Theodore Roosevelt
It is the last Sunday of the month which means it is time for the next president, making this week’s book of the week Theodore Roosevelt by Henry F. Pringle.
Theodore Roosevelt was born October 27, 1858, in New York City, NY to Theodore Roosevelt Sr and Martha Stewart Bulloch Roosevelt. He was the second of four children, and he was a sickly kid, always had bad eyesight and was kind of scrawny. Accordingly, he was quite bookish as he grew up, and fashioned himself a naturalist, being fascinated by animals, and was an amateur taxidermist as a kid, which was not a beloved hobby from his mother’s perspective. Roosevelt, contrary to popular history, hated being called Teddy. Family might call him Teedie, to everyone else it was Theodore or TR. Teddy was an indication you did not actually know him.
The family was decently wealthy and as a child they traveled quite a bit through Europe. In 1870, Roosevelt Sr. advised his son that while his mind was fine, his body was not and that he needed to strengthen his body to match the mind. And so, Roosevelt Sr. constructed a home gym for Roosevelt and for his siblings; his older sister Anna was also a bit sickly and was expected to use the gym. Roosevelt despised exercise and was perfunctory with it until one day he had an asthma attack while being teased by some other kids. This made Roosevelt determined to strengthen himself so he could fight back, and he willingly began boxing lessons.
As he grew up, his love for natural history was slowly replaced by a love for outdoor sports, especially hunting. As an avid reader while growing up, Roosevelt glorified in his own mind the personification of the Ideal Man as vigorous in body and mind, a warrior and a cowboy, and basically set about making that life for himself. I have no problem with that. I do have a problem with some of the shit he pulls later in life. We’ll get to that.
He entered Harvard in the Fall of 1876 and was a decent student. It’s while he was in college that he met his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee. They married in 1880 shortly after Roosevelt graduated from Harvard and they were married for four years before she died.
Now, immediately after graduating from Harvard, Roosevelt entered the local political scene in New York, serving as a member of the New York State Assembly in 1882, 1883, and 1884. He retired following the death of his wife Alice. Alice died two days after giving birth to their daughter, named Alice for her mother, but she did not die as a result of childbirth. Her cause of death was undiagnosed Bright’s disease, which, as you may recall, is what killed President Chester Arthur. But if you didn’t watch that video, Bright’s disease is basically extreme inflammation of the Kidney’s.
Just days before his wife died, his mother died, so this double whammy threw him seriously off his game and Roosevelt retired for a time to his ranch in the Dakota badlands, a ranch that ultimately cost Roosevelt a chunk of his inheritance after the heavy winter of 1887/1888 decimated the cattle herds in that area. With the closure of his ranches…plural, he had two properties in the Dakota’s, Roosevelt returned to New York where he married his second wife, Edith Carow in 1886. Carow had been a childhood friend and there was reason to believe they had intended to marry before Roosevelt met Lee and fell in love with her. Regardless, in the end Carow became Mrs. Roosevelt and would remain married to Theodore until his death and would serve as First Lady when he was in the White House. Together, they had five children of their own, Theodore III, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin. The four boys would serve during WWI and the youngest, Quentin, would die in that conflict. That’s still decades in the future though.
After his marriage to Edith and the failure of his ranches, Roosevelt needed to come up with some way of supporting his family. He did reenter politics briefly as the mayoral candidate for New York City in 1886 but ultimately set about writing several books on history, The Wilderness Hunter, History of New York, and a three-volume series on The Winning of the West. This kept the family fed and housed until the 1888 election when Benjamin Harrison won the White House. Roosevelt campaigned hard for Harrison and on the advice of Roosevelt’s political benefactor and friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Harrison appointed Roosevelt to the US Civil Service Commission, in which role he would serve until 1895, so all of Harrison’s term and into part of Grover Cleveland’s term.
Roosevelt did not particularly care for Cleveland, but they were both ardent believers in the Merit system and Civil Service Reform and in recognition of the positive contributions Roosevelt would make towards that, Cleveland kept him on until Roosevelt himself sought a new position. And what he wanted was to return to New York. So, he sought a position on the Police Board of New York.
