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

by Edmund Morris

“but he’s got no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.”12

“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.”

“Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick”

“I have about as much desire to annex more islands,” he declares, “as a boa-constrictor has to swallow a porcupine wrong end to.”22

Mark Twain is not alone in thinking the President insane. Tales of Roosevelt’s unpredictable behavior are legion, although there is usually an explanation. Once, for instance, he hailed a hansom cab on Pennsylvania Avenue, seized the horse, and mimed a knife attack upon it. On another occasion he startled the occupants of a trolley-car by making hideous faces at them from the Presidential carriage. It transpires that in the former case he was demonstrating to a companion the correct way to stab a wolf; in the latter he was merely returning the grimaces of some small boys, one of whom was the ubiquitous Quentin.

Theodore Roosevelt is a man of such overwhelming physical impact that he stamps himself immediately on the consciousness. “Do you know the two most wonderful things I have seen in your country?” says the English statesman John Morley. “Niagara Falls and the President of the United States, both great wonders of nature!”64 Their common quality, which photographs and paintings fail to capture, is a perpetual flow of torrential energy, a sense of motion even in stillness.65 Both are physically thrilling to be near.

A common theme in great figures is their charisma.

Yet the vast majority of his interlocutors would agree with Wells that Theodore Roosevelt has “the most vigorous brain in a conspicuously responsible position in all the world.”82 Its variety is protean. A few weeks ago, when the British Embassy’s new councillor, Sir Esmé Howard, mentioned a spell of diplomatic duty in Crete, Roosevelt immediately and learnedly began to discuss the archeological digs at Knossos. He then asked if Howard was by any chance descended from “Belted Will” of Border fame—quoting Scott on the subject, to the councillor’s mystification.83 The President is also capable of declaiming German poetry to Lutheran preachers, and comparing recently resuscitated Gaelic letters with Hopi Indian lyrics. He is recognized as the world authority on big American game mammals, and is an ornithologist of some note. Stooping to pick a speck of brown fluff off the White House lawn, he will murmur, “Very early for a fox sparrow!”84 Roosevelt is equally at home with experts in naval strategy, forestry, Greek drama, cowpunching, metaphysics, protective coloration, and football techniques.

This is so intriguing to me because I genuinely aspire to have a general knowledge of multiple subjects like Roosevelt did. I don't know why I find people that have a great general knowledge of things to be a "manly" quality, but somehow, I have this deep desire to grow in this area. I found a lot of inspiration to continue reading and learning when I came across this quote.

This is the time of the day he loves best. “Reading with me is a disease.”116 He succumbs to it so totally—on the heaving deck of the Presidential yacht in the middle of a cyclone, between whistle-stops on a campaign trip, even while waiting for his carriage at the front door—that he cannot hear his own name being spoken. Nothing short of a thump on the back will regain his attention. Asked to summarize the book he has been leafing through with such apparent haste, he will do so in minute detail, often quoting the actual text.

Definition of locked in.

The President manages to get through at least one book a day even when he is busy. Owen Wister has lent him a book shortly before a full evening’s entertainment at the White House, and been astonished to hear a complete review of it over breakfast. “Somewhere between six one evening and eight-thirty next morning, beside his dressing and his dinner and his guests and his sleep, he had read a volume of three-hundred-and-odd pages, and missed nothing of significance that it contained.”

On evenings like this, when he has no official entertaining to do, Roosevelt will read two or three books entire.119 His appetite for titles is omnivorous and insatiable, ranging from the the Histories of Thucydides to the Tales of Uncle Remus. Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy. In the past year alone, Roosevelt has devoured all the novels of Trollope, the complete works of De Quincey, a Life of Saint Patrick, the prose works of Milton and Tacitus (“until I could stand them no longer”), Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, the seafaring yarns of Jacobs, the poetry of Scott, Poe, and Longfellow, a German novel called Jörn Uhl, “a most satisfactorily lurid Man-eating Lion story,” and Foulke’s Life of Oliver P. Morton, not to mention at least five hundred other volumes, on subjects ranging from tropical flora to Italian naval history.