Theodore Roosevelt

“My Mistress Perforce”

No man, whatever may be his ability or industry,—even if he be a ranchman,—can write history in its best form on horseback. . . . Mr. Roosevelt, in making so good a work [The Winning of the West], has clearly shown that he could make a better one, if he would take more time in doing it.

{ William Frederick Poole, the Atlantic, 1889 }1

The strength of the work lies in the constant cropping out [cropping up] of the author’s own participation in the border life of the present day. From his own experience, example after example is drawn to illustrate situations that occurred in Kentucky and Tennessee a hundred years before.

{ Stephen Weeks, American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1895 }²

As The Winning of the West began taking shape, Roosevelt wrote to Francis Parkman, author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (1849), “I should like to dedicate this to you.”³ He sketched his book in a single sentence: “I am engaged on a work of which the first part treats of the extension to our frontier westward and southwestward during the twenty odd years from 1774 to 1796—the years of uninterrupted Indian warfare during which Kentucky and Tennessee were founded and grew to statehood, under such men as Daniel Boone and George Rogers Clark, John Sevier, James Robertson and Isaac Shelby.” For a longer view, he pointed out that “the first chapter in the ‘Benton’ will give you an idea of the outline I intend to fill up.” He would be interweaving literary genres, the writing he had done as a historian in Thomas Hart Benton and as a naturalist in Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. He quipped to Parkman, “Literature must be my mistress perforce, for though I really enjoy politics I appreciate perfectly the exceedingly short nature of my tenure.”⁴ The same qualms filled his letters to Henry Cabot Lodge. “I have made up my mind that I will go in especially for literature, simply taking the part in politics that a decent man should.”5 We hear notes of desire and anxiety.

The publisher George Haven Putnam recalled that Roosevelt was ambitious as a historian to do for the Southwest Territory what Parkman had done for the Northwest.⁶ He admired the young writer’s dramatic narratives, “vivid pictures which impressed themselves on the memory of the reader,” and bragged that The Winning of the West was fashioned almost exclusively within the Putnam building on Twenty-Third Street in New York City, a short walk from Roosevelt’s home. The book was printed and bound on the upper floors, written and revised on the second floor, and sold in the bookstore on the ground floor. All this could happen under a single roof because, after the publication of The Naval War of 1812, Roosevelt had entered the Putnam business as a silent partner. “Those who knew the man will realize the difficulty I might say the impracticality, of Roosevelt being ‘silent’ under any responsibilities,” Putnam quipped. The secretary Mrs. Partington was heard to say that the young Roosevelt was “profligate in suggestions” about how best to run the business.

He had been gathering materials for The Winning of the West as far back as 1886 when he had written audaciously to Lyman Copeland Draper, an antiquarian who was hoarding a considerable collection of documents. In 1888 Roosevelt sent another request, clarifying what he especially wanted—“any material concerning Boone that you are not going to make use of—or anything about Crockett”—and vowing he did not intend to steal his thunder.⁷ Draper never completed his book because, as he admitted, “I can write nothing so long as I fear there is a fact, no matter how small, as yet ungarnered.”⁸ The old man’s fastidiousness rankled and amused Roosevelt, who had few such qualms as a scholar.

The young man worked, as he could, to gather a “mass of original matter in the shape of files of old newspapers, of unpublished letters, diaries, reports, and other manuscripts.” He lived in a world where he had every opportunity to examine library documents at his leisure, even taking them home in the evenings.⁹ His cryptic notes for the project survive as a series of fragments offering us glimpses into his thinking and writing.¹⁰ Close to his heart are backwoodsmen who fought for the land west of the Alleghenies, men like Kasper Mansker, included in John Carr’s Early Times in Middle Tennessee.¹¹ In the notebook, Roosevelt scribbles, “A Dutchman [German] who spoke broken English. Wonderful marksman; & woodsman. . . . Mansker said he had never seen such vast herds of buffalo at French Lick (Nashville) covered whole face of county. . . . Made huts out of buffalo hides.” In the book, he transforms Mansker into a character of his own: “The rude and fragmentary annals of the frontier are filled with the deeds of men, of whom Mansker can be taken as a type” (1:124). He comes to life under Roosevelt’s pen: “When Mansker first went to the Bluffs, in 1769, the buffaloes were more numerous than he had ever seen them before; the ground literally shook under the gallop of the mighty herds, they crowded in dense throngs round the licks, and the forest resounded with their grunting bellows” (1:536). We feel and hear the immediacy of the passage: shaking ground, thudding hooves, and bellowing grunts. This is Roosevelt’s writing at it best, melding scholarly history and visceral experience. We see him erasing the hundred years that separate him from his putative hero Mansker: “He and other woodsmen came back there off and on, hunting and trapping, and living in huts made of buffalo hides; just such huts as the hunters dwelt in on the Little Missouri and Powder rivers as late as 1883.” As 1769 fades into 1883, Roosevelt crops up in the narrative, a literary device buttressed by several footnotes highlighting his own life along the Little Missouri in the 1880s.

