Teykaerts's Full Review: Edmund Morris - The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
If ever there was a man whose life was varied and exciting enough to merit a massive biography, it was surely Theodore Roosevelt. His striking physical presence, his boundless energy, his massive and thundering intellect, his personal charisma, and his unstoppable rise to supreme power have garnered a host of conflicting quotes from his contemporaries. Newton Curtis called him a “brilliant madman,” while cantankerous Mark Twain took a different tack, calling him “clearly insane.” Henry James, reading his violent articles on American expansion called him “a dangerous and ominous jingo.” He was alternately decried as “the most dangerous man of the age,” by Woodrow Wilson and praised as “the greatest moral force of the age” by the newspaper editorials that constantly spouted panegyrics to his majesty. Even his strongest detractors admitted that he was “a mental power of the first rate,” and that while he was often “the most despised man” in America by his political rivals, he was “the most beloved man in the country,” by the masses to which he always appealed. Clearly a man who can invoke such invective as well as such odes to his greatness requires a fine biographer to do him justice. In Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt the early life of “America’s only lovable President” is given shape and form, and by and large is done an excellent justice.
Beginning with his birth in New York and going right up until the very moment, 43 years later, that he was informed that William McKinley had died from an assassin’s bullet, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt portrays a man whose unique combination of talents, gifts, and situation allowed (or perhaps forced) him to rise at an unprecedented rate through the strata of American politics. The first 30 or so pages of the book are a present-tense (“he shakes hands vigorously...” etc) snapshot of a day in the life of the President after five years in office. A useful biographical technique, this section allows the reader to see finished product, Roosevelt the President, and thus view the development of the young Teddy through illuminated, foreseeing eyes. The picture we see is of a matured and polished version of the man he always was: an intensely likeable, brilliant, physically-intimidating (despite being a diminutive 5א, he was a full 200 lbs of thick muscle), and above-all a forceful and compelling personality. This prologue is indicative of Morris’s main purpose: to depict the titular rise of Theodore Roosevelt not as a series of stand-alone episodes, but as a synergistic combination of the skills, natural abilities, personality, political timing, and national development that had, in effect, predestined Roosevelt for the highest office in the land.
The progress of Roosevelt’s life is an astonishing thing to behold: as a child he was precocious and had a somewhat grotesque interest in zoology, with killing and examining the inner-workings of small creatures being his primary mode of study. Sickly and asthmatic as a child, he took his father’s advice and took up boxing and weight-lifting at an early age. His wealthy family (from the inner-most circle of the New York City aristocracy) took him on extended trips to Europe and Africa, where he became fluent in German and French after staying with a German family for nearly a year. Attending Harvard and graduating near the top of his class, he then attended law school for a time before getting his first taste of politics, dewy-eyed and innocent, at the age of 23. From this point on he became a State Assemblyman for New York, Speaker of the House for that same Assembly, a Deputy Sheriff in North Dakota, the Civil Service Commissioner, a New York City Police Commissioner, the Assistant Secretary for the Navy, Colonel in the U.S. Army, the Governor of the State of New York, the U.S. Vice President, and finally the President of the United States. Certainly there is no American political figure who can boast such a broad and varied range of political offices, and on a global scale only Winston Churchill (with whom Roosevelt shared many traits) can compare.
Morris’s chief concern is to portray Roosevelt the man. This is a deeply personal work, concerned at least as much with the inner-workings of the mind and heart of Theodore as with his political ascent. In fact, the two are shown to be inseparable. Morris makes it clear that Roosevelt threw himself completely into every task set before him (he was one of the great workaholics in history) and that all of his political accomplishments are a reflection of his personal beliefs and sense of duty. Morris does a fine job of unearthing the core of Theodore’s persona, detailing his love and awe of his father, his inimitable mix of foppish aristocracy and rough-and-tumble pugnacity, love of the untamed wilds and the closed-rooms of political machinations, and his iron self-discipline.
