The Art of Manliness - Theodore Roosevelt, The Last Romantic

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.620 Romanticism, not in terms of courtships and bouquets of roses, but as a philosophical

00:00:15.520 approach to life which blossomed in the 19th century, embodies many tenets, including nostalgia

00:00:20.320 for the past, a heroic view of the world, a firm sense of right and wrong, and the idea

00:00:24.860 that an individual can shape his own destiny as well as have an outsized impact on the

00:00:28.980 world. It is through this lens of romanticism, my guest says, that we can best understand

00:00:32.940 one of the most memorable, influential, and legendary figures in American history, Theodore

00:00:37.460 Roosevelt. His name is H.W. Brands, and he's a professor of history and the author of numerous

00:00:41.480 books and biographies, including T.R., The Last Romantic. Today on the show, Bill explains

00:00:45.840 how Teddy Roosevelt was one of the last bearers of the romantic spirit in America, where his

00:00:49.820 romanticism came from, and how that spirit motivated him to push and challenge himself

00:00:53.720 through boyhood till death, led him to both egoistic excesses and worthy epic deeds, and

00:00:58.480 influenced everything from his familial relationships, to his time as president, to his second and

00:01:03.160 third acts in life. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash Roosevelt

00:01:07.740 Romantic. H.W. joins you now via clearcast.io.

00:01:21.380 H.W. Brands, welcome to the show.

00:01:23.460 Delighted to be with you.

00:01:24.280 So, you are a professor of history at the University of Texas, and you've also written

00:01:29.160 several biographies, and the one we're going to be talking about today is T.R., The Last

00:01:34.160 Romantic. There's been a lot of biographies written about Theodore Roosevelt, but what makes

00:01:39.140 yours unique, and the reason I really liked it, was you make this argument that to understand

00:01:43.900 T.R., or one of the ways you can understand T.R. is to understand that he was a romantic.

00:01:49.080 Now, for those who aren't familiar with that term, beyond the association of, you know,

00:01:54.460 roses and being in love and Romeo and Juliet, how would you describe a romantic worldview?

00:02:00.960 Well, certainly the way I use it in the book, and as I apply it to Theodore Roosevelt, it implies

00:02:05.740 a heroic view of the world that a person, in his case, Theodore Roosevelt, can have a great and positive

00:02:14.540 impact on things, that there is right and wrong in the world. The romantic view also gravitates

00:02:22.820 toward, backward toward a golden age, thinking that there was a time when things were better,

00:02:27.820 and trying to hold on to some of that. But it emphasizes the individual. In the case, and in the

00:02:34.580 time of Theodore Roosevelt, a competing theory, a competing worldview was that espoused by the Marxists,

00:02:41.600 who said that things, that history unfolds according to great forces, class conflicts,

00:02:48.380 and leaves little room for the individual. The romantic view is just the opposite. The individual

00:02:53.280 can make a difference. And that was the essence of Theodore Roosevelt's approach to life.

00:02:58.600 And what got you thinking that, you know, this would be a good way to explore T.R.'s life,

00:03:03.220 was this romantic worldview?

00:03:04.400 Well, part of it came from knowing Roosevelt as president of the United States. I'm a historian

00:03:11.540 of the United States. And so I first came to know Roosevelt as the president, the first president

00:03:17.260 to enter office at the beginning of the 20th century. And so I knew him as this president. He

00:03:23.640 was a young president. He was full of energy. He had progressive notions. So that's how I knew him.

00:03:28.040 And I also recognized, I knew enough about him personally to see that he was a transition

00:03:35.600 figure. He was born before the Civil War, but he died after World War I. And the United States,

00:03:44.320 American society, has never undergone a more rapid, thorough transformation than it did in that

00:03:52.880 period than it did in his lifetime. So he was a child of the 19th century, but he was an adult in

00:04:00.300 the 20th century. And so I could see in, I knew enough about the United States, about Americans to

00:04:07.460 know that there was this sense that we're moving from this first era in our history, when we were a

00:04:14.800 small country, when we were a frontier nation, to the apex of world power. And Roosevelt was one who

00:04:25.320 embodied that transition. And so he had these ideas, and we're all, in some respects, products of our

00:04:33.880 upbringing. And so he was surrounded by an America. He grew up in America that was rooted in the tradition,

00:04:41.740 well, where the frontier was a big deal. But then it's a different world that he goes into.

