PRAISE FOR
THEODORE REX
“Take a deep breath and dive into Theodore Rex, Edmund Morris’s sequel to his 1979 masterpiece, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.… He writes with a breezy verve that makes the pages fly, and that perfectly suits his subject.… A combination of diffidence and enthusiasm allows him to write of our past—which looks like our future—with energy and clarity.”
—RICHARD BROOKHISER, The New York Times Book Review
“In Edmund Morris, a great president has found a great biographer. This … is every bit as much a masterpiece of biographical writing as Morris’s first installment, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.”
—MICHAEL LIND, The Washington Post
“Morris’s narrative account of Roosevelt as President is not likely to be bettered by any scholar at any time in the foreseeable future. As a literary work on Theodore Roosevelt, it is unlikely ever to be surpassed. It is one of the great histories of the American presidency, worthy of being on a shelf alongside Henry Adams’s volumes on Jefferson and Madison.”
—ERNEST R. MAY, The Times Literary Supplement
“By dint of its subject’s wildly captivating personality, Theodore Rex is able to combine the sweep of history and the complexities of statesmanship with the pervasive sense that you, the reader, are there.”
—JANET MASLIN, The New York Times
“This eagerly awaited second volume of Edmund Morris’s biography of Theodore Roosevelt could not have been better timed. [It is] just as scholarly and readable as the first volume.… Because of its theme and because of the scale of Roosevelt’s own actions, it is a book not only for the United States but for the world.”
—ASA BRIGGS, The Washington Times
“[The Rise of Theodore Rex] achieved a reputation as a modern classic, painstakingly researched, compellingly written, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.… Theodore Rex is a worthy successor.… Once again, the scholarship is painstaking, the choices made amid an overwhelming amount of ultra-rich subject matter are wise.… The scenes and anecdotes are so fascinating the book is compelling.… Morris is an exciting teacher of U.S. history.”
—STEVE WEINBERG, The Denver Post
“Displaying a rich collection of vivid anecdotes, Mr. Morris provides a brilliant account of Theodore Roosevelt’s nearly seven and a half years of power.”
—EDWARD J. RENEHAN, JR., The Wall Street Journal
“Roosevelt is a biographer’s dream, an epic character not out of place in an adventure novel. Edmund Morris captures perfectly the frenetic atmosphere that surrounded a President of boundless energy, imagination, and ambition.… Theodore Rex is a massive achievement and hugely entertaining.”
—MICHAEL O’HANLON, The Christian Science Monitor
“There have been many splendid books about Roosevelt, but this surpasses them.… [TR] would have liked the way Edmund Morris has conjured him in this arresting study of a man at the peak of his powers. Theodore Roosevelt is back as the most rambunctious ghost stomping in the attic of our national memory.”
—TED WIDMER, The New York Observer
“No president before him acted with such zest, and none has since. Small wonder that Mark Twain called Roosevelt ‘the most popular human being that has ever existed in the United States.’ … Morris is that happiest of biographers—one writing with affection about a colorful character who left his bootprints all over history.… The reader finds himself holding not so much a book as a whirlwind of energy.”
—HARRY LEVINS, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Roosevelt is a biographer’s dream.… His was a life of action—‘pure act,’ in Henry Adams’s phrase. Action produces narrative, and narrative requires scene-setting, and Morris has an uncommon talent for both. He is splendid when telling a story and describing the scenery against which it unfolds.”
—RUSSELL BAKER, The New York Review of Books
“It is easy to forget that you are reading about a former President—the man is so fascinating that the Presidency seems almost marginal.… Morris has to race to match Roosevelt’s pace, but at every turn the biographer shrewdly takes his protean subject’s measure.… The result is an inspiring reminder that greatness and politics aren’t always antithetical.”
—MALCOLM JONES, Newsweek
“Morris does a masterful job.… No self-respecting novelist would make up such a character.… Roosevelt might wonder why he rates only three volumes from Morris.”
—BOB MINZESHEIMER, USA Today
“Much of this book has the hurtling pace and alert eye of fiction.… Theodore Rex lets Morris be Morris … which is to say one of the most adroit biographers around.”
