nothing of what he did in his two terms of offi
ce, and certainly of Grant, whose military glory (one hopes) outshines the scandals of his administrations, and possibly of Kennedy, who offered a kind of spiritual rebirth to the nation that seems to be something apart from what he accomplished in his thousand days at the White House. Lincoln, of course, is the great example of the leader whose image and performance are of equally mammoth significance, though in his case the noble image, however like its original, was created largely after his assassination.

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of TR by his first marriage and survivor of all his offspring, remembered the father she loved with an admiration undimmed by sentimentality:

  When I look back on it now, which I rarely do, I can feel a little mean about my father, especially as a politician rather than as a person. The eyebrows tend to lift and the canines to show. He was certainly right for the period he lived in. Absolutely perfect. It was a time when we needed large families and armies and expansion overseas. It was all in the great imperial tradition. But I tend to see it through the eyes of young people today, and one just can’t have a prayerful attitude to it all.

  It is true. What sounded right and inspiring to the cheering multitudes at the dawn of the twentieth century rings with a slightly tinny resonance today. And what survives in the panorama of history, even more than TR’s trust-busting, or his building of the Panama Canal, or his negotiation of the Russo-Japanese War peace treaty, is the vision of the asthmatic youth who made a he-man of himself as a rancher in the Wild West, the intrepid Rough Rider who charged up San Juan Hill, the fearless antagonist of political vice and corruption, and the wielder of the “big stick” who sent his great white fleet around the globe to impress the alien powers with the spectacle of America’s might. There is almost no aspect of his life that is not relevant to some chapter of our history.

  But to return to Alice Longworth’s reservation. The following quotations should adequately demonstrate why much of our contemporary culture is at odds with TR’s most treasured views. Here, to begin with, he writes on the respective functions of the sexes:

  I believe that men and women should stand on an equality of right, but I do not believe that equality of right means equality of function, and I am more and more convinced that the great field, the indispensable field for the usefulness of woman, is the mother of the family. It is her work in the household, in the home, her work in bearing and rearing her children, which is more important than any man’s work, and it is that work which should be normally the woman’s work, just as normally the man’s work should be that of the breadwinner, the supporter of the home, and if necessary the soldier who will fight for the home.

  As a Harvard student he recorded in his diary: “Thank Heaven I am at least perfectly pure.” Edmund Morris confirms this:

  During his student years, nor indeed at any time in his life, did Theodore show the slightest tolerance for women, or for that matter men, who were anything but rigidly virtuous.… Sex to him was part of the mystical union of marriage, and, however pleasurable as an act of love, its function was to procreate. Outside marriage, as far as he was concerned, it simply did not exist.

  Nor did he have anything but anathema for reluctant parents:

  But the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.

  As to homosexuality, Alice Longworth, referring to a supposed remark made by Britain’s George V: “I thought men like that shot themselves,” commented, “My father was a bit like that.”

  Here is TR addressing the Naval War College on manly virtues:

  All the great masterful races have been fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its right to stand as the equal of the best.

  And the consequences of such a loss will be dire:

  If we ever come to nothing as a nation, it will be because the teaching of Carl Schurz, President Eliot, the Evening Sun, and the futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type bears its legitimate fruit in producing a flabby, timid type of character which eats away the great fighting features of our race.

  When his own sons went to war he wrote:

  I hope and pray that they’ll all come back, but before God I’d rather none came back than one, able to go, had stayed at home.

  In his autobiography he almost approves Britain’s whipping of sex offenders:

  There are brutes so low, so infamous, so degraded and bestial in their cruelty and brutality that the only way to get at them is through their skins.

  And in the same book he took his stand on capital punishment:

  But inasmuch as, without hesitation, in the performance of duty, I have again and again sent good and gallant and upright young men to die, it seems to me the height of folly both mischievous and mawkish to contend that criminals who have deserved death should nevertheless be allowed to shirk it.

  Finally, there are many today who would deplore his emphasis on the savage cruelty of American Indians in The Winning of the West as perhaps a partial justification of the stringent treatment that we meted out to them.