00:04:47.480 And so I get the romanticism from his early times, but I call him the last romantic. And I'm not going

00:04:53.440 to argue that there might be somebody else who would perhaps qualify for that. But it's a time when the

00:04:59.280 romance is going out of American life. Now, that's sort of what I knew about Roosevelt from a distance.

00:05:05.160 When I started studying him to write a biography of him, then I realized this romantic view

00:05:10.120 was cooked into his upbringing. Because he was a sickly kid. He was often ill of one thing or another

00:05:19.680 when he was young. He was also from a well-to-do family. And so he didn't attend public schools or

00:05:25.320 really hang around much with other kids, partly because of the wealth of the family, partly because

00:05:29.700 of his illness. And so he spent a lot of time, he spent his childhood in books. And the books that

00:05:34.780 really spoke to him were the ones that spoke about, well, not surprisingly, people, males, in his case,

00:05:42.420 he was a boy, who were strong, who were heroic types, exactly the kind of people he wanted to be.

00:05:49.520 And at least at that age and in circumstances, he couldn't be, but he could escape the confines of

00:05:56.540 his bedroom or his house by reading these books. And he imbibed this thoroughly romantic view of the

00:06:05.280 world, of the heroes. And he gradually got a sense that, I want to be one of them.

00:06:11.560 So this romantic worldview developed in his childhood from his reading of books. Beyond the reading of

00:06:18.040 books, how else do you see that romantic worldview manifest itself in TR as a child? Are there any

00:06:23.760 particular moments that stand out to you? Well, when he is a young boy, he's about 10 or 11 years

00:06:32.820 old. His father, whom Young Roosevelt, he shared the name of his father, they were both Theodore

00:06:39.060 Roosevelt, when Elder Theodore called Young Theodore into his office in his home. And he basically told

00:06:47.820 Theodore Roosevelt, Young Theodore, you need to take responsibility for yourself. He said,

00:06:52.420 you have a first rate mind. The kid was smart. You have a first rate mind, but you do not have a

00:06:57.640 first rate body. And without the body, the mind can go only so far. So the elder Theodore was

00:07:04.420 challenging the son. He said, you must make your body. Now, he had the financial resources where he

00:07:10.720 could build a gym on the fourth floor of the house, and he could hire boxing coaches and wrestling

00:07:15.460 coaches and personal trainers and all of this. And so Roosevelt took it as his personal mission

00:07:20.920 that he was going to build his body. But there was another angle to this. Because he had spent so

00:07:27.100 much time indoors, he associated the outdoors with this challenge, with the place that he could

00:07:33.320 demonstrate that he was as good, he was as strong, he was as brave as other people. So he started

00:07:38.500 hunting. Now, the hunting initially was an adjunct to a very, I mean, some people might say nerdy

00:07:45.320 kind of hobby, and that was ornithology. He collected birds. In those days, bird watchers

00:07:51.160 were also usually bird shooters. And the way you develop your collection is you go out and shoot

00:07:55.320 birds. And then you'd mount them and do all this other stuff. So Roosevelt became a hunter. And of

00:08:02.360 course, in his reading of history, many of the great heroes in American history, the Daniel Boone types,

00:08:08.020 they were hunters. And so Roosevelt associated hunting with the kind of manhood that he wanted to

00:08:17.240 grow into. Because if you could, you know, test yourself against fearsome beasts, then boy, that

00:08:24.860 was a real measure of your courage and of your skill and of your strength. You know, you start out with

00:08:30.760 birds, that's no big deal. But you advance from birds to larger animals, to deer, to moose, moose are

00:08:36.720 pretty dangerous, bears, and things like that. So Roosevelt kind of grew into this idea that what

00:08:45.800 he wanted to be, in addition to being strong and smart, was being an outdoorsman. And this in his

00:08:52.000 teen years. And of course, in those days, if you grew up in New York City, you didn't go hunting in

