Theodore Rex

Rating:
Summary: Subject Lives Up To Title In Excellent Bio
Review: Edmund Morris has crafted the second of his planned three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. This book, "Theodore Rex," lives up to the standard set by Morris in the wonderful "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," which won a Pulitzer Prize.

The author's prodigious research talents are again on display, as is his masterful ability to weave facts and minutia into a gripping historical tale.

The reader gets the full throttled and powerful President Roosevelt during his almost two terms in office. The book picks up nicely where I remembered his first volume leaving off. Roosevelt is summoned from the Maine wilderness upon the news of President McKinley's death. His descent down the mountain and into history is watched by those unsure what the youngest president (still) will mean for a newly industrialized and internationalized America.

The next seven years portray a man utterly sure of himself and his actions. Roosevelt defined the modern presidency for our time -- being the first executive to wield power aggressively and successfully without the benefit of a war. Indeed, the period between Lincoln and TR was one of congressional ascendancy. Roosevelt through force of personality, public appeal, Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, and facets of American economic life ripe for reform made the office paramount among the branches of government.

He enjoyed a tremendously successful reign (to continue with the spirit of the title). Most of his major legislative initiatives were to be written into law. As importantly, he coined the practice and phrase of using his office as a "bully pulpit" to reach over the heads of legislators to the people of the country - thereby harnessing and focusing the power of citizens to guide Congress to action. He also took the role of the government in a startling new direction for a Republic borne of reaction to sovereign interference in private liberties. Through Roosevelt, the federal government became the regulator, monitor and some-time arbiter of large economic interests, destroying forever the almost complete system of laisie-faire that had served a growing country so well up to that point (though by the time of Roosevelt's era courting potentially dangerous reaction through it's excesses and monopolistic practices*). He also cast government in the role of defender of natural resources, giving rise to conservation as an animating factor of public policy.

Roosevelt also brought a semi-enlightened attitude to civil rights to the White House. Though never completely divorcing race relations from his own political fortunes and needs, he never the less was willing to deal with American negros as civic beings entitled to basic respect and constitutional rights. At critical times (though not at every critical time), he also decried the terrorism and inequities some Americans visited upon our fellow citizens. From today's vantage point any reader finds himself wishing that TR would have championed an end to lynching and more complete civil rights as well as enlightened personal views on the capacity of the negro to be quicly assimilated given equal legal protection and a better social clime. For his time, he made significant progress (albeit mostly with gestures and statements) and became a champion to many black Americans who felt they had a sympathetic president for the first time since Lincoln (although some of the good will was washed away with TR's mis-handling of the Brownsville incident).

Morris also probes TR's adroit diplomatic skills and successful projection of American power among the world's nations. Most fascinating is the tale of our "almost war" with Germany over Venezuela -- a saga so intertwined with diplomacy and face saving as it's solution that three governments conspired to remove official records of the transaction from their archives -- making it still difficult today to understand exactly what happened. As energetic and successful as he was in domestic policy, TR drove America to the forefront of nations through his acquisition of Panama, settlement of the Venezuelan affair, brokering of the peace between Japan and Russia, and significantly through the expansion of our navy announced most spectacularly with the round the world cruise of the Great White Fleet. He was a brilliant practitioner of politics and diplomacy in wrestling for America a greater degree of influence and power in international affairs than we had enjoyed up to that point.

This is TR -- larger than life, sitting astride the Congress, the nation and finally the world. This is not a hagiography, TR's mistakes, short comings and deficiencies are covered. But, particularly through the lens of a century past, it is easy to see overall greatness in the character, initiatives, politics and even being of the man. Morris does historic and literary justice to Roosevelt, telling the incredible and fascinating story of our country's most energetic president with an energy that inspires as it illuminates.

Highly recommended. (Mr. Morris, please don't make us wait another twenty years for the final volume!!!).

*It is interesting to note that both TR and his second cousin FDR saw themselves as the defenders and saviours of a capitalist system at risk of wholesale socialization by extremists. Both viewed themselves as inherently conservative because of their conviction that an American economic system that would not address its own widely perceived excesses through regulation courted nationalization by the Bryons and Longs of the world. Business captains of course viewed them as heretical.

Rating:
Summary: Morris's Work of Art
Review: I would not have ordinarily sought this book out--thick biographies of historical figures tend to drag. But since Morris has a house in my office's neighborhood, he was gracious enough to come by for a book signing. Lucky me--it was only because of this that I picked up the book and started reading. Morris keeps the reader captivated and in doing so, manages to explain how this president who did not fight a world war like his successor (Wilson) or his fellow Roosevelt, or for that matter a cold war like the other president Morris biographied (Reagan) left such an indelible mark on presidential history.

