T.R. Rejudged
Shannon, David A.
T.R. Rejudged Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886, by Carleton Putnam. Scribner's. 626 pp. $10. Theodore Roosevelt and the rise of America to world power, by Howard K. Beale. Johns...
...a little hard to take...
...The Theodore Roosevelt Treasury: a self-portrait from his writing, edited by Hermann Hagedorn...
...Beale's study, an expansion of his Albert Shaw lectures at Johns Hopkins in 1953, could have been written only by someone who had done the years of research on Roosevelt that the author has...
...he paints his subject "warts and all...
...Nor is Roosevelt as a human being any more attractive in the mid-Twentieth Century...
...kept from 1878, when he first met Alice Lee, to 1884, when his young bride died in childbirth...
...Reviewed by David A. Shannon This year is the one hundreth anni-niversary of the birth of Theodore Roosevelt...
...These are not qualities that appeal to liberals today...
...Next year it will have been 50 years since he left the White House, and forty years since he died...
...If Hagedorn ever entertained a critical thought about T.R...
...Even when one remembers to judge him by the standards of his day rather than those of today and when one recalls his very great ability, his versatility, and his considerable progressive achievements, the Rough Rider's political glamour is not what it once was...
...Carleton Putnam, a newcomer to scholarship after a career as an airlines executive, is obviously sympathetic to Roosevelt...
...But times and tastes have changed...
...Howard K. Beale is critical of the direction Roosevelt led America in its foreign affairs but he has great respect for T.R.'s abilities...
...This long book— over 600 packed pages of text—gives the reader a vast amount of detail without blurring the main story of the young man's preparation for his public career...
...342 pp...
...But he is careful to defend the warts, even to try to explain them away...
...Johns Hopkins Press...
...and his track and field records the summer before he was 17 indicate no more than average physical prowess...
...he did not express it publicly...
...Quite the reverse...
...The picture of Roosevelt as a public figure that emerges from these pages is that of an exceptionally vigorous leader, very well informed, honest, intelligent, and articulate...
...In his day Roosevelt was a hero of the first magnitude to American progressives, an object of widespread respect, even of love...
...In his eight-page essay on Roosevelt as a writer, the editor maintains that T.R...
...In his domestic reformism he reeked of noblesse oblige, and he seldom seemed to understand that the motives of his opponents could be anything but dishonorable...
...This is the picture of Roosevelt that one gets from these books despite the fact that none of the authors is a bitter Roosevelt critic...
...Inclusion of an index would have made this book more useful...
...And ever faithful Hermann Hagedorn, author or editor of more than 20 volumes about Roosevelt, has conducted a long love affair with the memory of the Republican Roosevelt...
...wrote some "enduring literature," even "poetry," and explains that the press of public affairs prevented Roosevelt from making a greater contribution to literature...
...down to his essence, and he has done as well as could be expected with such an approach...
...Putnam presents evidence which indicates T.R...
...Hagedorn's effort is the least of these three volumes...
...This thoughtful and remarkably well researched and documented book is "historian's history" in the best sense of that phrase...
...He had cause for frustration certainly: when he was twelve his mother accompanied him on his daily trips to a gymnasium and supervised the proceedings...
...Of the Presidents since his day, surely only Wilson and his distant cousin Franklin matched him in ability...
...that he was or could have been a great writer is not so clear—at least from The Theodore Roosevelt Treasury...
...Putnam has mined the usual sources and discovered one significant new one...
...Many of the details are revealing...
...He appears here as self-righteous, imperious, lacking in compassion, and self-consciously manly in a YMCA gym leader sort of way...
...Putnam has set himself a high standard in this first volume, easily the best account of the young Roosevelt yet published...
...Whether one finds a reappraisal of American foreign policy agonizing, exhilarating, or long overdue, Beale's work will help in the process...
...600 pp...
...But he was also an extreme nationalist, a flagrant militarist (more so than our present General-President), and an imperialist with a Kiplingesque contempt for the dark-skinned majority of the world...
...That Roosevelt could write better than most Presidents is clear...
...The present generation of liberals find T.R...
...may have been more of a frustrated athlete than the "frustrated poet" Hagedorn thinks he was...
...But the scholarship of the volume should not deter laymen who are concerned about the foreign policy of the United States...
...Carleton Putnam's book, the first of a projected four-volume biography, is a thorough account of Roosevelt's first 28 years...
...He is fair in his presentation...
...It is clear that his comprehension of the problems [of foreign relations] was extraordinary, and his ability in dealing with them was superior to that of most Presidents and Secretaries of State...
...He has put together selections from 138 of Roosevelt's letters and published writings in an effort to distill T.R...
...Many contemporary problems of international relations are clarified by this examination of the roots of the problems...
...He obtained from Roosevelt's daughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a diary T.R...
Vol. 22 • May 1958 • No. 5