00:08:58.660 New York City, you had to go someplace else. So he would go to Maine, for example, that was the

00:09:04.000 nearest more or less wilderness area. But like very many Easterners in those days, his imagination 1.00

00:09:12.220 naturally flew to the American West, because the West was that part of the country that in some ways

00:09:18.060 was quintessentially American. It was the part of the country that continually remade itself. It's what

00:09:24.300 made America different from Europe. America had this frontier. America had this unsettled region out

00:09:29.900 to the West. And of course, in the West, there were buffalo, there were grizzly bears, there were

00:09:35.000 the big game of North America. So from the time he was a teenager, Roosevelt began dreaming of,

00:09:41.860 I'm going to go West, and I'm going to test myself against the great beasts of the Western wilderness.

00:09:47.320 Well, that's that idea of getting back to nature. That's an important part of romanticism,

00:09:51.180 right? Like you want to get in touch with nature, because that's what you do as a romantic.

00:09:55.620 And this is especially true in America, because there is this notion, there has long been this

00:10:02.560 notion of the unspoiled Eden that greeted English colonists when they arrived in the early 17th

00:10:11.140 century. And it's partly connected to a Protestant theological view of the Garden of Eden, the fall of

00:10:18.820 man, and all this other stuff. But it also seemed to play out in front of American eyes. And so

00:10:25.520 if they had stayed in England, if they had stayed in other parts of Europe, they wouldn't have been

00:10:31.000 able to identify with this wilderness, because you get very far from the populated East, and in fact,

00:10:39.800 the land looks pretty wild. And if you get across the Mississippi and across the Missouri, then it

00:10:44.260 still is wild. There were wild Indians out there. And that seemed to make this connection

00:10:50.240 with this earlier time. And it was possible to imagine this was the era of the so-called noble

00:10:56.980 savage, the unspoiled person of the wilderness. This bled over into some of the books that Roosevelt

00:11:04.600 has read as a kid, James Fenimore Cooper, and The Last of the Mohicans, and The Deerslayer, and all of

00:11:09.660 this. And so he had these models in his head of this is what the real America is like.

00:11:16.640 And Roosevelt recognized that a silk stocking kid from New York, that's not the real America. The 0.87

00:11:24.300 real America is the Daniel Boone character, the Davy Crockett, the frontiersman. And there was part

00:11:30.240 of him that really wanted to either become that or to test himself against that model to see if he

00:11:38.160 could become that if opportunity arose. All right. So as a child, he exercised, built his body,

00:11:44.240 helped him overcome his asthma. That's that sort of origin story of his. And that's a romantic

00:11:48.120 thing too, as well. But then also he developed this love of nature that you would see throughout

00:11:53.240 his life. And we'll talk about this later on, his cattle ranching, and then also his work in

00:11:57.560 conservation and some of his big hunting trips. But you mentioned his father and you talk a lot

00:12:02.960 about the influence that Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had on Theodore Roosevelt. Did Theodore Roosevelt

00:12:08.900 Jr., did he have a romantic view of his dad? He did probably more than most sons have of their

00:12:16.120 fathers, in part because there seemed to be such a gulf between Theodore Sr. and Theodore the Younger.

00:12:24.380 The father, as Theodore Jr., the Younger said, he was the finest man he had ever known. He was strong.

00:12:33.900 He was big and muscular and sturdy in a way that the young kid was not. Now, to some degree, that's

00:12:40.060 true of every adult father and little boy son. That distinction is always there. But in Roosevelt's

00:12:48.720 case, as far as he knew, his father had never been sick a day in his life. Now, this would change.

