Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [2]
“Doctor,” he had said on leaving college, “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.” Privately, he allowed for sixty years.
At first, paradoxically, he had had to struggle free of privilege. His eminence, at twenty-two, as the head of one of New York City’s “Four Hundred” best families disqualified him for politics, in the opinion of the rough professionals who dominated the state Republican party. Hustling for votes was not the business of a young gentleman with a magna cum laude Harvard degree.
So he had fought—if not with tooth and claw, then with whatever weapons, blunt or subtle, cleared his path—north to Albany as assemblyman from the “Silk Stocking” district, west to Dakota Territory as ranchman and deputy sheriff, south to Washington as civil service commissioner, back to New York City as police commissioner, south again to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy. In the process he won wide admiration for political skills so great as to render him unstoppable in his quest for power. If he was not alone in plotting the Spanish-American War, he did more than anyone else in the McKinley administration to bring it about. Then, as colonel of his own volunteer regiment, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,” and generalissimo of its faithful press corps, he transformed himself into a military hero. Fresh out of uniform at forty, he became governor of New York, and at forty-two, vice president under the reelected William McKinley. In September 1901, an assassin’s bullet made him President of the United States.
Not surprisingly, given his physical and rhetorical combativeness, many Americans greeted his accession to the presidency in 1901 with dread. Those of nonconfrontational temper shuddered at his “despotic” reorganization of the army, and demands for a navy big enough to dominate the Western Hemisphere. Their fears seemed realized when he used warships to safeguard the Panamanian Revolution of 1903, securing for the United States the right to build an isthmian canal—and, not incidentally, the ability to move its battle fleet quickly from ocean to ocean. At the same time, they had been amazed at his promptness in granting independence to Cuba in 1902, his willingness to accept less than total victory in exchange for a cease-fire in the Philippines insurrection, and his discreet mediation of the Russo-Japanese peace settlement in 1905—not to mention intervention in the Morocco crisis of 1906, which for a while seemed likely to plunge Europe into war.
His Nobel Peace Prize, the first won by an American, was in recognition of these last two achievements. Had the prize committee been aware of how successfully—and secretly—he had worked to contain the Weltpolitik of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the most dangerous autocrat on the international scene, it might have made its award sooner.
Nevertheless, he has never been quite able to resolve whether action is not preferable to negotiation, and might the superior of right. Even the most scholarly of his books, The Naval War of 1812 and the four-volume Winning of the West, are muscular in their bellicose expansionism. Read in sequence, his biographies of Thomas Hart Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell amount to a serial portrait of himself as a prophet of Manifest Destiny, a cultured revolutionary, an autocrat reconciling inimical forces. For bloodlust—strangely combined with tenderness toward the creatures he shoots—few memoirs match his Western trilogy, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, and The Wilderness Hunter.
Sexual lust is a subject he deems unfit for print. He is as delicate about the most intimate of acts as a Dutch Reformed dominie. That does not stop him from condemning birth control as “race suicide”—using the word race, now, in the loose sense of nationality. An advanced society must reproduce more and more, to swell its economic