The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  PRAISE FOR

  THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  “Reading Morris’s comprehensive, necessarily breathless account of Roosevelt’s rise is like riding a cannonball express through the Rockies, the peaks whipping past, one exceeding another in magnificence.”

  —MORDECAI RICHLER

  “Morris has written a monumental work in every sense of the word.… The result is a book of pulsating and well-written narrative, documented by well over 100 pages of minute, immaculate notes. An average reader will take a long time to read and absorb it all. But read it he will. The tale never lags, like its unique human subject.”

  —EDWIN TETLOW, The Christian Science Monitor

  “His prose is elegant and at the same time hard and lucid, and his sense of narrative flow is nearly flawless.… The author recreates a sense of the scene and an immediacy of the situation that any skilled writer should envy and the most jaded reader should find a joy.”

  —DARDEN A. PYRON, Miami Herald

  “It is a big volume, but it is exciting enough to thrill any reader. Morris has an exceptional dexterity with words.… This book will undoubtedly become the standard study of Roosevelt’s rise to power.”

  —THOMAS CONWAY, The Boston Sunday Globe

  “To his task Morris brings imposing assets.… He is scrupulous in the use of his material and notably fair-minded, … [and] he can tell a very good story.”

  —ELTING E. MORISON, The Washington Post Book World

  “This highly entertaining, immensely readable book is an extraordinary portrait of a most amazing man, Theodore Roosevelt.… Edmund Morris is scrupulously fair. He is not judgmental; he draws no sweeping conclusions. Sympathetic, amused, and understanding, he is neither adoring nor worshipful.”

  —CAREY MCWILLIAMS, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Theodore Roosevelt is one of those figures who cannot be fully calibrated without the distance of history and the views of an outsider. This towering biography is the first to answer both requisites.… Orchestrating his material with a certainty and lightness of touch, Morris shuns facile psychohistory and lets Roosevelt’s life build its own edifice.”

  —EDWIN WARNER, Time

  “If you want a classic Teddy biography, one that hews close to the Theodore Roosevelt of patriotic legend, this entertaining and colorful book is for you.… TR would have enjoyed this version of his life, not only because it’s exciting, particularly the cowboy tales, but because it’s morally correct.… In no other Roosevelt biography do we get a more lively and lifelike picture of the pre-presidential Roosevelt.”

  —NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN, Chicago Tribune

  “A huge book, but one that is so full of action that the reader will have difficulty putting it down.… A monumental piece of writing … one of the most interesting biographies to appear in many a moon.”

  —JAMES H. JESSE, The Nashville Banner

  “The documentation is almost overwhelming and the description of both events and personalities is unusually detailed and complete. Morris reveals the developing personality, the complex and often contradictory character, and the multiplicity of associations of this most ubiquitous of statesmen. His political career, literary activity, life as a rancher and soldier, and personal life are all abundantly covered. This may well become the definitive life.”

  —RALPH ADAMS BROWN, Library Journal

  “If a novelist were to create a character as multidimensional as Theodore Roosevelt, his credibility would be severely strained. One cannot finish Edmund Morris’s sympathetic study of the 26th President’s early years without feeling that if TR isn’t one of our history’s greatest men, he is surely one of the more fascinating ones.”

  —RICHARD SAMUEL WEST, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Morris has crafted a magnificent biography, carefully researched and gracefully written. He has a keen eye for just the right quotation to enliven an incident or bring a personality to life, and his own sense of humor sparkles through.”

  —ALLEN J. SHARE, Louisville Courier-Journal

  “Morris faces all the problems and contradictions.… If he were less sympathetic than he is, his treatment of these aspects might make for distortion, but as it is, it only makes for fuller understanding.

  “He is also, I must not fail to restate, a magnificent writer. You can read this book with the absorption with which you would read a great novel.… So great is Morris’s skill that the reader follows the story as breathlessly as if he did not already know the outcome.”

  —EDWARD WAGENKNECHT, Waltham-Newton News-Tribune

  “Readers of this first volume of a biography that takes Roosevelt to his first White House term will get some of the feeling of having received a series of doses of electric voltage.”

  —HARRY STEINBERG, Newsday

  “This volume leaves us on Sept. 2, 1901. President McKinley has been shot.… America would move into the 20th century with an activist President at its helm, a man who would set the pace of a strong, involved federal government. Morris is now writing that part of the story, and its publication is an event to anticipate eagerly.”

  —MAURICE DOLBIER, Providence Sunday Journal

  “This irresistible biography is a lot more than a string of dramatic anecdotes. For example, there’s the magnificent prose picture of the disastrous Western winter of 1886–87.… Time and again, Mr. Morris seizes such relatively minor incidents and blows them up to fill the imaginative landscape of his study.…

  “What does the total picture of Roosevelt add up to? … Mr. Morris’s refusal to interpret analytically pays rich dividends. We get to see the many contradictory sides of Theodore Roosevelt—the killer of big game and the passionate conservationist; the indefatigable writer of historical potboilers and the scholar who produced the definitive naval history of the War of 1812; the sentimental family man and the tub-thumping advocate of imperialism—the list could go on forever.… For the time being, we can count our curiosity over them among the many reasons for looking forward to the second volume of this wonderfully absorbing biography.”

