Roosevelt was the product of an extraordinary family, and great
things were expected from him since early adolescence. His
life story up to the time of his Presidency is covered in the
author's first volume, THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, and is also
the focus of David McCullough's MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK, but T.R.'s
ascent to power was of less interest to me than his presidential
accomplishments. Traditionally, Republicans cozy up to Big
Business, yet Roosevelt was the great trustbuster, frustrating the
plans of his social friends J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and
Edward H. Harriman. Traditionally, Republicans are gung-ho
for the economic exploitation of natural resources, but T.R. (an
avid outdoorsman and big game hunter) had the vision to create our
national park system, preserving for future generations the
wonders of Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and
others. (When Roosevelt first visited Yosemite, he had his
schedulers carve out four days that he spent camping and exploring
the park with his guide, an elderly John Muir. No phones, no
politics!)
Traditionally, Republicans, and especially Roosevelt, were proud
imperialists, extending the domain of their industrialized world
into the more under-developed but resource-rich areas of the Third
World, yet T.R. was enough of an international diplomat to receive
the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese
conflict.
Roosevelt's arrogance and his lack of a political correctness
gene would have been his downfall had he entered public service
decades later. He was warned by his advisors that he would
lose significant votes if he invited American people of color to
dine with him at the White House, yet he invited Booker T.
Washington to do just that more than once. During a time
when
most Caucasians felt African-Americans to be intellectually and
morally inferior, T. R. worried that this cancer of inequality
would prove to be the fatal flaw in our democracy.
Roosevelt's most well-known aphorism, "Speak softly, and carry a
big stick," was actually derived from a West African proverb,
though it was used by T.R. with the source obscured to affirm the
Monroe Doctrine as it applied to Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia.
The author Edmund Morris, who was roundly criticized when he
included fictional pastiches in DUTCH, his biography of Ronald
Reagan, has avoided that conceit here and succeeds in providing a
balanced portrait of a complex and fascinating statesman whose
terms of office ushered in the modern, global, era of the American
Presidency.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzerseltzer@seltzerbooks.com
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