Theodore Roosevelt, The Last Romantic
Episode Stats
Summary
Bill explains how Teddy Roosevelt was one of the last bearers of the romantic spirit in America, where his romanticism came from, and how that spirit motivated him to push and challenge himself through boyhood until death, in which case we can best understand him.
Transcript
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I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Romanticism, not in terms of courtships and bouquets of roses, but as a philosophical
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approach to life which blossomed in the 19th century, embodies many tenets, including nostalgia
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for the past, a heroic view of the world, a firm sense of right and wrong, and the idea
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that an individual can shape his own destiny as well as have an outsized impact on the
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world. It is through this lens of romanticism, my guest says, that we can best understand
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one of the most memorable, influential, and legendary figures in American history, Theodore
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Roosevelt. His name is H.W. Brands, and he's a professor of history and the author of numerous
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books and biographies, including T.R., The Last Romantic. Today on the show, Bill explains
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how Teddy Roosevelt was one of the last bearers of the romantic spirit in America, where his
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romanticism came from, and how that spirit motivated him to push and challenge himself
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through boyhood till death, led him to both egoistic excesses and worthy epic deeds, and
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influenced everything from his familial relationships, to his time as president, to his second and
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third acts in life. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Roosevelt
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So, you are a professor of history at the University of Texas, and you've also written
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several biographies, and the one we're going to be talking about today is T.R., The Last
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Romantic. There's been a lot of biographies written about Theodore Roosevelt, but what makes
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yours unique, and the reason I really liked it, was you make this argument that to understand
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T.R., or one of the ways you can understand T.R. is to understand that he was a romantic.
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Now, for those who aren't familiar with that term, beyond the association of, you know,
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roses and being in love and Romeo and Juliet, how would you describe a romantic worldview?
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Well, certainly the way I use it in the book, and as I apply it to Theodore Roosevelt, it implies
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a heroic view of the world that a person, in his case, Theodore Roosevelt, can have a great and positive
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impact on things, that there is right and wrong in the world. The romantic view also gravitates
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toward, backward toward a golden age, thinking that there was a time when things were better,
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and trying to hold on to some of that. But it emphasizes the individual. In the case, and in the
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time of Theodore Roosevelt, a competing theory, a competing worldview was that espoused by the Marxists,
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who said that things, that history unfolds according to great forces, class conflicts,
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and leaves little room for the individual. The romantic view is just the opposite. The individual
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can make a difference. And that was the essence of Theodore Roosevelt's approach to life.
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And what got you thinking that, you know, this would be a good way to explore T.R.'s life,
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Well, part of it came from knowing Roosevelt as president of the United States. I'm a historian
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of the United States. And so I first came to know Roosevelt as the president, the first president
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to enter office at the beginning of the 20th century. And so I knew him as this president. He
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was a young president. He was full of energy. He had progressive notions. So that's how I knew him.
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And I also recognized, I knew enough about him personally to see that he was a transition
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figure. He was born before the Civil War, but he died after World War I. And the United States,
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American society, has never undergone a more rapid, thorough transformation than it did in that
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period than it did in his lifetime. So he was a child of the 19th century, but he was an adult in
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the 20th century. And so I could see in, I knew enough about the United States, about Americans to
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know that there was this sense that we're moving from this first era in our history, when we were a
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small country, when we were a frontier nation, to the apex of world power. And Roosevelt was one who
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embodied that transition. And so he had these ideas, and we're all, in some respects, products of our
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upbringing. And so he was surrounded by an America. He grew up in America that was rooted in the tradition,
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well, where the frontier was a big deal. But then it's a different world that he goes into.
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And so I get the romanticism from his early times, but I call him the last romantic. And I'm not going
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to argue that there might be somebody else who would perhaps qualify for that. But it's a time when the
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romance is going out of American life. Now, that's sort of what I knew about Roosevelt from a distance.
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When I started studying him to write a biography of him, then I realized this romantic view
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was cooked into his upbringing. Because he was a sickly kid. He was often ill of one thing or another
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when he was young. He was also from a well-to-do family. And so he didn't attend public schools or
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really hang around much with other kids, partly because of the wealth of the family, partly because
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of his illness. And so he spent a lot of time, he spent his childhood in books. And the books that
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really spoke to him were the ones that spoke about, well, not surprisingly, people, males, in his case,
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he was a boy, who were strong, who were heroic types, exactly the kind of people he wanted to be.
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And at least at that age and in circumstances, he couldn't be, but he could escape the confines of
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his bedroom or his house by reading these books. And he imbibed this thoroughly romantic view of the
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world, of the heroes. And he gradually got a sense that, I want to be one of them.
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So this romantic worldview developed in his childhood from his reading of books. Beyond the reading of
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books, how else do you see that romantic worldview manifest itself in TR as a child? Are there any
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particular moments that stand out to you? Well, when he is a young boy, he's about 10 or 11 years
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old. His father, whom Young Roosevelt, he shared the name of his father, they were both Theodore
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Roosevelt, when Elder Theodore called Young Theodore into his office in his home. And he basically told
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Theodore Roosevelt, Young Theodore, you need to take responsibility for yourself. He said,
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you have a first rate mind. The kid was smart. You have a first rate mind, but you do not have a
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first rate body. And without the body, the mind can go only so far. So the elder Theodore was
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challenging the son. He said, you must make your body. Now, he had the financial resources where he
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could build a gym on the fourth floor of the house, and he could hire boxing coaches and wrestling
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coaches and personal trainers and all of this. And so Roosevelt took it as his personal mission
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that he was going to build his body. But there was another angle to this. Because he had spent so
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much time indoors, he associated the outdoors with this challenge, with the place that he could
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demonstrate that he was as good, he was as strong, he was as brave as other people. So he started
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hunting. Now, the hunting initially was an adjunct to a very, I mean, some people might say nerdy
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kind of hobby, and that was ornithology. He collected birds. In those days, bird watchers
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were also usually bird shooters. And the way you develop your collection is you go out and shoot
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birds. And then you'd mount them and do all this other stuff. So Roosevelt became a hunter. And of
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course, in his reading of history, many of the great heroes in American history, the Daniel Boone types,
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they were hunters. And so Roosevelt associated hunting with the kind of manhood that he wanted to
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grow into. Because if you could, you know, test yourself against fearsome beasts, then boy, that
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was a real measure of your courage and of your skill and of your strength. You know, you start out with
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birds, that's no big deal. But you advance from birds to larger animals, to deer, to moose, moose are
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pretty dangerous, bears, and things like that. So Roosevelt kind of grew into this idea that what
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he wanted to be, in addition to being strong and smart, was being an outdoorsman. And this in his
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teen years. And of course, in those days, if you grew up in New York City, you didn't go hunting in
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New York City, you had to go someplace else. So he would go to Maine, for example, that was the
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nearest more or less wilderness area. But like very many Easterners in those days, his imagination
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naturally flew to the American West, because the West was that part of the country that in some ways
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was quintessentially American. It was the part of the country that continually remade itself. It's what
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made America different from Europe. America had this frontier. America had this unsettled region out
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to the West. And of course, in the West, there were buffalo, there were grizzly bears, there were
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the big game of North America. So from the time he was a teenager, Roosevelt began dreaming of,
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I'm going to go West, and I'm going to test myself against the great beasts of the Western wilderness.