  —CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, The New York Times

  ALSO BY EDMUND MORRIS

  Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan

  Theodore Rex

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This Modern Library edition of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt does not differ substantially from the first edition published in 1979, although many passages have been recast. Important material deriving from recent Roosevelt scholarship has been added to the text and the documentation throughout. The book has been redesigned to conform with Theodore Rex, and some illustrations have been replaced. There are no major deletions.

  2001 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1979 by Edmund Morris

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published, in slightly different form, by Coward, McCann & Geoghegan in 1979.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Morris, Edmund.

  The rise of Theodore Roosevelt / Edmund Morris.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York : Coward, McCann & Geoghegan,

  © 1979.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77782-9

  1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and gover
nment—1901–1909. 4. New York (State)—Politics and government—1865–1950. I. Title.

  E757 .M883 2001

  973.91′1′092—dc21

  [B] 2001030520

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  To Sylvia

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: New Year’s Day, 1907

  PART ONE: 1858–1886

  1: The Very Small Person

  2: The Mind, But Not the Body

  3: The Man with the Morning in His Face

  4: The Swell in the Dog-Cart

  5: The Political Hack

  6: The Cyclone Assemblyman

  7: The Fighting Cock

  8: The Dude from New York

  9: The Honorable Gentleman

  10: The Delegate-at-Large

  11: The Cowboy of the Present

  12: The Four-Eyed Maverick

  13: The Long Arm of the Law

  14: The Next Mayor of New York

  Interlude: Winter of the Blue Snow, 1886–1887

  PART TWO: 1887–1901

  15: The Literary Feller

  16: The Silver-Plated Reform Commissioner

  17: The Dear Old Beloved Brother

  18: The Universe Spinner

  19: The Biggest Man in New York

  20: The Snake in the Grass

  21: The Glorious Retreat

  22: The Hot Weather Secretary

  23: The Lieutenant Colonel

  24: The Rough Rider

  25: The Wolf Rising in the Heart

  26: The Most Famous Man in America

  27: The Boy Governor

  28: The Man of Destiny

  Epilogue: September 1901

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Illustrations

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE: NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1907

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK PRECISELY the sound of trumpets echoes within the White House, and floats, through open windows, out into the sunny morning. A shiver of excitement strikes the line of people waiting four abreast outside Theodore Roosevelt’s front gate, and runs in serpentine reflex along Pennsylvania Avenue as far as Seventeenth Street, before whipping south and dissipating itself over half a mile away. The shiver is accompanied by a murmur: “The President’s on his way downstairs.”1

  There is some shifting of feet, but no eager pushing forward. The crowd knows that Roosevelt has hundreds of bejeweled and manicured hands to shake privately before he grasps the coarser flesh of the general public. Judging by last year’s reception, the gate will not be unlocked until one o’clock, and even then it will take a good two hours for everybody to pass through. Roosevelt may be the fastest handshaker in history (he averages fifty grips a minute), but he is also the most conscientious, insisting that all citizens who are sober, washed, and free of bodily advertising be permitted to wish the President of the United States a Happy New Year.2

  On a day as perfect as this, nobody minds standing in line—with the possible exception of those unfortunates in the blue shadow of the State, War, and Navy Building. Already the temperature is a springlike 55 degrees. It is “Roosevelt weather,” to use a popular phrase.3 Ladies carry bunches of sweet-smelling hyacinths. Gentlemen refresh their thirst at dray-wagons parked against the sidewalk. A reporter, strolling up and down the line, notices that the weather has brought out an unusual number of children, some of whom seem determined to enter the White House on roller skates.4

  “All citizens who are sober, washed, and free of bodily advertising.”

  Theodore Roosevelt receives the American people on New Year’s Day. (Illustration prl.1)

  More music seeps into the still air. This time it is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played with dignified restraint by the Marine Band. (The President has had occasion to complain, in previous years, of too loud a welcome as he arrives in the vestibule.) After only one strophe, the anthem fades into silence, and another murmur runs down the line: “He’s taking his position in the Blue Room.” Now a German march. “He’s begun to receive the ambassadors.”5

