The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [198]
“I shall probably never be in politics again,” Roosevelt wrote sadly to an old Assembly friend. “My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it; I should like to write some book that would really take rank in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream.”
THUS, IN A CRYPTIC CONFESSION dated 15 January 1888,98 did Roosevelt give his first hint that he was musing the major work of scholarship that would preoccupy him for the next seven years. Four volumes, perhaps eight, would be required to do the subject justice: his theme was enormous but vague. Within its blurry parameters (conforming roughly with the shape of the United States), he began to see heroic figures fighting, moving, pointing in one general direction.
The process of literary inspiration does not admit of much analysis. Writers themselves are often at a loss to say just when or why a given idea takes possession of them. Roosevelt, certainly, never indulged in such speculation.99 Yet it is possible to mention at least some of the fertilizing influences upon what he proudly called “my magnum opus.”100 In those first weeks of 1888 he happened to be checking through a batch of page proofs from England, comprising several chapters of The American Commonweath, by James Bryce, M.P., whom he had met in London the previous winter. Bryce wanted his expert opinion on various passages dealing with municipal corruption. As Roosevelt read the proofs through, he realized that he held a masterpiece in his hands. It was, he decided, the most epochal study of American institutions since that of de Tocqueville; it made his own Gouverneur Morris (whose galleys also lay upon his desk) seem pathetically trivial in comparison.101 Bryce’s reference to him, in a footnote, as “one of the ablest and most vivacious of the younger generation of American politicians” was flattering but ironic, given the present stagnation of his political career; it only served to increase his yearning to write a work “in the very first class,” which would earn him similar respect as an American historian.102
Back of this immediate ambition swirled a mass of past influences, with little in common except their general geographic orientation. Among them were his years in the West, living with the sons and grandsons of pioneers; his belief, inherited from Thomas Hart Benton, that America’s Manifest Destiny was to sweep Westward at the expense of weaker nations; his fascination with the racial variety of the West, and its forging of a characteristic frontier “type,” never seen in the Old World; his wide readings in Western history; his efforts, through the Boone & Crockett Club, to save Western wildlife and promote Western exploration—all these combined into one mighty concept which (the more he pondered it) he saw he might handle more authoritatively than anyone else. It was nothing less than the history of the spread of the United States across the American continent, from the day Daniel Boone first crossed the Alleghenies in 1774 to the day Davy Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836.103 He decided to call this grand work The Winning of the West.
His first act was to dedicate the book to the ailing Francis Parkman.104 Like most well-read men of his class, Roosevelt had been brought up on that writer’s majestic, seven-volume History of France and England in North America. Parkman was a scholar who combined faultless research with the narrative powers of a novelist. With that other sickly, half-blind