SOURCE: "Theodore Roosevelt: Learned Style," in The Learned Presidency, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988, pp. 39-88.

On 7 June 1910, in the Sheldonian Theatre of the University of Oxford, ex-President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the Romanes Lecture. He called it "The World Movement—Biological Analogies in History." The invitation by Lord Curzon, the chancellor of the university, to give the address was recognition accorded Roosevelt as a distinguished man of letters as well as a former American president. His reputation in each regard was understood and appreciated on both sides of the Atlantic. Roosevelt found the prospect of giving the Romanes Lecture greatly attractive. It would afford him the opportunity once more of expounding his view of modern history, the leading feature of which was the world movement of the European races across the backward areas of the world. This movement, which had been in process since 1500, he had first elaborated in writings done during the 1880s. Years later as a politician and statesman he had pursued policies that fit within this frame of historical reference. In "Biological Analogies in History" he proposed to relate his understanding of history to the scientific spirit of the day for the purpose of placing man in social perspective.

During the closing months of his presidency Roosevelt took time away from pressing political concerns to make a careful preparation of the text of his address. Early drafts were read and criticized by Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, while Lord Bryce, the British ambassador to Washington and sometime Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, found himself at the White House, as the President put it, "to suffer the wholly unwarrantable torments which I design to inflict … by going over my Romanes Lecture with me." But the result was a summation of the ideas of Roosevelt himself, a major effort on his part to pronounce a view of man in history. The success of the lecture has been dimmed by the comment of Dr. Lang, the Archbishop of York. "In the way of grading which we have at Oxford," he said, "we agreed to mark the lecture Beta-minus but the lecturer Alpha-plus. While we felt that the lecture was not a very great contribution to science, we were sure the lecturer was a very great man." If anything, Roosevelt intended to illuminate not science but society, using the methods of science where they seemed applicable and rejecting them when they were not. It is on this test that the lecture should be judged.

"Biological Analogies in History" strictly qualified the role of evolution in human affairs. The address exhibited in Roosevelt a sympathy for scientific method and achievement, as he extolled the greatness of Darwin and asserted that from the biological process of birth, growth, maturation, prosperity, and death, social patterns could be better understood: "As in biology, so in human history.…" He also pointed up differences and the danger of deductions from facile comparisons. For example, he said that "most of the great civilizations which have developed a high civilization and have played a dominant part in the world have been, and are, artificial, not merely in social structure but in the sense of including totally different types. A great nation rarely belongs to any one race." While the important ethnic divisions of mankind could not be ignored or discounted, usually they had not remained unified, and, accordingly, had not produced cultures that could be defined as purely ethnic. Civilization flowed out of a great accumulation of spiritual, moral, and intellectual principles and ideas that a particular race at some given period in history might especially express. But Roosevelt insisted that greatness came from ideals and not from blood. "We Americans and you people of the British Isles alike," he told his audience, "need ever to keep in mind that among the many qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a high and clear sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery." In public as in personal affairs, he declared, "though intellect stands high, character stands higher." It followed that problems, whether national or international in scope, ought to be approached in the "spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance of responsibility." Referring to Western imperialism—in effect, to the world movement—he concluded that "in the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another, unless … in the interest and for the benefit of that race." What Roosevelt had striven to do in "Biological Analogies in History" was to identify, contemplate, and praise human purpose in social development.

Some three months later, on 31 August 1910, at Osawatomie, Kansas, in a setting very unlike the Sheldonian Theatre, the ex-president fired off one of the major political speeches in his long career, "The New Nationalism." Though a political speech, it was laced with the pragmatism of William James as transmitted to public uses by Herbert Croly and voiced by the premier public man of the time, Theodore Roosevelt. Croly, in The Promise of American Life, had insisted that government was but an instrument of the people, a tool to be used in bringing about socioeconomic reforms vital to the good health of the country. The Constitution as a frame of government was rejected as a limitation on what one generation could do to solve its problems. Specifically understood, constitutional government must become a living process of change and adaptation, with man's intellect the directing force for good. Croly had been much impressed by Roosevelt's conduct of the presidency and had drawn heavily upon it in writing The Promise of American Life. The book, in turn, helped TR crystallize his thinking as an advanced Progressive.

Early in the Kansas speech Roosevelt offered a quotation: "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital and deserves much the higher consideration." Such were the words not of a radical agitator, the ex-president announced with deliberate irony, but of Abraham Lincoln. He went on to define the great issue of 1910 as "the struggle of free men to gain and hold the right of self-government as against special interests." ["The New Nationalism"] This was nothing new, he said, but in a complex industrialized society it had assumed new forms and new meanings. He reminded his audience that the objective of any reform ought to be the enhancement of opportunities for individual citizens. The "square deal" did not stand for the dole but the right to work, a right ensured "free from the sinister influence or control of interests" through the agency of a powerful central government. Disposed to accept combinations in industry as "the result of an imperative economic law which could not be replaced by political legislation," Roosevelt thought that the individual would be served best "in completely controlling such combinations in the interests of public welfare." Control should extend over business corporations, the money system, the national natural resources—over wealth in whatever form. This must be done in the name of "national efficiency," as pragmatism itself had efficiency as a goal. The national government was thereby promoted as a popularly elected instrument of national efficiency, blending democracy and science.

"The New Nationalism" was a notable synthesis of Roosevelt's mature progressivism. At the same time it exhibited the main elements that generally describe his thought. The evolutionary component was evident in the assertion that combinations were the "result of an imperative economic law"; the pragmatic strain was revealed in a call for "national efficiency" that had to go beyond mere negative regulation of vested interests; and, finally, a traditional national purpose—"the object of government is the welfare of the people"—suffused the entire message.

The whole of Roosevelt's thinking as a public man, of which "Biological Analogies in History" and "The New Nationalism" are compacted expressions, is an instructive detail in the broad canvas of the American mind at mid-passage. The decades from 1858 to 1919, years marking TR's lifetime, were times of intellectual transition in America. The changes affecting thought were substantial, influencing happenings in the counting houses, the legislative halls, and the courts of law. If it is true that the American mind would never be the same again, it is equally proper to observe that by 1919 that mind had become an amalgam of the very new and the very old. The transition had been completed in the sense that the flow of applications of the new scientific hypotheses associated with the name of Darwin had sought out every corner and contour of the national experience. No area of individual or social significance escaped scientific interpretation. However, while the traditional ideas of the colonial and early national inheritance had been altered, adapted, and attenuated, they were far from effaced. What had occurred was a truly pragmatic version of truth-reality in the making; new ideas had been wedded to older concepts, creating a more vital synthesis.

The mid-nineteenth-century American mind had possessed a strongly traditional quality. This traditionalism was not without challenge and change in the early years, but as late as the Civil War, inherited, time-honored modes of thought and attitude commanded the adherence of most men. This was especially true of religion at a time when religious beliefs were widely held by Americans. At the center of this faith was supernaturalism, buttressed by a system of philosophical absolutism. The household that Theodore Roosevelt grew up in was permeated by a religious spirit, exceptional only in the degree of its commitment, for the senior Roosevelt was a genuinely pious, churchgoing, praying Christian. The finished fixity of the systems of faith and reason enjoyed by mid-century Americans like the Roosevelts found expression both in the development of the Constitution as the great law of the nation and in capitalistic enterprise based on the certainties of private property, the operation of the two producing a mutually reinforcing effect. The Roosevelt family fortune, derived from trade and banking, rested squarely on the twin pillars of law and property, and rejoiced in heaven's approval. It was upon this traditional world of reassurance born of final answers that the new scientific hypotheses, pregnant with change, intruded. The year after Theodore Roosevelt's birth Darwin published The Origin of Species.

The Origin of Species has been called the most important book written in the nineteenth century. Whatever exaggeration may attach to this claim, its impact on American thought in Roosevelt's formative years was far-reaching. Darwin's book, with its principles popularized and applied to social conditions, delivered a grave blow to the supernaturalism that was central to American Protestant Christianity. As the inherited religious outlook yielded ground to new scientific teachings, much of the traditionalism of the American mind underwent a similar change. The allegiance of philosophers switched readily to evolutionary scientism and thence to pragmatism. The personalist ethic that had been part of the democratic-capitalistic impulse succumbed to the ravages of a relentless laissez-faire. The Constitution and the law, in turn, were made to do service in the working out of the nation's economic salvation.

Three ideas critical to American thought as it developed out of Darwinism fascinated Roosevelt's generation: changeability, progress, and a material order. Of the three, change and progress had formed part of American belief and experience from the first colonial foundations. No people had become more familiar with change and were more likely to accept it as a happy fact of life than were Americans. As for progress, the very word could be used to sum up national confidence in the national destiny. Progress in colonial America had become a reality even before progress was a philosophical postulate of the Enlightenment. Americans had been influenced by the fact and the philosophy of progress, their minds conditioned not merely to hope for human betterment but to demand it as their birthright. Their concept of progress, furthermore, had been keyed to individual success and to individual improvement, the social dimension being the sum of the well-being of individuals. Of all the features of America's past pointing the way to progress, none meant more to Theodore Roosevelt, or was to have greater impact on him, than the westward movement of the frontier. His zest for outdoor life and adventure had taken him to the Dakota country in the fall of 1883, and his experience there altogether enthralled him. He later was to speak of these western days as "the most important educational aspect of all my life." ["Speech at Sioux Falls, S.D."] In the West, in its history and actuality, Roosevelt was convinced he had found all that was best for America in nature and in society. To him it signified the free self-reliance of the individual and social progress for mankind, because the westward movement of superior peoples brought new lands under their dominion and their beneficence. There is something both paradoxical and sobering about Roosevelt's appreciation of the West. The very conquest would mean the eventual disappearance of the individual frontiersman and the assimilation of frontier populations into more complex social arrangements. But the two ideas: rugged individualism with its Darwinist overtones, and the welfare of mankind redolent of religious conviction, are suggestive of the persuasions that science and tradition continued to exert on him.

As social Darwinism supplied a new rationale for established ideas of change and progress, its acceptance by the American mind was hardly surprising. The stumbling block to a more complete victory for evolutionary thought was its third proposition, a material universe. Adherence to this concept, where adherence occurred, marked a dramatic break with tradition. Leading advocates of social Darwinism dismissed the claims of religion as unscientific, unverifiable, and therefore unworthy of their attention. The residue of traditional faith even of avowed evolutionaries could be considerable, nevertheless. John Fiske's advocacy of a theistic evolution in Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy illustrated the reluctance or the inability of some to cut loose completely from past intellectual moorings. This type of traditionalism was central to the view of Theodore Roosevelt. He saw Western man's history, especially since 1500, as an evolutionary process of the survival of the fittest and mastery by the superior races. He also believed that the mainspring of the evolutionary mechanism was character in individual men, and that the aggregate of this individual moral sense accounted for the superior race. Furthermore, the outcome of the evolutionary process was progress, invariably judged by him according to the norms of traditional ethics.

Pragmatism presupposed the same critical principles as social Darwinism. For similar historical reasons it proved congenial to the American mind. Pragmatism also encountered obstacles. The pragmatists differed from the Darwinists in their avoidance of a truculent challenge to ancient faiths, and their insistence on progress resulting from change that men could control and direct appeared more consistent with American history and the traditional spirit. While pragmatism was in fact a philosophy, it did not demand to become the philosophy of someone attracted to it. Pragmatism was readily utilized as an instrument of change by those who were generally satisfied with ethical values grounded in Scripture or on the rational nature of man. As instruments of reform, pragmatically inspired techniques might do yeoman service in the cause of maintaining the old moral order. For a "conservative as Progressive," for Theodore Roosevelt, this was the meaning of the Progressive movement.

Pragmatism was doubtlessly a more humane expression of scientific principles than social Darwinism. If its opposition to aspects of the traditional American mind was more subtle, it was also a philosophy better constituted to accommodate traditionalism, should the latter prove viable. After all, the ultimate test of the pragmatic dispensation was workability; a workable combination of the old with the new was among the first principles of pragmatism. Roosevelt's mature public mind exhibited this distinction in "The New Nationalism." Progressive reforms, if they were better able to bring about greater individual fulfillment, were attractive applications of pragmatism. Individual fulfillment remained for Roosevelt the key to social improvement.

The public mind of Theodore Roosevelt represented a union of traditional beliefs and scientific theories. Coming together in his vibrant and aggressive personality, they constituted what may well be termed the "Rooseveltian ethic," for Roosevelt himself added a unique and powerful ingredient. The constituents were closely related but not necessarily of equal importance. Each worked at times to qualify the others, and each at a given moment might appear dominant. All were securely part of his outlook as he came of age politically; all remained permanently in his thought. His mind was an amalgam of the old and the new, combining loyalty to traditional morality with a respect for scientific progress that was largely characteristic of the Establishment of his generation. The claims of traditional ethics were as much a part of him as his admiration for Darwin and Huxley, "seekers after truth." Insofar as Roosevelt was guided by high principles, traditionalism was modified by social Darwinism. Inasmuch as his public philosophy owed some of its character to his response to a succession of actual problems, in his mature years it displayed elements properly associated with pragmatism as an intellectual instrument, as well as with political expediency.

Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858 into a family deeply rooted in New York City's history, the place of his birth. His father, also called Theodore, was more a philanthropist than a businessman, but his considerable success in the marketplace enabled him to indulge his sense of responsibility for the less fortunate. TR's mother was Martha Bulloch, a Georgia belle who came north in 1853 after her marriage, though she remained Southern in spirit. The Civil War created some strain on the family. Once the conflict was over, the Roosevelt horizons were unclouded, and Teedie, as young Theodore was known in the family, grew up in a comfortable, regulated household presided over by his father. Later Roosevelt was to speak of his father as "the best man I ever knew," and a warm and loving relationship was part of the fact and memory of Theodore Roosevelt's growing up.