Rating:
Summary: an engrossing biography
Review: Although I do have some smaller criticisms, I want to make clear that I did enjoy Morris' 2nd volume very much. His writing makes you feel like you are living through each and every presidential crisis from the Panama Canal to Cuba to the brink of war between other nations. That same benefit has one small drawback -- at times, it was just a few too many details for me. That is to say that the subject grew out of focus as the events took center stage. For many, that will be a plus, not a minus but for me, I wanted more personal info about Roosevelt and not every single interaction he had with foreign ambassadors. The chapters that focused on Edith and Alice were terrific, but we don't get to see much as Teddy the father. I also loved the famous hunt description (that led to a pathetic roping of a bear, hence "Teddy Bear") and many of the personal anecdotes. I know my next book will be the first volume since his early childhood always fascinated me.

Morris' research is impeccable -- you will be a fly in the wall for every event that took place in R's administration. I also think Morris did a fair job showing both his faults and his strengths -- he could be a bully at times, a boor, but also an incredibly charming and diplomatic man. You will come out of this book knowing infinitely more about the time period and the man himself. Overall, an exacting and detailed biography that at times gets weighed under by minutiae (although that minutiae will be fodder for true historians).

Rating:
Summary: "Pure Act" in the Act
Review: Edmund Morris derived the name of this, the penultimate volume of his three-part biography on Theodore Roosevelt, from a wry comment made about the president by the novelist Henry James after a dinner party at the White House. After reading "Theodore Rex," however, one wonders if another personal assessment from the time might have made for a more appropriate title: Henry Adams' comment that TR was "pure act."

Theodore Roosevelt was certainly one of the most unique personalities ever to occupy the executive office. The scion of a dignified Knickerbocker family, he was enamored of the uncouth ways of the Wild West and big game hunters. A deeply cerebral and widely read Harvard graduate with dozens of publications to his credit, he reveled in physical combat, military glory and other exploits not often associated with intellectuals. He was, in short, an American original.

Morris devotes this volume exclusively to TR's White House years (1901-1909). Having read the first volume ("The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt") immediately before "Theodore Rex," I was surprised at the subtle, yet palpable difference in the style each was written. Where the first volume is extremely crisp and direct, the second tends to incorporate overly florid prose, as if Morris is consciously trying to make the biography read like a novel. Make no mistake, however; the book is beautifully written and always engaging, if not occasionally melodramatic.

For a narrative of such prodigious length relative to the time period covered (550 pages for just under eight years of presidential history), Morris surprisingly failed to give due consideration to some central issues of the Roosevelt administration. For instance, during the Panic of 1907, TR and his new secretary of the treasury, George Cortelyou, turned to J.P. Morgan and other Wall Street kingpins to help orchestrate a financial recovery. The price for economic stability, Morgan and others claimed, was to allow the U.S. Steel trust to save a failing brokerage house, Moore & Schley, from ruin. The remedy was to have U.S. Steel buy Tennessee Coal & Iron (TCI) from Moore & Schley (which the brokerage held as collateral for its loans) to provide the necessary liquidity to prevent default and further panic. Before the deal was consummated, however, U.S. Steel wanted assurances from the Roosevelt White House that they wouldn't be prosecuted for monopoly behavior because of the strategic acquisition. In Morris' telling of the story, TR agrees to the acquisition, the tide of panic is quickly stemmed and the economy recovers. Yet, in other versions TR and Cortelyou were criticized for being duped by Wall Street interests and that the TCI acquisition was merely a ploy by Morgan and his steel trust to gain valuable property at bargain prices along with immunity from federal prosecution. In fairness to Morris, this story may be told in great detail in the next volume, but if so he left no hints of foreshadowing in the present text and early criticism of the deal emerged before TR had left office.

Other reviewers of this book have claimed that Morris' account degenerates into something all too common in modern popular biography: hero worship. I disagree. Morris clearly maintains a healthy respect and admiration for TR and his political philosophy, but he is also quick to point out the president's weaknesses, such as his preening vanity, his instinct for political survival over personal loyalty, and, as his tenure in office came to a close, an increasing vindictiveness in his reaction to any and all opposition. Nor does Morris hesitate to lay blame on Roosevelt for some of his notable failures, the most prominent example being his conduct in uniformly dismissing an entire unit of African-American soldiers from the Army on highly circumstantial evidence of complicity in initiating a race riot at Brownsville, TX.

In sum, Morris delivers a superbly written and balanced account of a sometimes outlandish, often inspiring and always entertaining chief executive.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book about a Great Man
Review: It is astounding what a man Theodore Roosevelt was. He was a person of greatness who was able to cross and blur political party lines in a relevant way in which no other politician has been able to do since.

