The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris

(New York: Modern Library, 2010-11-24), 962

We think that the greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done. The one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men. (484, from The Winning of the West)

This year starts the Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, following Churchill in 2018-2020 and John Paul II in 2021-2023. I'm not sure who will be next, but I have a couple years to figure that out.

Roosevelt is a man of action. He is a man who takes the initiative and gets things done. "Bias for action" has become a bit of a corporate buzzword. Roosevelt is the original man of action. It started by basically willing himself from feebleness to strenuousness as a boy after his father told him, "You must make your body." You see it in his courtship of his wife and his writing of his books, including The Naval War of 1812 which he started as a student at Harvard and became a classic piece of history. He wouldn't have even been at "the great day of [his] life," the Battle of San Juan, were it not for his initiative to get his Rough Riders on a ship to Cuba. Time and again, he makes things happen: Harvard, New York Assemblyman, cattle rancher, Mayor of New York candidate, Civil Service Commissioner, New York Police Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Colonel of the Rough Riders, Governor of New York, Vice President, President. As he says: "It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them" (126).

There is something about Roosevelt that is quintessentially American. He represents the best of America when America was at its best. There is something special about America in its ascendency, having come together after the Civil War and before the grave evils and massive changes of the twentieth century—world wars, depression, inflationary monetary policy, international politics, sexual revolution and moral decadence, the rise of the nanny state and consumerism, and the wane of personal responsibility. No era is perfect, but it's easy to feel some nostalgia for this simpler, purer America.

I read this during the 2024 election, and there are some notable similarities between Roosevelt and Ramaswamy. Both are men in another league, both for their resumes and their ability to crank out books. Both bring a fresh perspective to an entrenched politics. I sense that on some level Ramaswamy and the new "America First" movement draw inspiration from Roosevelt and his Americanism.