Not surprisingly, Roosevelt imposes his own political ideas on Mansker, a quintessential American-American: “A single generation, passed under the hard conditions of life in the wilderness, was enough to weld together into one people the representatives of these numerous and widely different races” (1:89). Backwoodsmen of Irish or German or Dutch or French descent, “whatever their blood, had become Americans, one in speech, thought, and character, clutching firmly the land.” They shed Europe like a bulky garment:

They had lost all remembrance of Europe and all sympathy with things European; they had become as emphatically products native to the soil as were the tough and supple hickories out of which they fashioned the handles of the long, light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were yet strangely fascinating and full of adventurous toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as freedom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs could have endured existence on the terms which these men found pleasurable. Their iron surroundings made a mould which turned out all alike in the same shape . . . in dress, in customs, and in mode of life.

A backwoodsman himself, Theodore had bragged to Corinne, “I was pretty well done out with the work, the lack of sleep and the strain of the constant watchfulness, but I am as brown and as tough as a pine knot and feel equal to anything.”12

“The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples,” his very first chapter, argues that language marks a people—not race or culture or history as much as language, the distinguishing feature of advanced civilization. “The English-speaking peoples now hold more and better land than any other American nationality or set of nationalities. They have in their veins less aboriginal American blood.” Others have “tacitly allowed them to arrogate to themselves the title of ‘Americans,’ whereby to designate their distinctive and individual nationality” (1:30). To be clear, Roosevelt’s English was American English; later, as president, he would work to simplify even its spelling.

The Winning of the West sketches the story of the European invasion of North America and the movement of so-called “civilized” people into what he (and other historians) considered the “wilderness” of the West in a long series of battles against what they believed were “savage” peoples living on the lands the Europeans ought to own. The colonizing wars among the Spanish, the French, and the British, especially the War of Independence, forge a new people, American-Americans, who are, for Roosevelt, exceptional and triumphal. The main hero of the early volumes is Daniel Boone, “a man of few words, cold and grave, accustomed to every kind of risk and hairbreadth escape, and as little apt to praise the deeds of others as he was to mention his own” (1:291). No western writer, including Owen Wister, ever said so much about masculine restraint in so few words.

Roosevelt paints on a large canvas, chronicling a Darwinian struggle for the future of the land. “Terrible deeds of prowess were done by the mighty men on either side. It was a war of stealth and cruelty, and ceaseless, sleepless watchfulness. The contestants had sinewy frames and iron wills, keen eyes and steady hands, hearts as bold as they were ruthless” (1:123). This was the very warrior that Theodore Roosevelt most admired, sinewy, iron-willed, keen, steady, and, when need be, ruthless. The Northwest, stretching far into the West, “founded not by individual Americans, but by the United States of America,” is in truth “the heart of the nation” (2:200). His heartland belonged to European immigrants pushing westward. “The headwaters of the Missouri were absolutely unknown; nobody had penetrated the great plains, the vast seas of grass through which the Platte, the Little Missouri, and the Yellowstone ran. What lay beyond them, and between them and the Pacific, was not even guessed at” (1:503). Readers in 1883 knew almost nothing about the Dakota Territories, much less about the lands beyond. He painted a West that had passed out of the hands of primitive tribes and through the stage of hunters and trappers in Kentucky and Tennessee and had arrived roughly on his doorstep at the Elkhorn Ranch.

