Theodore Roosevelt

A Manly President's Gendered Personal and Political Transformations

Neil H Cogan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781135017132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Theodore Roosevelt explores the personal and political life of the 26th President of the United States. It considers among other things his "manliness, " a gendered framework of traits for the Gilded Age and Progressive Period guiding him and other men in business, politics, and war, and shows how the development of these traits transformed Roosevelt's personal and political decisions.

The work covers a storied personal life and emphasizes mental and physical challenges from depression, asthma, partial blindness, and attempted assassination. Cogan addresses the political transformation from traditional, to "Square Deal" Republican, to "Bull Moose" Progressive. The text also reviews initiatives dismissing corrupt officials, closing saloons, and arresting pimps; busting monopolies and bettering workplaces and consumer products; and conserving wildlife and natural resources. Contrary to popular conception, Roosevelt's manliness was not macho masculinity. Rather, it was an evolving framework of traits, including courage, service, and Christian morality.

Supported by a series of intriguing primary source documents, this book is essential reading for understanding Roosevelt, his era, and his manliness. It is an accessible tool for students studying and instructors teaching courses on the Gilded Age and Progressive Period in American history.

part I

Theodore Roosevelt

chapter 1
Acquiring Traits of Manliness

Sorting Out the Challenges of Childhood, Family, and Harvard

“A strenuous life” is the apt description Roosevelt used to define his own life as well as the manly life he encouraged others to live. In one sense of the adjective, a strenuous life describes the unintended difficulty of Roosevelt’s first 12 years, when his body continually was under severe strain from illness. And in another sense of the adjective, a strenuous life describes the stress of his subsequent 48 years, when he intentionally and deliberately put his mind and body into overdrive. Roosevelt was unable to exert himself physically and socially in his early life, but in the years thereafter, without intention of malevolence, he bullied his way into conversations, relationships, and events.¹

“A strenuous life” well describes Roosevelt’s everyday life, but it does not capture the many characteristics that made him a “manly” man. “Strenuous life” does not fully capture the physical and financial risks he took with seeming disregard of the dangers to which he subjected himself and his family. It does not capture the absence of fear and laudable courage he exhibited and the physically taxing strain he underwent in his encounters in war and the wilds. “Strenuous life” does not capture his frequent independence of social convention. And it does not capture his ethical and political views.

“Manly” and “manliness” are more fitting, explanatory, and encompassing. Manliness surrounded Roosevelt. He was born in New York City into a cohesive Dutch Reformed family, whose members regularly attended church and daily prayed. His grandfather, father, and four uncles, holders of Roosevelt family banking and importing interests, were regarded in New York as among the most wealthy and socially prominent of men.

After marriage and children, Roosevelt’s father, Theodore (“Thee”), was regarded as the “head of the family.” The children and dinner waited for him, and after he arrived home, changed, and was ready, he played with the children and began dinner with prayers. At the dinner table, talk was lively, about the family’s day, his father’s horseback ride, his mother’s letters, and Theodore’s collections. When his uncle Robert was in attendance, there were anecdotes about yachting.

Talk of the world beyond New York was about the tide of Civil War battles, victories and defeats of the Union and Confederacy, the cleverness or ineptitude of the generals, and the bravery or cowardice or soldiers. For young boys, at the table and in their heads were the stories they read, such as those by Mayne Reid, about strong, independent men who explored the American West and traveled at sea. The father at the head of the table, Thee, fit the contemporary manly figure – physically fit, business oriented, socially engaged, and always “the perfect gentleman,” his morals beyond question.

As he grew, Theodore benefited from a wide library his parents made accessible at home and on each extended trip abroad. He read widely and constantly. When he celebrated his 21st birthday, he asked for the complete works of the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle and the American “scientific” historian William H. Prescott, an unlikely gift request from someone of his age. As he read and as he studied at Harvard, Roosevelt’s constructs of manliness grew, and he developed his own guide and emphasized the traits and characteristics of manliness that fit his outlook. He was intelligent, confident, and driven enough to modify his guide, as appropriate. Whereas most young men likely imagined courage as standing their ground and facing the risk of death in the eye, Roosevelt’s eventual guide became more nuanced, encompassing more risks than death and more acts of courage than a ready gun and clenched fists.²

As he grew, studied at Harvard, competed at sports, socialized outside his circle, and entered politics, the traits and characteristics became those of his own fin de siècle manly man, the kind of man who rebels against corrupt political structures, the unfairness of monopolistic power, and the exclusion of laboring men and women from a seat at the bargaining table. He became the kind of man who, without hands-on experience, stakes claims to ranches, buys herds of cattle, hunts bears in the Dakota Badlands, rides days without companion through wilderness, and charges unprotected into rapid enemy rifle fire, mounted high on his horse.

