Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [333]
THE EULOGIES AND POEMS and memorial proceedings had hardly been printed and bound before the worshipful biographies began to appear. William Draper Lewis’s The Life of Theodore Roosevelt and William Roscoe Thayer’s Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography were substantial studies, reflecting some personal acquaintance with the great man, but their incense content was only a few degrees less fragrant than that of Lawrence Abbott’s Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt, Niel MacIntyre’s Great-heart, and William Hard’s Theodore Roosevelt: A Tribute.
Expectations were high that the authorized biography by Joseph Bucklin Bishop would be a scholarly and unbiased corrective. But Bishop was not yet ready to publish. Then in November 1919 Stuart Sherman, who had savaged Roosevelt in The Nation two years before, published a review of the hagiographies. Entitled “Roosevelt and the National Psychology,” it amounted to the first effective attack on the Colonel’s posthumous reputation.
“Mr. Roosevelt’s great and fascinating personality,” he began, “is part of the national wealth, and should, so far as possible, be preserved undiminished.” But those who insisted in canonizing a man so lustily, imperfectly, and on occasion tragically human offered posterity nothing more than “a whitewashed plaster bust.” Noting that the Colonel was always clear-eyed about himself, Sherman quoted his negative response in 1918 to a friend who told him he would be President again: “No, not I.… I made too many enemies, and the people are tired of my candidacy.” Roosevelt had understood then what his worshippers refused to allow—that both he and the American people had changed since his glory days at the turn of the century. And in changing, it was the people, not he, who had moved ahead.
Sherman looked back at the life of Theodore Roosevelt and found it to be a three-act drama, ultimately tragic because the protagonist had been brought down by his own gifts. First there was the young reformer, alone among the money-grubbing or inheritance-squandering materialists who dominated American society in the eighties and nineties, preaching and personifying his famous gospel of the Strenuous Life. “Under the influence of this masterful force, the unimaginative plutocratic psychology was steadily metamorphosed into the psychology of efficient, militant, imperialistic nationalism.” So long as the United States had no army to speak of, and no empire to fatten on, the energies Roosevelt had inspired had pushed toward a more perfect Union. But then, with amazing swiftness, both he and the nation had been elevated to supreme power.
As president, Roosevelt had been even more strenuous, establishing an ideal in the popular mind of a federal government as virile, incorruptible, and morally driven as himself. Panama should have been a warning to his supporters that the reformer at home was an imperialist abroad, but then and now, the American people had little understanding of foreign affairs.
It was not until Roosevelt visited Germany in 1910 that the imperial strain had begun to overmaster him. His address to the University of Berlin had shown the degenerative process at work, even as he spoke. Sherman quoted a “beautiful” passage from that speech, It is only by working along the lines laid down by philanthropists, by lovers of mankind, that we can be more sure of lifting our civilization to a higher