The Art of Manliness - #414： Theodore Roosevelt, Writer and Reader

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast if you've been

00:00:18.740 following the art of manliness for a while you know we're big fans of theodore roosevelt the

00:00:22.660 man embodied the strenuous life he was a rancher a soldier a hunter a statesman and a practitioner

00:00:28.380 of boxing and judo but what many people don't know about roosevelt was that he was also an

00:00:32.720 accomplished man of letters he wrote over 40 books himself and read thousands of others over the

00:00:37.200 course of his lifetime and as my guest on the show point out tr's literary life was tightly

00:00:41.800 interwoven with his mighty deeds today on the show historians and husband and wife team thomas bailey

00:00:47.020 and katherine joslin discuss their book theodore roosevelt a literary life we discuss how roosevelt

00:00:52.020 began the writing habit as a seven-year-old boy and how he wrote one of america's greatest military

00:00:56.340 histories when he was just 24 years old we then discussed tr's great literary successes including

00:01:01.000 the rough writers the winning of the west and african game trails thomas and katherine share

00:01:04.780 how roosevelt's penchant for action influenced his writing and how his writing inspired him to take

00:01:09.700 action and how john wayne and western movies wouldn't exist without tr's literary work we

00:01:14.900 then get into roosevelt's reading habits including his opinion on compiling list of must-read books

00:01:19.160 you're going to gain new insights about one of america's larger-than-life characters listening

00:01:22.680 the show after it's over check out the show notes at aom.is slash tr writer

00:01:27.440 tom bailey katherine joslin welcome to the show thanks for having us thanks for having

00:01:45.400 you for glad to be here so you two collaborated on a intellectual biography of teddy roosevelt there's

00:01:52.440 been so many biographies written about him but i love i mean you guys wrote this this i mean it's

00:01:57.680 it's a very thorough long biography just about what he wrote and what he read and one of the main

00:02:04.380 takeaways i got from your book is that roosevelt is often overlooked as one of the great american

00:02:10.460 writers like why do you think that has happened to him he's written over four dozen books and on top

00:02:14.840 of that he wrote all these magazine articles why why has he been overlooked amongst american writers

00:02:20.160 i think it's overwhelmed by his political presence because he is that major figure of the 20th century

00:02:28.400 and i think i think we're thrilled and captivated by the sort of myth of him

00:02:33.420 and so that we have it's not that his writing's been abandoned quite but i think it's it's ripe for the

00:02:42.040 picking for people now to go back and read him especially people who admire him as much as your

00:02:47.900 your listeners do okay let's talk about you know when his writing career began like when did roosevelt

00:02:54.000 start showing a penchant for writing was it a very early age oh he started writing as soon as he could

00:03:01.480 pick up a pencil uh and he wrote um he wrote letters he wrote journals i worked on the early kid i i just

00:03:09.980 he's such a wonderful character right from the start and when he would write letters he'd write a different

00:03:16.820 kind of letter to his father a different one to his mother a different one to his siblings he then

00:03:23.460 wrote these journals about what he was doing and he wrote them almost like plays and he'd give his

00:03:29.260 siblings all that were characters in it and you you don't even know quite who he was writing for he was

00:03:35.220 writing at seven and at nine these very early ages and so you know maybe he was writing for us

00:03:41.780 and he and he and he was he was fascinated by reading at the same time the roosevelt children

00:03:49.120 were homeschooled and they were given free reign of the library and free reign of the new york public

00:03:55.780 library and they simply read and read and read they read classic novels they read boy stories they read

00:04:03.200 stories for little girls they read everything and he was completely fascinated by the world of language

00:04:11.200 and he always was till the very pretty much the very day he died he was still writing and reading

00:04:18.160 i just want to add that as i was reading through his um journals and such they were reading things

00:04:25.860 as children like the main read or or john james audubon and certainly longfellow and uh sir walter

00:04:34.000 scott and dickens and such but he was also reading with his sisters books like harriet beecher stowe's

00:04:40.480 little pussy willow where she talks about how we all want to grow up to be good girls and louisa may

00:04:46.440 alcott's an old-fashioned girl so he he grew up sort of without prejudice about writing he he read

00:04:53.060 anything he could get his hands on but always did all his life i'm curious did do you think his reading as

00:05:00.640 a young child influenced his i don't know his romantic view towards life later on that you we would see in

00:05:08.060 his speeches about you know he was a jingoist he was all about he glamorized war he was all about the

00:05:13.300 outdoors did his reading as a child influence that well i think it probably did he loved the novels of