Education figured prominently in Roosevelt's youth. His father was keen to have his son instructed in the fundamentals of learning as well as in the new ideas of the scientific revolution. His education was an ongoing one; it originated at home, continued at school, and was not yet completed by the time Roosevelt became president in 1901. The formalities of that education began with Andrew Cutler on one end of the log when Cutler was hired in 1873 to prepare his young charge for the Harvard entrance examinations. Teddie was both a willing and an able student. His imagination and curiosity had been fired by the constant round of activities in his father's house, by travels to England, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and by a six-month residence in Dresden, where he learned something of the German language and culture—all this by the age of fifteen. In between these experiences he had been taught to read and write, mostly by tutors drawn from the family because of the uncertainties of his health. His father had been greatly concerned about the boy's physical well-being and had sternly but compassionately advised him "to make his body." "You have the mind but you have not the body," his father told him when he was about ten years old, "and without the body the mind can not go as far as it should." The result of this fatherly advice is well known. Theodore Roosevelt, from that moment, was the practitioner and advocate of "the strenuous life." There is no comparable episode that marks the beginning of Roosevelt's equal determination to make his mind.

He read extensively as a boy because the family was devoted to books, but his reading was commonplace in character. His father, noting his son's interest in natural history and wanting to occupy him during bouts of illness, gave him volumes by J. G. Wood, the English writer of popular books on nature. In this way and from observation and a collection of specimens, Teedie acquired an extraordinary amount of information about birds, animals, and flowers. He also read history, especially American history, and tales of adventure, including the writings of Cooper and Longfellow. In all of this there was too much of what interested the youngster and too little of an organized and rigorous approach to learning. He was able to read German well, for example, and do passably in French, but he had no grounding in Greek or Latin and had received no instruction in mathematics. It fell to Andrew Cutler to inculcate a method and to encourage a discipline, habits that were to become a permanent part of his life, as well as to accomplish the more mundane objective, passing the Harvard entrance examinations. Cutler's task, from the viewpoint of the tutor, proved both easy and satisfying. Roosevelt was the ideal student at the opposite end of the log. He prepared for eight different fields of examination, doing the minimum only in Greek. Special emphasis was given to Latin, history, mathematics, and elementary science. Roosevelt had to apply himself to these subjects, but he had little difficulty with German and French. In literature he needed neither introduction nor urging, but Cutler supplied proper guidance, while in botany and zoology he struck out on his own. Under Cutler's tutelage Roosevelt acquired the intellectual confidence necessary for him to make the most of Harvard.

The Harvard of the late 1870s was in the process of absorbing the initial educational reforms of President Eliot, making the school an interesting and an exciting place to be. By introducing the elective system to the undergraduate curriculum and developing graduate programs in various fields, Eliot sought to improve the educational experience of the college students and at the same time establish Harvard as an important university. Like others, Roosevelt profited directly from the elective system and indirectly from the enhanced intellectual atmosphere. Despite the liberalizing efforts of Eliot, there were prescribed courses for freshmen and some required subjects for the second year as well. In the first year Roosevelt studied Greek and Latin literature and language, German, advanced mathematics, physics, and chemistry—an arresting blend of the knowledge of antiquity and the findings of modern science. In his sophomore year he took rhetoric, Anglo-American constitutional history, French, German, comparative anatomy and physiology, and botany. Roosevelt applied himself diligently to all these subjects and was among the best students in what was deemed a brilliant class. By his junior year he had hit full stride, taking nine subjects that totaled twenty hours of lectures and laboratory periods. Performing well in all courses, he excelled in political economy and zoology. These two disciplines represented diverging roads, one of which he would choose to follow as a life's work, while the other would remain an avocation. Several factors dissuaded Roosevelt from a scientific career. He was an "outdoor naturalist" at a time when natural science was exclusively a matter of the laboratory. Having fallen in love with Alice Lee and become determined to marry her as soon as possible after graduation from Harvard, he recognized the value of a career of large prospects consistent with the Lee family's position. Finally, his desire to keep up his father's name as a civic leader drew him toward some form of public life. This decision is clear enough in retrospect, but hardly so if one examines his choice of senior subjects, which included political economy and Italian, and geology and zoology. When he graduated in June 1880 he won "honorable mention" in natural science, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was ranked twenty-first in a class of 177. In his autobiography, Roosevelt recalled that he "thoroughly enjoyed" Harvard but that "there was very little in way of actual studies which helped me in after life." The influence of the varied curriculum may well have been too elusive to be appreciated, but his study of history and science honed his mind as surely as the regimen of physical exercise had toughened his body. It was while a senior, for example, that he commenced his research on the naval war of 1812, the background of a book that would launch his career as a writer.

Looking beyond courses and grades and prizes, other considerations must be weighed in assessing the impact of the Harvard years on Theodore Roosevelt. The death of his father in 1877—"the best man I ever knew"—forced him to become more independent. He found the social life at college immensely appealing, and he was part of the extracurricular scene at the highest levels. His passion for Alice Lee, which was to lead quickly to marriage in 1880, thrust fresh responsibilities on him, completing his passage to manhood. Yet through it all, learning remained a critical element in his outlook, and Harvard confirmed his commitment to it. Books no longer meant withdrawal from the world as they may have during his sickly childhood, but "a reaching for a growing understanding" of the world and its people. He read literally hundreds of books over the course of the years and would later write them to describe an experience (The Wilderness Hunter), to analyze a historical event (The Naval War of 1812), and to celebrate a theory of history (The Winning of the West). Books about people were also to be part of Roosevelt's literary output: Gouverneur Morris, a founding father, Thomas Hart Benton, a frontier statesman, and Oliver Cromwell, a leader of moral purpose. According to Henry Adams, students of Roosevelt's day came to Harvard ignorant of all that men had thought and hoped, but while at Cambridge "their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight of suggestion." Harvard had fertilized Roosevelt's mind, which burst forth in an impressive array of books and other writings over the course of the next several years. Yet his future was to involve much more than books, devoted as he was to them. His total education had served a dual purpose. In Cardinal Newman's phrase, the end of education is "fitness for the world," by which he intended neither instant social utility nor economic success. What was meant, rather, was an intellectual fitness, the mental capacity for life that alone makes a person substantially useful and successful. This was the result of Theodore Roosevelt's education, of which Harvard was a part.

The image of the frenetic Teddy Roosevelt has an unquestioned validity. He had other dimensions, one of which was given a vivid rendering in his first book, published when he was only twenty-four. The Naval War of 1812 appeared in 1882. Edward Wagenknecht, in The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt, tends to dismiss the books as "hardly more than the work of a boy," yet "fair and soundly researched." It was a work, in fact, marked by patriotism but marred by jingoism. Some years afterward, and on the strength of this first book, Roosevelt was invited to do a study of "the naval operations between Great Britain and the United States, 1812-1815." This became volume six of William Laird Clowes's authoritative The Royal Navy (London, 1901). The later work is briefer than the original and, purged of much of its American bias, secured Roosevelt's place in the ranks of recognized naval historians.

The Naval War of 1812 had four editions by 1889 and was frequently reprinted thereafter. The book largely concerned naval battles. Maps were included to help the reader visualize the tactics employed, and various charts were presented, giving tonnage, armaments, and personnel attached to the ships in action. In these respects it was highly detailed if not greatly technical and a tribute to the author's respect for research. Roosevelt also proposed to use his study for larger purposes. He determined that the major disagreement between the United States and Great Britain was not so much over the neutral rights of ships and cargo as the impressment of American seamen by British captains. This problem led ultimately to the nature of citizenship, the question of jus soli or jus sanguinis. The rule of citizenship based on the choice of the individual was extremely important to the United States at the time, but it also held extensive implications in an era of increasing migrations from mother countries to colonies that eventually might achieve independence.

As Roosevelt wrote: "The principles for which the United States contended in 1812 are now universally accepted and those so tenaciously maintained by Great Britain find no advocate in the civilized world." In effect, the United States had vindicated an important element of international law by its naval victories.

Equally noteworthy in The Naval War of 1812 was the germ of the idea that was to be developed by others into the new field of geopolitics, paralleling the increasing concern with the influence of global conditions on national interests. America would have its own great geo-politician in Alfred Thayer Mahan, who would take his place alongside Sir Halford John MacKinder in his time. Years later Kaiser Wilhelm II was as intrigued by Mahan's writings on sea power quite as much as by the heartland thesis. In the preface to the first edition of The Naval War of 1812, Roosevelt wrote of the rising awareness of the role of the American navy in world affairs. "At present people are beginning to realize that it is folly for the great English-speaking Republic to rely for defense upon a navy composed partly of antiquated hulks and partly on new vessels rather more worthless than the old. It is worthwhile to study with some care," he went on, "that period of our history during which our navy stood at the highest pitch of its fame; and to learn … from the past.…" There is a good bit of the spirit of navalism and the Navy League mentality in these thoughts, but his basic proposition was grounded in a substantive, scholarly interest in naval history.

An amplified statement of Roosevelt's navalism was embedded in the reviews he wrote of three of Mahan's books. The first and the most important of these dealt with The Influence of Sea Power on History and appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1890. Roosevelt praised Mahan's recognition of the enduring effects that sea power had had on the development of certain of the great nations of the world, and his understanding "of the deep underlying causes and connections between political events and naval battles." Mahan's consideration of the juxtaposition of land and sea, of the extent and density of populations, and of the character of a people and their government made The Influence of Sea Power on History a remarkably timely book. Furthermore, just as Mahan demonstrated from history the dangers of naval improvisation, so Roosevelt voiced his renewed demands for naval preparedness. In his review of Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power on the French Revolution (1893), Roosevelt stressed two factors in particular: the ubiquity of the Royal Navy as the soundest explanation of British victory, along with the willingness of the French to be satisfied with privateering. Privateering was simply a variation of improvisation. In 1897, as war seemed more and more likely, Roosevelt used the occasion of his critique of Mahan's Life of Nelson to speak out for skill and bravery as essentials to victory in battle. By this time he was the assistant secretary of the navy and these were hawkish words, but TR felt more comfortable in so war-like a pose because he had founded his views on naval history.

An ardent admirer and good friend of Captain Mahan, Roosevelt had an unexampled opportunity to put into practice many of the ideas he shared with Mahan when he was appointed assistant secretary of the navy in 1897. His chief was John Davis Long, a superannuated Massachusetts politician who had been given the Navy Department for services previously rendered the Republican party. Long's age and disposition virtually made TR "lord of the navy," and he was eager to introduce Mahan's thinking into navy tactics and strategy. He rightly judged Secretary Long to be "only lukewarm" about an enlarged navy and sought to enlist Mahan's help to convince the secretary of the "vital need for more battleships now." As assistant secretary he was especially the foe of improvisation. He studied reports from the French, German, and British navies, especially regarding new developments in ships and armaments, determined to improve his grasp of the technical details of his job. At the same time he insisted on viewing the navy as an instrument of a great power. What was needed, therefore, were not merely coastal defenses or torpedo boats, but battleships and lots of them to carry American greatness across the world. Reflecting his review of Mahan's study of Nelson, Roosevelt was prepared to alter one of the sacred traditions of the navy, promotion by strict seniority. Roosevelt argued that men must be promoted to command positions on their record, because they had been brave and skillful, and they had to be young enough to be creative and energetic. Mahan had argued this persuasively and Roosevelt understood him perfectly. TR wrote the Naval Personnel bill of 1898, which the Congress passed and under which there was the strong tendency for the best officers to advance rapidly while the less fit were encouraged to retire after twenty years of service. In numerous ways the navy was stamped with the distinctive brand of Roosevelt and Mahan intertwined. The remarkable consideration was, perhaps, how much Roosevelt did in the year or so he was assistant secretary. He knew what he wanted to do, what he felt had to be done, long before his actual appointment. He learned from a study of books and from discussions with knowledgeable navy people, relating his ideas on the navy to an enlarging historical rationale.

The Naval War of 1812 was a testament to Roosevelt's scholarly if somewhat ingenuous interest in the navy and its place in national history. As keen as this interest was, the fleet remained but a means to an end, which was American greatness. Over the next ten years TR devoted himself to further writings, including books about the wilderness as he encountered it, the frontier, the marvels of nature, and the conquest of the western territories by the American race. In these literary endeavors the West as a part of the ongoing American experience held his attention fast. He was in the process of maturing his views of modern history, and while he was prepared to rely on books to inform his judgments, he insisted that personal experiences, whenever possible, should be some part of the raw material on which he drew for historical understanding.

Once while touring Egypt in 1872, a fourteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt wrote of standing atop a pyramid: "To look out on the desert gives one somewhat the same feeling as to look over the North American Prairies." He had, to be sure, not then glimpsed the Great Plains, but his remark does suggest the significance of the West to him. Roosevelt said it best when addressing an audience at Colorado Springs in 1901:

You and your fathers who built the West did even more than you thought, for you shaped thereby the destiny of the whole republic and as a necessary corollary profoundly influenced the course of events throughout the world.

Roosevelt was to go out to the Dakota country for the first time in 1883, and a romance was born. He bought a ranch, investing a goodly portion of his inheritance in the venture. When his young wife died in February 1884, within hours of his mother's passing, he instinctively sought out his Dakota ranch at Elkhorn for solace and distraction. He divided his time between eastern politics and western ranching down to the winter of 1886-87, when, because of some of the severest weather in memory, fully one-half of his cattle herd was lost. At that point he liquidated his holdings, but not before the West had left an indelible stamp.