—RICHARD LACAYO, Time
“The sheer loveliness of [Morris’s] prose, his adept handling of scenes and emotions, his skill at building suspense and managing disclosures, all these talents are manifest in Theodore Rex.… Morris’s unusual skills are a gift.”
—DANIEL AKST, New Jersey Star-Ledger
“Morris writes from inside, presenting everything in scenario fashion, with characters and action and dialogue, in energetic prose, and with little overt authorial presence.”
—NICHOLAS LEMANN, The New Yorker
“What commends Morris’s [book] is not only the sheer richness of TR’s life but the sheer, old-fashioned richness of the writing. Here is wit. Here is irony. And here is the talent to get it all across.… [Morris] has written a book so good that TR himself would have recommended it.”
—RICHARD COHEN, The Washington Post
“His style is reader-friendly and piquant. This is Roosevelt as his often astonished contemporaries observed him.… It’s a shining portrait of a presciently modern political genius maneuvering in a gilded age of wealth, optimism, excess and American global ascension.”
—JOHN CARMAN, San Francisco Chronicle
“Morris has roared back to print with a huge book on Roosevelt’s White House years.… A big, beefy biography of an inexhaustible character.”
—BRUCE CLAYTON, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Morris is above all a portraitist—perhaps the best currently writing.… His metaphors are often apt; at times they are brilliant.”
—H. W. BRANDS, Boston Sunday Globe
“Magnificent … This is a compulsively readable, beautifully measured and paced account. Probably no extended study has better captured Roosevelt’s dynamism, his childlike enthusiasms … his determination to make the presidency the center of national life, his imperial view of his role, his yearning for American empire.”
—MICHAEL SHERRY, Chicago Tribune
“Superb … The new book is every bit as detailed and imaginatively written as its 1979 predecessor.… [Roosevelt’s] very real intellectual and physical appetites were positively Falstaffian.… What distinguishes Theodore Rex is, if anything, not the copious research (there are 180 pages of notes) but rather its deeply novelistic construction, the numerous writerly touches, and the acts of emotional sympathy.… Add to this some smaller touches … and you end up with a biography that’s as good as fiction … a narrative that is well suited in heft, temper, and tone to its vivid subject.”
—DANIEL MENDELSOHN, New York
“Roosevelt’s titanic personality emerges vividly and with a good deal of nuance; the nation he led through a period of turbulent economic, social, and political change proves to have much in common with America at the turn of the twenty-first century.… The narrative moves steadily forward, enriched but seldom slowed by detail.… Morris’s prose is swift and sure, with a good deal of bite.”
—WENDY SMITH, Newsday
“A reader doesn’t have to turn too many page
s of this grand biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential years before coming to the inescapable conclusion that TR was one of the most fascinating and singularly different presidents in American history.… [Theodore Rex is] brilliantly researched and masterfully told.… Without question, this is the definitive one-volume history of Roosevelt’s presidency.”
—TOM POWERS, The Flint Journal (Michigan)
“A recent C-SPAN poll placed [TR] fourth among all Presidents, behind only Lincoln, Washington and FDR.… Theodore Rex will only consolidate his standing.… It is a huge story, told against the tumultuous backdrop of national and global change.”
—BILL BELL, New York Daily News
Also by Edmund Morris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
Beethoven: The Universal Composer
Colonel Roosevelt
2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2001 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 hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 2001.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Morris, Edmund.
Theodore Rex / Edmund Morris.
p. cm.
Sequel to: The rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77781-2
1. Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858–1919. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1901–1909. I. Title.
E757 .M885 2001
973.91′1—dc21 2001019366
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The narrative of this book confines itself exclusively to Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, 1901–1909. For compatibility with quotations, many usages current at that time have been retained, particularly with regard to place-names. Hence, e.g., Peking is used for Beijing and Port Arthur for modern Lushun. Where necessary, such names are clarified in the notes. A few words spelled differently then, but pronounced the same now, have been modernized. Hence, Tsar for Czar. “Simplified spellings” adopted by Roosevelt in his second term have been retained as idiosyncratic when quoted. Hence, thoroly, fixt, dropt. Ethnic appellations and honorifics reflect the styles of the Roosevelt era, as do occasional references to countries as feminine entities. Superlatives such as an unprecedented landslide apply only as of the date cited. Expectations or intimations of “coming events” are those of the period. Historical hindsights are confined to the notes.