00:05:20.520 sir walter scott which are pretty intensely romantic and his favorite boy don't forget was named quentin

00:05:27.020 for scott's novel quentin durwood right which is one of his most romantic and intensely romantic

00:05:35.940 medieval novels that was written in the middle of of scott's career he he was he adored that novel

00:05:43.440 and he adored quentin so yeah i suppose that his intense romanticism partly grows out of his reading

00:05:50.800 but it also grows out of his nationalism and it grows out of his intense love of the outdoors

00:05:57.400 and as a child tom going back to this you know your interest in nature writing like as a child he

00:06:03.200 started he thought of himself as a natural historian and he was he thought he was doing good work like

00:06:09.520 he wrote about birds and animals in his area like his his his career as a naturalist began as an

00:06:16.220 eight-year-old or nine-year-old that's right and i i did the early kids so i could jump in here

00:06:21.900 so uh when he meant to be an ornithologist and he was nearsighted and the family didn't know it until

00:06:28.700 he was 14 so he would go out and listen to birdsong and there are these wonderful descriptions where

00:06:34.720 he's not very musical but he tries to get the music right and then he he looks he spends a lot of

00:06:40.820 time he's supposed to be a kind of manic kid but he spends hours just observing and then

00:06:45.940 writing intricate notes about the bird and of course then he'd kill the bird and slit it open and

00:06:51.040 and he'd measure everything but he meant to be a scientist and when he went to harvard he had hoped

00:06:56.900 to do that but it it didn't turn out that way no he he found when he got to harvard that under the

00:07:04.920 influence of louis agassiz the science at at harvard had become science of the laboratory and he wanted to

00:07:12.420 do science out in the woods he when he was a kid he was extraordinarily patient along with his

00:07:22.680 hyperactivity of course and his sketches of the mice and the birds and the things that he saw in the

00:07:30.260 natural world are really touching and their uh kind of emotional intensity and their skill he was quite a

00:07:37.820 wonderful sketcher right pretty much we could say this for sure about roosevelt in all of his guises

00:07:45.960 whatever he turned his hand to he did very well right and he turned his head to an awful lot of

00:07:52.240 things not just writing and drawing and reading but all kinds of other things as well as you and your

00:08:00.140 listeners well know sure i'm curious is there some place people can go online to like see his journals

00:08:05.260 from when he was seven or nine years old well what's interesting about working with uh a figure

00:08:11.980 like theodore roosevelt is everybody wants to read him when we started to work we were uh we were

00:08:17.180 working at harvard and we were working with things that weren't online but now there's a theodore

00:08:22.020 roosevelt center they're looking to put all of this stuff that we were looking at in a privileged way

00:08:27.480 is now in a democratic way available to to your listeners that's right and so you can pretty much

00:08:34.520 call up all of this or not everything but the childhood material is available it's available

00:08:41.000 at harvard too but also at this dickinson state site right well it's not all digitalized yet because

00:08:50.660 there's way too much to digitalize very fast right but it's coming online gradually and it's coming

00:08:57.500 online steadily and it's a fully funded research program and within probably a decade all of his

00:09:06.560 writings will all of them the letters the journals the articles everything will be available online and

00:09:15.560 it will be you know it'll be a wonderful national treasure so as a child roosevelt started writing

00:09:22.120 journals letters sort of rudimentary scientific papers about natural history or the environment

00:09:28.520 what was roosevelt's first big breakthrough as a professional writer when did that happen

00:09:35.220 the breakthrough the really breakthrough book is the rough riders and that comes later

00:09:40.500 but after he left college he was studying for law and he was working on two pieces of writing

00:09:47.200 one of the hunting story called sow sow southerly that's the name of the ducks that he was hunting

00:09:52.280 and they very nearly died in the hunt and that if he had developed that part of himself that more

00:09:58.320 creative part he probably would be a very different writer today but you can see elements of that

00:10:03.600 writing as you move through his career but then he got a hold of this naval war of 1812 and he wanted

00:10:10.720 to be an historian and remember that after he's president of the united states he's president of the

00:10:16.180 american historical association so he wanted to be known as an historian so he worked on this naval war

00:10:22.980 which was really about the battle between the united states and britain in the great lakes and then they

00:10:29.260 wind up in plattsburgh in this little arena little lake champlain and they just blow the guts out of each

00:10:37.480 other and so he tells that story that's still an interesting story in fact the british liked it so well