Theodore Roosevelt included much of his experience of the West in his natural history trilogy: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). The first two of these volumes were written on the Elkhorn ranch. As much as he internalized about the West, Roosevelt, the author, was prepared to fall back on standard authorities to verify or improve his books. At Elkhorn, for example, he had seen fit to supply himself with T. S. Van Dyke's Still Hunter, Richard Dodge's Plains of the Great West, John Dean Caton's The Antelope and Deer of America, and Elliott Coues's Birds of the Northwest. Even as an outdoorsman Roosevelt was a scholar. In addition he drew from Burroughs, Parkman, and Thoreau, and especially from the journals of Lewis and Clark, of which he had made a thorough study. As he wrote Brander Matthews in 1888: "Mind you, I'm a literary feller, not a politician nowadays." It must be added that in these literary endeavors are to be found a number of salient general statements that illuminate Roosevelt's theory of history, and especially demonstrate his attraction to many of the tenets of social Darwinism.

The first of these books based on Roosevelt's western days, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, was in the main an account of stalking the buffalo, the black-tailed deer, and the giant grizzly, and in his story of the hunt lies the great charm of the narrative. Yet there is more here than storytelling. For example, in the fate of the plains buffalo is a wider lesson, heavy with Darwinist accents:

The rapid and complete extermination of the buffalo afforded an excellent instance of how a race that has thriven and multiplied for ages under conditions of life to which it has always fitted itself, by a process of natural selection continued for countless generations, may succumb at once when these surrounding conditions are varied by the introduction of one or more new elements, immediately becoming the chief forces with which it has to contend in the struggle for life.

Indeed, the history of the West was a history of the change of nature by technology—largely for the good, as Roosevelt judged it. It was the long-range rifle, along with the advance of the cattle industry, that denied the Great Plains to the buffalo and enabled settlers to develop a frontier civilization.

Incidental to all this but especially fascinating to Roosevelt, was the evolution of the wood or mountain buffalo, which acquired habits widely different from those of the plains animal. His observations led him to note that the mountain buffalo had developed a keener sense of smell but had less sharp eyesight, and that the mountain variety grew longer and denser hair on a body that was more thickset. "As a result, a new race has been built up; and we have an animal far better fitted to 'harmonize with the environment."' Roosevelt concluded that "the formation of the race is due solely to the extremely severe process of natural selection that has been going on among the buffalo herds for the last sixty or seventy years." This kind of personal observation of evolution made a lasting impression.

Roosevelt afforded evolution a wide application that encompassed race relations between the white man and the red man. He believed that a good deal of "sentimental nonsense" had been written about the white man's taking of land from the Indians. Admitting that gross wrongs had been committed due to the brutality of the frontier and not infrequently deception by government agents, he denied that the plains had belonged to the Indians in the first place. "The simple truth is that the Indian never had any real ownership of it at all." Just as no one thought of the white hunters who roamed the wilderness as owning any part of it, so neither should the Indians be deemed proprietors of the lands they moved across. The wars against the Indians had been merciless, but also "just and rational." "It does no good to be merciful to the few at the cost of the many," was the way Roosevelt summed up his attitude regarding the sufferings of the Indians.

In Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail the basic evolutionary thesis had a different appeal. Roosevelt treated the frontier as a version or portion of the great American melting pot. Concerning the cowboys he wrote: "It would be impossible to imagine a more typically American assemblage, for although there are always a certain number of foreigners, usually English, Irish or German, yet they have become completely Americanized." These cowboys were the vanguard of a permanent civilization on the plains, inasmuch as their employers, the stockmen, were "the pioneers of civilization and their daring made the after-settlement of the region possible." Both stockmen and cowboys alike were of the self-reliant breed who had proven their superiority over the Indians and the Mexicans. The Stockmen's Association was the seed from which a self-governing West would grow, a process uniting Darwinism and democracy and leading on to progress. Roosevelt found that "the frontiersmen show their natural aptitude for organization … lawlessness is put down pretty effectively." For those who cared to read Roosevelt closely it was evident that his concern went beyond claw and fang, and that he discerned in the work of conquest and settlement the true measure of American history.

From a literary standpoint the best of the natural history trilogy is The Wilderness Hunter. Roosevelt had greatly matured as a writer, avoiding annoying repetitions and extravagant generalizations from the limited samples of his own experience. He was intent on his storytelling and was ready to share his expanding knowledge of forest and game. But in the preface to The Wilderness Hunter he once again attempted to enlarge the meaning of the life of the wilderness hunter:

In hunting, the finding and killing of the game is after all but part of the whole. The free self-reliant adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy, the wild surroundings, the grave beauty … all of these unite to give the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. The chase is among the best of all natural pastimes, it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the lack of which, in a nation, as in an individual, the possession of no other qualities can possibly atone.

The hunter was the archetype of freedom and thus the best kind of citizen in Roosevelt's idealized democratic republic.

Francis Parkman, Theodore Roosevelt, and Frederick Jackson Turner—three American historians of the West—were three men tied together by circumstance and substance. It is not inappropriate to bracket Roosevelt with these renowned scholars whose work he much admired, for in The Winning of the West he, too, made a lasting contribution to the historical literature of the frontier. Roosevelt's opus—not the magnum opus he dreamed of writing—was first published in four volumes: one and two in 1889, three in 1894, and the final volume in 1896. Altogether Roosevelt carried the story down through the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803. In taking up The Winning of the West today, nearly one hundred years from the appearance of the first volume, certain allowances have to be made. There is much (too much for contemporary tastes) of spread-eagle triumphalism both in what Roosevelt wrote and in how he wrote it. Too often he chose to see his function as that of storyteller, neglecting institutions in favor of the lives of the men who conquered the land. The result is a series of vignettes that becomes locked in memory largely because the men described were cast in the mold of heroes. Then, too, Roosevelt's dislike and distrust of Jefferson is troubling, though it may be well to remember that Jefferson's stature has been greatly enhanced by historians and others writing long after Roosevelt registered his opinions.

In his correspondence with Frederick Jackson Turner, in fact, he appeared prepared to soften his strictures. In a review of volume four Turner had scolded him for his harsh evaluation of Jefferson's conduct during the Citizen Genet affair and pleaded for a more sober judgment. Roosevelt wrote in reply: "I am more and more inclined to think you are quite right as to the inadvisability of my taking the tone I did toward Jefferson. The trouble is," he explained, "that I meet so many understudies of Jefferson in politics and suffer so much from them that I am apt to let my feelings find vent in words." Based on his own admission, the conclusion has to be offered that Roosevelt allowed subjective considerations to bias his historical writings. It was a fair admission, honestly made, but it indicates a serious shortcoming in his work.

The strengths of Roosevelt as historian of the West clearly outweigh the deficiencies. Not only did he make significant use of manuscripts and archival materials, but he did so under conditions not calculated to make his searches routine, as he explained in the preface to volume one of The Winning of the West. For the reader's information he listed the sources he had consulted, with a brief description of each. Apart from research in the archives in Washington, carried out between 1889 and 1895 when he was serving as a civil service commissioner—and an active one at that—Roosevelt made visits to Nashville, various locations in Kentucky, and New York to consult sources. Friends and contacts sent him material for use from Canada and from California. Compared with his research for Thomas Hart Benton and that done by other historians of the time, Roosevelt's research efforts were quite respectable.

A second aspect of The Winning of the West, which grows directly from the wide use of original sources, is the depth of the accounts Roosevelt offered. He brought his readers in close contact with many of the individuals who were in the vanguard of frontier conquest and who otherwise would have gone unnoticed. He was nothing if not thorough, exhausting what sources he had access to. The result is a spirited account, yet one in which the author is willing to linger over detail. Roosevelt demonstrated that he was something other than an amateur historian at a time when historians were just becoming conscious of themselves as professionals. The American Historical Association—Roosevelt would serve as its president in 1912—was organized in 1884, and the enduring work of Turner, Beard, and others lay ahead. Whether Theodore Roosevelt would ever have ranked with the great historians, had he decided to be a writer of history rather than primarily a maker, is debatable. He was not unaware of the deficiencies of The Winning of the West, as well as the superficiality of his studies of Benton and Morris. He agreed with Turner on the need to search the Spanish, English and French archives about the treaties of Jay and Pinckney, for example, and had he become a fully professional historian, no doubt he would have worked to overcome his faults.

Beyond the historical apparatus expertly used, Roosevelt's standing as an historian derives from a willingness to offer a conception of history at once seminal and controversial. Let the very first paragraphs of The Winning of the West speak for him:

During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.

The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents. The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John. Over half the descendants of their fellow countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, when these three Englishmen were born, held not a single white inhabitant; the race which, when they were in their prime, was hemmed in between the North and the Irish seas, today holds sway over worlds whose endless coasts are washed by the waves of the three great oceans.

In view of the foregoing passage there can be small doubt of Roosevelt's perspective, his prejudice, and his confidence respecting the English-speaking peoples and their place in modern times.

In The Winning of the West Roosevelt was striving for an acceptable historical framework into which he could fit the whole range of history since 1500, and with which the events of American history from the first settlements could be rightly understood. In this he was not following the lead of Turner, but was breaking new ground very much on his own initiative. He dedicated the four volumes to "Francis Parkman To Whom Americans Who Feel Pride In The Pioneer History Of Their Country Are So Greatly Indebted." Thus he stood between Parkman and Turner as historian of the pioneers and the frontier. Perhaps not nearly so good a historian as Parkman, and surely nowhere close to Turner in influence, Roosevelt nonetheless is justly associated with them. His analysis contained adumbrations of the democratic persuasions of the westward movement as it sought to justify the expansion of one people at the cruel cost to another. To Roosevelt the westward tide was irresistible by either Indian or Mexican. As he explained himself to Turner in discussing the Louisiana Purchase: " … the very point which Henry Adams failed to make [was] that the diplomatic discussions to which he devoted so much space, though extremely interesting, … did not at all determine the fact that the transfer had to be made. It was the growth of the western settlements that determined this fact." What Roosevelt had done was to catch the cadence of western expansion, and he marched across four volumes of the American frontier experience in step with it.

Equally remarkable, Roosevelt's writing during the 1880s and 1890s was done while he continued to be directly or indirectly active in politics. He campaigned for Blaine for the presidency in 1884, stood for mayor of New York City in 1886, served on the Civil Service Commission from 1889 to 1895, and in the latter year began a stint as police commissioner of the City of New York. The quality of his writing may well have suffered by reason of his hectic public pace, but the quantity remains impressive. Though he wrote some quite ordinary books, as a consideration of Thomas Hart Benton and Gouverneur Morris will show, his need to relate contemporary politics to historical models through the device of books and essays affords compelling evidence of Roosevelt's instinctive reliance on learning.

During these years when Roosevelt was writing at such a furious rate, he was conscious of himself as a literary person. Less deliberately, at least in terms of an over-arching philosophy, he was busy formulating a theory of history. The study of history became the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt's life of the mind and his active public career, and a necessary part of it was a study of the work of individuals who had helped create the present. Though attracted to the social Darwinist explanation of change and progress, TR was too much a traditionalist to ignore the feats of heroes. He therefore expected that contemporary public life could not be significantly improved without men of upright character and purpose. In writing The Winning of the West, he admitted that he had "always been more interested in the men themselves than in the institutions through and under which they worked." For someone of this disposition, "the great man" theory of history was a sore temptation.

Roosevelt attempted three biographies, lives of Thomas Hart Benton, Gouverneur Morris, and Oliver Cromwell. He appeared convinced that history was more than forces or cycles, and that progress came about because men sought it. Roosevelt believed in man because he believed in men. Of the three biographies, that of Benton was the best. It was, however, hastily written during the spring of 1886 while TR was on his Badlands ranch and deprived of even the most elementary library resources. At one point he wrote his friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, to ask assistance in getting some basic information about Benton's last years so that he might finish the manuscript and send it off to the publisher. What makes Benton noteworthy is its view of the senator as a westerner. Benton's efforts to make cheap land available to settlers, his appetite for as much North American territory as might be had to accommodate the expanding American race, and his advocacy of hard money in the style of another westerner, Andrew Jackson, gave Roosevelt ample reason to describe his subject in favorable terms. Furthermore, Benton was a nationalist at a time when nullifiers and secessionists plied their views. Roosevelt thought such attitudes totally abhorrent and judged Benton to be a better American for having used his position and influence to thwart them.

Despite a prolific pen, writing was not an easy matter for Theodore Roosevelt. "Writing is horribly hard work to me; and I make slow progress," he confessed at the time he was at work on Benton. "I have got some good ideas … but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is very rough and I do not like a certain lack of sequitur that I do not seem able to get rid of." Evelyn Waugh once described writing as putting words down on the page and pushing them one after the other, and Roosevelt's technique shared something of this mode. What carried him forward, what gave him the push, was his sheer enthusiasm, a habit that made him want to explain and to justify, in the case of a biography, the accomplishments of a historical figure with whom he was in sympathy. Thomas Hart Benton easily qualified in this respect, but Gouverneur Morris was less likable.

Gouverneur Morris was in the nature of an assignment by the editor of the American Statesman series, John T. Morse, Jr. Roosevelt would have preferred to write about Hamilton or, better still, Lincoln, but once he was into Morris he found him a more apt subject for his pen than, for example, John Jay. Roosevelt had something less than total enthusiasm for Morris, a man thoroughly elitist in temperament. One who could refer to the people as "poor reptiles who bask in the sun," and who could predict that "they will bite 'ere noon, depend on it," was out of touch with TR's democratic spirit, however conservative Roosevelt has been judged. Consequently the Morris book was marked by frequent digressions, some of them quite gratuitous. At the start of chapter six, "The Formation of the National Constitution," Roosevelt chided Morris for not foreseeing that even with the loss of the colonies Britain would remain a great power, "that from their loins other nations, broad as continents, were to spring, so that the South Seas should become an English ocean and that over a fourth of the world's surface there should be spoken the tongue of Pitt and Washington." Such commentary might be dismissed as silly except when taken as part of a continued awareness and support of the world movement of the English-speaking peoples, which, to Roosevelt's consternation, was about to be challenged by the Boers in South Africa. Neither the subject nor the author's literary reputation was well served by Gouverneur Morris.