To my Mother and Father
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Publisher’s Note
Dedication
Prologue: 14–16 September 1901
THE FIRST ADMINISTRATION, 1901–1904
1: THE SHADOW OF THE CROWN
2: THE MOST DAMNABLE OUTRAGE
3: ONE VAST, SMOOTHLY RUNNING MACHINE
4: A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
5: TURN OF A RISING TIDE
6: TWO PILOTS ABOARD, AND ROCKS AHEAD
7: GENIUS, FORCE, ORIGINALITY
8: THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME
9: NO POWER OR DUTY
10: THE CATASTROPHE NOW IMPENDING
11: A VERY BIG AND ENTIRELY NEW THING
12: NOT A CLOUD ON THE HORIZON
13: THE BIG STICK
14: A CONDITION, NOT A THEORY
15: THE BLACK CRYSTAL
16: WHITE MAN BLACK AND BLACK MAN WHITE
17: NO COLOR OF RIGHT
18: THE MOST JUST AND PROPER REVOLUTION
19: THE IMAGINATION OF THE WICKED
20: INTRIGUE AND STRIVING AND CHANGE
21: THE WIRE THAT RAN AROUND THE WORLD
22: THE MOST ABSURD POLITICAL CAMPAIGN OF OUR TIME
Interlude
THE SECOND ADMINISTRATION, 1905–1909
23: MANY BUDDING THINGS
24: THE BEST HERDER OF EMPERORS SINCE NAPOLEON
25: MERE FORCE OF EVENTS
26: THE TREASON OF THE SENATE
27: BLOOD THROUGH MARBLE
28: THE CLOUDS THAT ARE GATHERING
29: SUCH A FLEET AND SUCH A DAY
30: MORAL OVERSTRAIN
31: THE RESIDUARY LEGATEE
32: ONE LONG LOVELY CRACKLING ROW
Epilogue: 4 March 1909
Acknowledgments
Archives
Select Bibliography
Notes
Illustration Credits
About the Author
A Preview of Edmund Morris’s Colonel Roosevelt
PROLOGUE:
14–16 September 1901
Saturday
THEODORE ROOSEVELT became President of the United States without knowing it, at 2:15 in the morning of 14 September 1901. He was bouncing in a buckboard down the rainswept slopes of Mount Marcy, in the Adirondacks. Constitutionally, not so much as a heartbeat impeded the flow of power from his assassinated predecessor to himself. Practically, more than four hundred miles of mud and rails still separated him from William McKinley’s death chamber in Buffalo, where preparations for an emergency inauguration were already under way.
For all Roosevelt knew, he was still Vice President, yet he already realized that he would soon assume supreme responsibility. Yesterday’s telegrams, relayed up the mountain by telephone operators, riders, and runners, had documented the spread of gangrene through his bullet-ridden Chief:
THE PRESIDENT IS CRITICALLY ILL
HIS CONDITION IS GRAVE
OXYGEN IS BEING GIVEN
ABSOLUTELY NO HOPE
The last telegram to reach Roosevelt’s vacation cabin in Upper Tahawus had been urgent enough to banish all thought of waiting for clearer weather:
THE PRESIDENT APPEARS TO BE DYING AND MEMBERS
OF THE CABINET IN BUFFALO THINK YOU SHOULD
LOSE NO TIME COMING
So, shortly before midnight, he had kissed his wife and children good-bye and begun the descent to North Creek station—at least a seven-hour drive, even by day.
He was now, at the moment of his accession, halfway through the second stage of this journey, some five miles north of Aiden Lair Lodge, where a new wagon and fresh horses awaited him. He sat alone on the passenger seat, shrouded against splashes of mud in a borrowed raincoat several sizes too big. His favorite hat, a broad-brim slouch pulled well over his ears, kept some of the drizzle off his spectacles—not that he could see anything beyond the buckboard’s tossing circle of lamplight. Nor had he much to say: since leaving Lower Tahawus, indeed, he had spoken hardly a word to the lanky youth in front of him. From time to time, he muttered to himself.