00:12:54.520 His father died of cancer when Roosevelt was in college. But as a child, he looked at his father

00:13:00.580 as this tower of strength, as this brave person, as this handsome person, as this sort of rock of

00:13:06.780 stability. And Younger wanted to be like that. Now, of course, as he grew older, he realized,

00:13:14.940 well, okay, it's not exactly that. It's not, my father isn't everything I thought. And there was an

00:13:21.060 aspect of this that really sort of intensified Roosevelt's desire to prove himself. And that was

00:13:29.620 that during the Civil War, which came along when Roosevelt started when Roosevelt was three years

00:13:34.640 old. So he was this young kid in New York, and he saw the troops marching around New York. He was

00:13:39.620 there amid the draft riots in 1863. And so he was really swept up in the war. But the war came home,

00:13:47.980 the Civil War came home for young Theodore Roosevelt in a way that it's not for most people,

00:13:52.320 because his family had divided loyalties. His mother and his grandmother, his maternal grandmother,

00:13:58.520 who lived with him at this time, they were both from Georgia. And so they were rooting for the South.

00:14:03.200 He had uncles who fought for the Confederacy. And his father, however, was a Unionist, a Northerner,

00:14:10.360 except that his father did not put on the uniform of the Union Army, did not fight. Now,

00:14:16.500 his father didn't fight primarily because his mother said, I cannot bear the idea that you might kill

00:14:24.540 my brothers. So what Theodore Senior did was to take a civilian position. And it was a very

00:14:31.980 responsible, important position. He went from camp to camp, persuading the soldiers to allow

00:14:38.320 the War Department to send their paychecks to their wives and their dependents at home so that they

00:14:44.320 wouldn't be in want while the fathers were fighting. So it was a very worthy thing. He probably did more

00:14:49.960 good for the Union cause in that function than if he had put on a uniform and been a staff, an aide

00:14:56.780 to some general, which is probably what he would have done. But to the young kid and to the teenager

00:15:03.820 he's growing into, being a civilian during wartime, that was falling short. And when Theodore

00:15:10.580 Roosevelt would hear his age peers tell stories of what their fathers had done during the war,

00:15:16.900 he just had to keep embarrassedly silent because his father didn't have any war stories.

00:15:24.100 And Theodore Roosevelt's sister, he had two sisters, and his younger sister recalled that

00:15:30.500 he made a silent pledge. Theodore Roosevelt made a silent pledge in some way

00:15:36.720 to make up for this one chink in his father's armor, this one deficit in his father's resume. 0.83

00:15:45.480 And that was, he was going to prove, the younger Theodore, the son, was going to prove that the

00:15:51.560 Roosevelt men were brave. He was going to go to war and show his courage under fire in a way his father

00:15:58.400 had not. And so the relationship with his father was one that drove even further Roosevelt's notion that

00:16:07.620 I have to be a hero. I have to prove my courage. I have to demonstrate that I'm strong and brave and

00:16:14.140 able. The fact that his father died when Roosevelt was in college meant that the adult son never got to

00:16:24.260 measure his father sort of adult to adult because his father was gone. And there's, in most cases,

00:16:32.540 when an adult child grows up and then comes to know the adult father, there's a kind of equalization,

00:16:39.020 there's a kind of some measurement that, all right, I understand that you can have, you know,

00:16:44.580 your flaws, we all have flaws and so on. With Roosevelt, no, his father dies. And so he

00:16:49.120 is deprived of the ability to develop that relationship. So his father is this hero with one

00:16:56.180 little Achilles heel. And if I can somehow make up for that, then my father will be perfect and he

00:17:02.920 can remain perfect in my vision. So this is part of what drives Roosevelt as he becomes an adult.

00:17:10.280 And that would probably play an influence in his involvement in the Spanish-American War.

00:17:14.000 And we can talk about that here in a bit. But before we do, so this is, we're talking about,

00:17:18.640 we're up to him being a young man. He's hunting, he's gone to college. You describe in college,

00:17:22.840 he was sort of an odd duck at Harvard. He was boxing, but also he wanted to like recite Tennyson

00:17:28.480 while he was boxing. And people thought it was kind of weird, but he ended up flourishing.

00:17:34.520 He gets out of college and he marries his first love, this girl named Alice. Let's talk about his

00:17:40.920 family life. Like how did TR's romanticism influence his relationship with Alice? And then

00:17:46.700 how did his romantic worldview shape how he responded to her death?

