The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (94 page)
Read The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Online
Authors: Edmund Morris
Here is Roosevelt the aggressor, single-handedly killing or crippling seven Indians in the pitch darkness of his pioneer log cabin; wrenching himself from the stake and running naked for five days through mosquito country; trying consecutively to shoot, knife,
throttle, and drown a reluctant Chief Bigfoot, while his own brother puts a bullet in his back; advancing upon Vincennes through mile after mile of freezing, waist-deep water; and, in a moment of supreme ecstasy, spurring a white horse over a sheer, three-hundred-foot cliff:
There was a crash, the shock of a heavy body, half-springing, half-falling, a scramble among loose rocks, and the snapping of saplings and bushes; and in another moment the awestruck Indians above saw their unarmed foe, galloping his white horse in safety across the plain.
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Here, too, is Roosevelt the righteous, assailing the “warped, perverse, and silly morality” that would preserve the American continent “for the use of a few scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.”
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He pours scorn on “selfish and indolent” Easterners who fail to see the “race-importance” of the work done by Western pioneers.
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Yet Roosevelt is not sentimental about the latter. He shows the tendency of the frontier to barbarize both conqueror and conquered, until such civilized issues as good v. evil, law v. anarchy, are forgotten in the age-old struggle of Man against Man.
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It is a primeval warfare, and it is waged as war was waged in the ages of bronze and iron. All the merciful humanity that even war has gained during the last two thousand years is lost. It is a warfare where no pity is shown to non-combatants, where the weak are harried without ruth, and the vanquished are maltreated with merciless ferocity. A sad and evil feature of such warfare is that the whites, the representatives of civilization, speedily sink almost to the level of their barbarous foes, in point of hideous brutality.
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Yet, says Roosevelt, this kind of struggle is “elemental in its consequences to the future of the world.” In a paragraph which will return to haunt him, he proclaims:
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori—in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people … it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.
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Roosevelt the proud saw no reason to retract this passage in later life, for the overall context of
The Winning of the West
makes plain that he regarded any such race-struggle as ephemeral. Once civilization was established, the aborigine must be raised and refined as quickly as possible, so that he may partake of every opportunity available to the master race—in other words, become master of himself, free to challenge and beat the white man in any field of endeavor. Nothing could give Roosevelt more satisfaction than to see such a reversal, for he admired individual achievement above all things. Any black or red man who could win admission to “the fellowship of the doers” was superior to the white man who failed.
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Roosevelt’s long-term dream was nothing more or less than the general, steady, self-betterment of the multicolored American nation.
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Of Roosevelt the military man, as revealed in
The Winning of the West
, little need be said. Chapter after chapter, volume after volume, demonstrates his ability to analyze the motives that drive men to battle, to define the mysterious powers of leadership, and weigh the relative strengths of armies. His accounts of the Battle of King’s Mountain and the defeat of St. Clair are so full of visual and auditory detail, and exhibit such an uncanny sense of terrain, that it is hard to believe the author himself has never felt the shock of arms. One can only infer from the power and brilliance of the prose that such passages are the sublimation of his most intense desires, and
that until he can charge, like Colonel William Campbell, up an enemy-held ridge at the head of a thousand wiry horse-riflemen, he will never be fulfilled.
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R
OOSEVELT WAS NOT ALONE
in his efforts during the early 1890s to define and explore the origins of Americanism. Long before the final volume of
The Winning of the West
was published, other young intellectuals took up and developed his theme that the true American identity was to be found only in the West. The most brilliant of these was Frederick Jackson Turner, who came to the Chicago World’s Fair in July 1893 to deliver his seminal address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” before an audience of aging, puzzled academics.
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Turner had admiringly reviewed Roosevelt’s first two volumes in 1889, and had marked in his personal copy a passage describing the “true significance” of “the vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled.”
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His thesis—that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advancement of American settlement westward explain American development”—was identical with that of
The Winning of the West
, albeit expressed more succinctly.
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But Turner refined away much of the crudity of Roosevelt’s ethnic thinking. It was not “blood,” but environment that made the American frontiersman unique: he was shaped by the challenge of his situation “at the meeting-point between savagery and civilization.” Forced continually to adapt himself to new dangers and new opportunities, as the frontier moved West, he was “Americanized” at a much quicker rate than the sedentary, Europe-influenced Easterner. Consequently, said Turner, it was “to the frontier that the American intellect owes its most striking characteristics.”