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Well, that's that idea of getting back to nature. That's an important part of romanticism,
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right? Like you want to get in touch with nature, because that's what you do as a romantic.
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And this is especially true in America, because there is this notion, there has long been this
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notion of the unspoiled Eden that greeted English colonists when they arrived in the early 17th
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century. And it's partly connected to a Protestant theological view of the Garden of Eden, the fall of
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man, and all this other stuff. But it also seemed to play out in front of American eyes. And so
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if they had stayed in England, if they had stayed in other parts of Europe, they wouldn't have been
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able to identify with this wilderness, because you get very far from the populated East, and in fact,
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the land looks pretty wild. And if you get across the Mississippi and across the Missouri, then it
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still is wild. There were wild Indians out there. And that seemed to make this connection
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with this earlier time. And it was possible to imagine this was the era of the so-called noble
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savage, the unspoiled person of the wilderness. This bled over into some of the books that Roosevelt
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has read as a kid, James Fenimore Cooper, and The Last of the Mohicans, and The Deerslayer, and all of
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this. And so he had these models in his head of this is what the real America is like.
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And Roosevelt recognized that a silk stocking kid from New York, that's not the real America. The
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real America is the Daniel Boone character, the Davy Crockett, the frontiersman. And there was part
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of him that really wanted to either become that or to test himself against that model to see if he
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could become that if opportunity arose. All right. So as a child, he exercised, built his body,
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helped him overcome his asthma. That's that sort of origin story of his. And that's a romantic
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thing too, as well. But then also he developed this love of nature that you would see throughout
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his life. And we'll talk about this later on, his cattle ranching, and then also his work in
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conservation and some of his big hunting trips. But you mentioned his father and you talk a lot
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about the influence that Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had on Theodore Roosevelt. Did Theodore Roosevelt
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Jr., did he have a romantic view of his dad? He did probably more than most sons have of their
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fathers, in part because there seemed to be such a gulf between Theodore Sr. and Theodore the Younger.
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The father, as Theodore Jr., the Younger said, he was the finest man he had ever known. He was strong.
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He was big and muscular and sturdy in a way that the young kid was not. Now, to some degree, that's
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true of every adult father and little boy son. That distinction is always there. But in Roosevelt's
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case, as far as he knew, his father had never been sick a day in his life. Now, this would change.
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His father died of cancer when Roosevelt was in college. But as a child, he looked at his father
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as this tower of strength, as this brave person, as this handsome person, as this sort of rock of
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stability. And Younger wanted to be like that. Now, of course, as he grew older, he realized,
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well, okay, it's not exactly that. It's not, my father isn't everything I thought. And there was an
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aspect of this that really sort of intensified Roosevelt's desire to prove himself. And that was
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that during the Civil War, which came along when Roosevelt started when Roosevelt was three years
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old. So he was this young kid in New York, and he saw the troops marching around New York. He was
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there amid the draft riots in 1863. And so he was really swept up in the war. But the war came home,
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the Civil War came home for young Theodore Roosevelt in a way that it's not for most people,
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because his family had divided loyalties. His mother and his grandmother, his maternal grandmother,
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who lived with him at this time, they were both from Georgia. And so they were rooting for the South.
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He had uncles who fought for the Confederacy. And his father, however, was a Unionist, a Northerner,
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except that his father did not put on the uniform of the Union Army, did not fight. Now,
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his father didn't fight primarily because his mother said, I cannot bear the idea that you might kill
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my brothers. So what Theodore Senior did was to take a civilian position. And it was a very
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responsible, important position. He went from camp to camp, persuading the soldiers to allow
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the War Department to send their paychecks to their wives and their dependents at home so that they
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wouldn't be in want while the fathers were fighting. So it was a very worthy thing. He probably did more
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good for the Union cause in that function than if he had put on a uniform and been a staff, an aide
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to some general, which is probably what he would have done. But to the young kid and to the teenager
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he's growing into, being a civilian during wartime, that was falling short. And when Theodore
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Roosevelt would hear his age peers tell stories of what their fathers had done during the war,
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he just had to keep embarrassedly silent because his father didn't have any war stories.
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And Theodore Roosevelt's sister, he had two sisters, and his younger sister recalled that
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he made a silent pledge. Theodore Roosevelt made a silent pledge in some way
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to make up for this one chink in his father's armor, this one deficit in his father's resume.