As Americans, we understand why George and Abe's sculpted heads are up on Rushmore. We remember that Jefferson had something to do with Independence and the Revolution and was also a president. But after reading Theodore Rex, one can understand the placement of his bust upon the great mountain. Washington won the land, Jefferson bought the land, Lincoln saved it...but Teddy--he shaped it and colored the landscape.

Rating:
Summary: Ursa Theodore . . .
Review: I devoured this book. As another has stated, this book gets into the minutea of Roosevelt's life. You can almost see the rocks as he climbs them. Living in DC makes some of my haunts seem so much more . . . historic.

However, I think the author did a very subtle job of providing insight and interpretation than one might expect. I also found heaps of fragrant (not flagrant) historical (and histerical) perspective that fertilized my imagination. When I last covered this period of history (in school, unwilling), it seemed so dry and disjointed. This work put all the zest of life back into it. I came away from the book with real appreciation for his accomplishments, even though I may disagree with the man's politics in certain areas.

One must wonder if the title "Theodore Rex" mightn't be a play on Tyrannosaurus Rex as well as an allusion to the subject's autocratic style.

One thing I didn't like so much was how quickly he rambled through the last year of his Presidency in the last hundred pages. I felt like the author was trying to finish his work in time for publication. He glanced over items I would have thought he would normally have delved into. You can certainly tell the author was trying to convince you he did his homework, and he did.

Rating:
Summary: A great history, but sometimes it reads like a comic book
Review: As I commented in my review of David McCullough's book _John Adams_, biographies that make heroes out of their subjects bother me. First, these biographies seem biased. More importantly, it often happens that the subject of the biography became a hero in real life only because of the context
surrounding him; as Abraham Lincoln admitted, he was largely a victim of circumstance. If he's a great man, it's because he had greatness thrust upon him. Biographies that worship their subjects often skip this important detail, perhaps because the author himself doesn't see it.

_Theodore Rex_ takes hero-worship to a new level. One never feels as though one is reading the biography of a man - one is instead reading about a superhero. Where David McCullough paints John Adams as a man whose every pore sweated principle, Morris depicts Teddy Roosevelt as a bold risk-taker, sucking the marrow out of every moment he lived. This is a man who ate large, led large, and never looked back with the regrets that mere mortals face.

If Roosevelt comes out of _Theodore Rex_ with any fault at all, it is excessive ego. Under Morris's pen, this doesn't come out as a vice, but rather a personality quirk justified by the egoist's greatness.

All those negative comments aside, I do have to give the book credit for a lot of things:

* Morris makes a convincing case that Roosevelt, of all people, really *did* create his greatness, rather than having it forced upon him by the events he lived through. Roosevelt is the man who sent the Great White Fleet around the world as a defensive measure against the Japanese. He deftly manipulated the diplomats and politicians around him to get what he wanted. He was one of our nation's first conservationists. He could out-hike and out-hunt those around him. He took some of the first brave stands against lynching in the South (even though, for political reasons, he sometimes made mistakes). Circumstances didn't dictate that he do these things; he himself did.

* The writing is crisp and fluid. Morris wants his story to follow the breakneck pace at which he believed Roosevelt's life progressed.

* Following David Herbert Donald's example (see my review of Donald's _Lincoln_), he tries to depict Roosevelt's life in something like a retrospective present tense. Never does the historian tell us that ``future generations found this action heroic"; he's telling the story as though future generations don't yet exist. Despite the book's heroic tone, this helps us believe that we're reading at least a somewhat unbiased narrative. Moreover, it imposes some discipline on the author.

* Morris manages to tell us a dense array of facts at the same time that he tells us a heroic story. We might expect that a book with such strong prose would acheive it at the expense of historical detail; Morris handily violates this expectation.

Morris has made a name for himself writing nonstandard biographies of American icons (e.g., his biography of Ronald Reagan entitled _Dutch_), so we shouldn't be surprised with this one. Still, my vision of the ideal historical biography involves more history and less comic book than Morris provides.

Rating:
Summary: Good news. Morris doesn't show up in this book.
Review: Bully book. Fascinating man and time, for sure.

Here's something I decided while reading the book: if TR were alive today, he would have a weblog; the guy wrote hours everyday: articles, letters, books, speeches. Reminds me a lot of Churchill's prolificacy. Roosevelt's topics ranged from bird watching (and listening) to naval warfare. A voracious and multilingual reader, as well.

Author Edmond Morris , (despite his missteps on the Reagan biography, Dutch) is a tremendous storyteller. Roosevelt and his times provide excellent material for Morris's skills. I couldn't help drawing parallels with today, as Roosevelt's era (turn of last century) saw so many changes taking place in transportation, communication and technology. The roles of and relationships between government and business were also major issues as they are today.

