Roosevelt was the product of an extraordinary family, and great things
were expected from him since early adolescence. His life story up
to the time of his Presidency is covered in the author's first volume,
THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, and is also the focus of David McCullough's
MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK, but T.R.'s ascent to power was of less interest
to me than his presidential accomplishments. Traditionally, Republicans
cozy up to Big Business, yet Roosevelt was the great trustbuster, frustrating
the plans of his social friends J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and
Edward H. Harriman. Traditionally, Republicans are gung-ho for the
economic exploitation of natural resources, but T.R. (an avid outdoorsman
and big game hunter) had the vision to create our national park system,
preserving for future generations the wonders of Yellowstone, Yosemite,
the Grand Canyon, and others. (When Roosevelt first visited Yosemite,
he had his schedulers carve out four days that he spent camping and exploring
the park with his guide, an elderly John Muir. No phones, no politics!)
Traditionally, Republicans, and especially Roosevelt, were proud imperialists,
extending the domain of their industrialized world into the more under-developed
but resource-rich areas of the Third World, yet T.R. was enough of an international
diplomat to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese
conflict.
Roosevelt's arrogance and his lack of a political correctness gene would
have been his downfall had he entered public service decades later.
He was warned by his advisors that he would lose significant votes if he
invited American people of color to dine with him at the White House, yet
he invited Booker T. Washington to do just that more than once. During
a time when
most Caucasians felt African-Americans to be intellectually and morally
inferior, T. R. worried that this cancer of inequality would prove to be
the fatal flaw in our democracy. Roosevelt's most well-known aphorism,
"Speak softly, and carry a big stick," was actually derived from a West
African proverb, though it was used by T.R. with the source obscured to
affirm the
Monroe Doctrine as it applied to Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia.
The author Edmund Morris, who was roundly criticized when he included
fictional pastiches in DUTCH, his biography of Ronald Reagan, has avoided
that conceit here and succeeds in providing a balanced portrait of a complex
and fascinating statesman whose terms of office ushered in the modern,
global, era of the American Presidency.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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