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And that was, he was going to prove, the younger Theodore, the son, was going to prove that the
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Roosevelt men were brave. He was going to go to war and show his courage under fire in a way his father
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had not. And so the relationship with his father was one that drove even further Roosevelt's notion that
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I have to be a hero. I have to prove my courage. I have to demonstrate that I'm strong and brave and
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able. The fact that his father died when Roosevelt was in college meant that the adult son never got to
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measure his father sort of adult to adult because his father was gone. And there's, in most cases,
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when an adult child grows up and then comes to know the adult father, there's a kind of equalization,
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there's a kind of some measurement that, all right, I understand that you can have, you know,
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your flaws, we all have flaws and so on. With Roosevelt, no, his father dies. And so he
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is deprived of the ability to develop that relationship. So his father is this hero with one
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little Achilles heel. And if I can somehow make up for that, then my father will be perfect and he
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can remain perfect in my vision. So this is part of what drives Roosevelt as he becomes an adult.
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And that would probably play an influence in his involvement in the Spanish-American War.
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And we can talk about that here in a bit. But before we do, so this is, we're talking about,
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we're up to him being a young man. He's hunting, he's gone to college. You describe in college,
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he was sort of an odd duck at Harvard. He was boxing, but also he wanted to like recite Tennyson
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while he was boxing. And people thought it was kind of weird, but he ended up flourishing.
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He gets out of college and he marries his first love, this girl named Alice. Let's talk about his
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family life. Like how did TR's romanticism influence his relationship with Alice? And then
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how did his romantic worldview shape how he responded to her death?
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Yeah. So this is a case where sort of the romantic worldview coincides with what people often think
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of when they talk of romance, you know, Valentine's Day and so on. Because Roosevelt indeed was an
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odd fit at Harvard. There are a lot of odd fits at Harvard, but he wanted to be an athlete. He wanted
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to be the star of the football team. He just wasn't coordinated enough. But he tried. And so he was
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stubborn. He was dogged. He realized that he could succeed at certain sports like boxing, where, okay,
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if you just keep standing, you know, and stay in there, wrestling, you know, if you can just,
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if you, if determination will conduce to success, then you can be a success. So he was that way,
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but he, he wasn't a particularly well-liked person. He wasn't most popular until, until, well,
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when his father died, his father left him a sizable fortune for a young man. And so all of a sudden now
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he can throw the parties and he can be the one who has the resources that bring other people around.
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So in his last couple of years at Harvard, he's much more of a success. And it may be, I don't know
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if it goes without saying, but it certainly was true that he became more eligible in the eyes of
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young women, including one, Alice Lee, over whom Theodore Roosevelt fell, fell head over heels for her.
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Now, this is kind of interesting because Roosevelt had had a boyhood girl friend, Edith Carrop. She was
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a friend of the family, a friend of his sisters. And Edith certainly thought that there was some kind
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of understanding she had with Theodore when he went off to college. They're too young to get married,
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but in her head anyway, marriage was in prospect. And then he forgot all about her when he fell for
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Alice Lee. And Alice Lee was this young, beautiful, charming girl. And at first Roosevelt thought that,
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boy, she's out of my league, but he was persistent in wooing her as he was persistent in a lot of things.
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And he finally proposed and she accepted and they were married. And Roosevelt thought, oh my gosh,
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this is the greatest thing could ever happen to me. And he was in a state of romantic bliss. And he,
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so this is going on and he's trying to figure out what to do with himself after college because
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he was wealthy enough that he didn't have to work, but he had to do something. So he shocked members
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of his family by deciding to go into politics. Now, for somebody of Roosevelt's class and station,
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this was an unusual choice because politics, certainly in New York, was not what members of the elite
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did. The elite folks, they counted their money and they circulated at their clubs, but they left the
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grubby business of governing to other people, to the striving Irish American types, to the ones who
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don't have any other way of getting ahead. But Roosevelt conceived this idea that he wanted to be part
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of what he called the governing class. Now, to some degree, I suppose this is because
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Roosevelt, by now, was insisting on always challenging himself. And it wouldn't be any
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challenge just to fill his time going to his clubs and going fox hunts and doing stuff like that. No,
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no, he needed a challenge. And politics was where he could make a challenge. Well, he got elected
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primarily because he was wealthy and could afford the bar tabs for all of his followers. And he got
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elected to the New York legislature. And for a couple of years, he thought his life was golden
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because he would go back and forth from his home in New York up to Albany when the legislature was
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in session, ride the train up and he'd write letters, love letters home to Alice and everything was
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great. And then when Alice became pregnant and they were going to have a child, boy, this was even
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better. But tragically, Alice died. Alice died giving birth to their daughter. And it just so
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happened that on the same day, and it happened to be Valentine's Day of all days, his wife died and
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his mother died in the same house because Alice was living with the mother in the final stages for
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pregnancy. And so there's this double blow on Roosevelt. Now, to be honest, Roosevelt felt much more
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deeply the death of Alice than of his mother. He was fond of his mother, but the father was the
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parent that really dominated Roosevelt's mindset. But when Alice died, then Roosevelt felt as though,
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in fact, as he wrote in his diary, he put a big black X over that day in his diary and said,
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the light has gone out of my life. And this was exactly the way you would expect the romantic hero to
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respond to the death of his true love. And Roosevelt thought that I will never feel love again. And so
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what he did was he fled. He fled the East. He fled politics for the West. Now, it just so happened that
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the summer before he had gone out to Dakota territory to hunt buffalo. He'd always been wanting to hunt the
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biggest game of North America. And so off he went. And while he was out there, he was very impressed
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with the region along the Little Missouri River and with the people he met out there. And Roosevelt,
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like very many Easterners, thought that Westerners, Western men were the authentic men of the country.
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This was the real America. And he wanted to be like them. So he had enough money that he decided to buy
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what amounted to a cattle ranch. He wrote a check for, I think it was $14,000 to this guy he had just
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met several days before and said, okay, I trust you basically because you're an honest Westerner
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and you wouldn't cheat me. And go buy me the cattle, get this thing set up. And so off he goes back East.
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And then when his wife dies, he has this refuge to which he can go, the refuge in the West.
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And he finds solace for his heart in the wilderness of the West. And he writes about
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riding through the badlands of Dakota territory, these strange, weird landscapes, that they were
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so strange that they did provide this kind of otherworldly solace. They were balm to his soul.
