The Rough Rider
The Letters Of Theodore Roosevelt.Edited
by Elting E. Morison.
Volumes I And II, The Years Of Preparation. Harvard University Press. 1549 Pp. $20.00.

This edition of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, to be completed in eight volumes, is second in importance among current editorial enterprises in Americana only to the great collection of Jefferson’s writings under way at Princeton. The first two volumes cover T. R.’s career from the time of his first extant letter, written in 1868 when he was ten, to the close of 1900, when he was Vice President-elect and as mature a man as he ever got to be. Inevitably there is material that will interest only scholars or specialists, but routine items have been eliminated and what is here is important. Mr. Morison and his co-editors have performed their immense task admirably; even their annotations are as spirited as the task of editorship will allow.

Roosevelt himself this reviewer finds consistently interesting but consistently unlikable. His reputation began to go sharply downward twenty years ago with the publication of Henry F. Pringle’s biography, and nothing that has since come to light—certainly nothing I can find in this mass of correspondence—goes very far to rehabilitate him. The letters, which confirm the familiar picture of his merits and defects, are unlikely to cause either an admirer or a detractor to change his mind.

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One of the keys to T. R.’s situation is that he was marginally rich and marginally honest. He came from a substantial and reputable family wealthy enough to keep him at the fringes of a society of great opulence but not enough to make him an easy member of it. His literary and historical work was for some time a crucial part of his income. In fact, he was something of a hack writer—a role well suited to the character of his mind, which rarely showed poise, balance, maturity, or detachment but which was abundantly endowed with energy and a kind of insensitive good cheer. During the years from 1886 to 1897 he published twelve volumes on history, Western life, and politics, whose quality, needless to say, is a little uneven. Before he established himself as a successful politician he seems to have felt the presence of a community of men considerably richer than himself as an obstacle to his career. Later, when his political success was beyond cavil he developed a certain disdain, well founded on the whole, for the political inflexibility of rich Americans. Although he felt that their callousness and their unwillingness to make concessions to popular needs might eventually cause social upheaval, his most pressing complaint about them was that they were not interested in war or empire and that their materialism was eating away what he called the great masterful fighting qualities of the race.

In saying that he was marginally honest, I do not mean to imply that T. R. was ever so much as tempted by peculation. He was a member of a class of gentry that was revolted by the sordid character of American politics and eager for reform. In the East men of this sort were divided between the compromisers, to whom political activity was meaningless if it did not lead to power, and the mugwump idealists, to whom power was meaningless if it did not lead to a pretty thorough victory for their principles. At an early stage in his career Roosevelt went with the compromisers. His drive for power—or, as it may be, his need to feel himself practically effectual—was too strong to make it possible to remain with the idealists; he much preferred to compromise quite heavily in order to gain such partial victories as he could. In itself this was quite defensible; but the mugwumps of T. R.’s own class felt that a man with his high pretensions to civic morality should have stood with them, and his letters suggest that he shared just enough of this feeling himself to find their expectations extremely disquieting. He developed a malignant hatred for men like E. L. Godkin and John Jay Chapman, and stated more than once that he preferred the pecuniary dishonesty of the bosses to what he thought was the far worse intellectual dishonesty of the reformers. He was incapable of admitting a difference in temperament, much less a difference in ideas, and his correspondence bristles with the most unrestrained denunciation of men who were in many ways his betters.

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The essential basis for judging a political man must be his political record. But T. R., as one of the very few American presidents since the day of John Quincy Adams who had any pretensions to being an intellectual or a cultural force, invites some special comment on his mind and taste. Here I think he can be designated only as an avant-garde philistine. True, he enjoyed the company of men of ideas. But he could relish ideas themselves only when they fell within the extremely limited range of his very brittle tolerance. His mind was overloaded on one side with the inhibitions of the genteel tradition in literature and on the other with the feeble clichés of conventional patriotism; and there is nothing in his political record more unpalatable than the combination of brutality and militant philistinism which he did his best to foster in our thinking. Here is a man who in the course of a love letter to his first wife (in 1884) suddenly interjects: “Today I sparred as usual; my teacher is a small man and in the set-to today I bloodied his nose by an upper cut, and knocked him out of time”; who writes fourteen years later from the battlefield in Cuba that “this is . . . the time of my life,” and “Did I tell you that I killed a Spaniard with my own hand when I led the storm of the first redoubt?”; and who, after writing a dozen books and serving with usefulness in at least two public offices, states that his leadership in battle entitles him to feel “as though I could now leave something to my children which will serve as an apology for my having existed.”

Not surprisingly this is a man who finds strenuosity one of the essential literary criteria, who admires such writers as Owen Wister and Sienkiewicz and John Fox, Jr., but who says of Chaucer: “I must protest a little against some of his tales, on the score of cleanliness,” and of Henry James: “What a miserable little snob Henry James is. His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories about the upper social classes of England make one blush to think that he was once an American . . . simply diseased. I turned to a story of Kipling’s with the feeling of getting into fresh, healthy, out-of-doors life.” But nowhere does he pose the issues and delineate his own position more clearly than in a letter of 1899 to Sir Cecil Spring Rice in which he discusses the future of the Anglo-Saxon “race” in the face of the German and Russian challenges. Understandably he comes to the conclusion that there is something healthier in the English spirit, but the following is illustrative of his way of arriving at it: “The two great fiction writers of today with a serious purpose are Tolstoi and Kipling, and each stands as typical for something in his own race and nationality. Which do you think the most healthy product for a nation, the author of the Kreutzer Sonata and My Religion, or the author of the “Recessional” and the Mulvaney stories? . . . It is the Slav, not the Englishman, who shows decadence. This ought to help us appreciate our less literate presidents.

One must always grant him that he had, among other things, a lot of gusto and a sense of humor, that he preached a higher civic morality than he could practice, that he had some good ideas on conservation, that he gave a job to Edwin Arlington Robinson, and that he appointed Holmes to the Supreme Court. It was Holmes, who thought him very likable, who wrote one of the best summations of him: “a big figure, a rather ordinary intellect, with extraordinary gifts, a shrewd and I think pretty unscrupulous politician. He played all his cards—if not more. R.i.p.”

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