  The expression “too horrible to mention” is to be taken literally, not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate that has befallen every white man or woman who has fallen into the power of hostile Plains Indians during the last ten or fifteen years. The nature of the wild Indian has not changed. Not one man in a hundred, not a single woman, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot look another in the face and so much as speak of. Impalement on charred stakes, finger nails split off backwards, finger joints chewed off, eyes burnt out—these tortures can be mentioned, but there are others equally normal and customary which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women are the victims.

  It should not be surprising, in view of the above and plenty of others, that there should have been critics who, according to Nathan Miller, have found TR “cunning, selfish, vindictive, melodramatic, megalomaniacal, dishonest, shallow, and cynical.”

  Such critics are far, however, very far, from giving us the true measure of the man. TR, it must always be borne in mind, had the lifelong habit of giving the freest reign to his tongue and pen, both publicly and privately, and it was his nature to be heartily emphatic, to make his points sometimes by gross overstatement. This by no means always reflected his true meaning, nor did it indicate that action would inevitably follow threat. He had wealths of reserve and was not above using bluster as a weapon. It is easy enough for a careful researcher to find justification for almost any interpretation of his acts in the 150,000 letters that he wrote or dictated, some running to many pages in length. But what the above quotations most certainly do not reveal is that their utterer was capable of the most profound political shrewdness, of a deep humanitarian concern, of a hatred of hypocrisy and deceit and a greatness of heart. TR was a political idealist who had the wisdom to know that only by astute and well-considered compromise in our legislative process could he hope to see enacted even a fraction of the social and military programs that he deemed—and in the opinion of this writer, correctly deemed—essential to the welfare of his nation. Which is why I believe he deserves his rank among our great presidents. He not only created an inspiring symbol—for his era, anyway—of courage and adventure in leadership; he contrived that his maneuvers “to get things done” should never descend from the strictly practical to the near corrupt. And we mustn’t forget that in his day he could speak of standing at Armageddon to do battle for the Lord without being laughed off the platform.

  One

  The Roosevelts were an old Dutch family who immigrated to Manhattan in the seventeenth century and prospered there. In a photograph of Lincoln’s New York funeral procession there can be seen the mansion of Cornelius
Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the city’s ten millionaires with a fortune based in real estate and merchandising plate glass. Watching from one of the windows are two little boys, believed to be Cornelius’s grandsons, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Elliott. Their father, Theodore Sr., lived more modestly in a brownstone on East Twentieth Street, where Theodore Jr., the future president, was born in 1858. He had been preceded by a sister, Anna, nicknamed Bamie, who in middle age married a naval officer, W. Sheffield Cowles, and was followed by another sister, Corinne, who wed the wealthy Douglas Robinson, and a younger brother, Elliott. The sisters, brilliant and admirable women, were lifelong devotees of their brother Theodore, but Elliott, despite good looks, charm, and intellectual ability, took early to drink and died a miserable failure, somewhat redeeming himself to history by fathering Eleanor.

  Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had little inclination for business and devoted the time that his means afforded to substantial work in city charities and hospitals, attaining a wide reputation for good works. Theodore Jr. adored and worshiped him, but he also admitted that though his father had never once physically punished him, “he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.” After the latter’s premature death at forty-six he said: “I often feel badly that such a wonderful man as Father should have had a son of so little worth as I am.”

  Theodore Sr. had married a southern belle, Martha (“Mittie”) Bulloch, from Georgia, who was lovely, gentle, self-indulgent, and something, one surmises, of a hypochondriac, who lay back on sofas and was waited on, hand and foot, by devoted family and servants. Her son Elliott called her “a sweet little Dresden monument.” She had a brother, James Bulloch, of more vigorous character, the Confederate agent in Britain who masterminded the construction there, contrary to international law, of the commerce raider Alabama, which sank or captured fifty-seven Union merchant ships until at last it was sunk by the USS Kearsage off Cherbourg. Another brother of Mittie’s, younger, a midshipman, Irvine, was rescued from the raider’s wreck and was supposed to have fired its last shot.