There are parallels in his years in the White House with today's headlines like the Microsoft antitrust case and the imploding of Enron. Also some striking similarities to today's challenges militarily and geopolitically. Politics aside, Roosevelt is a fascinating historical figure. And did he ever know how to get a way from it all. Even though it is not mentioned in either this book or Morris's volume on TR's earlier life, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, I seem finally to understand why TR made it onto Mt. Rushmore with Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.

Rating:
Summary: Undigested and indigestible
Review: You leave this book full and empty at the same time.
It's almost as if somebody had hired a private investigator to hop in a time machine and tail TR throughout his presidency. This is a gumshoe's report: professional, thorough, relentlessly informative. You will learn that TR caught the 10:17 train to Buffalo. You will learn the local congressman's full name who was riding with him. You will learn how the the weather was, and so on, and so on for many hundred pages. Don't look for interpretation here, a point of view, historic perspective, or insight. There's nobody home but us factoids. True, a few are interesting; TR didn't like sissy ghost stories; he championed weird spelling. But the cululative yield of all this information is numbness. Also, it's a rare sentence that doesn't contain at least one word or expression, however unmemorable, chastly enclosed inside quotation marks, a kind of certification of untampered truth. Morris carries this fetish so far that even the captions under the photographs are in quotation marks, even though he is only quoting himself. Perhaps Morris is doing penance for being so interesting in the Reagen book. A monumental labor of time and scholarship, but I think he should go back to sinning.

Rating:
Summary: The Rough Rider as President
Review: The size of this book seemed daunting at first (time pressure and all) but once I started on it, it was hard to put down. This volume covers Roosevelt's two terms as US President, from 1901 to 1909.

This is a big book. At more that 850 pages, it provides an almost daily record of TR's presidency, from the assassination of William Mckinley (14 Sep.1901) when he took over the presidency, for which he was initially dubbed "His Accidency"---to the inauguration of his handpicked successor, William H. Taft (4 Mar. 1909). The youngest president to date when he took office, TR was not universally beloved, but his energy and charm enabled him to win a full term in his own right by a landslide in 1904.

As mentioned above, this is a huge book, but open it and one will notice that the author has supplied us with almost 180 pages of footnotes and details on how he arrived at the conclusions for this work. Is it perhaps because Morris wanted to redeem himself after his 1999 memoirs of Ronald Reagan ("Dutch") which was mostly dialogue with characters built in? That made the book almost useless as a work of history. But the author, obviously a smart man who learns from mistakes (otherwise he would not have won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt"--as it obviously requires a great deal of smartness to win this award) goes back to pure, unadulterated, straightforward history fot this 2nd volume of a planned trilogy. After all, that's what he does best, as displayed by his numerous works.

This is a captivating book propelled by Morris's elegant and powerful prose about a bold and visionary President at America's crossroads to becoming a world economic and military power. Here are the campaigns against the Trusts, the battles over the Panama Canal, Cuba and the Philippines, his mediation to end the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 for which TR received the Nobel Peace Prize--to name only a few of the important events. But the author also sheds less travelled historical roads, like the tense standoff between the US and Germany in Dec. 1902 over German intervention in Venezuela, whic is just a part of TR's fear that Latin American countries might become European protectorates which led him to issue his "Corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. Numerous examples of Roosevelt's stubborness, his domineering attitude toward his subordinates, his eccentric passions and pursuits and his recklessness with his rhetoric are all over the pages of this work. Morris also offers some lively background on TR's chaotic family life, but the overwhelming strength of this book is his emphasis on TR, the political man--the man who agonized over the decision not to seek a third term, a choice whose repercussions will most likely be a part of the third and final volume. This work also shows that TR believed that not all people could transcend their backgrounds in one generation, so he insisted that blacks should be uplifted before they were integrated, that Filipinos should be trained for self-government before they were given independence, and that the influx of uneducated immigrants should be curbed. A rank imperialist and uncritical disciple of Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, he believed that the US was engaged in a fateful struggle for markets, power and prestige. Under the sobering responsibilities of office, however, he concludes that the nation's real interests lay in a stable world balance of power rather than a far-flung colonial empire.

What was behind the title of this work, "Theodore Rex"? It was the American novelist and critic Henry James who coined it for America's 26th Prez.--and he didn't mean it as a compliment. James detested the fiercely patriotic and interventionist Chief of State ("the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding noise"). Roosevelt retaliated by branding James "effete" and "a miserable little snob"--which induced another reliably outspoken and irreverent American novelist and playwright Gore Vidal, who happens to be a latter-day student of history's great feuds to say, "It takes one to know one."