  FOR THE LAST half hour they have been rolling up in their glossy carriages—viscounts, barons, and knights bearing the greetings of emperors and kings to a plain man in a frock coat. A sizable crowd has gathered outside the East Gate to watch them alight under the porte cochère. Their Excellencies teeter down, almost crippled by the weight of full court dress. Plumed helmets wobble precariously, while silver nose-straps tweak at their mustaches. Great bars of medals tangle with their swaying epaulets, gold braid stiffens their trousers, and swords of honor slap against their thigh-length patent-leather boots. Officers of the White House detail, themselves as brilliant as butterflies, hurry across the sunny gravel to assist. Screened through the tall pickets of the White House fence, all this awkward pageantry dissolves into an impressionistic shimmer, and the crowd watches fascinated until the last diplomat has hobbled inside.6

  Thousands of other onlookers throng Sixteenth Street and Connecticut Avenue to watch the cavalcade of Washington society converging upon the White House. Justices of the Supreme Court creak by in dignified four-wheelers. Congressional couples display themselves to the electorate in open broughams (necks crane for a glimpse of “Princess Alice” Longworth, the President’s beautiful daughter, in apricot satin and diamonds). A silver-helmeted military attaché steers his own electric runabout. Two energetic little mules haul a mud-spattered bus full of Army ladies.7

  Inspired by the balmy weather, many of the President’s guests arrive on foot. Lafayette Square is crowded with elegant young men and women. Naval officers march five abreast, their plumes frothing in unison. Chinese grandees drag heavy silk robes. Grizzled veterans of the Civil War stomp along with tinkling medals, and the crowd parts respectfully before them. The air is full of high-spirited conversation and laughter, while the music pouring out of the White House (a continuous medley, now, of jigs and Joplin rags) creates an irresistible holiday mood. A newspaperman is struck by the happiness he sees everywhere, on this, “the best and fairest day President Roosevelt ever had.”8

  SUCH SUPERLATIVES in praise of the weather are mild in comparison with those being lavished on the state of the union. “On this day of our Lord, January 1, 1907,” the Washington Evening Star reports, “we are the richest people in the world.” The national wealth “has been rolling up at the rate of $4.6 billion per year, $127.3 million per day, $5.5 million per hour, $88,430 per minute, and $1,474 per second” during President Roosevelt’s two Administrations.9 Never have American farmers harvested such tremendous crops; railroads are groaning under the weight of unprecedented payloads; shipyards throb with record construction; the banks are awash with a spring-tide of money. Every one of the forty-five states has enriched itself since the last census, and in per capita terms Washington, D.C., is now “the Richest Spot on Earth.”10

  Politically, too, it has been a year of superlatives, many of them supplied, with characteristic immodesty, by the President himself. “No Congress in our time has done more good work,” he fondly told the fifty-ninth, having battered it into submission with the sheer volume of his social legislation.11 He calls its first session “the most substantial” in his experience of public affairs. Joseph G. Cannon, the Speaker of the House, agrees, with one reservation about the President’s methods. “Roosevelt’s all right,” says Cannon, “but he’s got no more use for the Constitution than a tomcat has for a marriage license.”12

  “Theodore the Sudden” has been accused of having a similar contempt for international law, ever since the afternoon in 1903 when he allowed a U.S. warship to “monitor” the Panamanian Revolution. If he loses any sleep over his role in that questionable coup d’état, he shows no sign. On the contrary, he glories in the fact that America is now actually building the P
anama Canal “after four centuries of conversation”13 by other nations. A few weeks ago he visited the Canal Zone (the first trip abroad by a U.S. President in office), and the colossal excavations there moved him to Shakespearean hyperbole. “It shall be in future enough to say of any man ‘he was connected with digging the Panama Canal’ to confer the patent of nobility on that man,” Roosevelt told his sweating engineers. “From time to time little men will come along to find fault with what you have done … they will go down the stream like bubbles, they will vanish; but the work you have done will remain for the ages.”14

  Few, indeed, are the little men who can find fault with the President on this beautiful New Year’s Day, but they are correspondingly shrill. Congressman James Wadsworth, a battered opponent of Roosevelt’s Pure Food Act (which goes into effect today), growls that “the bloody hero of Kettle Hill” is “unreliable, a faker, and a humbug.”15 The editor of the St. Louis Censor, who has never forgiven Roosevelt for inviting a black man to dine in the White House, warns that he is now trying to end segregation of Orientals in San Francisco schools. “Almost every week his Administration has been characterized by some outrageous act of usurpation … he is the most dangerous foe to human liberty that has ever set foot on American soil.”16 Another Southerner, by the name of Woodrow Wilson, is tempted to agree: “He is the most dangerous man of the age.”17 Mark Twain believes that the President is “clearly insane … and insanest upon war and its supreme glories.”18

  Roosevelt is used to such criticism. He has been hearing it all his life. “If a man has a very decided character, has a strongly accentuated career, it is normally the case of course that he makes ardent friends and bitter enemies.”19 Yet even impartial observers will admit there is a grain of truth in Twain’s assertions. The President certainly has an irrational love of battle. He ceaselessly praises the joys of righteous killing, most recently in his annual message to Congress: “A just war is in the long run far better for a man’s soul than the most prosperous peace.”