For any writer, the hardest days come as a book makes its way into a reader’s hands. On June 2, 1889, Roosevelt could tell Anna that the two volumes would be out in ten days, even as he doubted his skill: “It is wholly impossible for me to say if I have or have not properly expressed all the ideas that seethed vaguely in my soul as I wrote it.”13 He wrote to Lodge, complimenting him on his new book about George Washington: “It is no small triumph to have written such a book as that.”¹⁴ Roosevelt admitted, “You have now reached what I am struggling for; a uniformly excellent style.” But by the end of the month, he could boast that the first edition of his book had nearly sold out.

On July 7, 1889, the New York Times reviewed The Winning of the West under the heading “Pushing Their Way.”¹⁵ The young writer could not have found a more fulsome audience. The anonymous voice in the review reminds us that Theodore Roosevelt was himself a New Yorker. The review bristles with clichés—“one man in a thousand” and “above the general run of men” who sheds “light on the subject.” Casting a scornful eye on scholars, the reviewer cautions, “In some minor respects there will be some who may differ from Mr. Roosevelt, but this may be asserted, that it will be difficult to conceive how anybody can ever come better prepared, in a personal sense, for this precise kind of work than the author.” He chides sedentary scholars: “It is not within our province to expatiate on the literary qualities of historians who in their closets seek for highly-clever second-hand inspirations.” Such a pedant may journey to Watauga Creek to see for himself an old beech tree with carvings, but he could never decipher a line like “D. Boon cilled a bar on tree in the year 1760,” as Roosevelt, a “ranchman of to-day,” could easily do. He even attaches a letter from John Allison verifying the carving: “The tree is a beech, still standing, though fast decaying.”

The reviewer, shallow and adoring, caught Roosevelt cropping himself into the purported history and thought what he was doing made sense, because his defining credential was not his birthplace, 28 East Twentieth Street, New York City, but his Elkhorn Ranch on the Little Missouri River in the Dakotas. The reviewer was convinced that Roosevelt could tell the story of the pioneering spirit because he shared “the living bond of human sympathy” with backwoodsmen, hunters, ranchers, and cowboys. He praised the prose style and quoted Roosevelt liberally:

“A grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, the love of freedom rooted in their very hearts’ core. Their lives were harsh and narrow; they gained their bread by their blood and sweat in the unending struggle with the wild ruggedness of nature. They suffered terrible injuries at the hands of the red men, and on their foes they waged a terrible warfare in return. They were relentless, revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fearless, loyal to their friends, and devoted to their country. In spite of their many failings, they were of all men the best fitted to conquer the wilderness and hold it against their enemies.”

Roosevelt had created out of fairly plain language a myth of the West that put an Old New Yorker in the saddle. What could be better than that? His hometown newspaper declared his writing “true literary art.”

Historians were not as willing to give Roosevelt a pass in the intellectual arena, where they eyed his work with suspicion. In November, William Frederick Poole, head of the newly established Newberry Library and president of the American Historical Association and the American Library Association, was asked by William Dean Howells to review The Winning of the West for the Atlantic Monthly.16 Poole, who wrote anonymously, applauded Roosevelt’s entry into a scholarly field filled with “thin and sensational” tales of “doubtful authenticity.” He thought the young man, familiar with colloquial language, brought to the field a literary style that was “natural, simple, and picturesque, without any attempt at fine writing.” Poole especially favored the use of primary materials: “Few writers of American history have covered a wider or better field of research, or are more in sympathy with the best modern method of studying history from original sources.” Roosevelt held promise as a writer and a scholar. The praise ended there.

“No man, whatever may be his ability or industry,—even if he be a ranchman,—can write history in its best form on horseback,” Poole mocked, drawing one of the first caricatures of Theodore Roosevelt. The bumptious writer “tripped on level ground where there is no need of it.” The book was riddled with errors because the writer was too eager to be done: “We have a feeling that he might profitably have spent more time in consulting and collating the rich materials to which he had access.” He had raced through the Haldimand Collection in Ottawa or skipped over portions of the Michigan Pioneer Collection, missing “a mine of information which has never been used in any Western history.” Poole hit hard: “Mr. Roosevelt, in making so good a work, has clearly shown that he could make a better one, if he would take more time in doing it.”17 He took the author to task for one error after another, painstakingly detailing what Roosevelt had misread or failed to read. He scolded him for disparaging the work of his elders: “Writers, and young writers especially,—Mr. Roosevelt is only thirty-one years of age,—are apt, in the glow of composition, to deal in sharp epithets and sneering comments concerning preceding writers who they think have erred; and these passages are commonly toned down, or, what is better, canceled, in a deliberate revision of the manuscript.” As he held the book in his hands, Poole thought the sneers looked peevish on the printed page.

