Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [250]
Roosevelt the modern statesman clearly owed much to his youthful cultivation of, and acceptance by, frontiersmen of the hardest and most violent sort. A man who could earn the respect of such “desperadoes,” and write about them with such unsentimental empathy, was unlikely to be fazed by eruptions of the primitive in the behavior of senators, or, for that matter, of plenipotentiaries. His youth in the Badlands had been an education in essentials:
He was able to observe there, in its absolute nakedness, the perpetual phenomenon of existence on this planet: human life consisting of the rhythm and friction of two parallel dynamics, inextricably interlaced, twin instincts eternally directing its course, the struggle for existence and the acceptance of existence. Both of them are positive forces, fertilizing and appropriate, the complete and final fusion of which will probably coincide with the ruin of humanity and the reign of silence around the world.
Out of his lessons in man and nature, Roosevelt had evolved a Darwinian philosophy that was harsh, yet wholly altruistic. No one reading his volumes of political and social essays, Administration—Civil Service, American Ideals, and The Strenuous Life (La Vie intense), could have doubted what sort of President he would be. An anarchist had ironically elevated to power “the supreme political personality of our time, of all contemporary statesmen the one surest of his mission, and most capable of achieving it.”
What these didactic works lacked in charm, they made up for in exhortatory effect. Old World sensibilities might recoil, at first, from the extraordinary aggression of Roosevelt’s attacks on “that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class,” as well as on all who put private gain, or cloistered security, or machine loyalty before their larger social obligations.
The tone is resolute, affirmative, maybe even brutal. He is pitiless toward hypocrites and rogues, whom he always identifies by name. Rare, in a man of his station, is the audacity, vehemence, and hasty decisiveness with which he exposes and denounces the corruption of the political world around him.… To live, for him, has no meaning other than to drive oneself, to act with all one’s strength. An existence without stress, without struggle, without growth has always struck him as mindless. Those who remain on the sidelines he sees as cowards, and consequently his personal enemies.
“OF ALL CONTEMPORARY STATESMEN, THE ONE SUREST OF HIS MISSION.”
Roosevelt in his Sagamore Hill study, September 1905 (photo credit 25.2)
There was, nevertheless, “a contagious force” to Roosevelt’s moral energy, which no foreign sophisticate could resist. “One feels braced by the presence of a reformer, in the full sense of the word.… He shakes our delicacies, repeats to us the healthy, grand lesson that no refinement can compensate for rugged virtues.”
Braced thus, one was pleasantly shocked when Theodore Roosevelt stopped preaching and started affirming. At such times, Bazalgette wrote, Roosevelt was possessed of an almost evangelical urgency, campaigning for political and social reform with the “ineradicable conviction” of a John Knox or a Martin Luther:
Such is the magnetism of his utterance, so forceful is his advocacy, that he persuades us to understand him and love him, even though we—I speak of such [Europeans] as myself—flinch and protest, and refuse to suit our instincts to his. When, for example, the excess which is part of his nature moves him to the point of “spread-eaglism,” formidably increasing the vibration of patriotic