00:10:44.000 that they wanted their own story and they wanted him to write the chapters about the great lakes so it's

00:10:50.440 still an interesting it's still an interesting book to read it was well reviewed it was accepted

00:10:57.280 people the reviewers of the new york times and like newspapers were kind of astonished that this young

00:11:04.660 man he was 22 years old at the time wow had written such a had written such a scholarly mature

00:11:12.240 thoroughly researched book right but well there's there's theodore roosevelt for you right the reason

00:11:21.620 he wrote that book is because as a boy he had traveled with his daddy because they had real life

00:11:27.460 experiences and that's what kids need to have but he went to plattsburgh once and somebody gave him a

00:11:33.120 cannonball from that battle in lake champlain and and it just uh sparked his excitement about this

00:11:41.580 military adventure and he his his mother's his mother was from the south and lived on a plantation

00:11:48.320 and her brothers were confederate heroes naval heroes in the civil war and he then visited them they were

00:11:57.020 of course living in after the war they lived in liverpool in england and he would visit them and talk to

00:12:03.020 them about the boats he was just fascinated whatever he picked up fascinated him but all of that

00:12:08.460 stuff was poured into this book which started his career as a historian i'm curious throughout all of his

00:12:15.160 work and you know even beginning with the war the naval battles of the war of 1812 like what was

00:12:20.240 roosevelt's guiding ethos when it came to writing like did he have like a an ethic or an aim he was

00:12:27.460 shooting for with his writing yeah yeah he meant to tell the truth mainly he told the truth and he

00:12:37.500 wanted the narrative of american history and american life to be presented as vividly as it could be

00:12:47.700 presented right and he wanted that in politics and he wanted that in art and he wanted that in all public

00:12:55.040 life and one of the persons who was maybe most fascinated by him and in that notion of the

00:13:04.300 national ethos was walt whitman uh who who said you know he's got a little bit of the dude but he

00:13:12.920 tells it like it is it's good great yeah i like i like that stuff by roosevelt you know yeah that was

00:13:21.260 another thing i thought was really fascinating about this time period oh you know was this you

00:13:24.900 know sense of nationalism not just politically but like culturally like like roosevelt and even

00:13:30.240 whitman and you know you see with thoreau and emerson they they were really like they were very

00:13:35.280 self-conscious about we're trying to create american literature american art that rivals european

00:13:43.480 literature or european art like they had a chip on their shoulder that's right there is a kind of

00:13:48.340 national defense that i should write about that but what he thought and he wrote about what the

00:13:53.480 national literature should look like he he wrote an essay like that and he what he said about american

00:13:59.040 writing is it ought to smack of the soil edith wharton's novel her first novel is a historical novel

00:14:05.260 about italy he wrote to her and said no you know write about new york we want to write we want to

00:14:11.300 create our own writers here and he was part of the american academy of arts and letters which is part of

00:14:18.240 that whole movement as you say to sort of give ourselves a national art and a national voice

00:14:24.200 and he was voted into that group that very intimate group in the second round in 1905 along with henry

00:14:32.700 james and henry adams and he and the people who voted for him were people like mark twain and they meant

00:14:39.440 they really meant to build he said you know you can study literatures and ideas from other places he

00:14:44.820 sounds like emerson in this way but that doesn't mean that we have ideas here so we he was full

00:14:51.620 throated in his notion that we should have a national literature right and he wanted to see himself he

00:14:57.840 wanted to define himself kind of as an american american that's right right i mean he really he really

00:15:03.960 was intent on the national voice and the national experience in another sort of ethic that you you

00:15:11.240 highlight throughout the book i love this line i'm going to read it here it's from his autobiography

00:15:14.860 about you know his writing he said i have always had a horror of words that are not translated into

00:15:20.440 deeds of speech that does not result in action in other words i believe in realizable ideals and in

00:15:26.380 realizing them in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing that that's that's really at

00:15:31.300 the heart of what he thinks about language i think that's true and that's in american ideals that first

00:15:37.860 book of essays the second book of essays that he writes when he's fairly young and even later in

00:15:43.620 his life he says go back and read that those are the words that matter to me and that's interesting how

00:15:49.640 that goes both ways you know you can take language and turn it into action but then you can take action

00:15:57.380 after you've taken the action and go back into language with it and it becomes his books right and then his

00:16:05.120 books become the source for law which is a different kind of language and a different kind of bringing

00:16:11.880 action into language which then shapes subsequent action so i mean he he sees this as a kind of ongoing