00:17:52.200 Yeah. So this is a case where sort of the romantic worldview coincides with what people often think

00:17:58.920 of when they talk of romance, you know, Valentine's Day and so on. Because Roosevelt indeed was an

00:18:07.000 odd fit at Harvard. There are a lot of odd fits at Harvard, but he wanted to be an athlete. He wanted

00:18:14.120 to be the star of the football team. He just wasn't coordinated enough. But he tried. And so he was

00:18:19.860 stubborn. He was dogged. He realized that he could succeed at certain sports like boxing, where, okay,

00:18:27.340 if you just keep standing, you know, and stay in there, wrestling, you know, if you can just,

00:18:32.300 if you, if determination will conduce to success, then you can be a success. So he was that way,

00:18:38.400 but he, he wasn't a particularly well-liked person. He wasn't most popular until, until, well,

00:18:47.260 when his father died, his father left him a sizable fortune for a young man. And so all of a sudden now

00:18:54.680 he can throw the parties and he can be the one who has the resources that bring other people around.

00:19:02.600 So in his last couple of years at Harvard, he's much more of a success. And it may be, I don't know

00:19:08.320 if it goes without saying, but it certainly was true that he became more eligible in the eyes of

00:19:13.360 young women, including one, Alice Lee, over whom Theodore Roosevelt fell, fell head over heels for her.

00:19:21.580 Now, this is kind of interesting because Roosevelt had had a boyhood girl friend, Edith Carrop. She was

00:19:31.700 a friend of the family, a friend of his sisters. And Edith certainly thought that there was some kind

00:19:39.420 of understanding she had with Theodore when he went off to college. They're too young to get married,

00:19:45.080 but in her head anyway, marriage was in prospect. And then he forgot all about her when he fell for

00:19:54.660 Alice Lee. And Alice Lee was this young, beautiful, charming girl. And at first Roosevelt thought that,

00:20:02.680 boy, she's out of my league, but he was persistent in wooing her as he was persistent in a lot of things.

00:20:08.760 And he finally proposed and she accepted and they were married. And Roosevelt thought, oh my gosh,

00:20:16.720 this is the greatest thing could ever happen to me. And he was in a state of romantic bliss. And he,

00:20:25.800 so this is going on and he's trying to figure out what to do with himself after college because

00:20:31.020 he was wealthy enough that he didn't have to work, but he had to do something. So he shocked members

00:20:37.920 of his family by deciding to go into politics. Now, for somebody of Roosevelt's class and station,

00:20:45.660 this was an unusual choice because politics, certainly in New York, was not what members of the elite

00:20:53.860 did. The elite folks, they counted their money and they circulated at their clubs, but they left the

00:21:03.680 grubby business of governing to other people, to the striving Irish American types, to the ones who 1.00

00:21:11.360 don't have any other way of getting ahead. But Roosevelt conceived this idea that he wanted to be part

00:21:17.600 of what he called the governing class. Now, to some degree, I suppose this is because

00:21:23.380 Roosevelt, by now, was insisting on always challenging himself. And it wouldn't be any

00:21:31.580 challenge just to fill his time going to his clubs and going fox hunts and doing stuff like that. No,

00:21:37.660 no, he needed a challenge. And politics was where he could make a challenge. Well, he got elected

00:21:42.920 primarily because he was wealthy and could afford the bar tabs for all of his followers. And he got

00:21:49.280 elected to the New York legislature. And for a couple of years, he thought his life was golden

00:21:55.240 because he would go back and forth from his home in New York up to Albany when the legislature was

00:22:01.340 in session, ride the train up and he'd write letters, love letters home to Alice and everything was

00:22:06.600 great. And then when Alice became pregnant and they were going to have a child, boy, this was even

00:22:11.560 better. But tragically, Alice died. Alice died giving birth to their daughter. And it just so

00:22:18.940 happened that on the same day, and it happened to be Valentine's Day of all days, his wife died and

00:22:24.780 his mother died in the same house because Alice was living with the mother in the final stages for

00:22:31.000 pregnancy. And so there's this double blow on Roosevelt. Now, to be honest, Roosevelt felt much more

00:22:39.300 deeply the death of Alice than of his mother. He was fond of his mother, but the father was the

00:22:45.180 parent that really dominated Roosevelt's mindset. But when Alice died, then Roosevelt felt as though,