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And to Roosevelt, the West became this place to which he could go when he needed to get away
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from the cares of the East. Now, this had been in the collective American mindset for generations.
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The West was where we can go when things go wrong in the East. Now, as a matter of fact,
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most Easterners didn't go West, but the idea that they could, that was really important.
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And it's critical for Roosevelt's emotional, political development for that country. It was at
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just this time that the frontier is vanishing. Enough Americans have moved West so that in the
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1890 census, so Roosevelt's wife dies in 1884 and Roosevelt's out there in the 1880s. But in 1890,
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the director of the census says, you know what? There's no longer any frontier because the settlement
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is scattered all across the West. So there's this idea that the frontier is vanishing. And this
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important aspect of America's psychic life is disappearing as well. But Roosevelt believed
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that there was something special that he was able to get there before it went away. But it became a
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very important part of not only of his life, but of the identity that he created for himself. He was
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an Easterner by birth, but he was a Westerner by adoption and a Westerner in spirit.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. So his first wife dies, Alice Lee, and he had this romantic ideal of love
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that, okay, if your first wife dies, you don't remarry. And he told his sister that I'm not going
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to remarry. Well, he ends up remarrying and it was Edith Carroll, his childhood friend. And he even wrote
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letters to his sister. You know how I feel about getting remarried, but I just feel it's the right
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thing to do. And it's sort of like this whirlwind wedding kind of under the radar. Then he becomes
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this family man. Is there anything we can learn about TR's romanticism through his family life?
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Well, what we see with Roosevelt is this sort of full-blown romanticism of his boyhood that
00:26:53.300
continually runs up against reality because romanticism is, at its heart, an unrealistic view
00:27:01.880
of the world. Now, we all have certain unrealistic views of the world and they have to be reconciled
00:27:09.820
with reality at times. And Roosevelt was able to retain some of these. But when he re-encountered
00:27:16.560
Edith Carroll, he realized that, well, he was attracted to her. And as you suggest, he felt guilty about it
00:27:26.000
because you're only supposed to have one true love. Those romantic nights of the round table and all this
00:27:32.160
other stuff, you know, this one true love for each of us. And he talked about how he didn't know what he would
00:27:38.000
do should he be fortunate enough to get to heaven after he died because he'd have to explain to Alice that he had
00:27:45.280
been unfaithful to her after her death by marrying Edith. Anyway, but he does. And they have children.
00:27:51.620
And the kids, the kids aren't really part of Roosevelt's romantic vision. But one of the things
00:27:58.900
they do is they make Roosevelt really attractive to voters. And because, okay, here's this family man
00:28:06.800
and he's young. Roosevelt was remarkably young in all of this stuff. He's going to be, when he does
00:28:14.040
become president, he'll be the youngest president in American history till then and since then.
00:28:18.100
But the fact that he had kids, it demonstrated a kind of vitality. Often the virility of someone
00:28:25.300
is measured by, okay, did you have kids? And he had bunches of kids. He had six kids and the kids
00:28:31.780
were all running around. And so while he was in politics, even when he got to the White House,
00:28:36.300
he was the first president, I think since Lincoln, who had young kids in the White House. And this was
00:28:43.460
this was fantastic for a lot of people because they tended to look on politicians as these old guys
00:28:50.820
in stuffy suits. And Roosevelt wasn't stuffy. And he had children running around. The children are doing
00:28:56.540
what kids did. So some of Roosevelt's romantic view, part of it makes him appealing to the American
00:29:05.000
public because they have the romantic view too. But other things that made him appealing were just the
00:29:08.860
fact that he seemed to be this honest guy. And he had kids and he paid attention to the kids and
00:29:14.140
he used to play with the kids. And he would let the kids have pets and sometimes they would bring
00:29:19.020
horses into the White House. There's one case where they brought a small horse in the elevator of the
00:29:22.760
White House. The kids were up to what kids do. And so Roosevelt became, in decades later, when John
00:29:31.900
Kennedy became president and his two cute kids, they made Kennedy and Jackie, his wife, all that more
00:29:38.060
appealing because, oh, what cute kids. And they said the same thing about Theodore Roosevelt and his
00:29:42.320
children. So we talked about after the, he got involved in politics early on in his young adult life,
00:29:49.580
fled it for a little bit and got back in. And he was primarily involved in New York politics,
00:29:53.680
but eventually he gets, you know, the national party catches, they, they, they seize Deidre
00:30:00.260
Roosevelt. Like this guy's got potential and he finds himself assistant secretary of the Navy.
00:30:05.840
And he's in a position now where he's have, he's able to have some amount of influence
00:30:09.480
on world affairs and it allows him, and you kind of, the way you described it, allows him to
00:30:15.140
start making up that deficiency that his dad had of not fighting in war. He tells about his involvement
00:30:20.660
as assistant secretary of Navy and how that eventually may have led up to the involvement
00:30:25.760
of him, you know, charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American war.
00:30:29.380
Sure. So Roosevelt was a really talented guy and people recognize the talent in Roosevelt, but
00:30:34.680
he was basically in the wrong political party because he was of a reformist frame of mind at a time when
00:30:42.520
the Republican party was growing more conservative by the year, by the decade. So he was an odd fit.
00:30:48.220
And he was also, he was also this, well, at least before he goes off to war, he was somebody who
00:30:56.880
couldn't get elected outside of a narrow circle. So Roosevelt wanted to get back into politics,
00:31:01.420
but the Republican bosses didn't like him. And so they wouldn't give him the nomination.
00:31:06.780
So what he did was he went back into politics, but as an appointed official rather than an elected
00:31:12.080
official, he couldn't get elected, but he could get appointed and he was good at what he did.
00:31:15.280
So he was a civil service commissioner. Then he was on the New York police board.