On October 27, with the November review already in his hands, Roosevelt shot off a letter to the Atlantic Monthly. “I do not know whether it is usual for an author to write to a reviewer; but yours is the first criticism of my book from which I have learnt anything,” he disarmed his critic.¹⁸ Stinging from the charge of hastiness, he defended his use of time: the rigors of his political duties had compromised the book he was writing. “I either had to get it out at once or wait several years; I ought to have done the latter, I suppose,—but I didn’t.” The voice is fresh, eager, alert, and combative. Cheekily reviewing the review, Roosevelt took Poole’s measure: “It was a real (albeit not unmixed) pleasure to me to see it; for curiously enough I have never so far met a man with whom I could discuss this early western history, or who knew anything about it as a whole, and yours was the first article I read on the subject which I felt was written with knowledge and authority.” A pedant’s pen, however, was not what Roosevelt was reaching for: “What I am especially aiming at in my history is to present the important facts, and yet to avoid being drowned in a mass of detail.” He favored haste in composition over “intolerable antiquarian minuteness,” with Draper perhaps most in his mind. Even as the Atlantic issue was arriving on newsstands, Poole was responding to his young colleague: “It is very gratifying to me to have you say that you ‘felt that the article was written by a man who knew the subject’ and that you had ‘learned something from it.’” It turned out Poole had an ego, too. He was won over.

In December, the two men met at the closing session of the American Historical Association’s annual meeting. From the minutes, we know that the U.S. Civil Service commissioner Theodore Roosevelt gave an extemporaneous address, “Certain Phases of the Westward Movement during the Revolutionary War,” that was taken down by the secretary. We recognize his voice, confident and clear: “The foundation of this great Federal Republic was laid by backwoodsmen, who conquered and held the land west of the Alleghanies, and thus prepared the way for the continental dominion of the English race in America.”19 A lively discussion ensued. In his own term as president of the American Historical Association in 1912, Roosevelt would call for “History as Literature,” the very blending of historical and imaginative storytelling he was crafting in the late nineteenth century.

Getting from the first two volumes to the third took him five years, not because he toed the mark as a scholar, reading more deeply in archives to enrich the story, but because he turned his pen to other projects, keeping in mind the money he could earn as a writer. Over these same years, Roosevelt wrote a brief biography of the founding father Gouverneur Morris, in the American Statesman series.²⁰ His Benton volume had not gone particularly well, and he confessed to Lodge, “Do you know, I can not help thinking John Jay more deserving to have a place in the Statesmen series than Morris, though the last is so much more amusing.”²¹ In the book, he characterized Morris as able, fearless, cultivated, devoted, tough, having as his most desirable distinction “affection for things American.” Not much to build a story on.

From the Ryan Hotel in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on October 1, 1888, Roosevelt had responded to a book offer from Brander Matthews, the literary adviser at Longmans, Green, and Company, to write a history of New York City for the American Historic Towns series (Lodge was writing the volume on Boston).²² “I should like much to do the work; and will undertake it with pleasure if a little lee way is allowed me to finish up some matters which I must get through first,” Roosevelt promised, even as he plunged into the 1888 presidential election, campaigning for Republican Benjamin Harrison over Democrat Grover Cleveland.²³ For his work, President Harrison appointed Roosevelt to the United States Civil Service Commission, a job he would hold over the next six years—into President Cleveland’s administration—as he argued strongly for reform of the patronage system, insisting that government jobs ought to be based on merit alone and not party affiliation. Even with the contract signed, Roosevelt pushed the deadline back on the New York history: “I am going to spend six weeks after the 5th of August out West among the bears and cowboys, as I think I have fairly earned a holiday.”24 Each year, he saved weeks in late summer for hunting trips in the West; nothing got in the way of that.

