Theodore Rex
By Edmund Morris
Random House
Reviewed by Daniel Akst
for the Star-Ledger
Theodore Roosevelt seems almost a cartoon to us today, stomping all over Latin America with his big stick and guillotine dentition, or shouting “bully!” while blasting some helpless wild animal in his beloved wilderness. His battlefield valor came in a discredited war, and the sanguinary character of his life ill-suits the increasingly vegan self-image of Americans in our own day.
The silky prose and patient accessibility of Edmund Morris’ new biography, Theodore Rex—to say nothing of the intense controversy surrounding the author’s last book, a fanciful life of Ronald Reagan--may draw enough attention to his latest subject to shatter the Rough Rider caricature in the popular mind. Yet this book too will raise some hackles, and impatient readers will pay a price for Morris’ long-ago decision to write TR’s life in three volumes.
Morris himself hasn’t suffered for it. His first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 and was no doubt a factor in his selection as Reagan’s authorized biographer. Granted unprecedented access and gifted with a literary sensibility, Morris produced the remarkable Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, a novelistic riff on the enigmatic president’s life that provoked the wrath of historians.
They will be less angry this time around, yet even in this volume we find ourselves fairly often inside the head of someone long dead, a symptom that Morris hasn’t entirely abandoned his novelistic approach. The sheer loveliness of his prose, his adept handling of scenes and emotions, his skill at building suspense and managing disclosures, all these talents are amply manifest in Theodore Rex and will no doubt raise further suspicions among his fellow biographers, just as Churchill’s almost supernatural eloquence stimulated jealousy and suspicion among politicians during his lifetime.
For the reader, at least in this case, Morris’ unusual skills are a gift. Theodore Rex (the title is from a good-natured jibe by Henry James) vivifies not just a fascinating figure but a crucial period of American history, which is shown to us through the consciousness of a remarkable man. Before reaching the White House, after all, TR was a great deal more than the conqueror of San Juan Hill. He had read 20,000 books (in French, German and Italian as well as English), and written 15 of his own. He was an accomplished ornithologist, a historian, a twice-married father, and had been New York City Police Commissioner and Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Two weeks after his 40th birthday, he was Governor of New York, then the most populous state in the union.
That was true for everyone. It was the beginning of the age of complexity, of industries and technologies beyond any one person’s ken, of faster and wider dissemination of information, and of American involvement on the global stage. By the time TR left office, in 1909, both the presidency and the nation were irrevocably changed. Like his distant cousin who took office a generation later, Theodore Roosevelt gave us much of the America we know, not just the imperial presidency but also environmentalism, not just foreign adventuring but an awareness of the nation’s power and its responsibilities. He grappled with many of the same issues we do: immigration, race, terrorism, the overweening character of big business, the role of the federal government, the gap between rich and poor.
Morris’ Roosevelt is the larger than life character you might expect, consuming food, books and people with Gargantuan fervor and never losing his boyish pleasure in fun and games—even when pugilism cost him the sight in one eye. But Morris’ Roosevelt is also a master statesman, which is to say a brilliant negotiator and manipulator. Brawny and impatient he may have been, yet Roosevelt was capable of supreme delicacy in bringing the Russians and Japanese to the negotiating table in hopes of ending their Asian war. He won the Nobel Peace Prize when he succeeded.
TR had somewhat more trouble with his largely Republican Congress, yet even there, bolstered by his great popularity with the voters, he pushed through legislation that vastly expanding the federal government’s power to regulate commerce, particularly giant corporations and food quality. He used his executive powers to advance the cause of labor, particularly in a dangerous coal miners strike, and to preserve vast tracts of forest. And he got the Panama Canal going, even if it did take some gunboat diplomacy; the isthmus was part of Colombia, but when that nation seemed unlikely to ratify a treaty permitting the giant ditch to go forward, the Roosevelt administration gave crucial help to the secessionists who brought modern-day Panama into being.
The difficulty is that Theodore Rex focuses entirely on its subject’s time in the White House. For a trilogy this makes sense, but readers of this one substantial volume will miss out on TR’s fascinating early life and hectic later one, both tainted by tragedy. Young Roosevelt lost his mother and his first wife, both much beloved, on the same day, and readers who know what happens later will read with foreboding the charming scene, toward the end of Theodore Rex, involving little Quentin, his youngest son, who was soon to die in World War I. All this presumably will be covered in Morris’ anticipated third volume.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to get a full picture of the man without reading the first two volumes together. Yet a large life demands a large history, and Edmund Morris has obliged with a work large not just in size but in spirit as well as scope. One only hopes it doesn’t take him quite as long again to bring us volume three.
Daniel Akst is the author of The Webster Chronicle, a
novel.