00:31:20.260
And while he was in those positions, he would campaign on behalf of the Republican candidates
00:31:25.760
for elective office. And he campaigned in 1896 for William McKinley and was a stout campaigner for
00:31:31.580
McKinley. And when McKinley won, he was in line to get a job. This is the way people get appointed jobs
00:31:36.320
in national administrations. And Roosevelt, well, he dreamed, dreamed, oh, maybe I'll be secretary of
00:31:43.440
state. He was very interested in foreign affairs, but that was above his grade. But instead he got
00:31:49.260
the job of assistant Navy secretary. Now this was assistant might sound relatively small potatoes,
00:31:55.100
but for Roosevelt, it wasn't in part because the cabinet secretary, his boss was somebody who
00:32:00.160
wasn't particularly interested in running the office. And so he, he let the daytime running the
00:32:05.740
office go to Roosevelt, but also because Roosevelt had grand ideas about what the United States ought to
00:32:11.540
be doing in the world. Roosevelt looked upon the United States as a bigger version of himself.
00:32:18.560
And just as he looked for a chance to prove himself, to prove himself strong and brave and
00:32:24.120
upright and all this, he looked for opportunities for the United States to prove itself strong and
00:32:28.540
brave and upright. And when a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule broke out in Cuba in 1895,
00:32:35.660
Roosevelt was all for American intervention. And he kept, as assistant Navy secretary,
00:32:40.160
he kept pushing William McKinley, his boss, the president saying, you've got to intervene.
00:32:43.980
You've got to intervene. And finally, not by himself, but in conjunction with other people,
00:32:49.340
Roosevelt talked McKinley into declaring war against Spain and to intervening in the Cuban
00:32:56.560
uprising against Spain. And Roosevelt, well, a lot of people thought the United States ought to do it
00:33:02.900
to relieve the suffering of the poor Cuban people. Roosevelt didn't really care that much about the poor
00:33:08.020
Cuban people. What he cared about was the opportunity for the United States to step up and play the role
00:33:13.820
he thought it ought to play on the world stage. And he was going to help this happen. And so while he
00:33:18.680
was assistant Navy secretary, he gave orders when his boss was out of the office, when Friday afternoon
00:33:24.040
his boss had gone home, he sent orders to the commander of the American Pacific fleet. They called it the
00:33:29.060
Asiatic fleet in those days, George Dewey. He said, in the event of war with Spain, go straight to the
00:33:33.460
Philippines and attack their fleet there. The Philippines, one might say, the Philippines,
00:33:38.440
people did say later, what, the Philippines? Well, the Philippines were another Spanish colony.
00:33:42.260
So if the United States went to war with Spain, then the Philippines would be fair game. So Roosevelt's
00:33:46.900
order went out. And when the war came, that's exactly what Dewey did. And the United States
00:33:51.740
seized control of the Philippines and made, eventually at the war's end, made the Philippines an
00:33:56.880
American colony. But meanwhile, meanwhile, Roosevelt did something that should have boggled the mind of
00:34:03.780
just about anybody else and should have boggled his own mind if he hadn't been so wrapped up in
00:34:09.560
proving that the Roosevelt men were brave. His sister and other people who knew Roosevelt said,
00:34:16.400
you know, Roosevelt, this is when Roosevelt was a relatively young man. He's still in his early thirties,
00:34:21.440
mid thirties. And they say, you know, Roosevelt, he just wants a war. He doesn't care who the war is
00:34:27.500
against. He wants a war so he can go to war, so he can stand up under enemy fire and show that he's
00:34:33.260
brave. And so, and basically to atone for his father's failure in the civil war. So when the war
00:34:41.160
comes, the war that Roosevelt had been instrumental in bringing on, Roosevelt quit his job in Washington.
00:34:47.680
So he can go fight, he can join a cavalry regiment and can go test himself under fire. And he does,
00:34:55.720
he goes off to Cuba and he performs quite bravely, quite gallantly in the battle for San Juan Hill.
00:35:02.620
And the enemy shoots at him and people get killed on either side of him. It was kind of dumb luck,
00:35:08.660
but he himself wasn't killed, but he wasn't. And ever afterwards, Roosevelt described that battle as
00:35:16.400
his crowded hour. And strikingly, up to that time, Roosevelt was what could fairly be called a war
00:35:24.800
monger. He wanted war, other things being equal, he wanted a war. After that, nope, nope. In fact,
00:35:31.420
after that, Roosevelt eventually would win the Nobel Peace Prize because the war had served his purpose
00:35:37.860
of proving to himself that he was brave. He didn't flinch under fire. And once having demonstrated that,
00:35:44.480
he didn't have to do it again. But he came home a military hero. And one of the reasons he came home
00:35:49.600
a military hero was, well, in the army during the war, he wrote a memoir. He sent back weekly,
00:35:57.760
monthly reports that were published in Scrivener's Magazine and then gathered as a memoir called The
00:36:02.160
Rough Riders. And so he told his own heroic story of his role in the Spanish-American War. And he
00:36:09.200
came home to a hero's welcome. And basically catapulted him to the national stage. I mean,
00:36:14.360
it's probably why, well, he became vice president and he became president because the president was
00:36:19.280
assassinated. But after that point, he was able to get elected on his own.
00:36:22.520
Okay. So in fact, although he came home a hero, there were lots of heroes from the war and there
00:36:26.160
was no clear path for Roosevelt to the White House. In fact, he was chosen by those Republican
00:36:31.980
political bosses in New York to replace a corruption-stained candidate for governor.
00:36:39.500
They needed a new governor. He thought, this Roosevelt character, he'll be a good stand-in.
00:36:43.020
And so he accepted and he got elected. But everybody thought that was as far as he would go.
00:36:49.300
In fact, he soon ran afoul of his sponsor, Tom Platt, the Republican boss in New York,
00:36:55.640
because he was too independent-minded. Roosevelt didn't realize something.
00:36:58.780
Maybe he was chosen by Tom Platt to be the nominee, but the voters voted him governor.
00:37:06.920
And so the next day he wakes up and says, I'm governor, Tom Platt, you're not.