From his Civil Service office in Washington, D.C., as time allowed, he wrote New York, publishing the volume in January 1891. In his preface, he declares himself not a scholar but a casual observer of “the workings of the town’s life, social, commercial, and political, at successive periods with their sharp transformations and contrasts,” and he meant “to trace the causes which gradually changed a little Dutch trading hamlet into a huge American city.”²⁵ We note his verbs: “sketch,” “trace,” “outline,” and even his “barely touching.” The book, unimaginative and perfunctory, traces themes he was working out in other histories. For example, we recognize his call for Americans without prefix, not Irish-Americans, nor German or even Native-Americans, if anything American-Americans. Over two hundred pages, he gave his readers information that many no doubt already knew, and the book was a dud. In the literary business, and he referred to himself in a letter to Matthews as a “literary feller,” one writer often helps another, each building his own career. Thus it was Brander Matthews who, without signing his name, wrote a most admiring review of New York in Century Magazine.²⁶

The lure of nature writing was always strong in Roosevelt, and during the lull between volumes of The Winning of the West, he relaxed into writing The Wilderness Hunter (1893). Two poetic epigraphs invite readers into his narrative, the first from “The Ship in the Desert” by Joaquin Miller, the “Poet of the Sierras,” in a passage that places lumbermen, who had climbed the “rock-built breasts of earth” and seen “the face of God,” back in camp where “They saw the silences / Move by and beckon.” The second lines are from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in a passage that welcomes us to join lumbermen in their winter camp: “The blazing fire at night, the sweet taste of supper, the talk, the bed of / hemlock boughs, and the bear-skin.” The lines remind us that Roosevelt was a reader, an admirer of language that evokes mood, as he wrote, “The free, self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings, the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to study the ways and habits of the woodland creatures—all these unite to give the career of the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm.”²⁷

Daniel Boone appears as the archetype of the American backwoods hunter, who heralded the arrival of the pioneer who, in turn, conquered the wilderness by wresting the land from the supposed “savages”; and thus, step by bloody step, “often leap by leap, the frontier of settlement was pushed westward” (15). The book traces familiar ground without the intrusion of footnotes, and the reader of The Wilderness Hunter arrives fairly quickly in the West that Roosevelt knew firsthand, a West devoid of buffalo herds and beaver-laden streams, especially after the blizzard of 1887. The lack of big game, small game, even songbirds, may well have caused him to consider ways to ameliorate the damage done by unwise and unplanned over-ranching, and heedless profiteering by brutal commercial game hunters.

How could he bring his two “mistresses,” literature and politics, together? Inviting a dozen or so friends, all of them interested in large-animal hunting, and all men of means, to Anna’s Fifth Avenue apartment, Theodore proposed an association, dubbed the Boone and Crockett Club, to promote game laws, good hunting ethics, and governmental policies to foster game preserves and seasonal regulations. By 1888, it had been legally established, with by-laws, policy aims, and Theodore Roosevelt as president. His literary critic and now friend George Bird Grinnell was second in command, and together they began planning a series of publications by the club, to be edited by the two of them, and for which they would both write. Roosevelt remained president until 1894, and by that time, the organization’s power and farsightedness were obvious. Yellowstone National Park was rescued from desolation by commercial enterprises; plans were afoot for the formation of the Bronx Zoo; sequoia groves were protected in California; and Boone and Crockett books were well under way: American Big-Game Hunting (1893), Hunting in Many Lands (1895), and Trail and Camp-Fire (1897). Over the years, with Roosevelt looking on, the group inspired the American Bison Foundation, which almost single-handedly kept the American bison a viable species in the American West, and such groups as Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited, as well as offering lobbying and financial support to encourage the formation of national forests, new national parks, and a long series of national wildlife refuges. Conservation and wildlife preservation without the Boone and Crockett Club would look much different from how it does today.

Roosevelt used political activism to further his writing career, and the Boone and Crockett books remain to this day editions of scientific and hunting literature in late nineteenth-century America that are not only beautifully produced and edited, but in every way reputable. Roosevelt—the writer, the wildlife biologist, the politician—enhances America’s ability to conserve precious natural resources. Did he come up with the idea for the Boone and Crockett Club by himself? Did he pattern it after his uncle Robert Roosevelt’s ground-breaking work to preserve game and commercial fishing in the Hudson River? Did he found this service organization to pay homage to his late father? It scarcely matters. Having founded the club, and driven it, and protected it, he could also use it to further his standing as a nature writer, a science writer, and visionary of conservation and preservation of the natural world. Not bad for the myopic boy who in Oyster Bay used to listen to birdsong because he could not see the singing birds.

