The Barnes & Noble Review
Theodore Roosevelt and his two-term presidency (1901-9) deserve a king-size, seize-the-man biography -- and Edmund Morris has provided one. "TR" typifies the "can do" American; his famous maxim, of course, was "Speak softly but carry a big stick." Morris presents eyewitness history through the voices of the makers and shakers. His exhilarating narrative will captivate readers, providing welcome confirmation that this nation can produce presidents who bring leadership to great issues, hold to their purpose, and shape the destinies of nations.
President McKinley's assassination brought the 43-year-old TR a challenging presidency, one to which Morris is a clearsighted guide. At home, TR had to persuade Congress to curb competition-stifling corporate trusts, monopolistic transcontinental railroads, and unhygienic food industries that saw consumers as sheep. He also faced labor and racial strife. Abroad, the American presence in Cuba and the Philippines brought criticism, the Russo-Japanese conflict threatened major power shifts in the Far East and Europe, and a politically and financially fraught decision on the Central American canal route -- Panama or Nicaragua? -- had to be made. TR rose to every challenge. Despite the demands of family and social life, he read, wrote, and traveled extensively. Not least, TR put national parks and conservation of natural resources on the legislative agenda.
All TR's notable contemporaries -- including historian Henry Adams, naturalists John Burroughs and John Muir, robber barons E. H. Harriman and James J. Hill, poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, financier J. P. Morgan, fellow politician William Howard Taft, civil rights leader Booker T. Washington, and novelist Owen Wister -- appear onstage, their clear voices projecting the excitement of the day.
Morris is blessed with the imagination and skills to write gripping popular history. He doesn't dilute but illuminates events in presenting an account that immediately sparks interest and captures the mind. Readers will note that American interventionism abroad (today's major issue) was much debated during TR's presidency, when major interventional imperatives challenged the new superpower's tradition of relative restraint in foreign affairs.
Theodore Rex is the long-awaited second volume of the TR saga. Morris delivered the first volume, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, in 1979. It won a Pulitzer Prize; Theodore Rex is a solid bet for another. (Peter Skinner)
Peter Skinner lives in Manhattan.
In the second installment of his megabiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris writes with a breezy verve that perfectly suits his subject.
— New York Times
Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex is every bit as much a masterpiece of biographical writing as his first installment, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award.
— Washington Post Book World
Theodore Roosevelt is one of America's best-remembered presidents—but why? Though his seven-and-a-half-year term of office was far from uneventful, most of his specific achievements have faded from our collective memory.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War; he appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. to the Supreme Court; he was the first president to invite a black man to dinner at the White House. Without him, the Panama Canal might not have been dug or the Grand Canyon turned into a national park. If you knew any of these things, you are way ahead of the game. Yet "TR" (as he was known in his day) has somehow remained an American icon, one sufficiently evocative that political commentator David Brooks, seeking to put into historical context the speech given by George W. Bush to Congress after the World Trade Center disaster, chose to quote from Roosevelt's 1899 speech "The Strenuous Life": "We of this generation do not have to face a task such as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe to us if we fail to perform them!"
Edmund Morris won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, but a funny thing happened on the way to that fine book's long-awaited sequel. He was chosen as Ronald Reagan's authorized biographer and granted fly-on-the-wall access to the White House, out of which he spun a partly fictionalized account of Reagan's life and times that threw readers and reviewers for a loop. For all its peculiarities, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan was a much better book than is generally realized, but those unable to accept its novelistic license will be comforted to learn that Theodore Rex isnothing more—or less—than a solid, straightforward biography, exhaustively researched and excitingly written.
To be sure, it is hard to write boringly about Roosevelt, one of the few American presidents who could fairly be described as eccentric to the point of strangeness. His pince-nez glasses, ginger-colored mustache and muzzlelike face were a cartoonist's wildest dream, and he acted as oddly as he looked, tearing around Washington with an enthusiasm neatly summed up by Cecil Spring Rice, one of his oldest friends: "You must always remember that the President is about six." To H.G. Wells, Roosevelt seemed "to be echoing with all the thought of his time, he has receptivity to the point of genius." Mark Twain, on the other hand, was struck by his mercurial energy: "He flies from one thing to another with incredible dispatch.... Each act of his, and each opinion expressed, is likely to abolish or controvert some previous act or expressed opinion." For those who continued to cling to the sedate manners of an earlier day, that energy seemed almost diabolical. "The devil is whirling me round," complained the aristocratic Henry Adams, "in the shape of a grinning fiend with tusks and eye-glasses."
Yet Roosevelt's temperamental extremism, as Morris rightly observes, was placed in the service of the political instincts of a natural compromiser: "As always in situations involving extremes, Roosevelt's instinct was to seek out the center." Born into upper-middle-class comfort, he entered politics out of a sense of noblesse oblige, then discovered that he had a knack for its cut and thrust. Unpersuaded by the sink-or-swim gospel of laissez-faire economics, he concluded that big government (big, at least, by the modest standards of 1901) could make America a better place in which to live, and he set out to drag the wealth-worshipping old guard of the Republican Party into the twentieth century. Though he loved to talk tough, politics taught him to take what he could get and brag about it, and he happily settled for such incremental measures as the Pure Food Act of 1906 instead of insisting on radical reforms that could never have gotten through Congress.