00:37:10.540
And so he started to demonstrate that he would govern as he wanted to do. So Platt,
00:37:15.100
what am I going to do with this guy? He's not the person that I wanted to get elected,
00:37:18.700
at least it turned out not to be the one. So Platt engineers his nomination to be vice president,
00:37:23.620
thinking, okay, going to kick him upstairs, get him out of my hair. Because in those days,
00:37:28.360
the vice presidency was almost like a witness protection program. People went into it,
00:37:32.360
never came out. You never heard of him again. Except, except on those couple of cases,
00:37:37.120
and there'd been two cases before, three cases before this, where presidents had died or been
00:37:41.500
killed in office. And people on the National Republic said, oh God, we sure hope this doesn't
00:37:47.500
happen to McKinley because then Roosevelt will be president. He was the last person they wanted
00:37:50.720
to be president, but that's exactly what happened. William McKinley was assassinated,
00:37:54.000
and Theodore Roosevelt became president. And he told his friend Henry Cabot Lodge,
00:37:59.720
it's a shame to have to enter the White House this way, but here I am. So now I'm going to do
00:38:05.020
what I want to do. And I think you make the case that throughout his presidency, his romanticism
00:38:10.420
is what, that shaped how he approached the office of the presidency. And it fundamentally
00:38:15.980
reshaped how Americans think of the office of the president.
00:38:20.920
Well, I wouldn't say that it reshaped how Americans view the office because romanticism was
00:38:27.540
sort of a dwindling resource in American life. And it's one of the reasons I call Roosevelt the last
00:38:33.460
romantic. And there's not a president after him that follows that model. And Roosevelt,
00:38:39.720
a romantic, at least as I use it, is someone who looks back. But Roosevelt was not,
00:38:45.220
there was more to Roosevelt than that. He looked forward. And Roosevelt could use that romantic
00:38:49.060
strain in himself and in others to his advantage, but he wasn't bound by that. And so, as I said,
00:38:56.040
Roosevelt told Henry Cabot Lodge, it's a shame to have to become president this way. He would rather
00:38:59.520
have been elected by the people, but he hadn't, but he was still president. He was going to do what he's
00:39:03.740
going to do. And he was going to yank the United States into the 20th century because Roosevelt
00:39:09.860
believed, for example, that big business had gained too much power in American life, that capitalism
00:39:18.100
had run away with American democracy, and that just as capitalism had bulked up during the last
00:39:25.200
decades of the 19th century, Roosevelt was going to bulk up American democracy. One of the first things
00:39:30.980
that he did was to call in J.P. Morgan, who was the great financier and the orchestrator of various
00:39:37.200
mergers that gave rise to these big trusts. Trust was the term for monopoly in those days.
00:39:42.140
And he told Morgan that he was going to break up Morgan's most recent trust, railroad trust called
00:39:48.220
Northern Securities. And Morgan was outraged. Wait a minute, you can't move the goalposts on us,
00:39:54.620
you know, because this was fine. And Morgan said, look, if you've got a problem with this,
00:39:58.140
you know, just send your guys to my guys and we'll talk it over. And Roosevelt said, that's not the
00:40:01.520
way we do it. America's democracy runs the show here. I am the president. The people elected me.
00:40:06.920
Nobody elected you to anything, J.P. Morgan. And so you're going to play by the rules that I
00:40:11.440
establish. So, and furthermore, Roosevelt was going to push the United States onto the world stage.
00:40:18.360
It already came partly from the push that he gave in triggering the war against Spain,
00:40:24.040
but the United States under Roosevelt really stepped out and stepped into world affairs. He
00:40:28.920
served as a mediator between the Russians and the Japanese in the war. Those two countries were
00:40:35.300
fighting. And for that, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. But Roosevelt had this grand vision for the
00:40:40.720
United States. And it was a vision that there was a certain romanticism to it, but it certainly was
00:40:46.260
not confined to that. And it wasn't backward looking at all. It was very forward looking.
00:40:49.260
No, yeah, I would say that idea that a single man can change the world, a single individual could
00:40:55.940
have influence on the world. I mean, he expanded, like before that, the office of the president,
00:41:01.440
there was a very limited view of the office of the president. It's like, okay, the legislature takes
00:41:05.520
care of everything. Roosevelt said, no, I'm going to use as much power as I have. And I'm going to do
00:41:11.620
things like he did, like, you know, the Panama Canal. And he said, well, Congress is debating that.
00:41:15.640
Yeah, well, here I'm in a backhoe digging the Panama Canal. He saw opportunities to take control
00:41:22.580
or take charge, and he just took it by the reins.
00:41:25.640
Roosevelt was a complex individual. And he was also a very resourceful individual in finding
00:41:30.960
arguments for positions he wanted to take for reasons that transcended the arguments. So
00:41:37.120
Roosevelt was one who believed in the power of the presidency, actually, who believed in the power
00:41:42.280
of himself. He was unusually self-confident. And I'm not quite sure where this comes from.
00:41:52.240
Being the eldest child, the eldest son, excuse me, is probably part of it. Being named for your father
00:41:58.700
maybe contributes to that. But he took the view that, well, you know, if the Constitution doesn't
00:42:06.320
say I can't do it, then I'm going to do it. And people can try to stop me. So Roosevelt had this
00:42:12.380
idea that the United States, and he did believe that the presidency, the president embodied the
00:42:20.020
United States in a peculiar way. Now, some of this was simply Roosevelt, but some of it was a consequence
00:42:24.740
of changes in the nature of America's position in the world, changes in things like technology.