00:22:51.700 in fact, as he wrote in his diary, he put a big black X over that day in his diary and said,

00:22:57.680 the light has gone out of my life. And this was exactly the way you would expect the romantic hero to

00:23:05.680 respond to the death of his true love. And Roosevelt thought that I will never feel love again. And so

00:23:14.320 what he did was he fled. He fled the East. He fled politics for the West. Now, it just so happened that

00:23:23.800 the summer before he had gone out to Dakota territory to hunt buffalo. He'd always been wanting to hunt the

00:23:30.320 biggest game of North America. And so off he went. And while he was out there, he was very impressed

00:23:36.260 with the region along the Little Missouri River and with the people he met out there. And Roosevelt,

00:23:42.000 like very many Easterners, thought that Westerners, Western men were the authentic men of the country.

00:23:48.620 This was the real America. And he wanted to be like them. So he had enough money that he decided to buy

00:23:55.540 what amounted to a cattle ranch. He wrote a check for, I think it was $14,000 to this guy he had just

00:24:01.560 met several days before and said, okay, I trust you basically because you're an honest Westerner

00:24:07.260 and you wouldn't cheat me. And go buy me the cattle, get this thing set up. And so off he goes back East.

00:24:13.800 And then when his wife dies, he has this refuge to which he can go, the refuge in the West.

00:24:18.780 And he finds solace for his heart in the wilderness of the West. And he writes about

00:24:25.340 riding through the badlands of Dakota territory, these strange, weird landscapes, that they were

00:24:32.480 so strange that they did provide this kind of otherworldly solace. They were balm to his soul.

00:24:39.800 And to Roosevelt, the West became this place to which he could go when he needed to get away

00:24:47.900 from the cares of the East. Now, this had been in the collective American mindset for generations.

00:24:55.800 The West was where we can go when things go wrong in the East. Now, as a matter of fact,

00:25:01.860 most Easterners didn't go West, but the idea that they could, that was really important.

00:25:08.020 And it's critical for Roosevelt's emotional, political development for that country. It was at

00:25:15.020 just this time that the frontier is vanishing. Enough Americans have moved West so that in the 0.95

00:25:22.640 1890 census, so Roosevelt's wife dies in 1884 and Roosevelt's out there in the 1880s. But in 1890,

00:25:29.800 the director of the census says, you know what? There's no longer any frontier because the settlement

00:25:34.620 is scattered all across the West. So there's this idea that the frontier is vanishing. And this

00:25:40.120 important aspect of America's psychic life is disappearing as well. But Roosevelt believed

00:25:48.040 that there was something special that he was able to get there before it went away. But it became a

00:25:53.760 very important part of not only of his life, but of the identity that he created for himself. He was

00:26:01.300 an Easterner by birth, but he was a Westerner by adoption and a Westerner in spirit.

00:26:06.840 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:26:11.340 And now back to the show. So his first wife dies, Alice Lee, and he had this romantic ideal of love

00:26:18.020 that, okay, if your first wife dies, you don't remarry. And he told his sister that I'm not going

00:26:23.680 to remarry. Well, he ends up remarrying and it was Edith Carroll, his childhood friend. And he even wrote

00:26:30.320 letters to his sister. You know how I feel about getting remarried, but I just feel it's the right

00:26:35.280 thing to do. And it's sort of like this whirlwind wedding kind of under the radar. Then he becomes

00:26:40.060 this family man. Is there anything we can learn about TR's romanticism through his family life?

00:26:46.560 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, 0.98

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 0.89

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, 0.67

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 1.00

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

00:44:09.980 set the model there.

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

00:44:29.600 anything to do?

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 0.99

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 0.58

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 0.94

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,

00:52:33.680 you know, you might die by that time.

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

00:55:10.340 the rest of your work?

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.

00:55:29.220 Good to talk to you.

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 artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles written

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00:56:23.500 Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you not only listen to the AOM podcast,

00:56:27.000 but put what you've heard into action.

00:56:35.840 Thank you for listening to the AOM podcast.

The Art of Manliness - March 29, 2021

Theodore Roosevelt, The Last Romantic

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