The essay is a brief intro to one of the topics below. You can choose whichever you want, I will provide 3 sources according to your choice of topic. No other source can be used.
TOPICS TO CHOOSE FROM;Franklin Roosevelt
American Communism
The United Nations
The Freedmen’s Bureau
The Ku Klux Klan
George Custer and the Battle of Little Bighorn
Cowboys and the Cattle Kingdom
Theodore Roosevelt
Women’s Suffrage and the 19th Amendment
The Harlem Renaissance
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Theodore Roosevelt
Editor: Anne Commire
Date: 1994
From: Historic World Leaders
Publisher: Gale
Document Type: Biography
Length: 3,211 words
Content Level: (Level 4)
Lexile Measure: 1230L
About this Person
Born: October 27, 1858 in New York, New York, United States
Died: January 06, 1919 in Oyster Bay, New York, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: President (Government)
Other Names: Roosevelt, Theodore D.; Roosevelt, Teddy; Roosevelt, Colonel
Updated:Jan. 1, 1994
Full Text:
“We’ve had quite a lot of Presidents, They come from near and far, –And few have tried to avoid the job– –A couple
merely annoyed the job– But no one ever enjoyed the job With the gusto of T.R.” –Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benét
Twenty-sixth U.S. president and Republican reformer, who was the youngest man to ever hold the office, first president to
win a Nobel peace prize, and the person for whom the toy “Teddy Bear” was named.
1880 Graduated Harvard
1881 First elected to the New York State Assembly
1884 Delegate to Republican National Convention; purchased North Dakota ranch
1889 Appointed to U.S. Civil Service Commission
1895 Appointed New York City police commissioner
1897 Named assistant secretary of the navy
1898 Organized and served as colonel of “Rough Riders,” during the Spanish-American War; elected governor of New York
1900 Elected vice president of U.S.
1901 Became president of U.S., following assassination of McKinley
1904 Elected president
1906 Awarded Nobel Peace Prize for role in Russo-Japanese War
1912 Lost Republican nomination for president; helped form Progressive Party of America, “Bull Moose Party”
1916 Refused Progressive Party’s presidential nomination
1917 Rejected by Woodrow Wilson as military service volunteer in World War I
1919 Died at Oyster Bay, New York
Although Theodore Roosevelt descended from an old Dutch family that settled in New York (then New Amsterdam) in the 1640s and
belonged to the genteel aristocracy of Manhattan, the blood of many nationalities mingled in his veins. He was Dutch, German,
Scotch-Irish, Welsh, French, and English. Of course, he thoroughly enjoyed his mixed ancestry and often talked at length concerning
it. In the politics of “melting-pot” America, it had great value. Legend has it that while receiving people he would say, “Ah, you have a
Welsh name! I have Welsh blood myself.” “Well, you are German, so am I.” Once, when meeting a Chinese dignitary, he supposedly
boomed out automatically, “Congratulations, I am partly Chinese, too!”
As a child, “Teedie” suffered from asthma. Until the age of 11, he was a sickly, puny, fair-haired, nearsighted lad interested in natural
history to the exclusion of most other childhood activities. Supposedly his father worried over the sorry specimen he saw and told
T.R., “You have the mind but not the body and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make
your body.”
“Teedie,” who worshiped his father, responded positively. The elder Roosevelt installed a gymnasium on the second floor of their
New York townhouse where young Theodore spent long hours with punching bag, dumbbells, horizontal bars, and other exercise
paraphernalia. Although his physique improved, reportedly he was thrashed by a bully in upstate New York in 1872. From that
whipping emerged Theodore Roosevelt the warrior. He began boxing lessons, took wrestling instructions, and ultimately learned the
Oriental art of self-defense, jujitsu.
Through physical activity he literally remade his body, becoming the robust, muscular individual who peers out from photographs in
many history books. Until he wore out his body at the age of 60, Roosevelt lived what he preached, “the strenuous life,” the life of
fitness, which he believed kept man honed to a “fighting edge,” his finest expression.
Nothing ever frightened him again. During his first term in the New York Assembly, he knocked a political opponent senseless. While
ranching in the Dakotas, he disarmed a western badman in a saloon, slamming him to the floor. As president of the United States,
while attending a reunion of the “Rough Riders” in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he threw the state’s governor down a flight of stairs. And
though his men hunched behind rocks and trees during the charge up Kettle Hill–not San Juan–near Havana, Cuba, during the
Spanish-American War, Colonel Roosevelt with bullets splattering all about him spurred his horse ahead, stopping periodically to
allow a few noble comrades to catch up. Years later, he paid his father the supreme compliment when he wrote in his Autobiography,
“My father was the best man I ever knew.” He was “the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”
But if T.R. could be violent, he could also be compassionate. His love for his first wife, Alice Lee, is one of the great tragedies in
presidential history. When she died in 1884, he spent two years in mourning. In 1886, he married Edith Carow and with her raised
two daughters–one by his first wife–and four sons. He was a great father–instructing, soothing, educating, comforting, and tending
his brood. While he was president, laughter rang through the White House. The “Colonel” provoked it.
