Theodore the Great

Conservative Crusader

Daniel Ruddy

• Publisher: Regnery History
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781621572640
• eBook ISBN: 9781621574415
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

Theodore Roosevelt has a complicated legacy. To some, he was the quintessential American patriot and hero, a valiant soldier and hawkish leader. Others remember him as the Progressive cultural icon, the trust-buster who split from the Republican Party.So who was the real Teddy Roosevelt?Daniel Ruddy's new biography cuts through the impenetrable tangle of misconceptions and contradictions that have grown up over the last century and obscured our view of a man who remains one of the most controversial and misunderstood presidents in U.S. history. Weighing Roosevelt's lifetime of actions against his sometimes-contradictory Progressive rhetoric, Ruddy paints a portrait of a man who led by undeniably conservative principles, but who obfuscated his own legacy with populist speeches. By focusing on Roosevelt's actions and his effect on American history, Ruddy clears the cobwebs and presents a real and convincing case for remembering Theodore Roosevelt as a great conservative leader.

PART I

THE FIRST MODERN PRESIDENT

CHAPTER ONE

TR’S ROLLER-COASTER REPUTATION

Theodore Roosevelt was always controversial, but he was also enormously popular. In late 1907, fifty-five newspapers around the country asked whether President Roosevelt, then completing his second term, should run for a third. Of the 21,475 people who responded, 69 percent said yes.¹ This was an astounding level of approval on its own merits, never mind that it rose up against the long held presidential tradition established by George Washington of retiring after two terms.

To the astonishment of his critics, who repeatedly called him a dictator, Roosevelt had pledged after his election victory in 1904 not to seek a third term. That third term was his for the taking in 1908, and, while it is rash to indulge in counterfactual history, given the unity of the Republican Party under his leadership, it is easy to imagine his earning a fourth and a fifth term as well. At the end of five terms, he would have been only sixty-two—eight years younger than Ronald Reagan was when he began his presidency.

Roosevelt’s immense popularity is apparent in the results of another newspaper survey, this one conducted by the Baltimore Sun in February 1909. The paper asked readers, “What will Theodore Roosevelt’s nickname be in the history books of the future?”² The survey results, whatever their limits, show a departing president regarded with affection (Teddy, Teddy Bear), respect (Theodore the Great, the Big Stick, the Strenuous President, the Trust Buster), and admiration (the Peacemaker, Father of the Panama Canal, the Rough Rider).

It seems fair to say that no American president has left the White House more liked by the public than Theodore Roosevelt, but not all responses to the Sun’s question were complimentary. A vocal minority of Americans saw him as an autocrat who usurped the constitutional powers of the legislative and judicial branches and as a reckless imperialist who shamelessly flouted the sovereignty of weak nations in Latin America. Members of this faction suggested the following nicknames:

While Roosevelt’s critics often accused him of being a vainglorious potentate, less serious detractors ridiculed his ungainly physical appearance (Him with the Teeth, the Gargoyle in the White House); mocked him as a sort of P. T. Barnum with a childlike need to be the center of attention (Too Much Teddy, the Greatest Show on Earth, Theodore the Preposterous, the Limelight, Mr. Bunk, the King of Capers, Teddy the Tiresome, the Blarney Stone, the Airship that Never Came Down); or pushed back against his political moralizing (the Political Evangelist, the Common Scold, the Dragon of Right, the High Priest of Good Morals).

Other nicknames suggested by the readers of the Baltimore Sun include: the Lion Hunter, the Superman, the Busy-Body, the Chief Detective of the United States, the Observed Observer, the Hero of San Juan Hill, the Gladiator, Theodore the Little, the Nightmare of Grafters, the Agitator, the Prince of Discord, the Archangel, the Ruthless, the Preacher, the Encyclopedia, Panama Teddy, Theodore the Impossible, the Man that Scared John D. [Rockefeller], Seven Long Years!, the Monitor of All Creation, the Lone Truth-Teller, the Promoter of Panics, the Hero Told to Oversee (anagram of Theodore Roosevelt), Roosevelt the Mighty, the Jack of All Trades, the Oracle of Oyster Bay, the Janus of America, and Xantippe (the overbearing wife of Socrates).

To most of the country, though, he was simply “Teddy”—not a father-figure like George Washington but a respected big brother. No other American president except “Abe” Lincoln has been honored in this way. Roosevelt did not insist that Americans call him “Teddy,” the way President Carter insisted that everyone call him “Jimmy.” He preferred, in fact, to be called Theodore. But he appreciated, however reluctantly, the moniker verdict of the people, who on the whole thought of him as a beloved family member, not an aloof politician.