00:16:22.860 continuum right that it moves back and forth and then you read and you get new ideas and you consult with

00:16:30.340 writers you consult with john burroughs you consult with john muir and you come up with the idea for

00:16:38.540 yellowstone park and josemite park and the idea of the national preservation and conservation of

00:16:50.540 of land right but that starts in language and it starts in idea and then it comes back into law

00:16:59.520 and then you make it real it's he's a he's always not content just to think about things but to do

00:17:07.480 things and i'm sure we're going to i'm sure we're going to get to the man in the arena

00:17:12.420 for sure but i mean it sounds like i mean i was going to say like you know he did all these

00:17:20.360 you know larger than life things big hunts he fought in cuba so i was reading it's like i wonder if

00:17:25.500 like he did those things so he could have something to write about well that's an interesting question

00:17:30.940 no i don't think he got up in the morning and thought well i'll go out on a hunt because i can

00:17:35.240 write about it later i think that's the whole point is that that action and writing come together

00:17:41.300 he went on the hunt well those first hunts he went to in dakota was because he came home one day and

00:17:47.440 his wife and his mother on a valentine's day died of separate things and utterly by surprise and he

00:17:54.360 was he had to restore himself and he went to his ranch in dakota and started killing animals and

00:18:01.860 trying to deal i think with the specter of death and those and from that he started to write and he

00:18:08.980 said well you know i'll have plenty of time writing out here and it was a way of sort of mending

00:18:13.800 himself and so there's this relationship always between i don't think he meant to go out there to

00:18:22.540 write no but once he got there he took he took the pen with him and the pad and he did what he

00:18:28.540 always did as a child he continued to write about the adventure and then of course he got better and

00:18:34.140 better at that so that by the time he went to cuba he could come back in that very militaristic and

00:18:39.960 full-throated way and become a hero and so overwhelm people that they make him the governor of new

00:18:46.280 york and go ahead well and by the time he goes to africa and then later to brazil he's invented for

00:18:55.640 himself a much more daring kind of literary form which is to think to write about it as it's happening

00:19:03.880 he'd go out and hunt all day long or work or explore all day long and when everybody else came

00:19:11.440 home exhausted at night he'd set up his desk and his lamp and he'd write about what happened that day

00:19:18.940 and send it to the publisher without really any editing and the publisher would strike it into

00:19:25.480 short stories and publish them in scripters both both books were published as in scripters magazine

00:19:32.720 and then the chapters were collected into a book and that's a very risky kind of uh literary form

00:19:40.140 almost all writers like to look over what they've written before they publish it yeah but not when

00:19:45.720 you're as confident as roosevelt you're just like yes well that idea of being confident and confident

00:19:51.320 in the first draft it probably comes from the fact that you know he started writing as a child and he

00:19:57.240 was always comfortable in language but you can look at manuscripts they're wonderful

00:20:02.480 to look at he he would come in and he he had pretty much the whole story in his in his head and he

00:20:09.620 would run down the page very quickly and then he'd go back and look at it and if he had anything else

00:20:16.780 there's anything he wanted to do sometimes he would improve on a verb or something but then he would do

00:20:21.900 these balloons where he'd put more and more information in so he always added to what he had to say

00:20:27.820 um but there is a confidence in a writer that maybe you get from having written every day

00:20:34.400 i think there's no doubt about that you know he's he is sure of his own chops right right i don't think

00:20:41.280 he was he was sure of his own chops in all of his aspects of his life you know he i don't think he ever

00:20:48.180 thought he was wrong once ever no yeah that's true i mean he was he was self-assured and self-assertive

00:20:56.000 in a way that really smacks of the 19th century i don't think males in the 21st century get to have

00:21:04.140 that sense of assurance anymore right no definitely i'm curious the way you know

00:21:11.060 the way he approached writing sort of this first person account sort of mixing observation

00:21:17.640 in history did did roosevelt in a way fashion a new form of writing that influenced how other

00:21:24.940 americans wrote like did he have an influence on the literary scene is that's what i'm asking well

00:21:29.060 he knew writers of course and worked with writers all the time but one of the things the contributions

00:21:34.220 i think you could talk about he meant to write a kind of epic of the west and so he and he wanted to

00:21:40.000 do something where he put faunal nature together with hunting and and he wanted to um tell the story

00:21:46.060 of what was going on in the west and his friend a really close friend was owen wister who wrote the

00:21:52.440 virginian and another was frederick remington and if you put frederick remington's uh sculptures

00:21:58.700 together with owen wister's novel together with those stories about faunal nature and hunting you

