Faculty Book Review--February/March 2003
Kathleen Dalton's
Theodore
Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life
By
John Van Atta
Theodore Roosevelt was that
most rare type of American politician—a man of principle who,
despite being of the moneyed class, tried to make the system work
with fairness and justice for most ordinary folks. If many
Americans are still drawn to TR’s story, it is not only because of
its romantic, larger-than-life quality, but also because we wonder
what it would be like to have more leaders with just a little of the
Old Trustbuster’s moral substance and genuine conviction to guide
them.
Biographies of
Roosevelt are, of course, not so rare. The popular market for books
on TR must be pretty healthy for Alfred A. Knopf to bring out
Kathleen Dalton’s massive volume—all 708 pages of it—in the wake of
H. W. Brands’s T. R: The Last Romantic and, still more
recently, Edmund Morris’s much acclaimed Theodore Rex.
Enough fresh insight to justify yet another weighty contribution to
such an extensive literature is hard to imagine, and yet Dalton’s
interpretation, though controversial, generates much that is new;
her achievement will secure her place among the top three or four
leading authorities on TR and his family. She holds the Cecil
F. P. Bancroft chair in the History and Social Science at Phillips
Academy, Andover, and began laboring on this book as a graduate student
in 1975.
What may strike readers as most different about Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life is the often-startling contrast between the public TR—that fabulous image, largely self-invented—and the man’s private, truer self. Edith Roosevelt, who could see into her complex husband better than anyone else, once commented that his character was “far more complicated and intricate than is commonly supposed.” Trying to chart a middle course between TR’s canonizers and his debunkers, Dalton brings out more of that complexity than any other writer has before. Relying heavily on rarely used—and in some cases previously untapped—manuscript sources, she informs us, for example, that Roosevelt did not succeed in overcoming his debilitating childhood asthma by vigorous exercise (as he often claimed), but in fact battled the affliction on and off throughout his adult life.
An over-privileged child of one of New York’s wealthiest and best-connected families, he sowed more wild oats at Harvard than we knew. Supposedly transformed in the 1880s by his experience among cowboys in Dakota Territory, he spent far less actual time at his ranch in the West than TR himself and most of his biographers would have us believe. Roosevelt did not all-but-abandon his daughter Alice after the untimely death of her mother, as some would have it, nor did he entirely refrain from reference in future years to his ill-fated first wife. More importantly, we learn that this most energetic, politically adept, and self-confident of presidents also was plagued by psychological vulnerability, battled dark moods (even had bouts of depression), was capable of serious and sometimes inexplicable public blunders, and could be verbally reckless to the point of needing to be reigned in by his wife and closest friends.
Dalton also reveals sides of TR that, if believed, would make him more palatable to liberal intellectuals of today than he generally has been. That would include his growing openness to equality and calls for justice for African-Americans, his eventual strong support for women’s rights and suffrage, his increasingly radical devotion to Progressive causes throughout the final years of his life, even long after the well-known Bull Moose campaign of 1912. In short, Roosevelt overcame many of the prevailing prejudices of his class and his time. The high marks he receives from Dalton on issues of race, class, and gender—themes currently in fashion among professional historians—may elicit the skepticism of some readers, but the case in his favor is extensive and compelling.
In sum, this multifaceted book goes well beyond the standard account of Theodore Roosevelt as writer, naturalist, historian, rancher, explorer, soldier, politician, and president. The “heroic” parts of TR’s career—his part in the Spanish-American War, in particular—receive less attention (or are viewed less heroically) than in some accounts of his life, especially those written for a less scholarly readership than the one Dalton is most likely to win over. This is probably not the book for those who prefer never to look too deeply or critically into the lives of “great men” or who just want to feel good about being American. Nor would one expect the worshipful Theodore Roosevelt Association to provide an exalted place for Dalton’s volume in their bookshop at Sagamore Hill. No matter. Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life is an elegantly written and scrupulously researched book, one that pulls TR down from Mount Rushmore and restores him to something recognizably close to flesh and blood. Maybe nobody will ever nail down the elusive “real TR,” but Kathleen Dalton has enriched our sense of the man apart from his overpowering legend.