Sincere, if slight, grief for McKinley—a cold-blooded politician he had never much cared for—struggled in Roosevelt’s breast with more violent emotions regarding the assassin, Leon Czolgosz. In his opinion, those bullets at Buffalo had been fired, not merely at a man, but at the very heart of the American Republic. They were an assault upon representative government and civilized order. Unable to contain his rage, he leaned forward and blurted an excoriation of Czolgosz into the rain. “If it had been I who had been shot, he wouldn’t have got away so easily.… I’d have guzzled him first.”
MEANWHILE, IN WASHINGTON, Secretary of State John Hay sat alone, weeping. For hours, he had heard newsboys shrieking outside his library window: “Extra! Extra! All about the President dying!” Aging and increasingly hypochondriachal, Hay had once worked for Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield, and seen them both assassinated. This third assa
ssination, compounded by the recent death of his own son, was enough to extinguish all desire to go on living in an alien century. But duty had to be done. When the final knell sounded across Sixteenth Street, he wrote a telegram officially informing Theodore Roosevelt that McKinley was dead. He ordered it sent to North Creek Station.
AT ABOUT 3:30, the lights of Aiden Lair Lodge appeared in the mist. The landlord, Mike Cronin, was waiting outside with his rig. Roosevelt climbed down onto the wooden landing. “Any news?”
“Not a word.” Cronin spoke awkwardly, uncertain how to address his passenger. “Jump in right away, and we’ll be off.” He fumbled with a lantern. Roosevelt said, “Here, give it to me!” and joined him on the driver’s seat.
The new horses, two big black Morgans, started off swiftly. Cronin was an expert whip, and hoped to break his own daylight record of just under two hours to North Creek. The horses knew every curve of the sixteen-mile road, but the descent grew slippery, and one of them stumbled. Conscious of the precious value of his cargo, Cronin dragged on the reins.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter!” Roosevelt exclaimed. “Push ahead!”
(photo credit prl.1)
Most of the time, the road was invisible, except when log bridges drummed suddenly under the buckboard’s wheels, and errant boulders loomed out of the mud, necessitating detours. Roosevelt kept holding his watch to the lantern. “Hurry up! Go faster!” Their speed increased on the steep descent. Cronin worried aloud about skidding off a bend and falling hundreds of feet into the bogs beneath. But Roosevelt was calm. “If you’re not afraid I am not.”
SINCE PUBERTY HE had taught himself to pluck the flower safety out of the nettle danger. Although his physical courage was by now legendary, it was not a natural endowment. He had been a timid child in New York City, cut off from schoolboy society by illness, wealth, and private tutors. Inspired by a leonine father, he had labored with weights to build up his strength. Simultaneously, he had built up his courage “by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.” With every ounce of new muscle, with every point scored over pugilistic, romantic, and political rivals, his personal impetus (likened by many observers to that of a steam train) had accelerated. Experiences had flashed by him in such number that he was obviously destined to travel a larger landscape of life than were his fellows. He had been a published author at eighteen, a husband at twenty-two, an acclaimed historian and New York State Assemblyman at twenty-three, a father and a widower at twenty-five, a ranchman at twenty-six, a candidate for Mayor of New York at twenty-seven, a husband again at twenty-eight, a Civil Service Commissioner of the United States at thirty. By then he was producing book after book, and child after child, and cultivating every scientist, politician, artist, and intellectual of repute in Washington. His career had gathered further speed: Police Commissioner of New York City at thirty-six, Assistant Secretary of the Navy at thirty-eight, Colonel of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, the “Rough Riders,” at thirty-nine. At last, in Cuba, had come the consummating “crowded hour.” A rush, a roar, the sting of his own blood, a surge toward the sky, a smoking pistol in his hand, a soldier in light blue doubling up “neatly as a jackrabbit” … When the smoke cleared, he had found himself atop Kettle Hill on the Heights of San Juan, with a vanquished empire at his feet.
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