Colonel Roosevelt

Review by Geoffrey Wawro

This is the absorbing capstone to Morris’ sensational three-volume biography of Teddy Roosevelt, which began with The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex. This volume covers the wilderness years. After clawing his way from the genteel obscurity that membership in New York’s “400 families” generally entailed, Roosevelt had risen from Albany assemblyman, to Dakota rancher and sheriff, New York police commissioner, assistant secretary of the navy, New York governor, colonel of his own volunteer regiment (“Roosevelt’s Rough Riders”), to the vice presidency of the U.S. When President McKinley was killed by an assassin, T.R. had finished McKinley’s term from 1901-4, been elected in his own right in 1904, but then surprisingly declined to run in 1908. That’s where Colonel Roosevelt picks up.

The colonel, so-called for his command of the Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, probably erred in retiring from public life and turning over the reins to William Howard Taft. Taft was a pro-business Republican, who rejected President Roosevelt’s progressivism, and relaxed most of the environmental, labor and consumer protections that T.R. had toiled so hard to impose. But Roosevelt found no support for a comeback in the GOP; his progressive positions on labor relations, female suffrage, race (Southerners called him the “coon-flavored president”) and the environment were not theirs. Corporate donors and fixers much preferred softies like McKinley and Taft.

Cast adrift, TR restlessly traveled the world, seeking the fun and adventure he had missed while running the country from Washington. Colonel Roosevelt details the trips to South America, Africa and Europe; everywhere he went T.R. was greeted as “Mr. President,” which certainly grated on the real president. Teddy was the most famous living American, and perhaps the most rigorous time manager the nation had ever produced. Searching for the lost president on a Sudanese train, an aide found T.R. hiding from journalists (and family) “in one of the white enameled lavatories with its door half open…he was busily engaged in reading, while he braced himself in the angle of the two walls against the movement of the train, oblivious to time and surroundings. The book in which he was absorbed was Lecky’s History of Rationalism in Europe.”

Refreshed by the years out of office, Roosevelt tried and failed to wrestle the Republicans out of Taft’s flabby grasp. To revive the reform program—“the Progressive motto is, ‘pass prosperity around’”—T.R. ran as a barnstorming third-party “Bull Moose” candidate in 1912. “Hard as a maple knot,” as one newsman jotted, T.R. nevertheless succumbed to Woodrow Wilson’s landslide victory. T.R. did garner more votes than Taft, which was some consolation. The biography ends with his life of writing and reflection at Sagamore Hill, as well as his fathering of a talented brood. What makes this volume every bit as good as the others is Morris’ engaging style; he has a nose for thrilling anecdotes and turns phrases like no other writer alive. In the end, T.R. faded away; sick with malaria from one of his South American trips, he grew weaker, and then, grief-stricken by Quentin’s death in France in World War I, he died in his bed at 60.