Still, he could hate mightily. Although he was descended from an old Georgia family through his mother, a southern beauty,
Roosevelt, an ardent nationalist, despised the aging Jefferson Davis, calling him “the Benedict Arnold of his time.” He could also be
clever in his disdain. In the Autobiography, he tells how his friends were horrified that he intended to enter politics after graduating
from Harvard. “The men I knew best,” he writes, “were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men with cultivated taste and
the easy life.” They considered politics a cheap affair of saloonkeepers and horsecar conductors. “I answered,” he added, “that if this
were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class . . . and that I intended to be one of the
governing class.”
He became one of the governing class with the help of Joe Murray, immigrant Irish lieutenant to the local ward boss of the 21st
Assembly district, the German-born Jacob Hess. They played key roles in T.R.’s election to the State Assembly in 1881. Once in
Albany, he immediately became identified with reformers and, despite supporting the tainted James G. Blaine for president in 1884,
continued to be so. He enhanced his reputation among respectable, reform-minded, loyal Republicans with an unsuccessful effort to
become mayor of New York City in 1886.
President Benjamin Harrison, for whom he campaigned two years later, named him to the three-member Civil Service Commission in
1889. Here, to the dismay of his colleagues, Roosevelt assumed the role of unofficial chairman and helped reorganize the board and
its examinations. He also began a steady stream of speechmaking, championing “honesty” in government and “morality” in politics.
These views, which he advocated for the remainder of his life, caused some historians to label him, “the apostle of the obvious.” His
friend, whom he later appointed secretary of war and state, Elihu Root, once remarked that T.R. was the only man he had ever
known who discovered the Ten Commandments.
William Strong, the reform mayor of New York, made Roosevelt a commissioner of the city’s corruption-ridden police force in 1895.
His black cape, tooth grin, and pince-nez glasses soon became symbols of fear as he prowled the streets nightly to make sure New
York’s finest were at work. When he mistakenly tried to enforce Sunday blue laws closing saloons, New Yorkers decided that their
police had been reformed sufficiently.
Rough Riders Fight in Cuba
T.R. was rescued by President William McKinley, who appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. He was involved in the decision
to move Commodore George Dewey’s India Squadron to Hong Kong from where it sailed against the Spanish fleet at Manila when
war broke out. A big navy advocate, T.R. supported the “large policy” of expansionism. He was a jingoist, advocating war with Spain
and telling his intimates that McKinley’s handling of affairs demonstrated that the president “has no more backbone than a chocolate
eclair.”
When war came, he resigned from the Navy Department to organize the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry or “Rough Riders,” with whom
he distinguished himself in Cuba. While America rejoiced in its easy victory in the “Splendid Little War” (it lasted ten weeks),
Roosevelt discussed his exploits in a small book entitled, The Rough Riders. Never one to downplay his importance, when Finley
Peter Dunne, whose columns appeared under the pseudonym of Mr. Dooley in the Chicago Tribune, read Roosevelt’s book, he had
Mr. Dooley say, “If I was him I’d call th’ book `Alone in Cubia.'”
“Boss” Tom Platt, Republican senator from New York, sponsored Roosevelt for governor in 1898. Not particularly fond of the nation’s
newest hero, Platt believed T.R.’s candidacy was the only way the state could be kept Republican considering the serious challenge
mounted by Democrats. The Colonel won the governorship by a small majority and soon angered Platt by disregarding
recommendations for patronage appointment. As governor, he developed a lengthy, but largely innocuous, reform program. Its main
achievement was a tax on corporate franchises.
By 1900, the former Rough Rider was ready for a promotion, and the New York political bosses, especially Platt, were ready to be rid
of him. Neither McKinley nor his close associate, Mark Hanna, was thrilled with the prospect of Roosevelt being the ticket’s vice
presidential nominee. Nevertheless, they did not intervene when western delegates and eastern party bosses secured his
nomination. During the campaign, Roosevelt stumped the country while McKinley remained aloof. They won handily over the
Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, the so-called “Great Commoner.”
McKinley Assassinated, Roosevelt Is President
In September 1901, Leon Czolgosz, with a gun hidden in his bandaged fist, shot President McKinley and put T.R. in the White House.