Was Theodore Roosevelt the inventor of moderate Republicanism? That is the clear implication of Theodore Rex, but Morris never makes the point explicitly, and this is one of the book's few weaknesses (along with a too-fancy prologue in which we see America in 1901 through the eyes of the newly inaugurated Roosevelt). Morris is so interested in showing us Roosevelt as he looked to his contemporaries that he fails to supply enough of the clarifying perspective of hindsight. Presumably his just-the-facts-ma'am approach is to some extent a response to the furious criticisms of Dutch, but some will doubtless feel that Theodore Rex errs in the opposite direction.
Even so, this is a marvelously rich and readable book, a bit too long but not grossly so, and you will put it down knowing why Roosevelt has held on to his secure place in America's fast-shrinking historical imagination. For Morris, Roosevelt's singular achievement—no less enduring than the five national parks for whose creation he was chiefly responsible—was to have "left behind a folk consensus that he had been the most powerfully positive American leader since Abraham Lincoln." As legacies go, that beats Camelot, Vietnam, Watergate and Monica Lewinsky.
—Terry Teachout
The second entry in Morris's projected three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt focuses on the presidential years 1901 through early 1909. Impeccably researched and beautifully composed, Morris's book provides what is arguably the best consideration of Roosevelt's presidency ever penned. Making good use of TR's private and presidential papers as well as the archives of such protégés as John Hay, William Howard Taft, Owen Wister and John Burroughs Morris marshals a rich array of carefully chosen and beautifully rendered vignettes to create a dazzling portrait of the man (the youngest ever to hold the office of president). Morris proves the perfect guide through TR's eight breathless, fertile years in the White House: years during which the doting father and prolific author conserved millions of Western acres, swung his "big stick" at trusts and monopolies, advanced progressive agendas on race and labor relations, fostered a revolution in Panama (where he sought to build his canal), won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War and pushed through the Pure Food and Drug Act. John Burroughs once wrote that the hypercreative TR "was a many sided man, and every side was like an electric battery." In the end, Morris succeeds brilliantly at capturing all of TR's many energized sides, producing a book that is every bit as complex, engaging and invigorating as the vibrant president it depicts. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
When Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, his conservative critics feared a precipitous presidency. But as shown by Morris's second volume on the "Bully" president, what emerged instead was a balanced leader who deserves being ranked among America's top five chief executives. There was universal praise for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, the first volume of Morris's TR biography, which claimed both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1980. After his controversial Dutch: A Biography of Ronald Reagan, Morris returns to TR and his traditional acclaimed method, which is stylistically eloquent and historically balanced. Morris shows how Roosevelt adapted Abraham Lincoln's wartime presidency as his own model for transforming America's domestic and international agendas. His two major miscalculations were his premature announcement declining a second complete term and the handling of the Brownsville Affair, when he gave dishonorable discharges to all 167 men from three black companies stationed near Brownsville, TX, when they refused to identify 12 members who had retaliated against discriminatory practices in the town. Morris excels at placing TR in the context of his time, showing how he outmaneuvered powerful but ossified opponents from the Gilded Age and trumped isolationists by averting war, in the process winning the first Nobel Peace Prize. He also set the standard for the Hyde Park Roosevelts, whose emulation of his "accidental" presidency a generation later was perhaps his ultimate contribution to democracy. Essential for all libraries.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
In a sequel to the Pulitzer-winning biography of Teddy Roosevelt's earlier years (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt), Morris celebrates his tenure in the Oval Office, lauding him as the most popular and energetic chief executive of the early modern era. Morris views Roosevelt as the next great president to succeed Lincoln. While his predecessor, William McKinley, represented dour 19th-century values, Roosevelt was more akin to the industrialization that was turning the US into a global power. He was a dynamic reformer who acted first and asked questions later. The author runs through the many irons Roosevelt always had in the fire, using each to show how his personal magnetism, political canniness, intelligence, and force of will earned him a bevy of successes and almost no significant defeats. On the domestic front, Teddy mastered the art of the end run around his political enemies, disarming orthodox Republicans by arguing that they support his trust-busting initiatives or else face the chaos of labor uprisings and quieting labor by throwing them bones designed to least infuriate management. In foreign relations, his personal magnetism and Navy-enlarging policies earned him, and the country, the respect of the great powers. He fended off German encroachments on Venezuela, ensured that the Panama Canal became a reality, and negotiated peace between Russia and Japan. Morris also devotes much attention to Roosevelt's physical exploits, which later influenced his conservation efforts. He was constantly climbing in Rock Creek Park, swimming nude in the Potomac, and boxing or practicing martial arts with members of his cabinet. To blow off steam he hunted, often in the South, where hewas seen as too friendly toward African-Americans. Because Democrats receive little attention here, one wonders how Morris might have rendered their criticisms. A boosterish rendering of a potent head of state.
Praise for the rise of Theodore Roosevelt
“Magnificent . . . a sweeping narrative of the outward man and a shrewd examination of his character. . . . It is one of those rare works that is both definitive for the period it covers and fascinating to read for sheer entertainment. There should be a queue awaiting the next volume.”
-W. A. Swanberg, The New York Times Book Review
“Theodore Roosevelt, in this meticulously researched and beautifully written biography, has a claim on being the most interesting man ever to be President of this country.”
-Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Spectacles glittering, teeth and temper flashing, high-pitched voice rasping and crackling, Roosevelt surges out of these pages with the force of a physical presence.”
-The Atlantic Monthly
“Morris’s book is beautifully written as well as thoroughly scholarly-clearly a masterpiece of American biography. . . . Hundreds of thousands will soon be reading this book . . . and will look forward, as I do, to Morris’s second volume.”
-Kenneth S. Davis, Worcester Sunday Telegram