00:42:30.140
But in the first place, under the U.S. Constitution, the executive branch, the presidency, takes second
00:42:36.660
place to Congress. The legislative branch is Article II in the Constitution after Article I dealing with
00:42:42.000
Congress. And through the 19th century, that was the position that most presidents took. The executive
00:42:46.940
branch is called the executive branch because it executes the will of Congress. But Roosevelt thought
00:42:52.160
it should be more active than that. He thought it was necessary, especially in a world where foreign
00:42:56.220
policy plays a large role because Congress is this very large committee, and it can't make decisions
00:43:03.040
very quickly. In domestic affairs, that's not a particular drawback. But in foreign affairs, that's
00:43:07.820
fatal. And Roosevelt recognizes. Roosevelt also recognized with the emergence of modern communications
00:43:13.780
technology, in particular, with the modern mass circulation press. All these newspapers, they have to sell
00:43:20.080
lots of copies of their papers to cover their costs. They need a riveting story. And it's a lot easier to
00:43:28.640
write a story, a more dramatic story, about one person, about one man, forceful man, than it is about the
00:43:34.560
committee of several hundred that Congress consists of. And then there's a fact of Roosevelt had these
00:43:40.300
children, and they were a story in themselves. So Roosevelt galvanized the attention of the American
00:43:47.240
political culture. Roosevelt is the first truly modern president in that regard. Until Roosevelt,
00:43:53.720
the president was not usually the focus of American political attention. At certain times, during the
00:43:59.600
Civil War, of course, with Abraham Lincoln. But in the 20th century, the president is going to be
00:44:05.220
really at the center of everything in American politics. And it's largely because Theodore Roosevelt
00:44:11.760
So Roosevelt described his time as the president. He had a good time. He genuinely enjoyed being
00:44:16.800
president. There's some presidents that they described, like, I hate it. It was, like, the
00:44:20.280
worst job I ever had. Like, Taft, I don't think, really particularly enjoyed being president.
00:44:24.600
What happened after his presidency? Like, how did his romanticism keep pushing him when he didn't have
00:44:30.840
So part of Roosevelt's problem in this regard was that he became president too soon. He became
00:44:36.280
president when he was 41. And that's young for such responsibility. Of course, what it meant was
00:44:42.220
that he's going to not even be 50 when he leaves the White House. So what's he going to do for
00:44:46.900
his second act? And he thought, okay, well, he handpicked his successor, William Howard Taft.
00:44:56.000
And so he thought that Taft saw eye to eye with him on important issues. And so, okay, good. I got my
00:45:01.480
guy in there. So now I'm going to go and give him a chance to form his own presidency, to make his own
00:45:06.940
reputation. Off he went to Africa, which is, of course, where somebody like Theodore Roosevelt would go.
00:45:12.580
He had basically hunted all the big game there was in North America. So where's even bigger game?
00:45:19.220
Ah, there are elephants in Africa. So off he went to Africa. It was a safari that he always wanted to
00:45:24.420
go on. And now he had a chance. And he was able to do it under the auspices of science. Roosevelt
00:45:31.860
was a conservationist. Now, to modern sensibilities, that might seem weird. Roosevelt slaughtered more
00:45:39.220
animals in his life than all but probably a handful of other people in his age. So what does that have
00:45:45.240
to do with conservation? Well, in fact, Roosevelt helped found one of the first and most important
00:45:50.120
conservation groups, the Boone and Crockett Club in America. And they conserved natural resources so
00:45:56.440
they would have something to hunt in the future. They didn't want to kill all the animals.
00:45:59.420
And so it wasn't uncommon for Roosevelt to go off to Africa and shoot elephants and rhinos and other
00:46:08.520
big game for the purposes of science and conservation. Because he made sure that the
00:46:13.260
elephants were sent back to the Museum of Natural History and stuffed and put on display there.
00:46:18.500
And so people could say, oh, that's what an elephant looks like. And this was, of course,
00:46:21.740
before television or anything like that. And so, yeah, he could do it for science. He could do it
00:46:26.040
for conservation. But he could also do it because there was still in Roosevelt that itch that, okay,
00:46:32.300
I have to prove myself. This had become part of Roosevelt. So he had to keep proving himself.
00:46:37.660
He went off to Africa. And he proved himself by standing there in front of a charging elephant and
00:46:43.280
killing it, not himself getting killed, not flinching. That was good. But then he came back to
00:46:48.300
America. He finally came back. He spent a year in Africa nearly, and he had to come back. And what's
00:46:51.460
he going to do now? And some people who were unsatisfied with the way McKinley had handled
00:46:58.140
the presidency, he began whispering in Roosevelt's ear, you know, he's just not doing what you thought
00:47:02.140
he should do. He's betraying you. And it didn't require too much whispering to get Roosevelt to say,
00:47:07.240
you know what, I need to take over again. In those days, there was not a constitutional ban on
00:47:13.860
third terms. And technically, it wouldn't have been a third term anyway, because he
00:47:17.880
he had inherited the first term. But in any event, he decides to run again. Now, this was perhaps
00:47:25.260
Roosevelt at his least admirable, because he talked himself into believing that his country
00:47:33.960
needed him. The progressive movement needed him. Really, it was Roosevelt needed something to do.
00:47:40.780
He needed a challenge. And the challenge was to run for president as a third party candidate.
00:47:47.160
Third parties had never done well in American politics. Roosevelt did better than any third
00:47:52.480
party candidate before or after, but he failed. He didn't get elected. And he destroyed the elective
00:47:59.600
political career of William Howard Taft. He split the Republican Party, costing Taft and himself both
00:48:05.380
the election, which went to a Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. So that's what he did. And then having lost
00:48:10.580
that one, he got to do something else. Now, he's still still a relatively young man. He's in his
00:48:15.180
early 50s. And what's he going to do? Well, he decides to go on a trip of exploration into darkest
00:48:23.660
Amazonia. He's going to follow this river from its headwaters. People knew about the headwaters.