Although president by accident, few men have been as prepared to be chief executive. Roosevelt was a respectable scholar, best
remembered for his three-volume study, The Winning of the West. He thought seriously about major social and military issues the
nation faced. An easterner, he had tremendous rapport with westerners. He also traveled abroad frequently and moved easily among
the European governing classes.
Professor Richard M. Abrams, University of California (Berkeley), believes Roosevelt was the first modern president, stating that
Roosevelt “put the presidency and the federal government at the center of peacetime political action. He made the White House a
national focus for the social mood.” Still, his tangible accomplishments, when compared to those of William Howard Taft or Woodrow
Wilson, are not as great as one might expect from the leading verbal champion of reform.
The late Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter labeled T.R., “The Conservative As Progressive,” and that he seems to
have been. His greatest achievement was making reform respectable and popular after its radicalization by Populism, a southern and
western crusade of dispossessed farmers and opportunistic politicians. Whether Roosevelt was a sincere reformer is in doubt. Of
course, the Colonel and reform were symbiotic, mutually benefiting from their relationship. The more T.R. popularized reform, the
more popular reform made T.R.
Oratorically, he assailed big business, excoriating it for corrupting the economy, creating a plutocracy, and establishing reverence for
commercial greed. The press nicknamed him, “the trust buster.” But in truth he supported big corporations, if they behaved in an
economically beneficial manner–lowered prices, raised wages, created efficiency in production, and invested in scientific research to
improve products. In 1912, as the Progressive Party’s presidential nominee, he championed big business in his “New Nationalism”
platform, albeit his patrician dislike of “very rich men” continued.
He was an opponent of the existing protective tariff system but, because of political considerations, did not advance revision as an
objective of his administrations. He supported moderate strengthening of the Interstate Commerce Commission, established in 1887,
with the passage of the Elkins Act (1903) and Hepburn Act (1906). He also helped secure the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat
Inspection Act (1906). However, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist of the Agriculture Department, deserves the lion’s share of credit
for these.
Always the advocate, T.R. did suggest a variety of changes that became laws later, including the income tax, a national inheritance
tax, federal regulation of stock-market speculation, and a federal eight-hour day and workmen’s compensation law for laborers.
Although essentially unfriendly to organized labor, he intervened in the anthracite coal strike of 1902 to promote a “square deal” for
labor and management in ending the dispute.
He Champions Conservation of Natural Resources
Conservation of natural resources is where he is best remembered as a reformer. He depended heavily on Secretary of the Interior
James R. Garfield and Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot for advice in this area. His program was not that of the preservationist, i.e.,
naturalist. Rather, his administration championed conservation through policies of “rational use” to provide resources for future
generations by reclaiming arid lands, waterways, or water-power sites. He brought considerable land into the public domain to halt
exploitation by private interests.
Roosevelt called into being the first National Conservation Convention, which helped spawn 41 state conservation commissions by
1910. He created the Inland Waterways Commission to promote flood control and improve navigation. He also created a Rural Life
Commission, which critics dubbed the “Rural Uplift” Commission. After a comprehensive investigation of living conditions in rural
areas it presented a lengthy report, which Congress refused to publish. Nevertheless, legislation pertaining to farmers in the Wilson
Administration was influenced by this study.
A kind and generous man in many respects, T.R. created a monumental flap in his administration by inviting the distinguished black
educator Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch with him. When southern newspapers heard that for the first time in
history a president had sat down to eat with an African-American, they exploded. One called the dinner “the most damnable outrage
ever.”
Roosevelt was most in his element in foreign relations. He helped shepherd Cuba to a form of self-government with the United States
as a protector under the Platt Amendment. He was responsible for the establishment of an American Canal Zone in Panama, where
the canal was built and where the United States acted “as if she were sovereign.” He sent American customs collectors into the
Dominican Republic and justified his action by stating the “Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” thus making the U.S. the
“policeman of the Western Hemisphere.”
He spent a great deal of time with Japanese-American relations, trying to uphold the “Open Door Policy” of his predecessor through
diplomacy and a show of force, as when he sent the “Great White Fleet” around the world in 1908. He failed to bolster the Open
Door, but for his effort in the Peace of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese War, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. He
fostered better relations with Great Britain, using the Alaskan Boundary Dispute (1903) to enhance American prestige and to prompt
the American public to appreciate England’s reasonableness in settling the affair. He also played a role in helping Britain and Europe
avoid war in the Moroccan Crisis of 1905-06.
The appellation “Big Stick Diplomacy,” which has been used to describe the foreign policy of his administration, is a bit misleading.