The last of the biographical trilogy was Oliver Cromwell. It appeared in serial form in Scribner's magazine from January to June, 1900, and was published as a book by Scribner's that same year. Cromwell was described only half-facetiously by Arthur Hamilton Lee as "a fine, imaginative study of Cromwell's qualifications for the governorship of New York." TR was, of course, serving in that office when the biography came into print. Oliver Cromwell is best termed a character study rather than a formal biography. It is not clear why Roosevelt took up Cromwell, of all possible subjects open to him. If he had discovered many of Cromwell's traits, both his strengths and weaknesses, in himself and felt compelled to write about them through a thinly disguised literary device, the process would be consistent with his preoccupation with history as a way of explaining the contemporary, whether a scene or person. His admiration for the Lord Protector was genuine. He once wrote approvingly of the embattled Boer farmers as "belated Cromwellians," going on to say, however, that it was absolutely essential to the world movement that English be spoken south of the Zambesi.

As for Cromwell, Roosevelt determined that his real historical importance lay in his establishment of political liberty. It was a half-wrought kind of liberty, because in victory Cromwell tied its enjoyment directly to religious tests. But once religious animosity had moderated sufficiently, freedom of conscience was allowed to develop under the law. In the course of his analysis Roosevelt displayed a good comprehension of the Whig version of English history and generally endorsed it, but he was acute enough to reject misinterpretations from the past. A perceptive distinction between Spanish and French Catholicism in the first part of the seventeenth century was one example of his rejection of stereotyping. More than anything else, Oliver Cromwell revealed the Roosevelt passion to publish, stemming from his belief that thought must result in action. He viewed scholarship in somewhat the same fashion. Writing in The Outlook in 1912 he contended that "scholarship that consists in mere learning but finds no expression in production, may be of interest and value to the individual himself … but unless it finds expression in achievement" is sterile. "… Scholarship is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when the scholar not merely receives or acquires, but gives." For Roosevelt, thoughts were not fulfilled unless they resulted in a tangible product. Having studied Cromwell he was intent on sharing his knowledge with others.

From 1923 to 1926 the Memorial edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, edited by Hermann Hagedorn, was published in twenty-four volumes. Each set in the limited edition was numbered and signed by Edith Kermit Roosevelt. In his preface Hagedorn explained the organization of the numerous writings and observed that his aim had been "to arrange the material in a way that would make it as easy as possible for the reader to find out what Mr. Roosevelt's convictions were on any subjects; or haply just to browse in the green fields of his stimulating discourse." The learned Roosevelt is present in each of these volumes, but perhaps nowhere does he show to better advantage than in volume fourteen, Literary Essays. In the preface to that volume Brander Matthews included a short essay, "Theodore Roosevelt as a Man of Letters," replete with comments on the literary Roosevelt. Comparing Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin, he found they differed in "that Roosevelt was an author by profession and Franklin an author by accident." Matthews held further that Roosevelt "wrote well because he had read widely and deeply—because he had absorbed good literature for the sheer delight he took in it." He called TR "A normal human being" and candidly pointed out that Roosevelt "liked to celebrate himself and to be his own Boswell." But Matthews also noted that to TR, "life was more important than literature, and what he was forever seeking to put into literature was life itself." Literary Essays brings to life an extraordinary mixture in Roosevelt—"distinctly a man of letters as a man of action."

"Social Evolution," an essay suggested by Benjamin Kidd's book of the same title, exhibited an important moderation in Roosevelt's endorsement of evolutionary ideas as applied to society. He objected to any account of society that rested on the single postulate of natural selection because he was bound to reject the materialistic implications deriving from such a position. He also faulted Kidd because nowhere in his work was character granted a function in human affairs. Roosevelt espoused character as essential for the achievement of social progress. Character was "the mother who watches over the sick child; the soldier who dies at his post." Both these models portrayed actions informed by convictions. "We need intellect," Roosevelt wrote, "and there is no reason why we should not have it together with character, but if we must choose between the two, we choose character without a moment's hesitation." As for social evolution, the hypothesis that progress was greatest where competition was keenest was not substantiated by cultural realities. Were this so, he contended, "the European peoples standing highest in the scale would be the south Italians, the Polish Jews, the people who live in the congested districts of Ireland. As a matter of fact, however, these were the people who made the least progress.…" The conclusion Roosevelt reached, one he continued to advance in essays and speeches throughout his lifetime, was that man's spirit, and in a sense, therefore, man's moral self, was the central consideration in accounting for social improvement.

Theodore Roosevelt's appreciation of literature of the more conventional sort is illustrated in three selected essays, "The Children of the Night," "The Ancient Irish Sagas," and "Dante and the Bowery." It is well known that when Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., on a White House visit from Harvard in 1905, showed his father Edwin Arlington Robinson's verse, the president was captivated. He asked his son to find out what he could about Robinson. Eventually the poet was invited to the White House for dinner, a sure sign of presidential approval. Roosevelt procured a sinecure for Robinson at the New York Customs House, since Robinson was virtually destitute when "discovered" by the Roosevelts. Feeling strongly that Robinson's work "should have attracted more attention," TR wrote to that effect in his essay that reviewed The Children of the Night, appearing in the Outlook in 1905. He found in the poems "an undoubted touch of genius … a curious simplicity and good faith. There is in them just a little of the light that never was on land or sea … it is not always necessary in order to enjoy a poem that one should be able to translate it into terms of mathematical accuracy. Those who admire the coloring of Turner … do not wish always to have ideas presented to them with cold, hard, definite outlines.…" Roosevelt said of the poem, "Luke Havergal," for example, that "I am not sure I understand the poem; but I am entirely sure that I like it." And what of "Richard Cory," which has found its way unerringly into so many school anthologies? For Roosevelt the poem spoke "a very ancient but very profound philosophy of life with a curiously local touch which points its keen insight." Roosevelt, the optimist, seems to have understood the man who went and put a bullet in his head. Commenting on another poem, "The Tavern," the president as critic again revealed his poetic inner self. In "The Tavern," he noted, Robinson "writes of what most of us feel we have seen; and then again of what we have only seen with the soul's eyes." No doubt Roosevelt felt a special kinship with the man who could write "The Wilderness," which told of nature as TR knew and loved it. The author of The Wilderness Hunter identified with the poet's words: "And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night wind … / The winds that blow the message they have blown ten thousand years." The President's terse, last comment, "this little volume, not verse but poetry," summed up his admiration for Robinson.

"The Ancient Irish Sagas" showed Roosevelt's fascination with the old Celtic text whose stories were just then being paraphrased in popular form by Lady Gregory and others. Just as he was later to praise the Abbey Theatre as "an extraordinary contribution to the sum of Irish literary and artistic achievement," he praised the sagas as the corresponding Celtic contribution to the corpus of ancient literature that the Germans, the French, and the English had helped to develop long ago. The contemporary Irish revival, in other words, owed a great deal to the new emphasis on the Cuchulain cycle and the Ossianic cycle. Such tales have much to tell the historian, thought Roosevelt, since they tend to portray life as it was lived in Erin in far-distant times. The greatness of these epics fell short of those of other peoples only because of the calamities and tragedies that befell Ireland. Roosevelt believed the Irish sagas truly remarkable in their treatment of women. Whereas women played no part at all in the "Song of Roland," and they were "alternately splendid and terrible" in the Norse and German stories, "it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Deirdre, the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach." In his rendering of the story line of the Cuchulain cycle Roosevelt consistently demonstrated his poetic sense, striving to catch in plain prose the spirit of the epic itself. For him the sagas possessed "extraordinary variety and beauty, in their exaltation of the glorious courage of men and of the charm and devotion of women, they contained a curious attraction of their own." Like the Irish players of the Abbey Theatre who sprang from the soil and dealt with things Irish, so the ancient sagas spoke of an authentic if irrecoverable Erin that was a meaningful but unappreciated part of Western civilization.

No less typical of Roosevelt, the man of letters, was his concern for poetry that made honest and imaginative use of the language of the marketplace, "today's market place—the Fulton Market" of New York, for example, and not the marketplace of Florence in the thirteenth century. This was the theme of "Dante and the Bowery." What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery!" he enthused. As he went on to explain, the nineteenth century was more apt than the thirteenth to boast of itself as being "the greatest of centuries," but except for its technology "it did not wholly believe in its boasting." Thus a nineteenth-century poet, striving to make a point, was likely to draw material from ancient or medieval times rather than his own. In America, only Walt Whitman dared to use anything like the Bowery, that is, "what was striking and vividly typical of the humanity around him." And even he, Roosevelt remarked, "was not quite natural in doing so, for he always felt he was defying the conventions and prejudices of his neighbors." The difference between Dante and Whitman was not so much between the artists themselves as their respective times. The conventions of Dante's century did not forbid him to use human nature just as he encountered it. Why not explore human nature by examples drawn from the Brooklyn Navy Yard as well as Piraeus, from Tammany no less than the Roman mob? TR urged. Dante had unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate predecessors, alongside the great names passed on to him from antiquity, because the passions of men are the same in all ages, godlike or demoniac. Dante was "quite simply a realist," displaying the sort of realism that Roosevelt judged to be missing in all too much of the poetry of his day. "We do not express ourselves nowadays in epics at all," he lamented; "we keep the emotions aroused in us by what is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was good or evil in the men of the past." The ex-president was not so sure that given the peculiar character of his times it could have been otherwise. "One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural and therefore undesirable, in another age," he admitted. Nevertheless, he wanted the contemporary artist to see, as had Dante, the "eternal qualities" in the people around us, remarking that Dante himself would have preferred it so.

Another of Roosevelt's literary essays was in the form of a review of The Law of Civilization and Decay by his good friend, Brooks Adams. Of the Adams thesis it may be enough to say that it held out the prospects of the decline of Western civilization because the imaginative, artistic, and warrior classes were being preempted by the economic man—of industry, capital, and trade. TR wanted instinctively to reject the thesis outright since it ran counter to his belief in progress. In fact, he granted Adams some occasional points but found the tone of the argument in favor of decay intolerable. A more telling indicator of Roosevelt's erudition may be the numerous historical and literary references that he made good use of in developing his position vis-à-vis Adams. These included the Crusades, the British conquest of India, the house of Rothschild, the Knights Templar, the fall of Constantinople, the blind Doge Dandolo, Macaulay, Thucydides, Alexander the Great, Henry VIII, the historians Froude and Henry C. Lea, the "pope Hildebrand," Emperor Henry IV, Philip Augustus, Philip the Fair, Froissart, Malthus, Erasmus, jacqueries, Timothy Pickering, Henry Adams, Louis XV, Louis Philippe, Marlborough, Wellington, Nelson, Grant, Lee, Henry George, and Edward Bellamy. It must be added quickly that this was not unusual. Roosevelt moved as easily from one century to another as from one culture to another; he approached millennia as readily as epochs. He wrote in such fashion not for the sake of display but because his wide reading encouraged him to express himself in such terms.

In Roosevelt the learned man overmastered the man of action frequently and with lasting effect. His presidency offered substantial evidence of this; learning was an operative factor once TR assumed office in September 1901. Viewed from this novel perspective an understanding of the Roosevelt presidency will not be altered in its broader outline. What is likely, however, is an enhanced appreciation of that presidency made possible by a fresh awareness of certain of his policies insofar as they were affected by his learning. With Roosevelt there was no touch of self-consciousness in mixing love of literature with love of political power. He was convinced that his understanding of society was enhanced by an understanding of the literature that society produced, that he was a better leader because he was better read.

Books aside, Theodore Roosevelt was well qualified for the presidency when he succeeded McKinley. In and out of politics for twenty years, he had been a state legislator, civil service and police commissioner, sub-cabinet officer, and one-term governor of what was the largest state in the nation, New York. "The Albany Apprenticeship," as it has been termed, was the most valuable part of his political education. Since it had come just before his election to the vice-presidency, he retained a feel for high-level administration. Roosevelt's military service in the Spanish-American War—he resigned as assistant naval secretary almost as soon as war was declared—earned him experience of a different kind that no doubt influenced his decisions as commander in chief. Characteristically, he wrote a book about his adventures, The Rough Riders (1899), another witness to his need to explain himself in a literary fashion. Roosevelt was at least as much a soldier as Andrew Jackson, but fell below the standards of Washington, Taylor, Grant, and, at a later time, Eisenhower. At heart TR was an amateur soldier; once the fighting was finished he was eager to return to politics, his natural milieu. Wooed in New York by reformers and the Republican machine alike to run for the governorship, he decided on machine support, convinced that he could be effective as a chief executive only with machine cooperation in the promotion of reform. Roosevelt and Thomas Collier Platt, the "easy boss" of the New York Republican organization, were almost completely opposite political types, yet there came to be an unlikely cordiality between the moral governor and the machine politico. Roosevelt was sufficiently successful as a reformer for Platt to want to move him out of Albany after a single term. Kicked upstairs to the vice-presidency in 1900, he turned out to be a darling of destiny. Assassination was a monstrous thing to Roosevelt, who once declared that the assassin stood on the pinnacle of evil fame, but he refused to be morbid about the circumstances of his elevation to the ultimate office. "Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability; that is all there is about it," he confided to Henry Cabot Lodge within a week of his swearing-in. Despite his age, and possibly because of it, Roosevelt was confident of himself in body, mind, and spirit.