Notes

  • The epigraphs at the head of every chapter are taken from Roosevelt's favorite poem, The Saga of King Olaf by Longfellow (1)
    • "I had a great admiration for men who were fearless and could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them." (16)
  • "If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies." (xv)
  • "It is fine to feel one's hand guiding great machinery." (xxi)
  • Reading
    • "His range of reading is amazing. He seems to be echoing with all the thought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius." (xxvi)
    • "This is the time of the day he loves best. 'Reading with me is a disease.'" (xxxii)
    • He reads 2-3 books per evening, 500+ books per year, his appetite is "omnivorous and insatiable" (xxxiii)
    • "The richness of Roosevelt's knowledge causes a continuous process of cross-fertilization to go on in his mind." (xxxiii)
    • "The young man never seemed to know what idleness was...Every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic, or some abstruse book on Natural History in his hand." (49)
    • His reading was "avidly eclectic" (479)
    • "It is a liberal education to work with him." (613, Secretary of the Navy Long)
  • His dad: "The best man I ever knew...but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid." (5)
  • His parents were on opposite sides of the Civil War (9)
  • Discipline: "Theodore Senior never chastised his son again. It was not necessary....Be sure to make the children obey your first order." (13)
  • "He was forced to explore the most forbidding room in the house: a windowless library, with tables, chairs, and gloomy bookcases. Chancing upon a [book], he opened it, and found within a world he could happily inhabit the rest of his days." (15)
  • Living in the country: "The children reacted to their rural surroundings with delight and general improvement to their health" (17)
  • Travel: They took a trip to Europe for a whole year when he was a boy, coving 9 countries (21)
    • "The cornucopia of Europe awakened his faculty of near-total recall." (22)
    • He "didn't believe in popes—no real American would", yet he did kiss the Pope's hand (28)
    • Then they took a trip to Egypt and the Holy Land: "Theodore Senior could relax, know that his son was educating himself." (38)
    • Daily Routine of studies in Germany:
      • 6:30 rise and breakfast
      • 7:30 study
      • 12:30 lunch
      • 1:00 study
      • 3:00 coffee and free time
      • 7:00 tea time
      • 7:30 study
      • 10:00 bed
  • Health: "Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one's body, but I know you will do it." (32)
    • "There and then he decided to join what he would later call 'the fellowship of the doers'" and he started to learn how to box. (35)
  • Language: "Private tutors coached him in English, French, German, and Latin." (34)
  • Eyesight: "I had not idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles." (34)
  • "Time and again Teedie was convinced that his father was all-powerful and irresistible; that forceful talk, combined with personal charm, would vanquish any opposition." (41)
  • Roosevelt was the "Apostle of the Strenuous Life" (57)
  • "Iron self-discipline had become a habit with him." (64)
  • He published his first book while a student at Harvard: The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks (65)
  • His father died while he was a student at Harvard: "He has just been buried. I shall never forget these terrible three days." (70)
    • "When the college boy of 1878 was entering upon his duties as President of the United States, he told me frequently that he never took any serious step or made any vital decision for his country without thinking first what position his father would have taken on the question." (72)
    • His father's advice: "Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies." (73)
    • "Oh Father, my Father, no words can tell how I shall miss your counsel and advice!" (75)
  • "The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people...Theodore enjoyed them immensely." (89)
  • "A life of most luxurious ease": rose early and worked before breakfast to work 6-8 hours before lunch with afternoon and evenings free for romance (92)
  • "Unable to find solace in reading books [due to his unrequited love], he began to write one, entitled The Naval War of 1812." (101)
  • Started law school, which he saw as a stepping-stone to politics. (107)
  • "Although a woman's place was in the home, he believed that the home was superior to the state, and that its mistress was therefore the superior of the public servant." (108)
  • Tirelessness: "Should a spare moment occasionally present itself, he filled it not with rest but with work." (123)
  • "It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them." (126)
  • After traveling abroad: "I have enjoyed it greatly, yet the more I see the better satisfied I am that I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit." (130)
  • "I can imagine nothing more happy in life than an evening spent in my cosy little sitting room, before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me, and playing backgammon with my own dainty mistress." (173)
  • People who don’t drink: "Since discovering at Harvard that wine made him truculent, he had begun a lifetime policy of near-total abstinence." (173)
  • The Badlands: "Here the romance of my life began." (200)
  • Not elected as speaker: "My defeat in the end materially strenghtned my position, and enabled me to accomplish far more than I could have accomplished as Speaker...Titular position is of no consequence, achievement was the all-important thing." (218)
  • As an assemblyman he worked for 14 hours per day, with 30 min of fierce sparring: "I feel much more at ease in my mind and better able to enjoy things" (218)
  • Roosevelt held Thomas Jefferson in contempt and worshiped Alexander Hamilton (220)
  • "With a writer's eye and ear, he noted down incidents and scraps of Irish dialogue for future publication." (227)
  • His mother and young wife died on the same day: "The light has gone out of my life." (230)
    • Morris' analysis: "In quitting him so early, she rendered him her ultimate service. In burying her, he symbolically buried his own lingering naïveté." (234)
    • He was then back to work at once: "There is nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me." (235)
    • "I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow. Nor does it lighten the pain to cease from working." (237)
  • His dream cabin in Dakota: "A long, low ranch house of hewn logs, with a verandah, and with in addition to the other rooms, a bedroom for myself, and a sitting-room with a big fireplace. There would be a rough desk, well stocked with ink and paper, two or three shelves full of books, and a rubber tub to bathe in. Out front, on a piazza overlooking the river, there would be the inevitable Rooseveltian rocking-chair, in which he could sit reading poetry on summer afternoons, or watching his cattle plod across the sandbars." (268)
  • "What true American does not enjoy a rocking chair?" (294)
  • Family Motto carved into his home at Sagamore Hill: Qui plantavit curabit—he who has planted will preserve. (299)
  • Roosevelt and his men took a raft to capture horse thieves: he took along some Matthew Arnold and Anna Karenina (319)
  • "It was not in his nature to think negatively. Hope lay in positive action." (350)
  • "If it had not been for my years in North Dakota, I never would have become President of the United States." (378)
  • He described his daughter as "an enchantingly pretty little girl of three" (386, an apt description of Ruth)
  • Started the Boone & Crockett Club to pursue conservation efforts (389)
  • Roosevelt "had a profound, almost Indian veneration for Trees" (389)
  • "I should like to write some book that would really take rank in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream." (391)