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And in listing those characteristics, Turner painted an accurate portrait of somebody not unfamiliar to readers of this biography:
That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things,
lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier.…
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Turner closed his great essay on an elegaic note. The Chicago World’s Fair marked more than the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World; it coincidentally marked the end of the era of free land. An obscure government pamphlet had recently announced that, since the frontier was now almost completely broken up by settlements, “it cannot … any longer have a place in the census reports.”
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This apparently unnoticed sentence, said Turner, made it clear that the United States had reached the limits of its natural expansion. Yet what of “American energy … continually demanding a wider field for its exercise”? Turner did not dare answer that question. All he knew was “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
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Theodore Roosevelt was not among Turner’s drowsy audience that hot summer’s day, but he was one of the first historians to sense the revolutionary qualities of the thesis when it was published early in 1894.
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“I think you have struck some first class ideas,” he wrote enthusiastically, “and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.”
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This was hardly the profound scholarly praise which Turner craved; but the older man’s warmth, and his promise to quote the thesis in Volume Three of
The Winning of the West
, “of course making full acknowledgement,” was flattering.
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Turner thus became yet another addition to the circle of Roosevelt’s academic admirers, and a fascinated observer of his later career.
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If one could no longer see the frontier retreat, one could have fun watching Theodore advance.
Roosevelt spent much of his time during the years 1893–95 formulating theories of Americanism, partly under the influence of Turner, but mostly under the influence of his own avidly eclectic reading. Gradually the theories coalesced into a philosophy embracing practically every aspect of American life, from warfare to wild-flowers.
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He began to publish patriotic articles with titles like
“What Americanism Means,” and continued to write such pieces, with undiminished fervor, for the rest of his life. In addition he preached the gospel of Americanism, ad nauseam, at every public or private opportunity. Ninety-nine percent of the millions of words he thus poured out are sterile, banal, and so droningly repetitive as to defeat the most dedicated researcher. There is no doubt that on this subject Theodore Roosevelt was one of the bores of all ages; the wonder is that during his lifetime so many men, women, and children worshipfully pondered every platitude. Here is an example, taken from the above-named essay:
We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism …
.
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And so on and on; once Roosevelt got a good balanced rhythm going, he could continue indefinitely, until his listeners, or his column-inches, were exhausted.
An analysis of “What Americanism Means”
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discloses that even when dealing with what is presumably a positive subject, Roosevelt’s instinct is to express himself negatively, to attack un-Americans rather than praise all-Americans. Imprecations hurled at the former outnumber adjectives of praise for the latter almost ten to one. Selecting at random, we find
base, low, selfish, silly, evil, noxious, despicable, unwholesome, shameful, flaccid, contemptible—
together with a plentiful sprinkling of pejorative nouns:
weaklings, hypocrites, demagogues, fools, renegades, criminals, idiots, anarchists …
One marvels at the copious flow of his invective, especially as the victims of it are not identified. It is possible, however, to single out Henry James, that “miserable little snob”
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whose preference for English society and English literature drove Roosevelt to near frenzy:
Thus it is for the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he, with his delicate, effeminate sensitiveness,
finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw; in other words, because he finds that he cannot play a man’s part among men, and so goes where he will be sheltered from the winds that harden stouter souls.
In such manner did Roosevelt, with the shrewd instinct of a rampant heterosexual, kick James again and again in his “obscure hurt,” until the novelist was moved to weary protest. “The national consciousness for Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is … at the best a very fierce affair.”
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James was too courteous to say more in print, but he privately characterized Roosevelt as “a dangerous and ominous jingo,” and “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.”
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I
T IS A RELIEF
to turn from Roosevelt’s own spontaneous essays to those prompted by the philosophizing of others, notably the English historian Charles H. Pearson, whose
National Life and Character: A Forecast
appeared in early 1894. Roosevelt wrote a ten-thousand word reply to this work of gentle, scholarly pessimism for publication in the May issue of
Sewanee Review.
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It represents altogether the better side of him, both as a man and as a writer, and can be taken as his confident answer to those who, like Pearson and Henry Adams, shuddered at the nearness of the twentieth century.