Progressivism at home and imperialism abroad made up the twin theme of American politics during Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. In his approach to and handling of specifics relating to these large matters, the impact of learning was discernible, but in different ways. In domestic affairs the influence was exerted more subtly, more as a presupposition of many of his undertakings. In foreign affairs, by contrast, the authority of learning was at once apparent. Reasons for this distinction are embedded in the intellectual tendencies of the late nineteenth century. Evolution and social Darwinism were very much in vogue, and for America the application of their principles to imperialist expansion was so pervasive it was almost involuntary. Yet on the political home front the philosophy of laissez-faire, reinforced by the same cult of competition, was being challenged outright by new attitudes looking toward reform and derived from a combination of traditional human values and practical measures. Many such measures could be tentatively identified with pragmatism. While it might be premature to describe any but a very few of Roosevelt's policies as consciously pragmatic before 1910, it remains useful to think of his practical measures as a reformer as influenced by a sense of pragmatism.

The best place to look for the force of learning in Roosevelt's domestic policies is in his assessment of character in the individual and thus in the race, a position easily discernible in his writings. In terms of American politics Roosevelt viewed character as the central element in reforming society. "No man can lead a public career really worth leading," he was to write later in his Autobiography, "no man can act with rugged independence in a serious crisis, nor strike out at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful foes, if he himself is vulnerable in his private character." This avowal of character meant that he was as sensitive as any behaviorist to the ills of American society and, as a result, was caught up in the Progressive movement. Though he might differ with many Progressives as to ultimate causes, one and all were disturbed by the same evils and frequently sought to overcome them by common methods, so that a distinction between them and the president (or ex-president) is not always understood. Indeed, it appears likely that, lacking Progressive support, Roosevelt could not have accomplished very much as a reform president. He managed at the same time to impart a strong, and popular, flavor of traditional morality to the general conception of what Progressivism stood for. The Progressive movement, despite its more radical possibilities, was to many very much in keeping with the old ways of thought in which nothing was more elemental than individual honesty and initiative. Roosevelt's understanding of the importance of the individual was a recurring aspect of his histories and his biographies, and received added emphasis in his biographical sketches of those he called "Men of Action."

The president put the case squarely in an article in the Outlook, written as he was about to leave the White House in 1909. "A nation must be judged in part by the character of its public men, not merely by their ability but by their ideals.…" In the series of character profiles, written over a period of years, he singled out Washington and Lincoln as the great American public men; he described them as "of the type of Timoleon and Hampden." Dealing with men of yesterday such as John Marshall and Andrew Jackson, he stressed qualities that he deemed made them great. Marshall "was in the best sense … a self-made man," "a hardworking Virginian who relied on his own reasoning," "entirely democratic … simple, straight forward and unaffected." Not all historians might agree with Roosevelt's evaluation of Marshall, but none would deny him the strong and determined nationalistic spirit that TR thought so praiseworthy. Jackson, in turn, "belonged to a stern and virile race, the Presbyterian Irish." He combined "physical prowess" with "the resolute determination to uphold the cause of order." Roosevelt judged that Jackson, as president, had done "much good and much evil." He strongly censured the introduction of the spoils system and believed Jackson's bank policy replaced a less-than-perfect system with an infinitely worse one, the wildcat state banks. What redeemed Jackson was that he "was emphatically a true American." In these accounts Roosevelt allowed himself heroes, but he was not uncritical of those he admired.

Lincoln was the great figure from the American past, Lincoln "the practical idealist." While in the midst of his presidency, Roosevelt wrote the preface to the Connoisseur's Federal edition of the writings of Lincoln, dated "Sagamore Hill, Sept. 22, 1905." In it he quoted from Lecky's fifth volume of History of England. Lecky contended that successful statesmen need not have the moral qualities of a hero or a saint; more worldly virtues would do: tact, knowledge of men, resolution, and the ability to meet emergencies. Lincoln, in Roosevelt's reading of history, exhibited the two sets of virtues that Lecky had represented as antithetical. For him Lincoln was "the wise and cautious radical," with TR again reflecting his own aspirations as a public figure through literary expression.

Roosevelt wrote of his admiration for a great many among his contemporaries, including John Hay, Leonard Wood, Booker T. Washington, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Muir, and Frederick Courtney Selous. What he observed of these men provides a deeper awareness of traits he admired that, in general, were needed for a healthy society, or as Roosevelt would have insisted, "a strong nation." John Hay's blend of a "marked literary ability" with public service delighted him. He identified Leonard Wood with "boundless energy and endurance," while his conduct of colonial governance was untainted by "selfish interests, whether political or commercial." Roosevelt quoted Scripture in a tribute to Booker T. Washington: "What more doth the Lord require of these than to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God? He did justice to every man. He did justice to those to whom it was a hard thing to do justice," according to Roosevelt, who valued Washington's "friendship and respect … a patriot and an American." Admiration was not confined to public men of action, however. Praising the sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, he lauded his design of United States coins as both artistic and historically meaningful. The "pure imagination" of the piece of sculpture, "Silence," done for the Adams gravesite, greatly moved the President. Linked with Saint-Gaudens was John Muir, the naturalist, whom TR credited with preserving beauty of a different kind, "those great natural phenomena: wonderful canyons, giant trees, slopes of flower-spangled hillsides." And he saluted the big-game hunter, Frederick Courtney Selous, "a highly intelligent, civilized man," but "hard-bit who pushed ever northward the frontier of civilization" in Africa. The character of people with whom he found himself involved in his conduct of affairs while president had a considerable effect on Roosevelt. He was comfortable and cooperated with the honorable man, but was easily put off by one whose behavior he thought was wrong, as his handling of the anthracite coal strike of 1902 bears out.

The anthracite strike, a major test of the new president's leadership, was governed in its outcome by three personalities: Roosevelt himself, who acted as a facilitator pushing hard for a peaceful resolution of the impasse between the miners and the coal operators; John Mitchell, the chief of the coal miners' union; and George F. Baer, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, the spokesman for the owners. Roosevelt's observation of the two antagonists in the fight helped to persuade him of the path he ought to take, that of neutrality but with his sympathies for the workers only thinly disguised, as well as the path he ought to avoid, that taken by President Cleveland in the Pullman strike of 1894 in using federal troops to break the strike. TR gained a healthy respect for Mitchell because of his dignified manner and never forgot the arrogance of Baer as an example of the worst of laissez-faire capitalism.

The issues in the strike centered around a worker demand for a 10 percent wage raise, improved working conditions, including reduced hours per shift, and recognition of the United Mine Workers as a bargaining agent for the workers. Some one hundred and forty thousand hard-coal miners were off the job from May until October, a time of year when consumption of coal was off peak. In the absence of public inconvenience, much less suffering, the strikers won considerable public support. In essence, what the workers wanted was to sit down and talk with the operators and thereby come to an agreement. In such a process there could be give and take, and recognition of the union would come about. The owners showed themselves intransigently opposed to discussion, with Baer uttering some of the most extreme statements ever made publicly in labor-management confrontation. He announced when talks were first proposed that anthracite mining was a business, not a religious, sentimental, or academic proposition. Some weeks later he was prompted to deliver his now infamous confession of faith: "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country." Baer's attitude was to take its toll on events. Mitchell, in contrast, was totally reasonable. He long had taken the position that the strike could have been avoided if a conference of the two sides had been convened, and it could be ended if such a conference were held at once. Baer's towering self-righteousness was set off sharply by Mitchell's moderation.

Over the summer months of 1902, though the president kept an eye on the situation, there was little sense of urgency. This mood was certain to change as coal inventories fell and cold weather loomed just ahead. Ordinarily priced at $2.40 a ton, coal had gone to $6.00 a ton and predictions were that it might reach $30.00 with little to be had unless the miners were soon digging coal. Roosevelt saw the unhappy prospects for what they were. The difficulty was that under the Constitution he was powerless to act to benefit the community at large. At one point he complained of being at his wit's end over how to proceed. Undeterred by constitutional incapacity to act, he continued to explore possible options and to worry about the outcome. Most importantly, he never stopped discussing the crisis with those he trusted: Elihu Root, Murray Crane, Philander Knox, and Cabot Lodge. With his persistent sense of history he informed Crane, the governor of Massachusetts, "I felt that the crisis was not one in which I could act on the Buchanan principle of striving to find some Constitutional means for inaction.…" Roosevelt, being Roosevelt, wanted to do something.

In early October the president played his trump card, calling a conference of representatives of the operators and the miners to meet with him and his attorney-general, Knox, in Washington. Both Baer and Mitchell attended. Though the meeting failed to resolve the crisis, it succeeded in convincing Roosevelt that George F. Baer was a reprobate and John Mitchell an honorable man. In the course of the October conference Mitchell once more iterated the position of the workers: a series of talks between miners and owners whereby a compromise might be secured. Failing that, the union was willing to accept a presidentially appointed arbitration commission and to abide by its decision. Baer would have no part of such an arrangement. He accused Mitchell of fomenting anarchy and violence and defiance of the law, and went to the length of berating Roosevelt for the very idea of having Mitchell in the same room as the president and himself. Roosevelt's sympathies were readily enlisted on the side of Mitchell and thus on that of the workers, though he was quick to assure J. P. Morgan that he would not allow himself to be swayed by such considerations. Of course Roosevelt was swayed by the behavior he had witnessed. Mitchell was a gentleman, Baer was not. These things mattered to TR, however much he might disavow their influence.

Meanwhile, the war of nerves continued. Roosevelt dispatched Elihu Root to New York for talks with Morgan about a renewed proposal for a presidential conference. He named General Schofield as the army officer who would be in charge of maintaining law and order in the coal fields, should the government have to seize the mines. He welcomed the offer of ex-President Grover Cleveland to have a part in any scheme of arbitration. All this amounted to the kind of pressure Baer could not resist indefinitely. Finally, on 11 October, agreement was reached on arbitration. The following March the commission voted a 10 percent wage raise for the miners along with some reduction in hours. While the union did not win formal recognition as a bargaining agent, the newly formed National Board of Conciliation was to have union representation. An important corner had been turned in the union's fight for legitimacy.

Historians have agreed that Roosevelt acted out of mixed motives in his handling of the anthracite strike: fear of social upheaval, Republican party political advantage, and a desire to be in the eye of the storm. But in no small measure the type of men who were party to the dispute helped to shape his judgments and, accordingly, to direct his actions. It seems altogether unlikely that, if Mitchell had been as arrogant and uncooperative as Baer, the president would have wanted to facilitate the kind of settlement that was reached. Mitchell's character made it easy for Roosevelt to blend the public welfare with the good of the workers to the advantage of his reputation as a "square deal" president. Roosevelt's long-harbored suspicions of the economic man were confirmed by the callous disregard for humanity that Baer personified. It was difficult, for the president, or for any third party, not to side against a man who, when reminded of the sufferings of the miners, retorted that the miners were not suffering, adding, "why, they don't even speak English."

Few remarks could have more offended Roosevelt's belief in the melting-pot thesis. In dealing with Baer, therefore, TR discovered not only an enemy of the miners, but an enemy of his vision of an America that took the various peoples who came to its shores and molded them into a single race. Once when writing about "true Americanism," he reviewed the history of immigration and settlement in America, a study that showed that to the successive waves of immigrant groups, America was "a matter of spirit, conviction, and purpose, not of creed or birth-place or language." The history of "the ancient republics of Greece, the medieval republics of Italy, and the petty German states of the last century" showed what particularism could do. The contrast between these historical examples and events in the United States meant that America would not be allowed to succumb to this local or regional sentiment that centered in race or language. The ghetto mentality had no place in America as the strange peoples were gradually assimilated.

The Northern Securities case (1904), which was another presidential triumph in the name of progressivism, involved a play of personalities as had the coal strike, but with a difference. In the coal dispute Roosevelt was a third party, whereas in the litigation involving the giant railroad combination engineered by Morgan, E. H. Harriman, and James J. Hill, the president was an antagonist. In the eyes of the business world TR was both antagonist and troublemaker. Business had long enjoyed virtual freedom from governmental regulation. As competition gave way to consolidation, monopoly conditions were achieved by the giant trusts. As early as 1902 Roosevelt had ordered his attorney general to institute proceedings against the Northern Securities Company, which had managed to clamp a stranglehold on all freight traffic out of Chicago to the upper West. Such a railroad combination was an ideal target for Roosevelt's ambition to show himself an enemy of the malefactors of great wealth and a friend of the people. After all, the combination included some of the biggest names in the corporate and financial world: Morgan, Harriman, Hill with Kuhn, and Loeb and Company thrown in for added measure. No sooner had Philander Knox instituted the legal proceedings than Morgan paid a visit to Roosevelt in Washington and made his bid to put TR in his pocket. "If we had done anything wrong," he advised the president, "send your man to my man and they can fix it up." To Morgan, life was that simple.

Roosevelt was not above a little "fixing" of his own and in a way that was to bear on the Northern Securities case. In 1902 with the death of Justice Horace Gray, the president named Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to the United States Supreme Court. TR sized up Holmes as a good Republican, the son of a worthy father with a gallant Civil War record, and a man with twenty years of valuable experience on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, where he had established his reputation as a liberal and reform-minded judge. Looking ahead to the time when reform laws would be put to the judicial test at the national level, Roosevelt was convinced Holmes was the right man for the job. The Holmes appointment revealed both the president's belief in the centrality of individuals in the working out of complex problems and a great faith in the power of men to control events. To him, the issue in the Northern Securities case was clearcut: business had to be made responsible to the will of the people through the agency of government. From what he knew of the man, he thought Holmes would see the matter as he did.

The decision was handed down in 1904. The effort to apply the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to the railroad combination was upheld by a five to four vote. To Roosevelt's surprise and annoyance, Holmes had voted against the regulation of railroads and for big business. More importantly, the rather unpromising Sherman act had been used to curb railroad monopoly in the public interest. The decision marked a notable advance in the war on the trusts, and other successful suits followed soon thereafter. Looking back on the outcome, Roosevelt chose to remember the case in terms of the men who had been involved. He complained that he could have carved from a banana a judge with more backbone than Holmes had displayed. Writing to Owen Wister, he put his finger on the main issue, singling out James J. Hill, probably be-cause of the latter's outspoken criticism of the decision: "Mr. Hill was doing what I thought wrong in the Northern Securities case," he told his friend. Roosevelt had met numerous wrong-headed men in life and in literature. Hill was a familiar type. TR also believed firmly that he knew what was right and what was wrong, and that there could be no difference between private and public ethical standards in the conduct of business. The railroad trust had been judged in technical violation of a law, but in Roosevelt's interior judgment the crux of the matter was that the railroad men had done wrong.