  • "Roosevelt like both of them, as he did everyone at first, then lost patience with them, as he did with most people sooner or later." (404)
  • Insult: "There is a half-pleasurable excitement in facing and equal foe; but there is none whatever in trampling on a weakling." (419)
  • Generalism: "We touch two or three little worlds, each profoundly ignorant of the others." (421)
  • In another league: "Insofar as a coarse intellect can comprehend a fine one, he had to acknowledge his own inferiority." (425)
  • "This young man was equally at home on Adam's Oriental hearthrug, the spit-streaked stairway of the Senate, or the sod floor of a cowboy cabin." (425)
  • "I don't feel as if I were working to lasting effect." (447) and "I often have a regret that I am not in with you and others in doing real work." (451)
  • I read this shortly before turning 34, which he hit on page 467.
  • John Morley: "Theodore Roosevelt 'was' America—the America that grew to maturity after the Civil War, marshaled its resources at Chicago, and exploded into world power at the turn of the century." (473)
  • The Winning of the West was the first comprehensive statement of Roosevelt's Americanism. (474)
    • "The frontier has gone, and wit hits going has closed the first period of American history." (479)
    • "We think that the greatest victories are yet to be won, the greatest deeds yet to be done. The one plain duty of every man is to face the future as he faces the present, regardless of what it may have in store for him, turning toward the light as he sees the light, to play his part manfully, as a man among men." (484)
    • "It is in the West that as a nation we shall ultimately work out our highest destiny." (571)
  • The Wilderness Hunter is arguably his finest book (484), and he wrote a book for boys Hero Tales from American History. (491)
  • Rice: "Teddy is consumed with energy as long as he is doing something and fighting somebody...he always finds something to do and somebody to fight." (486)
  • New York Police Commissioner: "Yet, in spite of all the nervous strain and worry, I am glad I undertook it; for it is a man's work." (506)
    • Was in the trenches with the police: showing up in the middle of the night to make sure policemen were at their posts. (508+)
  • "As always when he was learning something new, he visibly swelled with pleasure and satisfaction." (512)
  • Roosevelt argued that honest enforcement of an unpopular law was the most effective way to bring about its repeal. "It is the plain duty of a public officer to stand steadfastly for the honest enforcement of the law." (520)
  • "I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won't let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will being to work for it, I'll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I'll beat myself. See?" (528)
  • "The meanest of liars, who tells half the truth." (543, cf. ~The Collected Works of GK Chesterton)
  • "The sight of a battlefield is one of the most awful lessons in international ethics which a civilized man can receive." (546)
  • Roosevelt was "congenitally unable to understand the poor." (572)
  • "The less work Long [Secretary of the Navy] wanted to do, the more power he could arrogate to himself. All he had to do was win Long's confidence, while unobtrusively relieving him of more and more responsibility." (591)
  • Roosevelt's first public address as Assistant Secretary of the Navy at the Naval War College was the first great speech of his career. (593)
    • Advocating an expansionist policy: "No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war." (594)
    • "There are higher things in this life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort. It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness." (596)
  • ☐ "must needs" 603 📅 2024-11-28
  • Having a large family: Roosevelt had "shown valor in the warfare of the cradle." (604)
  • "I perfectly revel in this work. I am having immense fun running the Navy." (606)
  • "Roosevelt's own attitude to disease and frailty was this: if one ignored them long enough, presumably they would go away." (621)
  • Long took the afternoon off, and Roosevelt sent a momentous telegram to Dewey that paved the way for the US conquest of the Philippines, "in a single afternoon, he placed the Navy in a state of such readiness it had not known since the Civil War." (629-630)
  • "Roosevelt's personality was cyclonic, in that he tended to become unstable in times of low pressure. The slightest rise in the barometer outside, and his turbulence smoothed into a whirl of coordinated activity, while a core of stillness developed within. Under maximum pressure Roosevelt was sunny, calm, and unnaturally clear." (630-631)
  • "It was one of the most concise and at the same time one of the cleverest contracts I have ever seen. He made it a condition that the vessel should be delivered under her own steam at a specific point and within a specific period. In one sentence he thus covered all that might have been set forth in pages and pages of specifications. For the vessel had to be in first-class condition to make the time scheduled in the contract! Mr. Roosevelt always had that faculty of looking through details to the result to be obtained." (633)
  • By directing Long's attention to Langley's flying machine, "Roosevelt was recognized as the earliest official proponent of U.S. Naval Aviation." (636)
  • He brought about the Spanish American War with 1 year of becoming Assistant Secretary of the Navy (640), and was commissioned as lieutenant colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, "Roosevelt's Rough Riders" (643), "a peculiarly American regiment (707).
    • Rough Riders came from both the Union and Confederacy: "It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home." (654)
    • July 1, 1898 was "the great day of my life" when he led in the Battle of San Juan (681)
  • Campaigning for Governor: "He was too strong a man to be susceptible to flattery, asking not for rosy forecasts but facts as to where his campaign was weak and what could be done to strengthen it." (719)
  • Governor of New York: "I have worked hard all my life, and have never been particularly lucky, but this summer I was lucky, and I am enjoying it to the full. I know perfectly well that the luck will not continue, and it is not necessary that it should." (722)
  • Anger: "I declined to lose my temper." (727)
  • "I don't mean to do one single thing during the month except write a life of Oliver Cromwell." (742)
    • Roosevelt "called another stenographer and dictated gubernatorial correspondence in between paragraphs of Cromwell, while a barber tried simultaneously to shave him." (742)
  • "I have only a second-rate brain, but I think I have a capacity for action." (743)
    • Morris: "He had a brain that could always go straight to the pith of any matter. That is a mental power of the first rank." (743)
  • "I have always been fond of the West African proverb: 'Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.'" (754)
  • Page 769 lists his schedule while campaigning for Vice President, in which he was able to squeeze in over 4 hours of ready despite making 7 speeches!
  • Sagamore: "the golden leisurely chiming of the wood thrushes chanting their vespers." (775)

Topic: Biography

Source

New Words

  • ablution: A washing or cleansing of the body, especially as part of a religious rite (189)
  • lariate: A rope for picketing grazing horses or mules (207)
  • desuetude: The cessation of use; disuse; discontinuance of practice, custom, or fashion (414)
  • coruscate: To exhibit sparkling virtuosity (425)
  • valetudinarian: A sickly or weak person, especially one who is constantly and morbidly concerned with his or her health (456)

Created: 2023-09-03-Sun
Updated: 2024-11-29-Fri