BURNISHING HIMSELF AS THE ROUGH RIDER

Roosevelt expected to be remembered as Theodore the Great—an honorific that paid tribute to his ambition, his energy, and his achievements. An aristocrat with a privileged upbringing, his image among the American people was, paradoxically, one of a rough-riding frontiersman who had been a cowboy and hunter in the untamed West, who, when he turned to politics, was a tribune of the people leading a high-minded crusade against government corruption in the cultured East.

The defining characteristic of Roosevelt’s personality was his need to show the world he was manly and strong. In this respect, he was nothing like Abraham Lincoln, whose iron will to win and steely, inscrutable resolve were kept hidden beneath an affable and folksy persona, or George Washington, whose tightly controlled temper rarely exploded around others. He wasn’t like Thomas Jefferson, infamous for his preference for intrigue over frontal assaults on political enemies, or even the choleric Andrew Jackson, who let his Indian-killer, “Sharp Knife” reputation speak for itself.

Among American statesmen, Roosevelt most resembles Alexander Hamilton. Both were relatively small in stature, yearned for battlefield glory, and were aggressive in their defense of their honor. Roosevelt, of course, had to build his body up, to compensate for the ravages of his childhood asthma. Hamilton built up his mind as an aggressive autodidact and was an eager young militiaman at the start of the Revolutionary War. Both Hamilton and Roosevelt achieved their lifelong desire for heroic combat in spectacular charges that ended wars, Hamilton leading the climactic assault at Yorktown in 1781 and Roosevelt leading the final assault on the Spanish entrenchments on Kettle Hill in Cuba in 1898. Both men were hawks who denounced dithering presidents (in Hamilton’s case, John Adams; in TR’s, William McKinley) for vacillating leadership as war loomed with a foreign foe (France in 1798, Spain in 1898). Both men possessed a soaring ambition for personal and national greatness, and a fearless personality that invited conflict with antagonists.

Before the Spanish-American War gave him the opportunity for military combat, Roosevelt settled for political combat. As a politician, he portrayed himself as a crusader against sinister forces, while showing himself as an heroic version of a common man, too, through stories he wrote for popular magazines that described his rough-and-tough life in the unforgiving Dakota Territory. On his arrival in the West, Roosevelt had at first been regarded as a soft, pampered “New York dude, who was all teeth and eyeglasses” but had quickly changed that reputation by breaking “the buckiest, ugliest cow ponies he could find,”⁴ driving a corrupt sheriff out of town, tracking down and capturing horse thieves, and riding endless hours during the roundup with the rest of the hired hands. All this helped make Roosevelt an immensely popular politician.

POST-PRESIDENTIAL DIVE

But he made mistakes, too, which have harmed his reputation. His ill-advised decision in 1912 to bolt from the Republican Party and run for president as a Bull Moose Progressive made him seem power-hungry and erratic. The victory of Woodrow Wilson that year ended Roosevelt’s political winning streak, which had begun in 1881 with his election to the New York Assembly at the age of twenty-three. His reputation did not recover during his seven remaining years of life.

When the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying 128 American civilians, was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, Roosevelt insisted the United States, as a matter of national honor, join the war against Germany. Few, however, shared his view. Most Americans wanted to stay out of a horrific war in a distant land that did not seem to concern the United States. Refusing to flow with the popular pacific tide, he denounced Wilson for cultivating national apathy, but his pro-war agitation only decreased his popularity in a country that wanted to remain isolated from the world’s troubles.

The loveable Teddy Bear was now viewed as recklessly belligerent, indifferent to the carnage that awaited America’s youth in the trenches of France. “I think the American people feel a little tired of me,”⁵ said a frustrated Roosevelt. He was defying public opinion as he had never dared to do while in the White House:

I have spoken out as strongly and as clearly as possible, and I do not think it has had any effect beyond making people think that I am a truculent and bloodthirsty person, endeavoring futilely to thwart able, dignified, humane Mr. Wilson in his noble plan to bring peace everywhere by excellently written letters sent to persons who care nothing whatever for any letter that is not backed up by force!⁶

Roosevelt’s faded reputation did not benefit from his death in 1919. Warren Harding’s “Return to Normalcy” campaign the following year rang the death knell of the progressive era and set the tone for the 1920s. Sickened by the carnage of World War I and eager for a quiet life, the American people embraced the enigmatic “Silent Cal” Coolidge—the antithesis of the preachy, crusading Roosevelt.