"Of all Roosevelt's constructive endeavors, the movement for conservation was most marked by sustained intellectual effort and administrative force." This is the estimate of William H. Harbaugh, who has written further that in no other public enterprise "did the President blend science and morality quite so effectively." The tribute, which sums up the thinking of contemporaries and historians alike, is well deserved. Had TR been born a century or more earlier, he might well have had an important place in the conquest of great continent. As it was, it fell to him to describe that conquest as a historian, and, as a public official, to preserve as much of the continent and its resources as possible "for generations yet unborn." The historical, the literary, and the public Roosevelt were again forged as one.

The fight for conservation turned out to be a difficult one, in the process of which TR learned anew the meaning of "special interest" and congressional stonewalling, as well as the high price often extracted of a man of principle. In the effort to make conservation an enduring national commitment and not simply a passing policy of his administration, Roosevelt put the issue above partisanship; as a good Republican, he did not find that easy. No doubt the final outcome was favorably influenced by the man Roosevelt worked with in the conservation fight, Gifford Pinchot, a man with the qualities he admired in his father and in his historical heroes. Pinchot was the knight-errant in Roosevelt's quest for the holy grail of conservation. Wealthy, well connected, and well educated at Yale and at the School of Forestry in Nantes, France, he was a man of action who himself guided his official behavior by the learning he had acquired through study and experience.

Pinchot was an easterner, as was Roosevelt, of course, determined to save the westerners from the effects of their continued reckless use of natural resources. Ironically, the Roosevelt-Pinchot conservation program alienated westerners, including many of the plain folk as well as the giant timber and mineral tycoons. To westerners of all ranks, government regulation was seen as interference with economic freedom. The president understood this attitude perfectly, while not agreeing with it. As he told one meeting of the Forest Congress in Washington in 1905: "In the old pioneer days the American had but one thought about a tree and that was to cut it down; and the mental attitude of the nation toward forests was largely conditioned on that." But as a learned Roosevelt had discerned long ago, the freewheeling West was a phase in the evolutionary process. As the West matured and grew more complex it had to be regulated for the welfare of the people there and for the nation of which the West was an organic part. Roosevelt was prepared to follow the lead of forest technology, which was learning of a specialized kind. The scientists had the practical knowledge and the president sought to work through them to save the natural resources of America. At the same time he insisted that his own insights about the West, his careful study of its ways, and his experience as a ranchman gave him a special warrant to speak out.

Throughout his presidency Theodore Roosevelt pushed hard for conservation reforms by means of laws, executive decrees, and state cooperation. He supported the Newlands bill aimed at the construction of irrigation and reclamation projects as early as December 1901. His attitude was distinctly nonpartisan. Roosevelt set aside national forest reserves, on one memorable occasion just a step ahead of a congressional effort to tie his hands, adding millions of acres to this natural treasure. He supported tree-planting experiments on federal lands, became an advocate of selective cutting, acted to support flood-control works, and called for and got legislation that reorganized the federal bureaucracy responsible for supervising the conservation program. This latter reform was one Roosevelt identified with especially. He spoke of the need for a corps of professional foresters—"a new profession, a profession of the highest usefulness; a profession as high as the profession of law, as the profession of medicine, as any other profession most ultimately connected with the highest and finest development of a nation"—to the Society of American Foresters in 1903. Whatever the reform, it devolved upon individuals of character, of knowledge, and of energy to frame the laws and make them effective. Under Pinchot's firm guidance the forestry service became an outstanding component of the civil service. What the president had expressed as hopes for the conservation of American natural resources were well on the way to fulfillment by the time he left office.

Looking back over the various administration-led attempts to regulate private economic interests for the social good, Roosevelt is often heard invoking what he called "the Puritan spirit." He recalled on one occasion that the Puritans were people who possessed a to remarkable degree the power of individual initiative and self-help. Combined with these traits was practical common sense that taught them the wisdom of joining with others when it was necessary to get a job done. "The spirit of the Puritan … never shrank from the regulation of conduct if such regulation was necessary to the public weal." Roosevelt urged this spirit on the nation in his day. "The American people became firmly convinced of the need of control of the great aggregations of capital," he said, "especially when they had monopolistic tendencies." Using the Puritan past as a touchstone, the president argued that as the Puritans had found a certain degree of regulation appropriate to the requirements of the seventeenth century, so regulation, different but generically the same, was essential to effective government in the twentieth century. Roosevelt claimed that in this spirit of just regulation "we have shown there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law." Underlying the justice of regulation was the Puritan spirit of order and discipline. This use of the Puritan experience looks like a straining on Roosevelt's part to thread the historical needle, a demonstration that he could stray beyond limitations imposed by lessons drawn from the past.

"I am, as I expected I would be, a pretty good imperialist." Roosevelt pronounced this verdict on himself to his English friend from Spanish-American War days, Arthur Hamilton Lee, while touring Africa in 1910. What were the sources of that imperialism of which he spoke so confidently? They ranged from some primordial urge to conquer coming from deep within him, through a belief in the superiority of America as the highest expression of contemporary Western civilization, to a commitment to improve the lot of mankind generally by playing both master and servant to "the lesser breeds without the law." It was strongly Kiplingesque: brutal, self-serving, self-sacrificing, uplifting, and romantic. That it was also intellectual was made evident through two distinct but intersecting principles. The more basic one was evolution; its derivative, the authority of Anglo-Americans as the most advanced race, was evidenced by their achievements. From time to time Roosevelt called upon these principles to explain and justify the sweep of modern history and to account for particular actions taken during his presidency, actions for which he was ultimately responsible and that identify him with imperialism.

Greatly taken with the leading scientific proposition of his era, the process of natural selection, or what he once called "the line of descent from protozoan to Plato," Roosevelt made a careful study of both evolution and its outgrowth, social Darwinism. Darwin and Huxley had "succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of an age," so that "the acceptance of the fundamental truth of evolution is quite as necessary to sound thinking as the acceptance of the fundamental truths of the solar system." Yet he inclined to set Darwin and his work in perspective. Writing to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in 1904, he allowed that Darwin was "the chief factor in working a tremendous revolution," going on to express the opinion that in the future Darwin would be read "just as we read Lucretius now; that is, because of the interest attaching to his position in history." Early results of his study of evolution, as already shown by his opinion of Kidd's Social Evolution, strictly qualified the function of natural selection by insisting on the function of character. He later expressed mature judgments along these lines in "Biological Analogies in History." Accordingly, Roosevelt put great reliance on the achievements of the Anglo-Americans that exemplified the place of character. Of these none stood higher than the establishment of self-governing communities at home and the lessons of self-rule that they offered to colonial peoples. Successful self-government by a community was the equivalent of character in the individual. It required the adapting of a political system to changing circumstances while keeping intact the eternal principles of justice and truth. Imperialism called not for the exportation of the American system of government, but the American spirit of government. Just as "it was Roman influence on language, law, literature, the governmental system, the whole way of looking at life" that had given Rome its historical significance, so the contributions of the American people would be judged. The frontiersmen had swept across a vast continent, carrying their ideals and building up a superior nation. The superiority thereby demonstrated justified a continuing westward movement across the Pacific as well as American domination of the Caribbean. Weaker peoples, the Filipinos in particular, were to be servant and served alike. Destiny and responsibility met in imperialism no less in the twentieth century than two thousand years before.

Roosevelt inherited an imperialistic state of affairs when he took office in 1901. His mind-set was one that approved, in general terms at least, the policies that had brought about American presence in the Pacific and ascendancy in the Caribbean. The particulars of the situation, and therefore what he was bound to deal with once he was president, were, however, the result of the McKinley way of doing things. In the Philippines the nationalist insurrection under Aguinaldo had been put down by early 1901, so that as a new president, Roosevelt was not beset by the problems arising from a vicious guerilla war. He had enthusiastically approved the use of force against the native nationalists, likening Aguinaldo to Sitting Bull, but he sincerely rejoiced that such difficult times had passed. As he had looked forward to the end of the conflict as vice-president, he had told William Howard Taft, who was serving as governor general of the Philippines, that "the military arm should literally be an arm directed by a civil head." Believing fully in civilian control of the military establishment, he was from the start of his time in office prepared to give to Taft, and to William H. Hunt in Puerto Rico, "the largest liberty of action possible and the heartiest support," knowing that Taft and Hunt were themselves committed to civilian supremacy in the Anglo-American tradition.

The attainment by the Filipino people of self-rule was one of the objectives of Roosevelt's policy toward the Islands. But he was equally convinced that it had to be a gradual process if it were to be a permanent achievement. "It is not a light task for a nation to achieve the temperamental qualities without which the institutions of free government are but an empty mockery.…" "Our people," he went on to underscore in his first annual message to Congress, "are now governing themselves because for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. What has taken thirty generations to achieve we can not expect to see another race accomplish out of hand." Having urged caution both on Congress and the Filipino people, the president nonetheless declared: "We hope to do for them what has never been done for any people of the tropics—to make them fit for self-government after the fashion of the really free nations." Meanwhile American occupation of the Islands was imperative, an occupation depending directly on the American army, the same force that had denied the Filipinos their independence.

Buried in the rhetoric and the reality of American control was the inherent contradiction in the proposal of any imperialistic power to make the conquered fit for self-rule. The more pronounced the success of preparation for independence, the less justification there was for continued occupation by the colonial power. Irrespective of how cordial relations between colonial power and colonial people might have been, the contradiction became the controlling factor. It was a contradiction that Roosevelt could not escape and was prepared to face.

The president insisted that his administration was encouraging in every way the growth of those conditions that made for self-government, but the Congress appeared to want to move faster in the matter than Roosevelt. The Cooper Act, which the President signed into law in July 1902, made the Islands an unincorporated territory and declared that all citizens of the Philippines should enjoy the protection of the United States. The law also provided for the safeguarding of individual rights and specified a census, to be taken in preparation for the election of a lower house of a Philippine legislature. The Cooper Act further called for a strong, independent judiciary with the right of appeal to the United States Supreme Court when the Constitution or any treaty was involved in a dispute. The census was completed in 1905, the elections took place in July 1907, and in October of that year the first Filipino Assembly came together.

With his pronounced Anglo-American affinity, Roosevelt was inclined to compare American imperialism with its British counterpart, judging the former to be superior. "We have done more for the Philippines than the English have done in Egypt," he wrote Lodge in April 1906, and "our problems … were infinitely more complex." He noted further that while the British appeared to be exploiting the Malay Settlements, the cardinal doctrine of American rule in the Philippines was to avoid all forms of such behavior. As far as Roosevelt was concerned, Leonard Wood in Moro country had a more difficult job than his counterparts in Malaya and he had done his job better. In the same vein he told Lodge that the "performance of Taft, like the aggregate performances of Wood, surpasses the performance of Lord Cromer" in Egypt. Whether boasting or representing the facts, such estimates sharpened the contradictions in benign imperialism. Roosevelt accordingly garnished his optimism with a touch of restraint, saying that it would be unwise to "turn the attention of the Filipinos away from the problem of achieving the moral and material responsibility requisite … and toward dangerous intrigues for complete independence." At the end of his presidency TR continued to insist that the Filipinos had made great progress but that national independence was unthinkable, not only because of his judgment about the political maturity of the people of the Islands, but also because of what Captain Mahan had called "the problem of Asia."

Fascination with China and the lure of the China trade continued to work their magic on American foreign policy once Roosevelt became president. Mahan's book, The Problem of Asia (1901), marked his full emergence as a geopolitical thinker and, with other of TR's friends, including Brooks Adams and the English diplomat, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, he anticipated that China would be the great imperialist prize of the new country. All these observers tended to agree that Russia was the lurking menace. "I think the Russians have got the Chinese now whenever they like," Spring Rice wrote Roosevelt as early as 1896; "when they command and drill the Northern Chinese they will be a pretty big power—such a power as the world has never seen." Only later did the president become fully convinced of the potential danger of the Russians to the American position in the Far East. The Boxer Rebellion in 1900 occasioned Roosevelt to write Arthur Lee: "The stupendous revolution now going on in China is an additional reason why we [America and England] should work together." Later the president would orchestrate the peace negotiations bringing an end to the Russo-Japanese War because he said he thought the war a senseless slaughter of gallant men (a lesson learned well in Cuba) and because a continuation of the conflict would derange the balance of Far Eastern power. The Philippine Islands had to figure in the construction of an American strategy for the area, so that the United States could hardly forego possession of this stepping stone to the Asiatic mainland.

Before Roosevelt was long in office he came to realize the impossibility of America's doing more than maintaining the status quo in the Orient. Balance of power became the watchword. In such a policy British cooperation was vital. The English-speaking peoples would have to act together. The Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905, wherein Japanese hegemony in Korea was acknowledged by Washington and American preeminence in the Philippines was recognized by Tokyo, and the Root-Takahira Agreement of 1908, which saw each nation accept the status quo, were completely consistent with the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty of 1902, signaling the friendship of these two countries. The aggressive American attitude of 1898-1901 was distinctly moderated by Roosevelt, who admitted, toward the close of his presidency, that the Philippine Islands, from a military standpoint, might be "our heel of Achilles."