Roosevelt’s Grandparents

Theodore Roosevelt was born into a family of enterprising New Yorkers, whose Dutch Reformed forebears first immigrated to what was known as New Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century.³ Called Knickerbockers because of the baggy, rolled-up pants that the men wore, they spoke Dutch amongst themselves, attended the Reformed Church, prayed and married persons of their ancestry, or as Roosevelt put it, those of “Holland stock.” It was Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, Theodore’s grandfather, who broke the chain in 1821 when he married a woman who was not of Dutch ancestry. However, she did speak Dutch and, as Roosevelt later remembered, she taught Theodore the only Dutch words he could remember.⁴

Cornelius, known as CVS, was born in 1791 and died in 1874, and at his death he was one of his generation’s wealthiest New Yorkers. As a sixth-generation New York resident, 150 years following the first of the American Roosevelts, CVS entered Columbia College; he withdrew, however, without completing the program to establish a glass importing business. His successful business plan was to market a variety of plate glass, not manufactured in the United States, for installation in the many commercial and residential buildings under construction in Manhattan. With further business acumen, during the Panic of 1837, CVS invested glass importing profits into Manhattan commercial properties, “all at a good price.” He also invested profits in the Roosevelt family’s banking business, which in later generations became Chemical Bank of New York and, then, Chase Bank. Because of the several investments, CVS passed inheritances to his spouse and their five sons and made them, too, among the wealthiest of New Yorkers for their time.⁵

CVS both epitomized the modest manliness of his forebears and enabled a more robust manliness for his five sons, most importantly for Theodore Roosevelt’s father, Thee. CVS was devoted to the faith of the Dutch Reformed Church and was uncompromisingly honest, core traits for Dutch businessmen. He was also enterprising, inclined to manly financial risk, but not excessive risk. He was independent, but not so independent as to distant himself from the safety net of his family. He was socially aware and much involved in charitable activities, but notably as a donor and not as a doer.

Importantly, he did enable possibilities for others. When they reached their 20s, CVS made each of his sons a partner in his businesses. CVS and his spouse resided in a mansion off Union Square, and upon their sons’ marriages the parents gave each couple a gift of a nearby mansion. So, through the profits of their father’s businesses, each son had the wherewithal to live independently. With their father’s example of social involvement as a donor, each son had a possibility and a path for charitable giving and involvement in the community, an important trait of manliness in mid-nineteenth-century America.⁶

Roosevelt’s Parents; Life on Union Square

Roosevelt’s parents resided off Union Square, renamed from “Union Place” in the 1830s. Samuel Ruggles, who gifted the land for Gramercy Park, also acquired leases of property lots in Union Place; he encouraged New York City to enlarge the area’s commons and name it “Union Square.” Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of New York’s Central and Prospect Parks, designed landscape changes at Union Square, making the area a venue for large social gatherings and events of political notoriety. The Square was set at the intersection (that is, the “union”) of Bowery, Broadway, University Place, and 14th Street, and became a fashionable, in-town residence location for New York City’s socially prominent, wealthy class. It was the Square’s setting at the union of the major thoroughfares that likely accounted for Ruggles’ proposal for “union” rather than “place” as the name for the commons.⁷

But in addition to the geographic propriety of its name, the area was later popularly identified as Union Square because it was in close proximity to the Union League, an exclusively Republican club, and it was within a mile of Cooper Union, where Lincoln later gave his clarion antislavery speech. For the Roosevelt family, and for an impressionable young Theodore, it was appropriately Union Square because, through it, a team of horses slowly pulled the catafalque bearing in procession the late President Abraham Lincoln’s body, before it was carried by train for burial in Oak Ridge, near Springfield, Illinois. From the second-floor window of his parents’ Union Square home, six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt and his five-year-old brother Elliott watched the procession, a moment that quite remarkably was captured in a photograph of the two Roosevelt boys peering down from the window. For Theodore, at that young age, the coffin in procession became an indelible image of the person who would remain always his martyred hero.⁸

Theodore Roosevelt’s father, Theodore Sr., known in the family as Thee, was the youngest of CVS’s five sons, a younger sixth son having died at the age of one. Thee joined CVS’s company, renamed Roosevelt & Son when the sons joined the father’s businesses. But in contrast with CVS’s dedication (and perhaps like many children who are the youngest in a large family), Thee Roosevelt was less enthusiastic about the businesses than his siblings. He was more interested in community organizations, social occasions, and physical activity. Thee was a founder of the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History. He attended society functions, often without his spouse, and whether or not accompanied, he danced and conversed, frequently until the very end of an evening’s festivities. Thus, although the manly trait of pursuing work with vigor was less important in his self-awareness, the manly trait of social participation was important, significantly more so than his father’s.⁹

Other manly traits were also prominent. Mornings, Thee would ride his horse through Central Park and toward the Palisades. Although there was minimal physical risk in riding horses through the city, he was nonetheless an image of physical prowess, upright and in control of his mount, a manly image of strength in an urban setting. Both in the streets and in the privacy of his home, Thee disliked expressions of cowardice. Moreover, as manly men were expected to be, he was honest and devoted to prayer, not just in image but also in reality, just as father CVS was.¹⁰

This is reflected in his son’s remembrance. Theodore Roosevelt published his Autobiography in 1913, the year after he lost his last presidential campaign and, likely, when he had no serious thought about garnering favorable publicity for another political campaign. Roosevelt was at that time 55, a mature, self-reflective author who had written and spoken often and at length about manly men. In his writing, he remembered his father with narratives that used prominent traits of manliness. Not unexpectedly, he was kind to the memory of his father and without a doubt saw himself largely in his father’s likeness. Late and loving remembrances notwithstanding, Roosevelt’s particular uses of manliness are noteworthy.

The former President wrote:

My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness. He would not tolerate in us children selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness.¹¹

Given the absence of stories about Thee Roosevelt’s physicality beyond riding, “strength” as used by Thee’s son was likely not strength measured simply by muscular power. More likely, it was strength measured by character, that is, his firmnes...