Theodore Rex--The World Knows His Name

Theodore Roosevelt felt that he deserved the presidency. He was a man of vision who had great plans for the United States, but he ended up getting roped in as William McKinley’s vice-presidential candidate. Providence intervened when an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley, fatally wounding him. Edmund Morris opens Theodore Rex with an account of Roosevelt’s hasty train ride from Maine to Washington D.C . The ride, which spanned much of the northeastern United States, provided Morris with the opportunity to give an overview of the United States in the early 20th century. The reoccurring themes as Roosevelt passed through Pennsylvania’s coal country were the still relevant issues of trusts and labor.

Morris vividly characterizes all the principle characters that would become instrumental in Roosevelt’s administration, such as Elihu Root, the Secretary of War. Even somewhat more peripheral characters like J. Pierpont Morgan, the Bill Gates of 1900, with his “carbuncled nose,” receive interesting introductions. The style almost seems to pitch its own movies or documentaries. Theodore Rex is not a strict autobiography, as it only really deals with the Presidential life of Roosevelt. Both the events of historical importance and the brief glimpses into Roosevelt’s private life are strung together as a series of anecdotes. 1900 was not all stuffy shirts and top hats. Despite the seriousness of their jobs, Roosevelt and his cabinet frequently joked with one another. The book made me laugh out loud much more than I expected.

Roosevelt began pursuing the trusts, which were increasingly exploiting labor in order to make more money. The fact that Roosevelt was against trusts at all is pretty interesting, considering he was a Republican. The more conservative Republicans of Congress, such as Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon, believed the trusts should not be regulated at all. Regulation became an issue of morality for Roosevelt because the people in charge were prospering and refused to allow their employees to share in that prosperity. The “trust barons” were evil to Roosevelt. He started out fairly conservative, but numerous controversies during his presidency, such as the anthracite coal shortage during the winter of 1902 and Upton Sinclair’s publication of The Jungle moderated his views. The Jungle brought horror tales from the bowels of the Chicago meat industry, which also was a trust. Even the tale of a woman giving birth on the job and accidentally turning her baby into sausages failed to move the more conservative senators. Roosevelt was a moralist and such things happening in the country he fought for as a Rough Rider were unacceptable.

Interestingly, the trusts now occupy a more privileged space in the cultural memory of the United States. Pat Buchanan recently wrote a column entitled “Enron and the decline of capitalism” wherein he writes, “Growing up in the '40s and '50s, schoolchildren were taught about the 'Robber Barons,' those 19th century titans of steel, oil, banking and rail: Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, E. H. Harriman, James J. Hill and J. Pierpont Morgan. But for all their ruthlessness, all their greed, these men left America the greatest industrial, technological and financial power the world had ever seen. They built a nation.“ Compared to the chiefs of Enron who “game” the economy in our present era of “casino capitalism,” the “Robber Barons” occupy as important a place as the policy makers of the era, to Buchanan. Teddy Roosevelt would disagree.

Yet Roosevelt only really pursued issues if the public at large was interested in them. African-Americans were frequently the victims of lynching and the public had no real interest in ensuring that blacks received fair treatment under the law. Early in his administration, Roosevelt invited black leader Booker T. Washington to the White House, mostly to solidify black support for himself, and the public outcry of the visit undoubtedly caused Roosevelt to think twice about making any progress on the issue of race. Whites always articulated their racism as the danger of miscegenation. People speculated on Washington’s knee touching the knee of Roosevelt’s daughter Alice underneath the dinner table. Usually, rumors about an increase in the number of black men raping white women precipitated a lynching. Roosevelt always reiterated the barbarity of lynching, probably mostly due to his devotion to law. He was a white supremacist, at least in the sense that he believed that white men were superior to black men. He’s quoted as saying that black men were “thousands” of years behind white people.

Despite his racism, Roosevelt tried to improve the condition of the United States in several ways. Probably the greatest controversy he resolved during his first term as President was the Panama Canal. At the time when Roosevelt began working on it, the location for the canal had not been decided. The two possible routes were through Nicaragua and Panama. Roosevelt initially favored Nicaragua partly because of Panama’s political unrest. Panama was part of Colombia, which was constantly renegotiating the terms of the treaty that would permit the transfer of the canal project from France. Eventually, due to numerous circumstances too many and too involved to summarize here, the Panama Canal, which still provides passage to ships from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, began construction during the administration of Roosevelt.

The reason Morris and most of Teddy’s contemporary’s criticized him was for his hastiness and lack of decorum. These two things hardly seem worth criticizing given that they resulted from the strength of his convictions. At times he was quite an egoist, which caused him to injure people close to him in order to help his own political well-being. Because of the pettiness of political life, many of the more conservative Republicans grew to hate him. But the public loved him. As Roosevelt rode from town to town on a train during a speaking tour, he noticed that the crowds of people standing by the tracks always yelled “Teddy” rather than “Theodore.” Despite Roosevelt clearly stating that he would not seek the Republican nomination for the campaign of 1908, crowds of people brandishing teddy bears disrupted William Howard Taft’s day of glory at the Republican National Convention with chants of “Four more years!”

Like all human beings Teddy Roosevelt was flawed. But he was an incredibly interesting person. I was surprised to learn that Roosevelt made the conservation of natural resources a major priority. He read voraciously and penned many books, several of them on hunting or wildlife. Thankfully, Morris explains the happy coincidences that led up to the teddy bear being named after Roosevelt. Overall, I enjoyed the book very much. I now know more about the political state of the United States in the early 1900s than I ever thought I would know. Each time I picked up the book, I looked forward to learning more, even though I had no initial interest in Roosevelt.

Do not let the length of the book discourage you from reading it. The actual stuff you want to read is about 555 pages. Morris includes many pages of "footnotes." Unfortunately, there is no real convenient way of jumping from the text to the "footnote." I can only imagine historians or literature people having an interest in checking out Morris's sources, though.