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

by Edmund Morris

“has been rolling up at the rate of $4.6 billion

with characteristic immodesty, by the President himself. “No Congress in our time has done more good work,” he fondly told the fifty-ninth, having battered it into submission with the sheer volume of his social legislation.11 He calls its first session “the most substantial” in his experience of public affairs. Joseph G. Cannon, the Speaker of the House, agrees, with one reservation about the President’s methods. “Roosevelt’s all right,” says Cannon, “but he’s got no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.”12 “Theodore the Sudden” has been accused of having a similar contempt for international law, ever since the afternoon in 1903

to the lady who will sit at his right, looks like imperial pomp to some. “The President,”

was ever less than a god to him. Many biographers,