00:22:06.520 would you you could say that in that bundle you really have the notion of how we talk about the

00:22:11.720 west the western comes out i think he's influential in that way yeah and and you know what you end up

00:22:20.060 with with louis lamore is a kind of washed out western vision you know that uh popularized and really

00:22:27.620 over romantic roosevelt would have been uh bemused probably amused by you know the contemporary

00:22:36.480 western novel the louis lamore kind of thing but no he was at the heart of the invention of the west

00:22:43.100 our our concept of the west including the movies i think probably wow so without roosevelt we wouldn't

00:22:50.000 have john wayne maybe you know what you're right my mother would like that line

00:22:56.760 uh yeah i'm curious what he would think of you know like my favorite western novel is lonesome

00:23:03.780 i think he and larry mcmurtry would have hit it off almost instantly don't you yeah yeah and that

00:23:10.140 was one of roosevelt's most endearing habits he'd get into a book and he'd say i like this book and

00:23:17.000 i like this author and he'd sit down and he'd write him and he'd invite him to dinner and then he'd

00:23:22.140 quarter him and they would just talk right yeah he'd have had larry mcmurtry to the white house over

00:23:27.920 well let's talk we've talked a lot about his his writing life well before we move on to his reading

00:23:34.320 life what was roosevelt's most popular book and and i mean that's how he a lot of people don't

00:23:40.000 realize is that's how he made his living like that's how he supported his family even though

00:23:43.440 he came from wealth he lost a lot of it in the dakotas on the ranch so he had to write to feed his

00:23:49.840 family and give him a comfortable life that's right and remember he's a writer before he's a politician

00:23:54.520 and he's a writer after he's a politician and it is his uh it is his sort of business to be a writer

00:24:01.180 and do we do we know like how much he made as a writer and it's really tricky to know his finances

00:24:07.840 were hidden almost hidden yeah he wasn't good with money he was good negotiating contract up front

00:24:16.420 but he turned all the money over to edith she was a victorian lady and you can see

00:24:23.840 at sagamore hill you can see the budgets that she kept and they're all budgets of expenses and not

00:24:33.300 budgets of income so she kept that hidden and he was he was quiet about it too apparently and this is

00:24:42.820 hard to get at and you kind of have to get at it indirectly and by implication rather than explicitly

00:24:49.800 the sales of rough riders were so extensive and so successful that it re-established him as a

00:25:01.540 and the roosevelt family as a wealthy family it was estimated in one article that i found in the

00:25:09.040 in the washington post from 1901 that he had made a four hundred thousand dollars off of

00:25:17.720 the rough riders which in 1901 was just a huge sum of money right so he restored his fortune and he

00:25:28.340 always was scrupulous about making money he wanted to be paid for his work uh he wrote three books

00:25:36.660 while he was governor of new york he said once i get this office in the groove i'll give you

00:25:41.060 the books he said to his editors but they were living off the money that he was making as a writer

00:25:46.860 at that time so rose so rough riders his his story of his you know charging san juan hill in cuba that

00:25:53.120 was his most popular book yeah very popular yeah that was still for sure and still is it's fun to read

00:26:00.420 no yeah and then after that i mean i guess it was what would be like the second one would it be his

00:26:04.800 african hunting book or the story about the river of doubt no it was the african hunting book the story

00:26:12.700 of the of his you know the travels through the brazilian wilderness didn't sell nearly as it

00:26:19.520 wasn't disappointing exactly but it didn't sell as much as he had hoped right because he was out of

00:26:25.760 the public site and he had sort of disappointed people by you know running on the on the bull on

00:26:35.020 the bull bull's ticket right and while the sales were robust they weren't anything like the sales of

00:26:42.660 the african book so the two best sellers would have been yes uh the rough riders and travels through

00:26:50.220 africa but in terms of the retrieval work that we're interested in doing i think going back in

00:26:55.720 reading those uh ranch stories ranch life and the hunting trail is rather wonderful from 1888 or

00:27:03.420 um if you wanted to know about his politics and really understand him he would say you should read

00:27:09.320 american ideals which comes in 1897 a collection of essays and speeches and then of course the rough

00:27:17.180 riders but i think many people read his autobiography and we would say that the place to start in the

00:27:24.900 autobiography because he was so he was so i went sort of crabby by that time it was after he had lost

00:27:31.000 at bull uh at the bull moose and as he was uh angry about the resistance of americans to be involved in

