The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [242]
We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism … .36
And so on and on; once Roosevelt got a good balanced rhythm going, he could continue indefinitely, until his listeners, or his column-inches, were exhausted.
An analysis of “What Americanism Means”37 discloses that even when dealing with what is presumably a positive subject, Roosevelt’s instinct is to express himself negatively, to attack un-Americans rather than praise all-Americans. Imprecations hurled at the former outnumber adjectives of praise for the latter almost ten to one. Selecting at random, we find base, low, selfish, silly, evil, noxious, despicable, unwholesome, shameful, flaccid, contemptible—together with a plentiful sprinkling of pejorative nouns: weaklings, hypocrites, demagogues, fools, renegades, criminals, idiots, anarchists … One marvels at the copious flow of his invective, especially as the victims of it are not identified. It is possible, however, to single out Henry James, that “miserable little snob”38 whose preference for English society and English literature drove Roosevelt to near frenzy:
Thus it is for the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw; in other words, because he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among men, and so goes where he will be sheltered from the winds that harden stouter souls.
In such manner did Roosevelt, with the shrewd instinct of a rampant heterosexual, kick James again and again in his “obscure hurt,” until the novelist was moved to weary protest. “The national consciousness for Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is … at the best a very fierce affair.”39 James was too courteous to say more in print, but he privately characterized Roosevelt as “a dangerous and ominous jingo,” and “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.”40
IT IS A RELIEF to turn from Roosevelt’s own spontaneous essays to those prompted by the philosophizing of others, notably the English historian Charles H. Pearson, whose National Life and Character: A Forecast appeared in early 1894. Roosevelt wrote a ten-thousand word reply to this work of gentle, scholarly pessimism for publication in the May issue of Sewanee Review.41 It represents altogether the better side of him, both as a man and as a writer, and can be taken as his confident answer to those who, like Pearson and Henry Adams, shuddered at the nearness of the twentieth century.
“At no period of the world’s history,” says Roosevelt, “has life been so full of interest, and of possibilities of excitement and enjoyment.” Science has revolutionized industry; Darwin has revolutionized thought; the globe’s waste spaces are being settled and seeded. A man of ambition has unique opportunities to build, explore, conquer, and transform. He can taste “the fearful joy” of grappling with large political and administrative problems. “If he is observant, he notes all around him the play of vaster forces than have ever before been exerted, working, half blindly, half under control, to bring about immeasurable results.”42
Roosevelt refuses to look at the future through the “dun-colored mists” of pessimism, yet he does not pretend to see it all clearly. “Nevertheless, signs do not fail that we shall see the conditions of our lives, national and individual, modified after a sweeping and radical fashion. Many of the forces that make for national greatness and for individual happiness in the nineteenth century will be absent entirely, or will act with greatly diminished strength, in the twentieth.