He was quick-witted and at times bellicose but always sane and cautious in committing the nation. Unlike many of his
contemporaries, he did see the necessity of involving the country more actively in world affairs. His position was that, like it or not, the
stature of the United States, its large population, and industrial economy dictated involvement. As he saw it, the main question was
whether American leaders would recognize and prepare for the new role or stumble blindly from crisis to crisis.
In spite of a great deal of worry over his presidential prospects in 1904, he was nominated on the first ballot by Republicans meeting
in Chicago. He defeated the Democratic Party candidate, Judge Alton B. Parker, also of New York, in the popular vote, 7,623,486 to
5,077,911, and in the electoral vote, 336 to 140. In a moment of unguarded ebullience, Roosevelt pledged not to stand for re-election
in 1908, although he would be only 50 years old when he left office. Because of the pledge, the best he could do later on was to pick
his successor. He chose Secretary of War William Howard Taft, a politician who held but one elective office, president of the United
States, 1909-13.
Soon after ending his time in office, Roosevelt hunted in Africa, toured in Europe, and settled down to a literary career when he
returned home. But politics and governmental power still fascinated the Colonel. Reformer friends convinced him that Taft had
betrayed “Rooseveltian policies.” Taft, angered by criticism attributed to his old friend, allowed Attorney General George Wickersham
to bring suit against the U.S. Steel Corporation for violating the Sherman Anti-trust Act with T.R.’s permission in the Tennessee Coal
and Iron Company merger in 1907.
He Leads “Bull Moose” Party
Stung by accusations of improprieties on his part, Roosevelt threw his hat into the political ring against Taft for the 1912 Republican
presidential nomination. When Taft defeated him, T.R. claimed that the nomination had been stolen and with ardent supporters bolted
the Party, forming the Progressive Party of America at Orchestra Hall in Chicago. As the standard bearer for the “Bull Moose party,”
its unofficial name, he ran second to Woodrow Wilson, who was elected with only 42% of the popular vote. While campaigning in
Milwaukee on October 14, 1912, Colonel Roosevelt was wounded by a would-be assassin.
Although he halfheartedly supported Progressive hopefuls in 1914 elections, when they tendered him the 1916 presidential
nomination, he refused. With the entry of the United States into World War I, he offered his services to the military through Wilson,
who rejected him. All of Roosevelt’s sons served in the Great War. Quentin was killed in aerial combat in France in 1918. Theodore,
Jr., was the prime mover in founding the American Legion of 1919, the veterans organization of the First World War. Both Theodore,
Jr., and Kermit died while on active duty in World War II. President Theodore Roosevelt passed away peacefully in his sleep on
January 6, 1919.
Ranked seventh among presidents in a 1962 poll of historians, he is the only 20th-century president enshrined on Mount Rushmore
in South Dakota. Asked to comment on his time in office, he said, “I believe in a strong executive; I believe in power, but I believe that
responsibility should go with power, and that it is not well that the strong executive should be a perpetual executive.” He also said, “I
have tried to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with my God.”
PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Name variation: called “Teedie” as a child, he preferred T.R. or Theodore, or the “Colonel” in later life and abhorred the public usage
of “Teddy.” Born in the Manhattan borough of New York City on October 27, 1858; died on January 6, 1919, at Oyster Bay, New
York; son of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Martha “Mittie” (Bulloch) Roosevelt; married: Alice Hathaway Lee, October 27, 1880 (died
February 14, 1884); married: Edith Kermit Carow, December 2, 1886 (died September 30, 1948); children: (four sons) Theodore, Jr.,
Kermit, Archibald Bullock, and Quentin; (two daughters) Ethel Carow and Alice Lee (the only child of his first marriage about whom
the song “Alice Blue Gown” was written). Relatives: uncle of Eleanor Roosevelt, great-uncle of newspapermen Joseph and Stewart
Alsop, fifth cousin and uncle by marriage to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and third cousin twice removed of Martin Van Buren.
Predecessor: William McKinley. Successor: William Howard Taft.
FURTHER READINGS:
Abram, Richard M. “Theodore Roosevelt,” in The Presidents: A Reference History. Edited by Henry F. Graff, Scribner, 1984.
Collin, Richard H., ed. Theodore Roosevelt and Reform Politics. D.C. Heath, 1972.
Degregori, William A. The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents. Dembner, 1984.
Keller, Morton, ed. Theodore Roosevelt: A Profile. Hill and Wang, 1967.
Morison, Elting E., ed. The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. 8 vols. Harvard, 1951–54.
Mowry, George E. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt. Harpers, 1958.
Pringle, Henry F. Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. Harcourt, 1931.
