Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [339]
Edward Wagenknecht’s The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt also came out in 1958. It was a revelatory character study that avoided psychobiography and presented only facts, culled from what seemed to be a reading of every book and manuscript in the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard. Viewing “T.R.” as a sort of solar system of linked but separate worlds (those of Action, Thought, Human Relations, Family, Spiritual Values, Public Affairs, and War and Peace), it compressed in fewer than three hundred pages the fundamentals of a polygonal personality.
Three years later, a major one-volume biography appeared. It was William Henry Harbaugh’s The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, a determinedly objective book that exposed the work of Henry Pringle as superficial. The ponderousness of Harbaugh’s prose lent weight to his concluding observation:
Whatever the Colonel’s ultimate place in the hearts of his countrymen—and it yearly grows warmer and warmer—there is no discounting those incisive perceptions and momentous actions that made him such a dynamic historical force.… Long after the rationalizations, the compromises, the infights, the intolerance and the rest have been forgotten, Theodore Roosevelt will be remembered as the first great President-reformer of the modern industrial era.
Signs of the warming trend that Harbaugh spoke of proliferated after Sagamore Hill was declared a National Historic Site in 1962. President Kennedy signed the act of acquisition. On 22 November 1963 he flew to Texas with a speech he intended to deliver at the Dallas Trade Mart, extensively quoting Theodore Roosevelt on foreign policy. The speech was not given, but subsequent presidents showed an increasing willingness to admire, and even identify with, the Republican Roosevelt.
Richard Nixon invoked the image of “the man in the arena” so often, and with such relish in its details of dust and sweat and blood, as to suggest that he found them masochistically agreeable. After resigning his office on 9 August 1974 he bade farewell to White House staffers with a moving, if irrelevant, quotation from In Memory of My Darling Wife, the eulogy Roosevelt had written for Alice Hathaway Lee ninety years before. Weeping, Nixon observed, “That was TR in his twenties. He thought the light had gone out of his life forever—but he went on.”
The Vietnam War era climaxing with Nixon’s debasement saw the rise of a presentist subculture among historians who, rejecting Harbaugh, continued to see Theodore Roosevelt as a bully, warmonger, and racist. He was castigated for being unaware of the civil rights movement, free sex, meditation, and mutually assured destruction. This revisionism nevertheless drew useful parallels, such as that between the massacres of My Lai in 1968 and Moro Crater in 1906—the latter inflicted on Filipino rebels by General Leonard Wood with no dissenting word from his commander in chief.
Although doubts on the New Left about Roosevelt’s imperialistic “Americanism” persisted through the decade, two biographies at the end of it marked the beginning of a more objective reassessment that steadily gathered force. This writer’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) and David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback (1981) won literary prizes, and reassured post-Watergate readers that whatever Roosevelt “went on” to, after his twenties, had not been an abuse of presidential power. They coincided with the appearance of Sylvia Jukes Morris’s Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (1980), which documented one of the great marriages in American history.
Three decades later, the shifting sands of historiography seem to have allowed the monolith of Theodore Roosevelt to settle. Sand being sand, nothing of his future reputation can