00:27:37.780 world war one but in his autobiography there's a chapter called indoors and outdoors which is just

00:27:43.120 marvelous to read and of course we're literate we're literature people and there's a he has a book

00:27:50.040 called history as literature it's that essay about history as literature that i think is also quite

00:27:55.760 good and then tom you would add what uh you think through the brazilian wilderness right i think maybe

00:28:02.400 through the brazilian wilderness is the is the uh is a compelling read and then when he was an old man

00:28:09.760 in 1916 he published one last kind of nature book book of essays a kind of gathering of of writing that he

00:28:18.440 had done before and he had done some later and he it's called it has a really wonderful title it's

00:28:26.620 called a book lover's holiday in the open 1916 and his introduction to that collection of essays

00:28:34.980 is one of his really touching late pieces of writing right he even that's very much worth going back to

00:28:43.700 he even goes back and judges himself as a young man and trying to be a scientist and such and he

00:28:50.340 sort of gives him a drubbing for not being any better than he was it's a strange thing of the old

00:28:56.180 man passing judgment on the young man wonderful so we've talked a lot about his writing life but

00:29:01.800 besides being just a prolific writer roosevelt was as you said even as a child a voracious reader

00:29:07.820 do we know how many books roosevelt read in a given week and did he have any preferences on what he read

00:29:13.880 well first of all no preferences he would read anything and one of the charming things about

00:29:21.620 him when he was in the white house was that he used the library the librarian of the library of

00:29:27.500 congress as his personal librarian and he would write him a letter and he'd say send me 10 books on

00:29:33.600 hungarian history and i want to know something about the irish celtic myths and i want to know

00:29:40.080 about the ring of the nimble luga i want to know this i want to know that send me a stack of books

00:29:47.260 the guy would send him a stack of books he'd read him he'd send him back and say send me another

00:29:51.740 right he read by some estimates 300 books a year what's interesting i think about roosevelt's reading

00:30:00.100 is it's part of the myth of roosevelt that he always read fast he certainly didn't want to be

00:30:05.320 disturbed when he was reading but he read where we discovered reading more closely in his letters and

00:30:11.660 such he read at different speeds so he read something slowly and savored them he would sit with his wife

00:30:18.520 in the evening and they'd read aloud from books that they liked maybe from vanity fair or something

00:30:24.860 like that backly and they'd read just the they'd maybe just read the chapters that they liked or

00:30:30.220 just the conversations the way you might listen to music where you listen to parts of it and things

00:30:35.020 that you you enjoy he liked poets but he he read certain poems and over and over again so that his

00:30:42.260 reading was much more various and much more like a you know the lives we all lead i suppose in that

00:30:50.020 there wasn't any kind of standard way to talk about him as a reader and and he wasn't picky at all

00:30:56.660 no he he he he he loved certain classical writers he loved greek he loved greek writers he didn't much

00:31:06.640 like shakespeare no he he didn't like hamlet he thought that hamlet was a kind of a disgusting

00:31:13.500 character well and that makes sense doesn't it right and he used to joke that when he fit in the

00:31:20.000 jane austen he thought he had done something good for his soul well another thing that impressed me

00:31:24.860 about him is like he like read magazines that were you know sometimes people like trashy magazines of

00:31:30.000 the time and i like how i i loved how you described how you read them like he would hold them and he

00:31:34.280 just tear the pages out and throw them on the floor when he was done reading it so if he was waiting

00:31:38.640 for the train this is what people say about him he'd just go up to the magazine rack and he didn't look

00:31:44.720 through to see which ones he was going to do and always read the same thing he bought all of

00:31:48.720 them and then he'd sit there while he was waiting and he was bored he would tear the pages out of

00:31:53.760 newspapers too because those were ephemeral if your writing was in a newspaper or a magazine it

00:31:58.760 wasn't meant to last and so you'd see those the pages sort of underneath his feet when he got done

00:32:05.140 but the reason he wanted his articles to go from magazines to books is that books are then treated in

00:32:11.540 entirely different way and so that that's where the permanence in writing comes but he'd get really

00:32:17.660 mad and he'd write to them he was irritated with a gibson girl because what were women doing

00:32:23.500 wanting to ride bicycles and not have babies he thought they should have five babies i mean he'd get

00:32:29.540 really concerned about so all the aspects of life and going back to this idea that he had no preferences

00:32:37.540 about reading i think he's a few times in his career people would ask him like what's you know give

00:32:42.700 us a reading list right and he would basically said just read what you want like i don't have any