Roosevelt, Theodore. Autobiography. Scribner, 1926.
Blum, John. The Republican Roosevelt. 2d ed. Harvard, 1977.
Harbaugh, William H. The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt. Rev. ed., Oxford, 1975.
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. Knopf, 1948.
Mowry, George E. Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement. Wisconsin, 1946.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning
Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)
“Theodore Roosevelt.” Historic World Leaders, edited by Anne Commire, Gale, 1994. Gale In Context: U.S. History,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1616000508/UHIC?u=txshracd2497&sid=bookmark-UHIC&xid=b1a7e440. Accessed 22 Apr. 2022.
Gale Document Number: GALE|K1616000508
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, THE BIG APPLE,
AND THE GREAT WAR
Lewis L. Gould
Edward P. Kohn. Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore
Roosevelt. New York: Basic Books, 2013. xv + 256 pp. Bibliography and index.
$26.99.
J. Lee Thompson. Never Call Retreat: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great War. New
York: Palgrave, 2013. xi + 362 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography,
and index. $35.00.
The study of the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt has now entered a
phase where historians are tackling discrete parts of his career to illuminate
the larger whole. This turn of events is a promising development and should
furnish new depth and sophistication to the understanding of Roosevelt’s role
in U.S. history. Unfortunately, as these two books demonstrate, the process
is one that demands extensive manuscript research, a strong command of
the secondary literature on TR, and an intense concentration on the analytic
issues that his life raises. In the case of Edward P. Kohn, it has resulted in an
interesting, plausible idea about Roosevelt and New York City rendered in
a badly flawed and almost unusable volume. J. Lee Thompson’s treatment
of Roosevelt and World War I offers a comprehensive chronicle of Roosevelt
from 1914 to his death in 1919 but, because of self-inflicted research lapses,
falls well short of a compelling and reliable analytic narrative.
Edward Kohn, who teaches at the University of Bilkent in Turkey, faced
some self-imposed obstacles in writing this book about Theodore Roosevelt
and the city of New York from the 1880s to his presidency in 1901. Nowhere
in the book is it explained why there is no annotation for the text. There is a
brief bibliography and something called “Specific Sources by Chapter,” but,
for most of the narrative, the quotations and generalizations float in the air.
If Kohn were a reliable conveyer of facts, perhaps a note-free approach
could be somewhat justified. Assertions that Alton B. Parker was once mayor
of New York City (p. 181) or that John C. Spooner of Wisconsin opposed “the
Old Guard” in the Senate (p. 212) might just be the kind of slips that any author
could commit. In the case of the 1877 nomination by President Rutherford B.
Reviews in American History 43 (2015) 307–313 © 2015 by Johns Hopkins University Press
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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2015
Hayes of Roosevelt’s father to be the Collector of Customs in New York City,
however, Kohn encounters more serious difficulties. Senator Roscoe Conkling
opposed Roosevelt’s selection and, as Kohn notes, the appointment had to
pass through Conkling’s Commerce committee. Thus, Kohn concludes that,
on December 3, 1877, Conkling had “prevented Roosevelt’s confirmation from
coming to a vote in the Senate, and the issue died” (p. 35). This, according to
Kohn, was a shaping event in the life of young Teddy. If a researcher looks
at The New-York Tribune for December 13, 1877, though, a front-page story reported that the elder Roosevelt’s name had come before the Senate, six hours
of debate had ensued, and then the nomination had gone down by a vote of
25 to 31. The Tribune called this executive session “one of the longest and most
remarkable which has been held in many years.”1
To the degree that Theodore Roosevelt was all mixed up in the politics of
New York City, the historian who writes about him must follow the primary
sources where they lead. Kohn cites seven collections that comprised his
original research. If one compares Kohn’s less than magnificent seven collections with the seventy cited in Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to
Reform: Political Change in New York State (1981), one gets a vivid sense of how
expectations for manuscript research have declined over the past four decades.
Kohn apparently decided not to examine such pertinent collections as the
Nicholas Murray Butler Papers at Columbia, the Albert Shaw Papers at the
New York Public Library, and the George W. Perkins Papers at Columbia.
As John A. Garraty showed in 1960 in his biography of Perkins (Right-Hand
Man: The Life of George W. Perkins, 1960), the New Yorker and J. P. Morgan
partner was instrumental in securing the support of President McKinley for
Roosevelt’s selection as vice president.
