The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [194]
Morris is presented as the Constitution’s most brilliant intellect, as well as its dominant conservative force. Yet the narrative clearly shows why he was doomed never to rise to the first rank of statesmen:
His keen, masterful mind, his far-sightedness, and the force and subtlety of his reasoning were all marred by his incurable cynicism and deep-rooted distrust of all mankind. He throughout appears as advocatus diaboli; he puts the lowest interpretation upon every act, and frankly avows his disbelief in all generous and unselfish motives … Morris championed a strong national government, wherein he was right; but he also championed a system of class representation, leaning toward aristocracy, wherein he was wrong.62
Nevertheless Morris is commended for his “thoroughgoing nationalism,” and for his prophecy of an emergent America whose glories would make the grandest empire of Europe seem “but a bauble” in comparison. Roosevelt also praises his early espousal of the doctrine of emancipation. There are flashes of dry humor, as in the following explanation of Morris’s acquisitiveness: “He considered the preservation of property as being the distinguishing object of civilization, as liberty was sufficiently guaranteed even by savagery.”63
The book comes brilliantly to life in its penultimate section, describing Morris’s ten years in London and Paris, 1789–98, and his not-so-neutral participation in the major events of the French Revolution. Roosevelt was doubtless inspired by his own recent stays in those same cities, and his prose sparkles with true Gallic éclat. Chapters 7 through 11 are the best stretch of pure biography he ever wrote. Morris’s courtly flirtations with Mmes. de Staël, de Flahant, and the Duchesse d’Orléans; his plot to smuggle Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette out of Paris after the fall of the Bastille; the bloody riots of 10 August 1792, when he was the only foreign diplomat left in Paris, and gave sanctuary to veterans of the War of American Independence—all these episodes read like Dumas. Only the occasional jarring reference to municipal corruption in New York City, and sideswipes at the “helpless” Jefferson and that “filthy little atheist” Thomas Paine remind us of the true identity of the writer.64
The biography ends with two brief chapters tracing Morris’s decline into cantankerous old age. There are hints of certain “treasonous” tendencies during these “discreditable and unworthy” last years (Morris had been part of a Federalist group contemplating secession from the Union in 1812). Yet, in a final-page summary of the whole life, Roosevelt is willing to bestow his highest praise upon Gouverneur Morris. “He was essentially a strong man, and he was American through and through.”65
REVIEWS WERE NEGATIVE when Morris came out the following spring. The Book Buyer felt that there had been insufficient character analysis, and complained of some “rather dry” stretches of prose. The New York Times commented, “Mr. Roosevelt has no style as style is understood,” but allowed that “his meaning is never to be mistaken.” The Dial, while praising him for “an exceedingly interesting narrative, artistic in its selection, forcible in its pungent expression,” called his scholarship “rather more brilliant than sound,” and said that his irreverent treatment of the American Revolution, not to mention certain “slurs” upon eminent men of the past, were “beneath the gravity of historical writing.”66 It was generally agreed that Gouverneur Morris was clever, patchy, and superficial—a verdict which posterity can only endorse.
ROOSEVELT’S “STRAITENED FINANCES” made the summer of 1887 an uneventful one.67 He was kept from being too restless by the intensity of his work on Morris (the 92,000-word manuscript was researched and written in little over three months). Sometimes he took a day off to row his pregnant wife to a secluded spot in the marshes, where they would picnic and read to each other.68 For other recreation, he chopped wood, played tennis (winning the local doubles championship and promptly splurging