During Roosevelt's ascendancy the United States became an active policeman in the Caribbean and the watchdog of much of the western hemisphere. Cuba, Venezuela, Santo Domingo, Colombia, as well as Canada, in the dispute over the location of the Alaskan boundary, were all made to feel the power of the United States at one time or another. This was a posture based on strength and it immediately suggests the evolutionary ethic of survival of the fittest, giving a scientific justification for the dictum that might makes right. Roosevelt's disdain for Latin Americans generally went undisguised. "The bandits of Bogota," "banana republics," and "nests of a wicked and inefficient type" were all phrases of his manufacture. The sense of superiority they spoke was towering. As Roosevelt once remarked to the German ambassador, von Sternburg, "if any South American State misbehaves toward any European country, let the European country spank it." These states were like children, to be disciplined by adult nations as required by circumstances. They had not evolved to a sufficient degree of political maturity to enable them to manage their own affairs, necessitating American supervision.

Given the American sense of mission to uplift the peoples of the Philippines, it is appropriate to inquire whether the supervision in the Caribbean was in any way benign, in intention if not in effect, and whence the intended good derived. When there was a softening of the evolutionary thesis in Roosevelt's thinking about South America, it was due more to a general sense of justice and fair play and had limited relationship to Roosevelt's intellectual commitments. But the impression persists that the Latin American aspects of Rooseveltian foreign policy retained a distinct emphasis on power that was, in considerable part, traceable to Roosevelt's evolutionary outlook. His apologists have contended that TR did not believe that "might makes right" but that "might makes right possible to achieve." This is an intriguing distinction that, while possibly exonerating the president from extreme charges against him as a blatant imperialist, still does not deny the resort to force that was characteristic of the ethics growing out of the evolutionary dispensation. Yet force was a fact of life long before evolutionist teaching in the nineteenth century. Roosevelt had recognized this fact of life in building his body as a youngster, in his adventures as a Dakota ranchman, and in his military experiences during the Spanish-American War. Meanwhile, evolution as a cosmic explanation of things became part of his intellectual makeup. His learned mind gave no resistance to it. As for the tenets of social Darwinism, as opposed to evolution, he found he could not always morally or intellectually accept them. If Colombia was manhandled during negotiations over the building of a canal at Panama, force was utilized as a means to an end, but not as an end in itself. The application of force would eventuate in a result useful to mankind. As the president confided to his son, Kermit, the interests of civilization must take precedence over those of a wildcat republic like Colombia. There were times to draw on a knowledge of history for guidance and, again, there were times when it was plainly better to make history.

Much the same argument can be offered in evaluating Roosevelt's uses of the Monroe Doctrine, though the president appears far more imaginative, or creative, in his reliance on that historic pronouncement. Before he became president, TR spoke often and with passion about maintaining the Monroe Doctrine intact and applauded the efforts of others, not excluding the Democrat, Grover Cleveland, to see that it was honored. Yet Roosevelt was practical enough (and just possibly incipiently pragmatic enough, in the strict use of that word) to grasp the idea that the Monroe Doctrine had to be a tool of American power rather than a mere frame of reference. To be limited in its utilization by inherited versions of what the doctrine meant, inhibited meeting the fresh kinds of problems arising from an alarming dependence by many South American states on large European loans. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which he enunciated in his annual message to Congress in 1904, was an extension of the meaning of the doctrine necessitated by new conditions. If pragmatic truth comes about by the wedding of old ideas with new ideas to produce new truth, then Roosevelt may well have been acting in a clearly pragmatic way. And if the test of the new truth was to be its workability, his policy in Santo Domingo, where the corollary was first applied, proved that it was eminently true. European creditors were satisfied and the western hemisphere continued inviolate. As for Santo Domingo, it had surely received a moral insult to its sovereign status, but, practically speaking, it was better off with Americans collecting customs than when Dominican officials undertook the task. An immature nation, it had to rely on a more advanced nation for its immediate welfare. Roosevelt's incipient pragmatism had closed the intellectual circle, which helps to explain Roosevelt's confidence in his Santo Domingo policy despite heavy criticism in the Congress and the press.

The demands of the presidency on Theodore Roosevelt were heavy. The nature of the office and the changes that were part of the era combined with TR's own passion for action, resulting in what was a hectic pace. He retained his fondness and friendship with learning, nonetheless. Occasionally he dipped his pen into the literary well, though mostly he was preoccupied with matters and papers of state. He wrote several review-essays, including "The Mongols," a critique of The Mongols: A History by Jeremiah Curtin, and "The Children of the Night." He kindly wrote prefaces to The Master of Game by Edward, Duke of York and Hunting the Elephant by C. H. Stigand. "The Ancient Irish Sagas" appeared in the Century Magazine for January 1907.

During TR's days in the White House the doors were always open and through them came many distinguished men of learning and intellectual accomplishment. The president delighted in such visits and was as prepared to listen as he was eager to speak his own viewpoints on law, poetry, history, science, or whatever else his guests might like to discuss. Most of all he loved people who loved books. He had abiding personal friendships with James Bryce, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Owen Wister, Cecil Spring Rice, the brothers Adams, John Hay, Cabot Lodge, and G. 0. Trevelyan, several of whom exchanged long and serious letters with him. A forty-thousand-word account of his Afro-European tour of 1909-10 in letter form to Trevelyan is an example of his rare gift as a raconteur. "Literary salon" would be too tame a description of the White House during Theodore Roosevelt's occupancy. It was more like a literary merry-go-round. And when there was a break in the action the president turned to books, classics and contemporary works alike, which, after his wife and family, were his dearest companions.

For all of that Roosevelt often has been dismissed as anti-intellectual. Henry F. Pringle in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Roosevelt, a book that is distinguished by a lively but serious prejudice against its subject, has advanced the argument that Roosevelt was "far from an objective critic," judging literature "in the light of his own stern moral code." He certainly distrusted Zola and Tolstoy; and he rejected naturalism in literature as in bad taste at the very least. But he was ready to read these novelists, and if he dismissed them on moral grounds he did not proceed blindly or without what he considered substantial reason. As a critic of the Kreutzer Sonata, for example, all he really said was that Tolstoy had written a bad book.

Roosevelt was not reluctant to moralize about literature or history. In his 1912 address as president of the American Historical Association he insisted that "the greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.… Carlyle offers an instance in point. Very few men have ever been a greater source of inspiration than Carlyle when he confined himself to preaching morality in the abstract." But the ex-president believed that Carlyle "was utterly unable to distinguish either great virtues or great vices when he applied his own principles concretely to history. His 'Frederick the Great' is literature of a high order.… But 'morality' therein jubilantly upheld is shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle's other writings in which he lays down different principles of conduct." Put very simply, the "morality he praised had no connection with the morality as understood in the New Testament."

Theodore Roosevelt left the high office of president on an upbeat note. He was determined to keep his 1904 decision not to seek a second successive elected term, and to this effect he openly favored Taft's nomination by the Republican party, thus heading off a possible stampede for Teddy. His plan was to retire gracefully to private life and to his house at Oyster Bay, Sagamore Hill, much as Jefferson had sought out Monticello a century before, confident that Taft would be elected and would continue to follow the basic policy line he had laid out. "There is something rather attractive, something in a way living up to the proper democratic ideal, in having the president go out and become absolutely without reservation a private man," was the way he summed it up for St. Loe Strachey, the editor of the Spectator. As he was only fifty-one at the time, in good health and with a zest for life, there was, however, the real problem of a suitable occupation. He believed it would be an "unpleasant thing to be pensioned and given some honorary position," but at the same time he rejected one or two lucrative offers because of his suspiciousness of the marketplace. Apart from his not being a wealthy man, the very thought of idleness was so repugnant that Roosevelt was keen on both counts to do some worthwhile work. His earlier experience as an author naturally pointed him in a literary direction. He contracted with Scribner's to do a book on his pending hunting trip to Africa, and on his return from the Afro-European tour of 1909-10 he accepted an offer from Lyman Abbott to be a contributing editor of the Outlook. In 1909 it appeared that Roosevelt's career in the overall might go from books to books with high offices sandwiched in between.

The final decade of Roosevelt's life was far from totally bookish. The impression is that he went about like a roaring lion, such as he had missed killing while on safari, and that books and what they suggested had been put aside altogether. His need to be at the center of public life drew Roosevelt inexorably to active politics as early as 1910, and to political disaster in 1912 when the Bull Moose cause, for all its nobility and glamor, foundered on the reality of the two-party system. Any chance for a nomination in 1916, when he would have been fifty-eight and electable, was squandered in 1912. Meanwhile, another chasm opened, threatening both career and reputation—the 1914 war. Roosevelt believed almost from the start that America should join Britain and France in the fight. By 1915 he had gone fully public in his shrill demands for American entry on the Allied side and in his overbearing assaults on President Wilson's policy of neutrality. Frustrated by his lack of power, Roosevelt at this stage appeared to reverse the dictum of Lord Acton. It was a want of power that corrupted the ex-president, to the point that he resorted to name-calling to vent his spleen: "the trouble with Wilson is that he is plain yellow." This was not the learned Roosevelt speaking.

Prescinding from the misfortunes of his public life, Roosevelt had a great deal to say in his postpresidential years. It is altogether remarkable that he was able to combine public outcry with literary productivity, and political action with reflective writing. His previously cited "History as Literature" comes to mind at once. Consider the date of this address to the American Historical Association: 27 December 1912. TR had finished the arduous Bull Moose campaign six weeks before, a campaign in which he had blanketed the country, survived gunshot wounds to the chest, and roared his defiance at the old guard of his beloved Republican party in a cause he knew was lost. He took his defeat in stride but it cut him to the quick. Then in late December in Boston he gave his address to the AHA, an address that, although generally neglected over the years, contained some stunning observations. For all his insistence that the great historian must be moral, he believed strongly in science as a healthy influence on historical writing. Morality in historical writing "does not mean that good history can be unscientific; the great historian can do nothing unless he is steeped in science," he told his fellow historians. "He must accept what we know of man's place in nature. He must realize that men have been on this earth for a period of incalculable length." He saw no conflict between morality and science, in other words. Roosevelt's own scientific bent and training go a long way toward explaining the ease with which he made this accommodation. Much more memorable were the two additional notes he sounded that have a striking contemporary ring to them. "The great historian of the future will have easy access to innumerable facts [computer assisted?] and can not be excused if he fails to draw on the vast storehouses of knowledge [data banks?]." Furthermore, Roosevelt contended, the historian of the future must be able to distinguish between the usual and the unusual in this world of innumerable facts.

A second novel way in which the ex-president called for a new version of history had to do with the commonplaces of the past. The great historian "must be able to paint for us the life of the plain people, the ordinary men and women of the time of which he writes." "Nothing that tells of their life will be amiss to him: implements of labor, weapons of warfare, wills written, bargains made, songs that they sang as they feasted and made love." Nor were these observations simply to be made in passing. Roosevelt labored his injunction that "the historians deal with common things" and deal with them "so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our common things interest us as we live among them."

"History as Literature" was also remarkable for its final thoughts. After speculating on how the historian of the future would write about the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, Roosevelt was prompted to make a prediction. The historian would tell "of the frontier, of course, but also of the portentous growth of the cities," "the far-reaching consequences of industrialization," and of the new race arising from the melting pot. And "The hard materialism of our age will appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty idealism which must be reckoned with by all who would understand the American character." Roosevelt's final paragraph is worth quoting as well:

Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of today and of yesterday have done will perforce tell much that is unpleasant. This is but saying they will describe the arch-typical civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told, I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, that with many blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation.

In uttering these thoughts, the obvious fruit of reflection on the ultimate meaning and nature of the American experience, Roosevelt might well have been speaking to the audience of a much later time. For all its preachy overtones it constitutes an extraordinary commentary on American life and character. Composed and delivered in the aftermath of the 1912 election, it serves as a reminder that the learned Roosevelt was never that distant from the man of action.

TR's life during the whole of the 1909-19 decade may be characterized in the same way. While a contributing editor for the Outlook and in a private capacity as well, Roosevelt turned out journalistic and political pieces with no lasting value on a variety of subjects, but he also did some impressive work of a substantial nature. He brought out two books on travel, African Game Trails and Through the Brazilian Wilderness, his Autobiography, a collection of essays under the title, A Book-Lover's Holiday in the Open, and several deserving essays that contained reviews of important books of the day, including Arthur E. P. B. Weigall's The Treasury of Ancient Egypt (1911), Octavius Charles Beale's Racial Decay (1911), H. J. Mozans's Woman in Science (1914), and Henry Fairfield Osborn's The Origin and Evolution of Life (1918), the latter appearing just a year before his death.

Of all his contributions to the Outlook none stirred more controversy and none has been so widely used to misrepresent his attitude toward the arts than "A Layman's View of an Art Exhibition," his critique of the famous New York Armory Art Show of 1913. It has been described as the towering protest of an influential philistine against modern art. And it is true that Roosevelt was unsparing in his hostility to cubism and other futuristic art forms. "Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously," he wrote. "It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his fake mermaid." To him "the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence." Roosevelt observed that he was struck by the "resemblance of some of the art to the work of the palaeolithic artists of the French and Spanish caves." The palaeolithics were "interesting samples of the strivings for a human form … stumbling effort [that] represented progress.… Forty thousand years later, when entered into artificially and deliberately, it represents only a smirking pose of retrogression, and is not worthy of praise." These and like comments on some of the modernist entries have marked Roosevelt as an enemy of art. Too little notice has been taken of what he found in the Armory show that moved him. "In some ways," he wrote,

it is the work of the American painters and sculptors which is the most interesting in this collection, and a glance at this work must convince any of the real good that is coming out of the new movement, fantastic though many of the developments of these new movements are. There was one note entirely absent from the exhibition and that was the note of the commonplace. There was not a touch of simpering, self-satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhibition [of the Americans]. Any painter or sculptor who had in him something to express and the power of expressing it found the field open to him. He did not have to be afraid because his work was not along ordinary lines. There was no stunting or dwarfing, no requirement that a man whose gift lay in new directions should measure up or down to stereotyped or fossilized standards.