There were numerous relevant manuscript collections at the Library of Congress that Kohn passed by—for instance, those of Grover Cleveland, George
B. Cortelyou, Benjamin Harrison, John Hay, and William McKinley—but the
most stunning omission relates to two sets of papers about Elihu Root. Kohn’s
bibliography does not contain Philip Jessup’s standard two-volume biography
of Root. Root and Roosevelt were so aligned in New York after 1896 that leaving out Jessup is inexplicable. More important, reading the Jessup biography
would have alerted Kohn to the necessity of looking at the Elihu Root Papers
at the Library of Congress. Root had a hand in almost every aspect of Roosevelt’s rise—his entry into politics, his race for mayor in 1886, and his career
in the 1890s. Root was especially central to the controversy over Roosevelt’s
residence in New York in the 1898 gubernatorial election. At the same time,
Kohn could have learned about the Philip Jessup Papers, also at the Library
of Congress. In this collection are the records of Jessup’s detailed interviews
with Root, done in the 1930s, about his life and times. They are, of course,
the recollections of an old man, but Root’s words indicate that he had all his
GOULD / Theodore Roosevelt, the Big Apple, and the Great War
309
faculties intact. While they cannot be accepted without analysis, neither can
they be ignored.
One of the key questions in Theodore Roosevelt’s life is about his entry into
politics in 1881. Kohn discusses how, in the Twenty-third Assembly District,
the incumbent Republican was ousted in favor of Roosevelt. Yet Root is not
mentioned. In a session with Jessup on November 3, 1934, Root said: “When
Roosevelt came home out of college I was one of the group that got the regular organization fellow who was running for the Assembly to retire and let
us put Roosevelt in his place.”2 Was Root—speaking years after the events
in 1881—accurate? That is for the historian, seeking to see as many pertinent
sources as possible, to determine. If, however, the scholar is not aware of the
relevant collections, what are the chances of achieving a thorough result? In
the phrase so familiar to New Yorkers: fuhgeddaboudit.
Elihu Root was also something of a foil to Roosevelt during 1899–1900 in
ways that Kohn misses. Worried about his chances of getting a second term in
Albany and then winning the presidency after 1902, Roosevelt eyed the post
of Secretary of War. McKinley named Root to that position in the summer of
1899. There was a brief flurry of interest in Root for the vice presidency in
late 1899, until he took himself out of the running. Roosevelt then coveted
an executive post in the Philippines that eventually went to William Howard
Taft. Of all this, Kohn says nothing.
Any discussion of what made New York Republicans anxious about Theodore Roosevelt should start with his youthful endorsement of free trade and
his suspicion of the protective tariff. Kohn calls the tariff the “third rail of
nineteenth century politics” (p. 124), which it certainly wasn’t for Republicans,
but he nowhere delves into Roosevelt’s complex history with the issue. The
key point, of course, is that Republicans, ever watchful for apostasy about
protection, never forgot that Roosevelt in his youth had strayed from orthodoxy.
There are other places where Kohn demonstrates an uncertain command of
information. William McKinley’s message to Congress on April 11, 1898, asking
for intervention in Cuba, did not constitute a request for a declaration of war.
Like many another Roosevelt partisan, Kohn adopts the long-discredited tale
that Roosevelt’s cable to George Dewey on February 25, 1898, triggered the
attack on the Philippines on May 1. Yet Roosevelt had very little to do with the
formulation of naval war planning about the Philippines, which had actually
begun during the Cleveland administration in 1895. The legend that he did
so seems like a historical zombie, impossible to kill and always reappearing.
Kohn and others should consult the work of William R. Braisted, John A. S.
Grenville, and other scholars to see why the U.S. Navy behaved as it did.
For a short book, Kohn’s work seems padded with discussions of Roosevelt’s years at Harvard, his courtship and marriage to his two wives, and
even his adventures in Cuba. If, as Kohn argues, his heroic exploits did not
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impel Senator Platt to make Roosevelt governor in 1898, then why go over the
familiar ground of Las Guasimas and Kettle Hill? There is a sense throughout
this book that it was once a reasonable, modest monograph about TR as a
New Yorker that was then hijacked by a publisher’s ambition to add another
best-selling Roosevelt title to its list.
It is unlikely that anyone will want to retrace Kohn’s steps through the
thicket of New York state and local politics. That is too bad, because this
ambitious but very inadequate volume really will not do as an analysis of its
important subject.
The last years of Roosevelt’s life coincided with U.S. neutrality and then
belligerency during World War I. In this hectic period, an ailing, overweight,
half-blind Roosevelt assailed President Woodrow Wilson and his administration on behalf of Great Britain, France, and the other allies. In 1940, Hermann
Hagedorn traced how Roosevelt became The Bugle That Woke America to the
needs of preparedness. There have been studies of Roosevelt as a former
president by Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory (1973) and Patricia O’Toole,
When Trumpets Call (2005), but no volume has focused on Roosevelt and the
war as its sole subject.