The Great Depression revived the spirit of reform that Roosevelt had fostered, and his reputation revived with it. His progressive-minded cousin Franklin Roosevelt found the clan’s surname a political asset, and the title of his economic program, the New Deal, paid homage to TR’s Square Deal. Leading the Democratic Party, FDR successfully positioned himself as a conservative reformer, just as TR had done a generation before, thwarting the attempt of TR’s son, Ted Jr., to do the same within the Republican Party.

TR’s reputation benefited from this cross-party endorsement of his legacy, but was hit with a powerful countervailing force when many liberal academics in the 1930s linked TR to the rise of European totalitarianism. It seemed to be a natural outgrowth of his militaristic, strongman style of leadership. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for example, recalled the popular sentiment: “When I went to college in the 1930s, I was taught that Theodore Roosevelt was a blustering bully.”⁷ The first full-length biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Pringle’s Pulitzer Prize–winning volume published in 1931, added to this ugly, unfair picture by depicting his subject as a sham reformer whose remedies were at best superficial. Pringle, a cheerleader for Al Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, dismissed the Republican Roosevelt as a “magnificent child”⁸ and “violently adolescent person”⁹ who was “merely a strutting personification of an America newly powerful in a new century, but not quite grown up and hence dangerous.”¹⁰

THE VIEW FROM MOUNT RUSHMORE

If TR’s reputation was suffering among the intellectual class, he remained a popular figure—popular enough for sculptor Gutzon Borglum to chisel Roosevelt’s face, along with those of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, on Mount Rushmore in South Dakota between 1934 and 1939. Borglum had admired Roosevelt, having worked for him during the 1912 Bull Moose presidential campaign. Had another sculptor designed the monument, Andrew Jackson’s might have been the fourth face, or three presidents might have been depicted rather than four.

Roosevelt’s apotheosis on Mount Rushmore might have had less to do with his politics, though, than with his firm place as an American character. In the popular Cary Grant film Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), two kindly spinsters poison lonely old men and dispose of their corpses with the help of their crazy brother, Teddy, who believes himself to be Theodore Roosevelt. When not screaming “Charge!” and running up the stairs to San Juan Hill (the second floor of the house), Teddy is happy to bury the murdered men in the basement, convinced they were unfortunate victims of “yellow fever” contracted while digging the Panama Canal.

The film, a dark comedy, helped revive the image of old, loveable “Teddy,” but it also reinforced the erroneous idea that he was a touched-in-the-head cowboy adventurer, an avuncular madman (Mark Twain had once called him “insane”) with delusions of grandeur, a caricature his Wall Street enemies had circulated throughout his presidency to undercut his popularity. In fact, from Hollywood’s treatment of Roosevelt (often as a comic figure, as in Robin Williams’s 2006 portrayal in Night at the Museum), one would hardly guess he was a dignified, sober-minded statesman who commanded the respect of the world. Germany and Japan certainly took him seriously when he threatened them with the might of the U.S. Navy in 1902 and 1907, respectively (in the Venezuelan Crisis and a Japanese war scare), and forced both to back down. So did Britain when TR moved U.S. troops to the Alaskan border during tense negotiations to resolve a boundary dispute between the United States and Canada, gaining everything he demanded.

In the 1950s, when Roosevelt’s presidential papers were fully opened and an eight-volume set of his letters was published, historians began to realize how distorted his reputation had become since his death thirty years before. As a result, a much-needed scholarly reassessment of his presidency cast aside the clownish image, emphasizing for the first time the conservative core of his leadership and revealing a serious leader with a brilliant mind. Walter Lippmann, the renowned political commentator and a founder of the liberal New Republic, described the real TR when he pointed out a simple truth, that “Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative who adopted progressive policies.”¹¹

Changing global conditions helped burnish this positive, accurate view of TR. As America assumed the leadership of the free world in the Cold War struggle against Soviet communism, Roosevelt’s faith in his country’s destiny as a great power seemed far-sighted rather than far-fetched. Despite the international tensions of the 1950s, the American people were optimistic and prosperous and well-disposed to an oracle of national greatness.

The presidency of John F. Kennedy revived the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt. The Massachusetts aristocrat, a war hero and prize-winning author with hawkish views on foreign policy and progressive rhetoric on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE FIRST MODERN PRESIDENT
• PART II: THE MAKING OF A CONSERVATIVE REFORMER
• PART III: TR AS PRESIDENT: DOMESTIC POLICY
• PART IV: TR AS PRESIDENT: FOREIGN POLICY
• PART V: ASSESSING HIS TWO TERMS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• GUIDE TO SOURCES
• NOTES
• INDEX