00:32:47.540 yeah right yeah and and the president of harvard charles elliott norton had his five-foot bookshelf

00:32:54.460 right right with with the classics and whatnot that lined up and if you read these you'd be a well-educated

00:33:02.240 fan and somebody asked roosevelt about that and man did he tee off on that one

00:33:07.400 he said that's a ridiculous idea you can't possibly prescribe to anybody how you read because

00:33:14.580 reading is contingent you start here and then you think oh that's an interesting time in history i

00:33:20.540 want to read more and you go there and then you branch off into the poetry and then you see what

00:33:26.640 was happening in spain at the same time and then maybe you skip over to hungary and try to find that

00:33:32.040 out to you know you just read you know the idea of formula that you could have an education by

00:33:38.820 formula edith wharton found that you know but just an appalling idea as well but what an education is

00:33:47.040 doesn't come in a course and it doesn't come in a course pack and it doesn't come in a reading list

00:33:52.840 and education comes over the course of your life that you travel and talk with people and you read

00:34:00.700 and you write and you're engaged with living that that's what education is and that's certainly what

00:34:07.820 education was to theodore roosevelt you know who was an enormously well-educated man conversing he could

00:34:16.000 speak in spanish he could speak in french he he didn't think his french was very good he didn't have

00:34:22.020 very good he didn't have very good greek but he had pretty good latin he could speak german right

00:34:28.840 you know i mean he was he was broadly and deeply educated i'm curious how did roosevelt's reading

00:34:35.820 influence his thinking about let's say public policy did that have an influence okay so um so when he's

00:34:42.960 reading and this goes back to that whole idea of words into action and actions into deeds and such

00:34:48.700 but when he was police commissioner in new york he met uh jacob reese who had written how the other

00:34:54.860 half lives and then they traveled through the slums to see what was going on and uh then from that

00:35:01.660 reading and from knowing jacob reese he later thought of him they thought of each other as almost family

00:35:07.880 they so adored each other uh but then when he became governor of new york he knew about the child

00:35:14.680 labor about the safety of women in the workplace the safety of the workplace the limited hours of

00:35:20.400 work uh he was even interested well he got interested in sort of purity and foods he thought

00:35:26.580 you shouldn't say something on a label that wasn't in a food and then later when he was president

00:35:31.700 and upton sinclair had written the jungle he worked with the publisher everybody was trying to get that

00:35:39.080 sort of that text into line because there were so many outrageous things that the president thought

00:35:44.740 was that were in the book but then he worked to pass the pure food and drug act so that he really

00:35:52.960 when he had these sort of say more imaginative pieces that he was reading he could see how the

00:35:59.620 social betterment that could come from it and then he did work in fact to turn those kinds of ideas into law

00:36:06.540 his ideas about government came from his fellow politicians more than they came from his reading

00:36:15.040 right because he had the ideas but he did consult with his political advisors and his political friends

00:36:23.680 and he'd say i'm going to give this speech and i'm going to give it in potawatomi kansas and i want you to

00:36:30.560 go through osawatomi osawatomi i'm sorry those are the indians we've got here yeah i'm going to give

00:36:41.340 this please you know take this part of the speech and rewrite it and put the stuff in there put the

00:36:47.400 ideas in you think that i'm leaving out or prove them right and then give it back to me and then he

00:36:53.020 would take this document and he would very carefully rewrite it and then hand it over to his his secretary

00:37:01.040 and she would he whoever it was would type it up right and then he would read it and he pretty much

00:37:08.520 stuck to his texts when he was giving a speech the osawatomi speech it can be read it's a wonderful speech

00:37:16.800 by the time he collected these ideas together and he ran in the bull moose as the bull moose candidate

00:37:23.240 and the progressive candidate third party in 1912 he had this packet uh speech this very long speech

00:37:31.760 that he had all folded up in his pocket and people probably know the story but his glasses case

00:37:36.780 was also in the pocket so that when he was shot by a would-be assassin in milwaukee the bullet lodged in

00:37:43.740 his chest but it didn't kill him and it could be that that long speech that it may in fact have

00:37:48.740 saved his life and that's one of the primary of course your your listeners know this but it's worth

00:37:54.100 repeating that speech in milwaukee is one of the primary examples of manliness on dr's card right i mean

00:38:02.160 there there was the speech he had folded it he got up on the podium and he read it for 45 minutes it was

00:38:09.620 going to last another 45 but he was fainting he was fighting for loss of blood and they took him