In the world of writing about Theodore Roosevelt, there is a school that
finds him not just an admirable president, a compelling advocate for social
reform, and an interesting figure in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras.
These devotees of Roosevelt identify in him a world statesman of the first
rank, the most skilled practitioner of foreign policy in the nation’s history, and
a politician whose only flaw was to have an American citizenry that fell short
of his prowess. This Roosevelt does not need to be analyzed. Mere description
will disclose his greatness for those with eyes to see. J. Lee Thompson is very
much within this mind-set about TR. He promises his readers Roosevelt’s
words about World War I, “which remain eloquent and compelling today,”
and what others said in response. As for his own part as a narrator, Thompson
pledges to write “without overwhelming authorial prodding and embellishment” (p. x). In short, regarding TR, Thompson is very much in the mode of
what were called “incense-swingers.” He slides by the analytic difficulties of
this phase of TR’s life in part because he, like Kohn, had a restricted research
agenda in primary sources.
Thompson’s approach relies on extended quotations from letters TR wrote
to friends, public statements that the former president made, comments from
newspaper editorials, or letters back to Roosevelt. The result is a narrative
largely composed of lengthy passages from documents from which, one assumes, the reader is supposed to derive enlightenment. But the presence of
so many quotations drains them all of their prospective impact. At the same
time, by adroit manipulation of the evidence, Thompson distracts the unwary
GOULD / Theodore Roosevelt, the Big Apple, and the Great War
311
reader from what is missing—a consideration of Roosevelt’s performance as
a politician and public figure.
There is no doubt that Roosevelt hated Wilson. Yet Thompson does not
provide sufficient background about how the two men came to despise each
other. They were once friendly, drifted apart during Roosevelt’s presidency,
and exchanged bitter attacks on each other during the campaign of 1912.
Roosevelt never backed away from a challenge. Wilson was always too proud
to fight. Thompson never gets beyond the assertion that Roosevelt was well
qualified to be president whereas Wilson was not. It would have been difficult
for Thompson to sum up Wilson in a fair way, but doing so is necessary for
readers to grasp the dynamic between the two men. For most of Thompson’s
narrative, Wilson is little more than Roosevelt’s cartoonish projection of his
enemy.
In discussing Roosevelt’s difference with Wilson over how the United States
should have behaved when the Germans invaded Belgium, Thompson notes
that TR believed, had he been president, he would have had popular support
to intervene on the side of the Allies. Really? Assuming Roosevelt had won
in 1912, would Americans have wanted to see their military involved on the
Western Front? The notion that the (at that time) tiny U.S. Army could have
been transported to France and deterred the Germans is ludicrous on its face.
In his esteem for Roosevelt, Thompson puts his critical faculties toward his
subject on ice for the duration of the volume.
Thompson has visited a number of manuscript collections, especially on
the British side, but his main purpose in doing so seems to have been to find
Roosevelt letters. He praises his own research (p. xi), but his digging has not
been as thorough as he assumes. The omission of the Henry Cabot Lodge
Papers in the United States is hard to understand, as is the failure to consult
the papers of Henry L. Stimson. The Harold Ickes Papers, Library of Congress,
and the James T. Williams Papers at Duke University all have much helpful
information on the 1916–18 period. Most notable, as will soon become clear,
was Thompson’s failure to check out the George W. Perkins Papers at the
Columbia University Library.
However, wherever he did or did not go, Thompson rarely gets below
the surface. For example, he mentions an article that Roosevelt wrote for the
Metropolitan Magazine in late October 1915 and quotes from the story about it
that appeared in The New York Times on October 23, 1915. Thompson refers to
Roosevelt’s strictures against Wilson and discusses his criticisms of the Germans. He does not mention what Roosevelt said in attacking the performance
of the British for their failure to do their part as one of the Allies. Roosevelt
charged that “wealthy England” had “failed to do its duty” and had “put an
army of utterly inadequate size into the field, compared to what the other
powers have done.”3
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REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / JUNE 2015
Those comments set off an intense controversy in Great Britain that reached
the highest levels of government. In a letter to Cecil Spring Rice, British ambassador to the U.S., Britain’s Foreign Secretary Edward Grey said that TR’s
statement “about the part that we have taken in the war” was “calculated to
do us mortal injury.”4 Grey’s irate letter and the thinking it reflected within
the British government prompted a Rooseveltian retraction a few days later.