00:48:29.840
And they sort of knew what they thought were the lower part of the stream. But the part in between
00:48:36.060
was unknown. It was called the River of Doubt. And Roosevelt was going to join this expedition and go
00:48:41.080
down and explore this river. I mean, after hunting big game in Africa, how are you going to top that
00:48:47.920
if you're going to be the explorer type, the one who discovers great things? Well, Roosevelt had never
00:48:53.400
discovered anything, but this is his chance. Now, when you get to this point in Roosevelt's life,
00:48:59.580
you start to think that there must be something more about this. And one of the things that I,
00:49:06.740
at any rate, concluded about Roosevelt is his activism, his activity, his inability to slow down,
00:49:14.420
his inability to just relax and absorb what's around him. This derived from, I think,
00:49:20.600
from a certain kind of background. Well, in our day, we'd call it depression that he was dealing
00:49:27.200
with. Depression ran in the Roosevelt family. There were suicides in the family. And Roosevelt
00:49:32.380
at a relatively young age quoted the Roman writer Horace, who said, black care can never catch a
00:49:41.240
rider who gallops fast enough. And it seemed to me that Roosevelt was doing that galloping his whole
00:49:48.260
life. And so, he always had to find something else. There was another thing that just before he
00:49:55.360
was married, just before he married Alice Lee, who became Alice Lee Roosevelt, he underwent a physical
00:50:02.800
exam. This was not uncommon in those days, and especially for somebody who had had this background
00:50:06.580
of illness like Roosevelt. And as Roosevelt told it later, the doctor heard an irregularity in his
00:50:14.200
heartbeat. There was a heart murmur or an a-rhythm or something. And the doctor suggested that Roosevelt
00:50:21.020
ought to take life easy because if he strained himself too much, he might just fall over dead.
00:50:27.580
But Roosevelt concluded, nope, nope, I'm not going to live that way. I'm going to live my life to the
00:50:31.340
fullest. And if I die before the age of 60, so be it. So, in going to the Amazon, one can look at
00:50:40.900
Roosevelt's actions and think, okay, he doesn't know what to do with himself. There's really no act
00:50:46.140
after the presidency in American life that would suit Roosevelt. So, first he went to Africa. If he
00:50:52.900
had been killed by a charging elephant, he would have been okay with that. And I think that part of
00:50:58.720
him thought, well, okay, if I die of fever in the jungles of Amazonia, I'm okay with that. What a way to
00:51:05.100
go out. And in fact, he nearly did die of fever in the Amazon. But he survived and he came out of
00:51:11.140
that and he still has to figure out what to do. But he got out just in time for World War I to break
00:51:17.100
out. And he decides, yes, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to reprise my actions in the
00:51:23.620
Spanish-American War, but this time on a bigger scale. So, instead of raising a regiment of volunteers,
00:51:28.540
he proposes to President Woodrow Wilson to raise two divisions of volunteers. And he goes to the
00:51:33.820
White House and says, this is what I want to do. And Wilson says, no. And for Roosevelt, in fact,
00:51:41.540
at one point, Roosevelt said, aren't you kind of old? Somebody told Roosevelt, aren't you kind of
00:51:45.280
old to be volunteering to go off and fight in France? But Roosevelt said, I cannot think of a
00:51:49.040
better epitaph than Theodore Roosevelt died on the battlefield in France. So, it's almost as though
00:51:55.660
that romantic streak in Roosevelt was stronger than ever. He was going to go down to a hero's death.
00:52:01.000
The last thing Roosevelt wanted was to get old and frail and just die the way people died in
00:52:11.140
ordinary life. He wanted to die a heroic death if he died at all.
00:52:15.840
Well, he did die eventually. He did die. He didn't get to go off to France, but he did die of a heart
00:52:24.160
attack. And it came right after his 60th birthday. And it was about the time that his doctor said,
00:52:36.040
Well, Bill, what do you hope people, when they finish your book, what do you hope they
00:52:39.560
walk away with thinking or chewing on after they finish your book?
00:52:43.820
That there is a place for a grand vision of the world in causing people to attempt great things.
00:52:54.540
And Roosevelt is one of the most, I'll call him laudably ambitious figures to hold the White
00:52:59.960
House. He set high standards for himself. And he came, he did pretty well in living up to them.
00:53:07.220
To some degree, those high standards were part of this unrealistic view of the world,
00:53:13.020
this romantic view of the world. So that can even an unrealistic view of the world
00:53:17.860
can have worthy consequences. But Roosevelt also was very shrewd while he was president
00:53:28.860
and keeping his romanticism in check. And this is, if there's one thing to keep straight about
00:53:36.520
Roosevelt, Roosevelt as an individual was separable from Roosevelt, the president in a greater sense
00:53:45.720
than is often the case. So I said that Roosevelt before he being a president was this warmonger.
00:53:51.120
Roosevelt had several opportunities while he was president to push the United States into war,
00:53:55.340
but he refused. So Roosevelt understood that the president is this different, not necessarily a
00:54:04.180
different person, but he has a different function than an individual. So before, and now from the
00:54:09.620
standpoint of the biographer, the presidency is the boring part of Roosevelt's life because presidents
00:54:16.880
do what presidents do. Before Roosevelt was president, he's this really colorful character.
00:54:22.100
And you can see his personal and career trajectory rising. After he's president, you can see the trajectory
00:54:29.080
falling, but he still is very interesting figure, very does dramatic stuff. While he's president, he's kind
00:54:35.400
of boring. But Roosevelt understood the purpose for that. What you don't want is somebody who as president
00:54:42.500
is trying to play out these inner struggles, these inner visions and all of this other stuff. So Roosevelt is a
00:54:48.760
really good example of how you can be this very interesting character. You can really be a character
00:54:55.820
and still be a really good president. So in that regard, Roosevelt is kind of a model of how to keep
00:55:02.760
the personal separate from the professional to the advantage of both.
00:55:06.800
Well, Bill, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and
00:55:11.740
Well, the book is available everywhere books are sold. The book was published in the 1990s, but it's in
00:55:17.140
most bookstores if you go there. And certainly it's available on Amazon, TR, The Last Romantic.
00:55:22.100
And next to that book, you might find some of the other biographies that I've written.
00:55:26.480
Well, fantastic. Well, Bill Brands, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:55:31.720
My guest today was H.W. Brands. He's the author of the book, TR, The Last Romantic. It's available
00:55:36.280
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about the podcast
00:55:39.660
and this book at our show notes at aom.is slash rooseveltromantic.
00:55:50.460
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:55:54.040
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00:55:57.740
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00:56:23.500
Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast,