The Ebullient 'Teddy'

...If Harbaugh fails anywhere it is in his effort to portray Roosevelt as a fundamentally secure personality...

...More recently, Carlton Putnam published the first part of a projected fourvolume life...

...Yet he repeatedly indicates that this could not have been true: "He was constrained to prove again and again that he was a man among men...

...Generations of college students have read and enjoyed it...

...Power and Responsibility is not the last word on the Rough Rider...

...The picture we get is of a man driven by a desire to express himself and by a noble urge to do his duty...

...Sickness as a child and poor eyesight, combined with a dominant if not domineering father, led him to devote his whole adult life to an endless and irrational effort to prove his strength, manliness and endurance...

...For example, in dealing with Roosevelt's narrow-mindedness as a critic of literature (TR wrote off Henry James because he was an expatriate, Zola because his characters were immoral, Gorki because he lived openly with a woman who was not his wife, and Tolstoy because he possessed "certain dreadful qualities of the moral pervert"), he is as scathing as Pringle ever was...

...Since Pringle's time, a great deal of scholarly work has been done on TR...

...It will undoubtedly replace Pringle's book as the standard Roosevelt biography...

...Harbaugh rejects this interpretation: "His vaunted self-confidence was genuine," the author flatly states...

...Harbaugh is more restrained and also more informative than Pringle in his account of how Roosevelt "took" Panama from Colombia in order to construct the Canal, but the incident is properly classified as an "ineradicable blot" on his record...

...Henceforth, when any modern reader wants to know more about him, this is the book to which he should turn...

...But it sums up admirably what we know about him today...

...TR was indominable, capable of inspiring others, charming, versatile, undoctrinaire, utterly lacking in consciousness of rank...

...Throughout, Harbaugh has summarized carefully the latest research on every aspect of Roosevelt's life...

...Nevertheless, I think that most historians will agree with most of what Harbaugh says about Roosevelt's personality...

...All in all—and here, perhaps, Harbaugh does not do him full justice—a fascinating, endlessly controversial human being...

...For TR's almost insane vaporizings about conscientious objectors during World War I, the auther has only contempt...

...But no one supplanted Pringle's work...

...Roosevelt, he says, was "the first great President-reformer of the modern industrial era,' a "practical idealist" who molded "the new determinism and the old individualism into the only synthesis compatible with the American political temperament...

...Where controversies exist, Harbaugh shows excellent balance, outlining the differences of opinion fairly, and nearly always accepting the responsibility of committing himself one way or the other before moving on to new problems...

...Reviewed by JOHN A. GARRATY Professor of history, Columbia University Thirty years ago Henry F. Pringle published a witty, almost savage dissection of Theodore Roosevelt...

...A notable scholarly achievement, the book was a popular as well as a critical success, and it won a Pulitzer Prize...

...Roosevelt the relentless pursuer of big game, the "straight line" hiker, the man who sparred with the mighty John L. Sullivan, the fervid advocate of war and national honor, does not seem to have been a man who achieved real peace of mind...

...Still, Harbaugh never spares his subject when he believes him in the wrong...

...TR's whole career was marred by a seemingly congenital inability to view his competitors with normal dispassion...

...More than any other work, it established the image of Roosevelt that the public has accepted...

...Professor Harbaugh, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, has not produced as lively and entertaining a biography as Pringle's, but he has far surpassed his predecessor both in industriousness and in soundness of judgment...

...and yet strangely vacillating in many situations, willing to shift not so much with the winds of public opinion as with the whims of politicians, and, considering his general breadth and open warmheartedness, monumentally opinionated and narrow-minded in certain areas...

...He reminds us that, in the 1890s, Roosevelt came very close to seeking war for its own sake, and that he was a master of the half truth, boastful and sometimes terribly callous and cruel...

...But Harbaugh also points out the catholicity of Roosevelt's tastes, his encouragement of countless young authors and his "virile intellectualism," rare in a man of action and almost unique among major American politicians...

...It stresses Roosevelt's positive achievements as Civil Service Commissioner, his remarkable accomplishments in the field of conservation and the tremendous impact he made upon foreign relations before, during and after his Presidency...

...In the end, after some discussion as to whether Roosevelt was a moderate progressive or an intelligent conservative, Hafbaugh comes to an essentially positive conclusion...

...Now, with the publication of William Henry Harbaugh's Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, we have a new serious reappraisal of Roosevelt's entire career...

...The appearance of the eightvolume Elting Morison edition of his letters, the interpretive studies of John M. Blum, and important monographs by George Mowry, Howard K. Beale and others have added much to our knowledge of the ebullient "Teddy...

...His concluding bibliographical essay is a model of its type...

...The standard interpretation has been that Roosevelt's was a classic case of overcompensation for real and imagined inferiority...

...Harbaugh's portrait is generally friendly and sympathetic...