Now…he was actually an odd man here. The reason being his idea of absolutely strict enforcement of the law, which ultimately led to the belief that he only enforced the laws on the poor people of the city. The example given in the book was a law which existed against serving alcohol on Sunday’s. Now, most establishments paid lip service to this law, closing the front doors, but paying cops to look the other way as they let patrons in through the back door. Rather than fining or firing dirty cops who took these bribes, Roosevelt set about demanding the law be followed to the absolute letter and began arresting owners and shuttering businesses that continued to serve alcohol. But only those in low rent areas. High rise hotels were still able to serve alcohol. And this became a law in New York, while Roosevelt was on the Police Board, that if a hotel had ten rooms or more, they could serve alcohol on Sundays. A lot of “hotels” opened up, which rented rooms by the hour…. if you catch my meaning. Prostitution exploded, and so did alcohol use.
Now, in 1896 when McKinley ran and won the White House, Roosevelt was again brought to national politics as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. And when the USS Maine was sunk in Cuba on February 15, 1898, Roosevelt resigned from this post so that he could rally the troops for the invasion of and war in Cuba. And I feel like Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders are covered in most high schools, although I can’t for the life of me think why. I mean, the only reason I can come up with is Roosevelt was a larger-than-life character, and he built up and believed his own legend. By August 1898 Roosevelt, having charged up Kettle Hill and possibly San Juan, was basically bored with war, and demanded his troops be allowed to return him. As the war was effectively over by this time, his wish was granted, and was returned as a hero to the United States. He immediately threw his hat in the ring as a candidate for governor of New York, in which capacity he was serving when he was tapped to be the vice-presidential candidate in 1900 for McKinley’s second term in office.
And he was scaling a mountain in the Adirondacks when word was brought to him that McKinley had succumbed to the assassin’s bullet which had been fired week earlier. Roosevelt, by all accounts, handled himself with dignity during this whole tribulation, but he was sworn in and became the third VP to take over after a presidential assassination, and the fifth to do so following a death in office.
While serving out the remaining years of McKinley’s second term in office, Roosevelt managed to push through the building of the Panama canal, but he did not do so in the most diplomatic of means, rather he propped up a military for Panama, which at the time was part of Columbia, pushing for Panamanian independence, so the canal could be built through an independent country that was beholden to the United States for her independence. Additionally, and this is some 21st century financially fuckery, The New Panama Canal Company had $40 million paid into it by the United States to build the canal. No one knows who owned this company. I mean, the canal WAS built, obviously, as it’s still in use to this day, but we don’t know who owned the stock to the company that built it, so we don’t know who got obscenely rich off this deal. I did a google search, and nothing came up. What returned was references to the third set of locks built in the 21st century. So, there’s a mystery for the ages. Someone benefitted from this. But no one knows who. Ok, conspiracy theorists…there’s your new assignment. Go find out who benefited from the initial placement of the site of the central American canal in Panama. Nicaragua was initially favored, and around the time the decision was made to go with Panama, mother nature helped seal that deal by having a volcano in Nicaragua erupt.
So, the Canal was the hot issue of the presidency, and after the canal was underway, Roosevelt publicly made the improvident statement that he took Panama, I forget the context of the conversation where this was said. But it was publicly stated, and this caused Columbia to throw a fit and Woodrow Wilson to offer $25million as settlement with Columbia for the loss of Panama. Roosevelt took this settlement as a slap in the face and hated Wilson even more after that.
With the presidential election of 1904, Roosevelt made history as the first inheritor of the position to win nomination AND election in his own right. None of the other VP’s who had had to step into the role had been able to do that. He also made the very foolish statement that he will have served two terms and would not run again in 1908.
His second term was set to acting as intermediary between various European powers and as peace maker between Japan and Russia during the Russo-Japanese war from 1904 to 1905. During that conflict, the US backed Japan, informally. Japan was formally backed by the United Kingdom. Roosevelt’s diplomatic corps did manage to negotiate the formal peace between the two warring nations in Portsmouth, NH on Sept 5, 1905.
