Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

The President felt entirely at ease. It seemed “so natural and so proper” to have Washington wield his silver.

As for Booker T. Washington, “I shall have him to dine just as often as I please.”

THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL lack of inhibition—some said, of decorum—was much discussed at Washington dinner tables in the spring of 1902. Whether exercising, working, or pricking the bubbles of solemnity around him, he seemed unconcerned by his growing reputation as “the strangest creature the White House ever held.” On 28 May, he was seen hanging from a cable over the Potomac, presumably in some effort to toughen his wrists. Owen Wister caught him walking behind John Hay on tiptoe, bowing like an obsequious Oriental. This might or might not have been connected with the fact that Roosevelt was currently studying jujitsu. White House groundsmen, unaware that he was a published ornithologist, were puzzled by his habit of standing under trees, motionless, for long periods of time. Hikers in Rock Creek Park learned to take cover when he galloped by, revolver in hand; he had a habit of “popping” shortsightedly at twigs and stumps with live ammunition.

As if toughening himself for the crisis to come, Roosevelt intensified his latest exercise routine, “singlesticks.” Every evening in the residence, he and Leonard Wood donned padded helmets and chest protectors and beat each other like carpets. “We look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” the President joked. General Wood noted in his diary that Roosevelt was too excitable a stick-fighter to remember the rules. “It is almost impossible to get him to come to a guard after having been hit or delivering a blow.” Despite bruised shoulders and swollen wrists, the two old Rough Riders soon graduated to heavy ash rods.

His singlesticks duels with Leonard Wood continued: after one session he was so whacked about the right arm that he had to greet his evening guests left-handed.

The Ambassador’s own first impression of “the extraordinary President … more powerful than a King,” was one of both relief and surprise. He felt himself being swept away by a joie de vivre that engulfed all trouble. Unlike Bowen, he sensed no brutality, only the “force of will to do things.” Beaming like a schoolboy proud of his homework, Roosevelt launched into a discussion of Jusserand’s books. He related material in English Wayfaring Life to the habits of hoboes in Colorado, said he had been reading Piers Plowman on his ill-fated trip west, and talked of Chaucer and Petrarch, Shakespeare and Voltaire. Then, perhaps sensing Hay’s polite distress, he intoned a few “cordial sentiments” for transmittal to the Quai d’Orsay, and the interview was over.

AT 2:34 P.M., ROOSEVELT’S special train pulled out of Jersey City for Washington. Facing six hours of travel, he remembered that Nicholas Murray Butler had asked him for a list of recommended books. It seemed like a strange request, coming from the President of Columbia University, yet deserving of a full answer. He cast his mind back over what he had read since taking the oath of office, and began to scribble. Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus’ Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles’ Seven Against Thebes; Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes’ Frogs. Parts of The Politics of Aristotle. All these had been in translation. However, he had read, in French, the biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, Henri Turenne, and John Sobieski. He had also browsed, if not deeply studied, Froissart on French history, Maspero on the early Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations, “and some six volumes of Mahaffey’s Studies of the Greek World.” What else? The Memoirs of Marbot; Bain’s Life of Charles the Twelfth; Mahan’s Types of Naval Officers; some of Macaulay’s Essays; three or four volumes of Gibbon and three or four chapters of Motley. The battles in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; Hay and Nicolay’s Lincoln, and the two volumes of Lincoln’s Speeches and Writings—these I have not only read through, but have read parts of them again and again; Bacon’s Essays … Macbeth; Twelfth Ni...