The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

...Everything he touched became a dramatic issue...

...The effort is worth it...

...Conservation and land reclamation were worth it, war was worth it, simplified spelling was worth it, a pure food law and the regulation of the trusts and the railroads were worth it, as were all the things he advocated so vociferously in turn...

...Long ago Theodore Roosevelt had fascinated him, and the fascination continued...

...Even if in the end everything should come to nothing," Roosevelt once told the young H.G...

...But he has done it with an exactness of research and with an emotional commitment that make the familiar episodes, from childhood and Harvard student days to the Spanish-American War, as vivid and alive as if they had just happened yesterday...

...He has visited Roosevelt's old haunts, gone over the ground on foot, meditated on old portraits and cartoons until they have become for him three-dimensional...

...We read the documents and make our surmises, but nobody really has any actual conception of what it was like in another era...

...In any case, academics seem to have accepted Professor Murray's image of the hard-working Harding for their college textbook revisions...

...Theodore Roosevelt's was no exception...

...The effort's real...

...Hudson...

...He was a Harvard dude and then he was a populist, a peacemaker and a saber-rattler, a nature lover and an indecent slaughterer of animals, a politician of proud independence yet willing to come to terms with Thomas Collier Platt, the super-boss...

...He read two books a day, whatever else he did...

...Consequently, in every generation history has to be revised, lives have to be reevaluated, and biographies have to be rewritten...

...This is how the American master historians wrote, from Francis Park-man to Samuel Eliot Morrison...

...The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt ends with Vice-President Roosevelt vacationing in the remote Adiron-dacks and noting a ranger hurrying through the woods toward him with a yellow telegram bearing the news of McKinley's death...

...He was indeed an example of energy incarnate, a primal force that took disparate forms while itself remaining a constant...

...Certainly his biography will suffice for the rest of this century...

...It is a glib, easy gesture to invite the dean of American poets to perform at an inaugural...

...The most adventurously literate of our 20th-century Presidents, he makes Camelot seem a cardboard cutout...

...Both studies were typical products of the Ph.D.-trained historians...

...Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt has these qualities in abundance...

...The facts were there, and every fact was footnoted...

...Until the late sixties, for example, there had never been a proper biography of that least of Presidents, Warren G. Harding...

...There is also revisionism for the sake of revisionism, for academic kudos...

...His latest book is The President-Makers...

...Roosevelt saw to it that Edwin Arlington Robinson was given a sinecure job in the postal service...

...Morris has merely expanded and elaborated the twice- or thrice-told tales...

...Most endings are grim...

...If Harding is worth a second glance, the many-faceted Theodore Roosevelt is worth a very long new look indeed, as the most outrageously dynamic political leader of his day, a kind of common property, a reflection of his country at the century's end...

...Yet there was never the breath of life in those arid pages, never the feeling of human beings with blood coursing in their veins...

...Morris is an anomaly, for he grew up in Kenya, and his feeling for Francis Russell is a contributing editor of National Review...

...America is akin to that of a loyal colonial for the mother country...

...He was the first President to advocate an inheritance tax, the first to make the White House accessible to labor leaders, the first to endorse the eight-hour day and workman's compensation measures, the first to involve himself directly in capital-labor disputes, the first to concern himself actively with the conservation of the nation's natural resources and public lands, the first to send the American fleet round the world...

...Will the next volume be entitled The Fall of Theodore Roosevelt, as the glitter of the Presidency is succeeded by defeat, the gradual descent into a personal nihilism...

...John Morley later observed, "was" America-the America that grew to maturity after the Civil War, marshaled its resources at Chicago, and exploded into world power at the turn of the century...

...A massive book, its 886 pages take us only to the death of McKinley at the hands of the anarchist Czolgosz, whom Alice Roosevelt Longworth called "the founder of our family fortunes...

...Somehow that could have been his motto...

...Theodore Roosevelt on his visit felt no need to ask or answer such questions...

...He "discovered" Conrad and Kenneth Grahame, not from any cultural pose but because he loved their writings...

...Theodore Roosevelt, as the British M.P...

...The presidential years with their disillusioning aftermath are reserved for another volume...

...One eager academic revisionist, Professor Robert Murray, even went so far as to claim that the amiable, indolent President, whom Alice Roosevelt Longworth described with malicious accuracy as "just a slob," was actually conscientious and hard-working...

...How it felt to be alive at the last century's end we cannot really know, but Mr...

...The energy remained, to be absorbed finally in his World War death-wish to win the Congressional Medal and fall in battle...

...Wells in the White House garden, ' 'that doesn 't matter now...

...He had long known exactly where the United States was drifting, just as he had throughout life known where he was driving....There was no need to stop and ponder the dynamos, the "new powers" which so mystified Henry Adams, for he felt their energy whirling within himself...

...So I presume one day we will learn that Calvin Coolidge was really a spendthrift after all and John Kennedy monogamous...

...He announced in his high-pitched resounding voice that The Purple Land was a great book at a time when few in America had heard of W.H...

...Henry Adams at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition was overwhelmed and wondered "whether the American people knew where they were driving...

...It's worth going on with even then...

...The seasons did not matter...

...This present volume is a result of four years' labor, chiefly in the library of the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site...

...Recently I happened to read biographies of Joseph B. Foraker and of Harding's egregious attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty...

...And yet one is left with the enigma: What was Theodore Roosevelt...

...For the aging Roosevelt, the brightness indeed faded...

...But it takes love of literature and judgment to recognize still relatively unknown talents...

...Then, as Hard-ing's 100th birthday came and went, half a dozen Harding biographies appeared on the racks...

...One feels the need for something more rooted, more encompassing, more actual...

...He seems to have been so many oddly assorted things at once: an incarnated thesis and antithesis, profound and trivial, noble and ridiculous, sometimes wise and sometimes downright childish, but certainly a charismatic leader-in the day before that overworked adjective had been re-serviced...

...Roosevelt's life was an open one-no secrets to emerge later, no caches of love letters, no now-it-can-be-told incidents...

...Morris, by contrast, makes the breath of life sweep through his pages...

...Henry Pringle's 1931 biography has been more or less standard for almost half a century, yet somehow the abounding Roosevelt personality has come to seem restrained in his pages...

...To the established facts of Roose velt's life Morris adds telling and often newly uncovered details...

...Morris at times gives us the illusion of having lived it: that vanished era of optimism before the First World War when William Dewitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin, could tell his students that the great victories of mankind had been won and it was for them merely to consolidate...

...All that mattered were documented facts, copied carefully from index cards...

...There was no wind or sun or moon or landscape...