00:38:16.120 and they put him in the hospital very much against his will his wife was so angry oh he was but he

00:38:24.500 checked his mouth to see if there was blood there and he thought if there was blood there i'll die right

00:38:28.540 here and he didn't mind dying in a kind of battle that was heroic for him but when he didn't see the

00:38:35.060 blood he decided he'd go and give the speech and it was perfect for him he just he loved the crowd

00:38:39.880 and here he was with a bullet in his chest right no it's awesome it is awesome and you know what

00:38:46.180 you know it's like with so many things with roosevelt there's another side to that which is

00:38:51.480 virtually foolhardy right that he didn't go to take himself right straight to the doctor

00:38:58.400 right and get you know and get plugged up or something right but you know if he had done

00:39:05.440 that he wouldn't be nearly as interesting a human being to us as he is and even as he was dying in

00:39:12.200 1919 he was planning to run for president in 1920 so yeah he never he never stopped he was always

00:39:18.320 trying to turn words into action no no he never stopped that's you know and that's one of the most

00:39:23.740 compelling and astounding things about him is his absolute insistence on plunging into the future

00:39:31.320 you know i mean he's he just simply goes ahead and he goes ahead at high speed he's it's it's a

00:39:39.220 remarkable thing about him as you read his life and think about it you know how how profoundly

00:39:46.260 energetic he was and how profoundly committed to the future of the country and of himself and of his

00:39:54.580 family you know it doesn't matter where you are in the political spectrum uh i read this study

00:40:02.380 recently that he's the he's considered the number four president in uh in quality and in importance

00:40:09.560 if you're a republican if you're a democrat or if you're an independent across the across the way

00:40:16.240 right so he kind of embodied that sort of ideal of america that i think a lot of people have

00:40:22.620 energetic forward-thinking bold adventurous etc and i think he's a figure that i say he's ripe for

00:40:30.640 retrieval right now because i i think we live in a world where we want to be no matter who we are we

00:40:37.400 want to find this this kind of model in history uh what we have for him and we don't have for other

00:40:43.600 presidents is we have what we count it as four dozen books but 42 that he wrote on his own

00:40:50.100 and we can go back and uh and have this uh much closer relationship with him through language

00:40:55.680 well this has been a great conversation i'm curious where can be is there some place people go to learn

00:41:00.900 more about your work in the book or should they just go to amazon or their local bookstore to go pick

00:41:04.960 up a copy well what we are gonna make the suggestion that they go to their local library

00:41:10.640 and ask them to and ask them to order the book if they've not done it and we believe very much in

00:41:17.560 the local bookstore we just had a book launch at a bookstore in kalamazoo and i think that bookstores

00:41:23.680 are back in fashion again and we are at barnes and noble also and uh of course at amazon and uh

00:41:32.020 we're not hard to find you can google us you can google us and we pop right up right but if you

00:41:38.380 want if you know if some if people are interested in buying the book we we really support our you

00:41:44.040 know the the burgeoning market at local bookstores right which is very exciting i'm sure you know it

00:41:50.980 is also too right no yeah one just opened up magic city books terrific and the beauty of going to the

00:41:58.140 local place the library and the bookstore of courses that you can get our book and then you

00:42:02.800 can look around and you can find so many other things that interest you right what's great about

00:42:07.520 our bookstore it was started by the like non-profit reading foundation here in tulsa book smart tulsa

00:42:13.560 which is very roosevelt you know like roosevelt would approve right yeah yeah yeah that's cool

00:42:19.380 absolutely yeah all right well tom catherine this has been a great conversation thank you so much

00:42:24.400 your time a wonderful conversation thank you brett we've enjoyed it so much this is wonderful thank

00:42:30.300 you my guests today were thomas bailey and catherine joslin they're the authors of the book theodore

00:42:34.280 roosevelt a literary life it's available on amazon.com or as they recommended go check out your public

00:42:38.780 library recommend they pick it up or check out your local bookstore also you can find out our show

00:42:42.620 notes at aom.is tr writer where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic

00:42:47.420 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:43:03.560 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you're interested

00:43:07.460 in living tr strenuous life or at least something like it check out our program the strenuous life

00:43:12.140 it's at strenuouslife.co you can sign up for updates when we open up enrollment it's pretty cool

00:43:16.760 we basically try to help you take action on things we've been writing about in the art of manliness

00:43:21.160 for the past 10 years so go check it out strenuouslife.co as always thank you for your

00:43:25.500 continued support until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#414： Theodore Roosevelt, Writer and Reader

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