That Morris considers his subject to be a great man is indisputable. At times his praise can be almost fawning in its gushiness, and his unceasing parade of newspaper quotes about, of all things, Roosevelt’s teeth, is both annoying and difficult to swallow. Thankfully the author cuts through the cloying praise with streaks of surprisingly harsh criticism; Roosevelt is shown to be abstemious and completely unsympathetic to anyone who does not follow his strict standard of sleeping only with one’s wife (although with six children, he obviously was not impervious to lust!). He is also shown to be sanctimoniously prudish about drinking and too-dandy dresser. In describing the redundancy of many of Roosevelt’s expansionist speeches, Morris calls him “one of the bores of all the ages; the wonder is that during his lifetime so many men, women, and children worshipfully pondered his every platitude.” The book is filled with this sort of amusingly vituperative analysis, much as Roosevelt’s own words were liberally peppered with zinging invective.
Beyond his wittiness, Morris shows that Roosevelt was quite simply a genius, and a man of many talents. Upon graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt decided that it might be a jolly good time to write an exhaustively-researched analysis of the maritime portion of the War of 1812. Despite having no military training or even much experience with boats, his The Naval Battle of 1812 was considered the definitive text on the subject, and was immediately made required-reading at the Naval Academy. A complete list of Roosevelt’s abilities and accomplishments is too long to chronicle here, but among them are a photographic memory, extended hunting trips in the Badlands, a life-long battle against “machine” politics, a carefully wrought plan that brought the Phillipines under the sway of American rule, the unspoken leadership of a group of expansionist intellectuals that included Henry Adams, John Hay, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and William Howard Taft, and the first proposal to incorporate airpower into the United States military.
Although one could argue that the life of such an amazingly active man could practically write itself, Morris does an excellent job of explaining Roosevelt in way that we come understand the thought-process behind his actions, and the background behind his political ascension. He never spends more than 10-12 pages on any one episode, a practice with the dual purpose of keeping the book fast-paced and never bogged down (as so many biographies are) and of mimicking the frenetic pacing of Roosevelt’s own life. In describing particularly frenzied periods of activity – such as heavy campaigning at the Republican convention – Morris slips into the present tense to increase the sense of immediacy and action, a pleasant change of pace. He is simply a fine writer, with a vast vocabulary and a flair for memorable descriptions, particularly Roosevelt’s young wife, whom he describes as “outrageously kissable,” and young Teddy himself who at puberty was “a grotesque flower of adolescence, offensive alike to ear, eye, and nostril.” The most profound section of the book is the account of the death of Roosevelt’s wife and mother on the same day. Morris’s handling and explanation of Roosevelt’s amazing response to his wife’s death is a beautiful thing: you have to read it to believe it.
The book is not without its flaws: the section on Roosevelt’s time in Washington as the Civil Service Commissioner is utterly boring, with the tediousness of the descriptions surpassed only by the reader’s frank disbelief that the country was riveted by news of Roosevelt trying (unsuccessfully) to get the corrupt managers of several post-offices fired. I would have also liked to have seen a deeper analysis of Roosevelt’s first days in politics at Morton Hall in NYC. Apparently, the future leader of the free world got his political start because a bona fide street-thug-turned-municipal-politician named Joe Murray liked the way he shouted at a bunch of drunken Irishmen and decided to convince him to be a district representative. Morris recounts this as though it is most normal thing in the world, instead of a shadowy and ignominious starting point for an unrivaled political career.
All in all, the book is a literary feast. Roosevelt is certainly our most interesting president, if not our most interesting American period. The vast scope of his adventures, interests, and political rise are simply fascinating. The prose is lucid and quick-moving, and the book is both entertaining and educational. How can one not be entertained by the well-told tale of a man who in one year dominated the American political scene and was under the microscope of the press every second, and then just up and went to his ranch in North Dakota, where he tracked down and personally arrested three men who had stolen his boat? I can heartily recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in the history of our nation, or even as a how-to book on success. As far as biographies go, it ranks with William Manchester’s “The Last Lion” as the finest I’ve read.
Described by the Chicago Tribune as a classic , The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt stands as one of the greatest biographies of our time. Now back in prin...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
This Pulitzer Prize-winning biography from the author of Theodore Rex, first published in 1980, is now available in audio. Morris presents the story o...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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