T. R. STEPS UP
Hesseltine, William B.
T. R. Steps Up THE LETTERS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT: The Square Deal, 1901-1905. Vols, and 4 Edited by Elting E. Morison. Harvard University Press. 1,438 pp. $20. Reviewed by William B....
...He was a super-patriot and a militarist, calling on history and contemporary affairs to bolster up his Big Navy-strong America position...
...Within a few months, the assassination of McKinley released him from his bonds and gave wide play to his energy, aggressiveness, and zest...
...On no one of these subjects is there enough material to assess Roosevelt's part in its development or outcome...
...His popular appeal rested on his energy...
...Joseph ("Uncle Joe") Cannon...
...As parts, they leave out about nine-tenths of the information needed for a study of Roosevelt's activities...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine AFTER his election to the Vice-Presidency of the United States', Theodore Roosevelt went a-hunting bob-cats in the Wild West...
...He had played at polo and history and hunting and politics with the enthusiasm—and much of the spirit—of an amateur...
...The office, he thought, should be abolished...
...He was, moreover, both self-righteous and opinionated...
...He had been an active man and an articulate one...
...Talent and experience fitted him for a less restricted career than the Vice-Presidency, and he chafed in his impotent place...
...Many of his contemporaries mistook his flag-waving for statesmanship...
...Perhaps the first impression is that they were written by a literate person who thoroughly enjoyed putting words on paper...
...And he brought, as well, a taste for administrative routine that some of his predecessors lacked...
...The letters do, however, illustrate some facets of Roosevelt's personality and mentality...
...He was emphatic about his adherence to conventional principles, and ever willing to explain how his acts were based on the highest morality...
...The Washington correspondents were delighted, and their stories of the home life of the Roosevelts thrilled the nation...
...He had an especial hatred for such reformers as God-kin, Carl Shurtz, Oswald Garrison Villard, and the New York Evening Post...
...There is about one-tenth of the information needed to get an adequate picture of the coal strike, or Panama, or the Philippines, or politics, or the patronage...
...He brought to the White House a flair for drama that the staid old executive mansion had never before seen...
...Perhaps, however, the whole of these letters adds up to more than the sum of their parts...
...The editor and his assistants have selected these 2,000 letters from 20,000 that were available to them—and the proportion seems about that for each separate subject...
...He brought his six children to romp through the rooms, and he and his family gave a running demonstration of his doctrine of "the strenuous life...
...He killed over a dozen—some of them with a knife after the dogs had got them down—and sent the hides to a taxidermist...
...II The letters in these two volumes deal with these things, and in the process show him as a party builder, a father with paternal enthusiasm for his sons' prowess in athletics and studies at Groton and Harvard, an historian and a naturalist with a popularizer's disdain for careful scholarship, and a voracious reader over a wide range of subjects...
...The longer ones were sometimes repetitious and frequently pompous...
...During these years he handled a President's perennial problems of patronage, concerned himself with the administration of the Philippines, made sundry—and completely sincere—statements about morality in business and government, acquired Panama as a protectorate, quarreled with the South over the Negro question, settled a coal strike, built the Navy, and persuaded the Russians and the Japanese to end their war with the Treaty of Portsmouth...
...But taken as a whole, they show a man who was an interesting, even dramatic, extrovert—living strenuously, and defending copy-book maxims and a red-blooded - American - boy patriotism against the imponderable forces of a changing world...
...T. R. was sensitive to criticism, and generally convinced that his critics were deliberately dishonest, actuated by low motives, and traitors to their country...
...his real ability lay in his capacity as an administrator...
...Aldrich, Allison, Mark Hanna, Spooner, and Lodge, and Rep...
...The publication of two more volumes of the letters of Theodore Roosevelt carries his story through his first Administration, past the election of 1904, and into the first summer of his second Administration...
...If Roosevelt had a profession, it was that of a writer...
...The letters are illustrative of Roosevelt's thinking—they do not add fresh information, and the pages of history will not have to be rewritten in the light of new revelations...
...In March, 1901, he was installed as Vice-President, and found himself, for the first time in many years, without political influence and hampered by the necessity of maintaining the spurious dignity of his post and of giving quiet acquiesence to the measures of the McKinley Administration...
...Theodore Roosevelt was unfitted by temperament and training for his new role...
...It was to be his last extended hunting trip for a long time...
...He was a man of determination, of amazing energy, and of unusual versatility...
...His short letters were usually more sprightly than his long ones...
...Like most writers, his verbal effusions stood sadly in need of an editor's cruel pencil...
...They were "broad-minded and patriotic . . . sagacious, skillful and resolute...
...In contrast, he admired the sterling integrity of Sens...
...And yet, except perhaps for some minor details, these letters contain no new information or insight on Roosevelt...
...He had been a state legislator, a civil service commissioner, a police commissioner, a self-anointed hero of the Spanish-American war, and governor of New York...
Vol. 15 • December 1951 • No. 12