By 1894, back at his task of The Winning of the West, Roosevelt wrote to the emerging scholar Frederick Jackson Turner, professor of American history at the University of Wisconsin, who had brought new life to the American Historical Association in July of 1893 with his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Roosevelt told Turner that he intended to use and cite his ideas in the third volume of The Winning of the West. “I think you have struck some first class ideas, and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.”28 Certainly, it had floated rather loosely in Roosevelt’s mind and in the writing he had been doing for a decade.

The Harvard Collection includes a handwritten draft of the third volume of The Winning of the West that offers a window onto Roosevelt’s writing method at this stage of his career. The manuscript is legible, and we see him in high compositional mode, purifying the prose, making the writing clearer, always more readable, bringing emphasis to ideas that he wanted to highlight, leading toward stronger and more coherent individual sentences. One assumes he is writing as he goes, perhaps from cryptic notes, and the assurance of the hand suggests, as Putnam described it, that the young historian penned the first draft as a nearly finished draft. If so, the writing reveals Theodore Roosevelt’s uncanny talent for designing a story in his head, nimbly sorting and synthesizing vast stores of detail, before putting pen to paper and then moving quickly down the page in a steady cursive hand.

The manuscript chapter, “The Northwest Territory; Ohio, 1787–1790,” reads well even without its inserted revisions. Changes in the prose are relatively rare for a writer little given to reworking passages or altering the basic shape of his narrative. The pen moved to strengthen a verb or noun or subtract an adjective, showing signs of a mind focused on precision. It struck out the adjective “hard” and moved the adverb “directly” and alternated “first” and “early” to strengthen the opening lines, but most of the draft stands untouched:

So far the work of the backwoodsman in exploring, conquering, and holding the West had been work undertaken solely on individual initiative. The nation as a whole had not directly shared in it. The frontiersmen who chopped the first trails across the Alleghanies, who earliest wandered through the lonely Western lands, and who first built stockade hamlets on the banks of the Watauga, the Kentucky, and the Cumberland, acted each in consequence of his own restless eagerness for adventure and possible gain.

Roosevelt’s revising process was largely one of accretion. Rethinking, for him, almost always meant adding sentences, even paragraphs; you can see how he wedged new language between the lines, or, turning the page, how he placed new text in balloons in such tiny letters that the typesetter must have strained to grasp the words.

After reading the third volume of The Winning of the West, Turner wrote an anonymous review in the Nation, taking the strident historian to task.29 Roosevelt fired back to the editors for the reviewer’s identity. He then wrote a letter to Turner in his typically sly way: “It was a great pleasure to me to find that you were my reviewer” because it was “intelligent criticism.”³⁰ We hear the catty tone: “I hope you will write a serious work on the subject. I know of no one so well qualified for the task.” Turner, who had been raised in what we call today the upper Midwest (then the western frontier), believed in the power of frontier community. The West, as he could see from the world around him, was won by the steady building of local and county governments, the building blocks of democracy. He complained that Roosevelt failed to acknowledge the contributions of local, agrarian efforts in shaping the West, and Roosevelt retorted, “My aim is especially to show who the frontiersmen were and what they did, as they gradually conquered the West.” As for the charge that he had paid scant attention to the documents of land companies, he asserted, “The real importance of the movement came in the settlers themselves, whose habits of thought, modes of life, and systems of government left their mark stamped deep on the ground; while the traces left by the land companies were comparatively few.” From his experience as a bureaucrat—and he was the one with practical experience—the documents of committees and companies could not be trusted to tell a straight story. Any one of us who ever put together a committee report might agree.

Turner saw an American West won by yeoman farmers, artisans, and entrepreneurs, a collective that established the agrarian republic, the regeneration of society, argues Richard Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.31 Turner was at heart a populist, in stark contrast to the progressive Roosevelt. In the American West, Roosevelt saw an evolutionary struggle among racial groups, where indigenous peoples were defeated by backwoodsmen—“archetypes of freedom”—who in turn were replaced by cowboys and ranchers, much like himself. Slotkin hits upon Roosevelt’s tendency to crop up in the story, so much so that he “makes his own history the fulfillment of the larger historical processes he had invoked.” In The Winning of the West, the arc of history bends toward the Little Missouri, clearing the path for the owner of the Elkhorn Ranch.