Now, the events in Europe were territorial grabs of France for Morocco, basically pushing Germany out of that country. Which is to say a chunk of this book was laying out the world events that would lead to world war in less than a decade. Basically, all the pieces were there, Roosevelt managed to kick the can down the road a little bit so that world war became someone else’s problem. Which is ironic, given how much Roosevelt glorified war. Or maybe not. As Commander in Chief, he would not have been able to go to war himself, and when the Great War kicked off and America finally entered the fray, he petitioned Wilson to raise a battalion and go fight himself, which petition was denied.
When the election year of 1908 rolled around, Roosevelt made the announcement reconfirming that he was not seeking his own second term, and throwing his support to William Howard Taft, who had been his Secretary of War. And Taft won quite handily and upon leaving the office, Roosevelt set sale for Africa and Europe, the first continent for hunting, where he killed over 200 animals and had them shipped back to the Smithsonian for preservation and display. The second continent he schmoozed with the crown heads of Europe, even attending the funeral of King Edward VII, as the American representative on behalf of President Taft.
When Roosevelt returned to the States in 1910 is when division with Taft became a thing. Roosevelt decided he could do things better, and while he denied this is what he was doing, basically began campaigning, laying the groundwork for his own return to politics as a presidential candidate in 1912.
In 1910, while on his tour of the US, Roosevelt began creating the platform on which he would run, which he called the New Nationalism. It absolutely reeked of socialism.
“The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the national government. The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. The New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property.” People before property sounds good, except the only way to make it happen is for the government to own all the property and the people to own nothing. He essentially turned his back on the Constitution, which was written to protect property rights.
He also had the idea that the wealthy should not be able to buy their way out of trouble, which I agree with. However, by this time in history, the wealthy already owned our elected officials. Roosevelt’s campaign in 1904 is testament to that, as many rich financiers had contributed huge sums of money to his campaign, which was not required to be kept track of or disclosed. Campaign finance reform had not yet happened.
He did turn his back entirely on the Republican party in 1912, forming his own progressive Bull Moose party for that year. But since the platform differed little from what the Democrats proposed and the democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson had done a respectable job running New Jersey in the year before the election, Wilson won with a landslide 436 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s 88, and Taft’s 8. We’ll learn more about that over the next few months.
With his defeat in 1912, Roosevelt truly was done with politics and refused to run again, even though his progressive party nominated him in 1916. When the US finally entered the Great War in 1917, Roosevelt petitioned to form his own brigade, but was rejected, which is probably for the best. His health at this point was not awesome, he was wholly blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.
Roosevelt died at his home in Oyster Bay, NY on January 6, 1919, of an embolism in his coronary artery.
This book was a tough read and the author tended to go off on tangents to showcase Roosevelt’s character, which to me was thoroughly unlikeable. He reads on paper like a bully and a pompous ass. He undoubtedly had a politician’s charm, to have won election in his own right, and to have campaigned so effectively on behalf of others throughout the years, but the reason he ran in 1912 is that Taft wasn’t running things the way Roosevelt wanted them run. But Roosevelt was no longer in the White House, and rather than retire gracefully from the field, he just hounded Taft repeatedly.
And not just Taft, anyone Roosevelt saw as a political rival, he bullied mercilessly until they quit altogether. There was one incident in Brownsville, TX where the townspeople made the allegation that the black troops stationed there had rioted and shot up the town resulting in the dismissal of like 160 army personnel. Such dismissal made them ineligible for military benefits. Roosevelt accepted this information uncritically. When Senator Joseph B Foraker from Ohio showed pretty conclusively that it was racist towns people who had shot up their own town and framed the troopers, Roosevelt refused to back down and hounded Foraker into retirement, rather than admit an error had been made. Like five of the troopers were reinstated, the rest were left to fend for themselves.
So, while the book was well written, Roosevelt himself just came across as unlikeable, which made it hard for me to get through. There is nothing wrong with making a mistake, as long as you can own that mistake, which Roosevelt never did. He would just say yeah, I did x but so what? Here’s where I am now. Unless it was politically expedient to admit to X. Like when he was young, he believed in Free Trade. Then he joined the Republican party and was cured of that belief.
He's somewhere near the bottom of my personal ranking. Because I dislike bullies.
This book was reviewed on YouTube on June 25, 2023, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