Specifically, he singled out "'Arizona Desert,' 'Canadian Night,' the group of girls on the roof of a New York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the 'Heracles,' the studies of the Utah monument, the little group called 'Gossip' which has something of the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, the 'Pelf with its grim suggestiveness"—these and many more he found worthy of notice and respect. Without denying the virulence of the ex-president's dislike for much in modem art, it is wrong to remember him as an enemy of art or of all new directions in the art world.

Roosevelt's decision to write an autobiography, at least in its timing, resulted in a book satisfying neither for him nor for posterity. "I am having my hands full writing certain chapters of my past experience," he admitted frankly to his sister-in-law, Emily Carow. The whole project, in fact, started tentatively. When installments began appearing in the Outlook in February 1913, they were entitled "Chapters of a Possible Biography." The completed account was published in book form by the end of that year, Roosevelt having decided after all that it might be useful to have his version of events on the record. He faced two problems in recounting his life and public career. First, aware that he was writing what would be an important historical document, he wanted to be candid; conscious that such candor would offend any number of people still alive and active in politics, he was persuaded that he must be balanced and dispassionate in what he set down. The result is a story of a tepid kind in view of Roosevelt's personality, yet it also sounded more self-serving than it would have if it had provided a full, unrestricted version of things. The second was a more complicated problem. TR decided to end his biography as his presidency came to a close, not unlike General Grant, whose Memoirs went no further than Appomattox. The note of triumph was intended to produce a lingering effect in both accounts. For Roosevelt this meant that the whole new nationalism phase of his career, climaxing in the Bull Moose campaign, went unregarded. Still nurturing political hopes, Roosevelt decided it was best to say nothing of 1912, but the Autobiography is a poorer historical source as a result.

This truncated life suffered further, of course, from the fact that it was not to include the controversial role the ex-president took in the battle over American neutrality after 1914. Those were dark days, and even Roosevelt's more friendly biographers have been somewhat wary in their treatment. For all its extremism, Roosevelt's position was not totally indefensible, and it would have benefited him a great deal had he taken the opportunity to make some measured and formal statements in his own behalf, as distinct from the fulminations he uttered that have so warped his wartime image. As it turned out he was not vouchsafed the time required for this much-needed apologia.

Still, the Autobiography captured some of the variety and vitality of the man. It was a big book, as it had to be to accommodate the many-sided individual it described. It was a confident book, though there are hints of self-doubt from time to time. For all its deficiencies it added an important account to the historical record, which all too few presidents, either before or after TR, have attempted to do, except with the aid of ghost writers and rewriters and other adjuncts. At the very least it is certain that TR himself put pen to paper. Therefore, both contemporaries and historians have a better knowledge of the inner workings of a man whom Henry Adams once described as "pure act." The Autobiography also provides another major piece of evidence of Roosevelt's compulsion to resort to a standard literary form.

African Game Trails was a worthwhile book. Subtitled "An account of the African wanderings of an American hunter-naturalist," it was the product of knowledge, enthusiasm, courage, and a devotion to the written word. It is a big book, occupying nearly five hundred pages in volume 24 of the Memorial edition of Roosevelt's Works. With a sense of the romantic, TR signed the preface "Khartoum, March 15, 1910." One of the book's winning features is that one may open it at ahmost any page and enter into the adventure: stalking the rhino or the elephant, making the dangerous trek into the high grass country, or viewing the awesome natural settings. Roosevelt is so very much alive on the trail of game in Africa. But he is also the naturalist and the literate man. He is writing about hunting the giraffe, when he pauses to explain:

The country in which we were hunting marks the southern limit of the "reticulated" giraffe, a form or species entirely distinct from the giraffe we had already obtained in the country south of Kenia. The southern giraffe has blotches with dark on a light ground, whereas this northern or northeastern form is of a uniform dark color on the back and sides, with a network or reticulation of white lines placed in a large pattern on this dark background. The naturalists were very anxious to obtain a specimen of this form from its southern limit of distribution, to see if there was any intergradation with the southern form, of which we had already shot specimens near its northern, or at least northeastern, limit. The distinction proved sharp.

A page or two later, Roosevelt describes the sighting of a rhino amid a great herd of zebra. As the purpose of the day was not to hunt, he did not want to kill the rhino, which remained in a position obscuring the party's view of the zebra. TR wrote: "I did not wish to kill it, and I was beginning to feel about the rhino the way Alice did in the Looking Glass country, when the elephants 'did bother so."'

Roosevelt believed that apart from great sport "with the noblest game in the world," he was making some contribution to scientific knowledge. He had offered the Smithsonian Institution specimens of what he proposed to shoot and several field naturalists and taxidermists were members of the party. What makes African Game Trails all the more extraordinary as an account of the expedition is that it was written during the trekking itself. For that reason the adventures recounted have an immediacy and a freshness that produce a winning effect. During one six-week stretch, Roosevelt managed to put down forty-five thousand words, often writing by camp fire and under adverse conditions of weather and fatigue. The contributions the expedition made to scientific knowledge, while not great, were valiantly done, and the literary Roosevelt, put to the severest of tests, passed with high marks.

The literary Roosevelt was revealed further in the "pigskin library." In planning the African trip, Roosevelt proposed to take a number of books with him for solace by night after having hunted the big cats by day. His sister Corinne Douglas collected copies of the books he wanted, and had them cut to pocket size and bound in pigskin as a protection against jungle rot. It is necessary to cite only a few of the items he took. The Bible and Shakespeare, of course, along with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, headed the list. also included were Bacon's Essays, Lowell's Biglow Papers, Emerson's Poems, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as well as Vanity Fair by Thackeray and Pickwick Papers by Dickens. The pigskin library was never intended to be a listing of the world's great books. As Roosevelt wrote, there was no trace of dogmatism in preferring this book to that. It was a matter of personal choice: classics to reread as well as more contemporary novels, and poems to roll off the tongue. He conceded that he did not take scientific books "simply because as yet scientific books do not have literary value." Throughout his life Roosevelt had counted books among his friends, and some of those that were his best friends he wanted as companions.

Through the Brazilian Wilderness was Roosevelt's personal account of what was officially the "Expedicao Scientifica Roosevelt-Rondon." Invitations from the governments of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to visit those countries brought Roosevelt to South America in 1913. Once there, he was encouraged both by his fellow explorer, Father John Zahm, and the Brazilian government to undertake an exploration of the interior of Brazil. It was to be a scientific expedition to gather information about plant and animal life as well as to learn more about the geography and geology of the area. During the course of the exploration, Roosevelt, accompanied by his son Kermit, Colonel Rondon of the Brazilian army, and a small number of others from the general party, undertook to descend the River of Doubt to determine its location and how it flowed into the Amazon. This latter phase of the trip proved to be extremely dangerous. At one point the ex-president nearly died of infection and the accompanying high fever. That he persevered as an explorer is no more surprising than that he persevered as a writer. Under conditions far more severe than those encountered in Africa—for days the party was totally out of contact with the rest of the world and disasters lurked at every step—TR wrote his daily notes as the basis for his book, attired in head net and heavy gloves as protection against the insect stings that were a relentless fact of life. Two things were notable about the expedition. It led to a first-rate account of the adventure in which Roosevelt's modesty, courage, vulnerability, curiosity, and physical stamina were all visible; it was perhaps the most honest book in terms of himself that TR was to write. Second, the expedition was responsible for important scientific finds, geographic, geologic, and zoologic. In recognition of his work the ex-president was awarded the David Livingstone Centenary gold medal by the American Geographical Society. No less than a dozen separate bulletins and papers were issued by the Brazilian government on the basis of the findings of the expedition. In addition, specimens of birds and mammals, almost two thousand in all, were collected for the American Museum of Natural Science.

Roosevelt had clearly risked his life in this further try at "a great adventure." Very probably his health was undermined, as he suffered ailments off and on for the remainder of his life. He had taken the trip out of a sense of adventure, and equally out of a desire to advance scientific knowledge. What had happened in the course of his explorations had more than fulfilled his expectations on both counts. The Brazilian government named the great interior river that he had helped to locate "Rio Teodora," as a tribute to this North American friend and compatriot. Later Roosevelt delivered various lectures founded on his experiences to the National Geographic Society, the Royal Geographic Society, and the American Museum in New York. The Brazilian wilderness was a long way from the Adirondacks where in 1874 TR had made his first extensive scientific listing of summer birds. Yet there was a unity in his endeavors that combined these two treasure troves of nature. It was the unity of nature itself. Not surprisingly, he continued to probe nature and its ultimate secrets in his last intellectual efforts, offered in several essays and book reviews.

When "Biological Analogies in History" and "History as Literature" are added to the essays and several other pieces that Roosevelt wrote in the years 1909-19, it is an easy matter to appreciate the ongoing literary man in the sometime president. For all the allure and command of science he remained a humanist at heart, protesting not long before he died that the study of science must not be carried out at the expense of the study of man. But who was man, what was his purpose in the final accounting?

In "Racial Decadence," Roosevelt addressed the then delicate subject of "deliberate sterility in marriage." It takes a preacher of great compassion and a writer of taste to delineate views on such a subject without giving offense. The critique of Octavius Charles Beale's book was somewhat lacking in subtlety, advocating without qualification an anti-materialistic version of human life. In his analysis, Roosevelt came to the causes of a declining birth rate directly and forcefully. It was due, in his judgment, to "coldness, to selfishness, to love of ease, to shrinking from risk, to an utter and pitiful failure in sense of perspective and in power of weighing what really makes the highest joy and to a rooting out of a sense of duty, in a twisting of that sense into improper channels." To a large extent he equated the salvation of society with the fulfillment of duty by the individual. Flowing from duty were warm generosity, a willingness to take risks in a good cause, a healthy perspective on pleasure, and procreation.

In "Woman in Science" the ex-president raised his voice in praise of women and of women in history and deplored the deprivations they had endured for whatever reason. Yet he did so largely on empirical and rational grounds, rarely evoking God or sentiment. Though he respected women in a chivalrous fashion, he developed his celebration of womanhood from sterner stuff. After viewing what he termed "the so-called arguments" used to keep women down, he recognized that in the first flush of emancipation women might exult in their newly won freedom. But he was confident that women would not "shirk their duties" "any more than the average man in a democracy would be less dutiful than the average man in a despotism." Nor did Roosevelt believe he was being especially avant-garde in taking this position, describing it, rather, as part of "the right thinking of the day." He agreed with the contemporary French writer Jean Finot that humanity would be happier when women enjoyed equality with men. No less for women than for men, duty was the paramount consideration. No doubt Roosevelt's wife, Edith, to him a model woman, was not far from his thoughts as he wrote "Woman in Science." The mother of five of his children, she was endowed with a fine mind, a resolute will, and a sense of femininity, a combination that made her both companion and confidante.

Modern man, moral and scientific, was the inheritor of an anthropological and a historical past. Roosevelt entitled his review of E. P. B. Weigall's book on pre-Christian Egypt, "Our Neighbors, The Ancients." He discovered ready similarities between ancient and twentieth-century people. Using Ikhnaton to make the point that ideals and realities often clash, he flayed the doctrinaire reformers of his day for their insistence on immediate and total change. In effect, the human race was a constant in the ever-changing circumstances of time and place. Virtue and vice remained the same, though epochs might be separated by thousands of years. The unity of the human experience meant much to the philosopher in Theodore Roosevelt.

The ex-president's last significant book review appeared in the Outlook just a year before he died. It was a critique of Henry Fairfield Osborn's The Origin and Evolution of Life, a book he pondered. Osborn stressed that the beginnings of life to a physicist like himself lay not in form but in energy. But he offered his views without any dogmatic inflections. Roosevelt appreciated this because, as he had to admit, he himself was without the requisite physicochemical knowledge to dispute the scientists. As he had done numerous times before, he endorsed the evolutionary thesis as readily as the principle of a heliocentric solar system or the Newtonian postulates about gravity. But in pondering Osborn's treatment of the beginnings of life Roosevelt was moved to state his qualification of human evolution in a singularly trenchant fashion:

The tracing of an unbroken line of descent from the protozoan to Plato does not in any way really explain Plato's consciousness, of which there is not a vestige in the protozoan. There has been a non-measurable quality of actual creation. There is something new which did not exist in the protozoan. It has been produced in the course of evolution. But it is a play on words to say that such evolution is not creation.

In the contention between science and humanism that was perhaps the leading intellectual battle of his day, Theodore Roosevelt came down on the side of the traditional estimate of man, of woman, and of humankind.

No one is likely to deny to Roosevelt that whatever he did he did with flair. His writings were no exception, nor was the range of his pursuits or the confidence of his expression. Many times he wrote books or articles that appear to have no direct or immediately useful purpose. As has been suggested from time to time, he often wrote such literary pieces to organize his thinking in a general way rather than to advocate or justify a specific proposal or policy. Writing was part of his thought process to an unusual degree, but his flair too often worked to obscure this fact.

Roosevelt's style should not be taken as a model for other learned presidents, and specifically not for Taft or Wilson. Taft's writings were much less general, less wide of focus, and less interesting in consequence; much the same must be said of his mind. Wilson, on the other hand, possessed the professional qualities of Taft, but he wrote for more general audiences, conscious of his intention to instruct the reader. Taft, as a professor of law, brought something of that to his writings. Each of these presidents was unique, but TR had one special characteristic. He was the first in line. Being first in this remarkable series of learned individuals did not mean that it was easier for Taft and Wilson to follow in the presidency, but that it was more congruous that as learned men they should occupy the office. Roosevelt alone could not have revived the tradition of a learned presidency; Taft and Wilson, coming after, were no less essential. The three men, taken together, responded to the intellectual impulses of their age, imparting a fresh vigor to the presidency as it entered the twentieth century.