These documents take the historian behind the scenes of British attitudes,
a place where Thompson does not seem to have ventured. Surely he went
to the British National Archives, but that repository is not listed among his
“Manuscript Sources Consulted.” These letters are not part of Thompson’s
evidence, even though there are abundant traces of their existence in the
published Roosevelt letters.
There are other troubling examples of Thompson’s methods. In 1916, on
the eve of the Republican and Progressive national conventions, Thompson
notes: “The Colonel kept in touch with developments at the conventions by
a direct telephone line laid into the room of George Perkins at the Blackstone
Hotel” (p. 129). What he does not tell the reader is that John Garraty, in his
1960 biography of Perkins, quoted copious extracts from these talks that Perkins had recorded at the time.
Now some historians, aware that telephonic transcripts of Roosevelt in action
existed, might have hurried to the Columbia library to read such documents
in the original. After all, Perkins was TR’s closest political friend at this time.
Others, less zealous, might have contented themselves with Garraty’s detailed
text. Thompson simply ignores all this material and presses ahead with his
thin narrative. His only reference to Garraty’s book is tucked in a much earlier
note (p. 298n30). Left out, as a result, is Roosevelt’s incredible suggestion to
the Progressives that they should select Henry Cabot Lodge as their presidential nominee. That fatuous proposal illustrated how alienated Roosevelt had
become from his political child. It deserves to be mentioned in any account
of the 1916 conventions. History should not be a game of three-card monte
where the reader (or the mark) is misled about evidence by adroit omissions.
An example of Thompson’s reluctance to delve into the consequences of
Roosevelt’s actions also comes in the pages devoted to the former president’s
efforts to raise a division to fight in France after the United States entered the
war in April 1917. The information is all there in what is, by now, a familiar
story. Thompson does not step back and offer a judgment on the merits of
sending Roosevelt to France in the fashion that he wished. Half a century ago,
Otis Graham observed that the French general Joseph Joffre believed that it
took ten thousand to fifteen thousand dead men to instruct a novice general in
how to do his job on the Western Front. Roosevelt, said Graham, was “eager
to learn.”5 The point has not lost its relevance over the years. Roosevelt was
older than all the serving British generals, had no experience with handling
GOULD / Theodore Roosevelt, the Big Apple, and the Great War
313
large masses of troops, was fat, blind in one eye, and prone to attacks of
malaria and other fevers. To call his adventure anything other than personal
indulgence dressed up as patriotism seems unwarranted.
In his summing up, Thompson decides all the judgment calls in favor
of Roosevelt and against Wilson. One almost forgets that the United States
helped the Allies to victory under Wilson’s leadership. Rarely does Thompson
step back and ask tough questions about Roosevelt’s wisdom, for instance,
in encouraging his youngest son, who had weak eyes and a bad back, to be
a fighter pilot; or why his sons had to enlist only as officers in the war he
wanted so much; or why, if he desired to go to France, he did not stop his
prodigious eating and get himself into stronger physical shape in 1916–17.
Roosevelt has been dead almost a century. The time for reverential piety
toward his life is over.
Theodore Roosevelt will no doubt remain a favorite subject for historical inquiry. As the complexities of his life are examined, scholars need to be
aware that the range of applicable source material, particularly in manuscript
collections in the United States and abroad, is vast. The secondary literature
on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era expands each year, but older studies
also need to be taken into account. Authors and publishers now seem to regard the comprehensive research in primary sources of such earlier writers as
John Morton Blum or Arthur S. Link (whose biographical volumes on Wilson
Thompson did not use) as relics not to be emulated. When such a once-overlightly approach is followed, the result tends to be volumes like those of Kohn
and Thompson. Kohn could have taken as his model the works of the late
H. Wayne Morgan on William McKinley and national politics in the Gilded
Age. Thompson had before him the thorough example of Wilson biographer
John Milton Cooper, whose prodigious knowledge of manuscript collections
is daunting. Their failure to follow the lead of these esteemed scholars says
much about the current practices of the historical profession and the abandonment of comprehensive manuscript research as an essential research strategy.
Lewis L. Gould is the author of The Republicans: A History of The Grand Old
Party (2014). He is working on a study of the presidential election of 1916.
1. “Mr. Conkling Succeeds,” New-York Tribune, December 13, 1877.
2. “Conversation with Mr. Root at his apt. November 3, 1934,” Philip C. Jessup Papers,
I:245, Library of Congress.
3. “Roosevelt Gives His Defense Ideas,” New York Times, October 23, 1915.
4. Edward Grey to Cecil Spring Rice, November 3, 1915; Spring Rice to Grey, November
22, 1915, Papers of Edward Grey, FO800/85, British National Archives.
5. Otis Graham, The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America (1971), 90n9.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.