The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt, #1)

by Edmund Morris

I felt 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.

They found it hard to dislike someone so supremely unconscious of his own peculiarity. “Teddy” happened to be a fascinating, if spluttery, talker: he could analyze lightweight boxing techniques, discuss the aerodynamics of birds and the protective coloration of animals, quote at will from the Nibelungenlied and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and explain what it was like trying to remain submerged in the Dead Sea. He was “queer,” he was “crazy,” he was “a bundle of eccentricities,” but he was wholly interesting.

A cripple or a consumptive in the eye of the law is equal to the strongest athlete or the deepest thinker, and the same justice should be shown to a woman whether she is or is not the equal of man.… As regards the laws relating to marriage, there should be the most absolute equality preserved between the two sexes. I do not think the woman should assume the man’s name … I would have the word ‘obey’ used not more by the wife than the husband.

The question of suffrage, as his dissertation made plain, was not so much controversial as unimportant. If women wished to vote, then they should be allowed to do so.

Theodore’s heart, strained by years of asthmatic heavings and over-exercise, was in trouble. Far from climbing mountains in Maine, he must in future refrain even from running upstairs. He must live quietly, and choose a sedentary occupation, otherwise, Sargeant warned, he would not live long.113 “Doctor,” came the reply, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.”

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.

He allowed himself just one day to recover (having been in the saddle, almost continuously, for twenty-four hours) before riding another forty miles north to visit Sewall and Dow.81 They had unpleasant news for him: his forebodings of “trouble,” after rejecting the Marquis’s claim to the Elkhorn range, had been justified. E. G. Paddock—now more and more the power behind the throne of de Morès—had stopped by the ranch-site in late September, accompanied by several drunken gunmen. Finding Roosevelt away, the gang accepted lunch, sobered up, and rode off well stoked with beans and bonhomie. Since then, however, Paddock had begun to declare that the Elkhorn shack was rightfully his. If “Four Eyes” wished to buy it, he must pay for it in dollars—or in blood. Roosevelt, on hearing this, merely said, “Is that so?”82 Remounting his horse, he rode back upriver to Paddock’s house at the railroad crossing. The gunman answered his knock. “I understand that you have threatened to kill me on sight,” rasped Roosevelt. “I have come over to see when you want to begin the killing.”

Under the supervision of one “Hell-Roaring” Bill Jones, who stood over the ballot-box with a brace of pistols, the votes were cast with a minimum of bloodshed, and a county council duly returned to power. While its first edict, promising “to hang, burn, or drown any man that will ask for public improvements at the expense of the County,” could have been worded more diplomatically, it at least voiced sound Republican sentiments, and Roosevelt had every reason to be optimistic about the future of representative government in the Badlands.

When we thus rule ourselves, we have the responsibilities of sovereigns, not of subjects. We must never exercise our rights either wickedly or thoughtlessly; we can continue to preserve them in but one possible way, by making the proper use of them.

He makes a lot of enemies too, but so does anybody who is fit to live

he plunged at once into the somewhat rodent-like life of a professional historian.

“Oh Lord, help me kill that b’ar, and if you don’t help me, oh Lord, don’t help the b’ar.”

There is a half-pleasurable excitement in facing an equal foe; but there is none whatever in trampling on a weakling.”

His wit was brilliant and usually cruel. “They never open their mouths,” he complained of two House colleagues, “without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.” Asked to attend the funeral of a political enemy, he refused, “but that does not mean to say I do not heartily approve of it.”

Roosevelt had “that singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.”

Many times, as he grew older and more set in his ways, he would protest the moral rightness of his decisions; justice was justice “because I did it.”

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.”

Teddy is happiest when he conquers but quite happy if he only fights.”

“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 begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself. See?”

Hanna was now unquestionably the second most powerful man in America,60 and Roosevelt, celebrating with him at a “Capuan” victory luncheon on 10 November, felt a sudden twinge of revulsion at the part money and marketing had played in the campaign. “He has advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine!”61 Looking around the room, he realized that at least half the guests were money men. The Chairman might be easy in their company, but he, Roosevelt, was not. “I felt as if I was personally realizing all of Brooks Adams’s gloomy anticipations of our gold-ridden, capitalist-bestridden, usurer-mastered future.”

I cannot afford to disregard the fact that my power for good, whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.

As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union.44 It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?

“Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?”

We stand on the threshold of a new century big with the fate of mighty nations. It rests with us now to decide whether in the opening years of that century we shall march forward to fresh triumphs or whether at the outset we shall cripple ourselves for the contest. Is America a weakling, to shrink from the work of the great world-powers? No. The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks into the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.…

“who in office was more radical in 1899?”

“Every word that you write is a blow that smites the Devil.”