All writing is, to some extent, autobiographical, the writer often hidden behind the scene, offstage, out of direct action, but Theodore Roosevelt found ways, consciously and unconsciously, to bring himself onto the stage, as he would do most openly in The Rough Riders.

Biographers refer to the sharp exchange between the rival historians by quoting the end of Roosevelt’s letter to Turner: “I am a very busy man, and it is awfully difficult for me to get away.” To complete future volumes would require even more time: “I certainly can’t until I get entirely out of political life; a move I am strongly tempted to make.” With Turner’s criticisms still in his mind, Roosevelt wrote again on April 26, 1895. “I don’t think after all that our views as to the fundamental unity of the Westerners differ widely,” he soothed his colleague, adding that he was using Turner’s ideas at that very moment in “a chapter I am writing.”³² He was a good politician, no matter what hand he had to play.

The truth is that Theodore Roosevelt’s life was a whirlwind during the last decade of the nineteenth century, as his mind moved from idea to idea with a speed hard to imagine for a sedentary scholar like Turner who lived in a world of books and classrooms. The month he claimed to be stepping away from political life, Roosevelt was in fact looking for his next political job, not surprisingly preferring a seat on the New York Police Commission to a seat on Street Cleaning. On April 14, 1895, in a letter to Anna, he explained, “I would like to do my share in governing the city after our great victory; and so far as may be I would like once more to have my voice in political matters.”³³ Roosevelt took the job of police commissioner in May 1895. He wrote to Indiana lawyer Lucius Burrie Swift, editor of the Civil Service Chronicle, about the dismal chances for reform in New York City. “There are certain evils which I fear cannot possibly be suppressed in a city like New York in our present stage of existence,” he offered as a pragmatic reading of social evolution.34 “I shall do my best to find out how to minimize them and make them least offensive, but more than this I fear cannot be done,” he soberly pledged.

He sold an essay, “Six Years of Civil Service Reform,” to Scribner’s Magazine in June of 1895 for $175, and a review of Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution to North American Review, where he argued against Kidd’s notion that the fittest populations are forged by the keenest pressure. “The generals and admirals, the poets, philosophers, historians and musicians, the statesmen and judges, the law-makers and law-givers, the men of arts and of letters, the great captains of war and of industry—all these come from the classes where the struggle for the bare means of subsistence is least severe, and where the rate of increase is relatively smaller than in the classes below.”³⁵ Roosevelt was working on a theory of social evolution, based on eugenics, that would lead him later to lecture prosperous white women on the optimal number (five or even six) of children to have in order to secure the best chances for social progress, to produce generals and poets and philosophers and historians and musicians and statesmen. We look closely at his list as a measure of what he valued and in what order. He was a statesman and historian, not a general or admiral, not yet a colonel. Certainly he would never be a poet.

Sitting restlessly in an office, riding his bicycle to work for his only exercise, the young commissioner began exploring the city he was entrusted to protect. He wrote Anna on June 8, 1895, about a “night I passed in tramping the streets, finding out by personal inspection how the police were doing their duty.”³⁶ The next morning, lining up the group of frightened cops, he reprimanded or fined them for neglecting their duties. The next week, he enthused, “Twice I have spent the night in patrolling New York on my own account, to see exactly what the men were doing.”³⁷ He bragged of going forty hours without sleep and being in robust health: “But in spite of my work I really doubt whether I have often been in better health.” Even in New York City he could become tough as a “hickory nut.” His police work was practical, without a touch of the academic, and absorbed his energy and imagination.

“I have not tried to write a line of my book since I took the office,” he crowed to Anna. And the next week, he continued, “I am immensely amused and interested in my work. It keeps me so busy I can hardly think.”³⁸ He was thinking, but in a new way, about a wider world than Harvard or Dakota had offered. “These midnight rambles are great fun. My whole work brings me in contact with every class of people in New York, as no other work possibly could; and I get a glimpse of the real life of the swarming millions. Finally, I do really feel that I am accomplishing a good deal.” He reveled in an active life that left little time for writing, a pleasure any procrastinating writer can taste.

Writing to Lodge on July 20, 1895, he joked about his summer with groveling politicians of the baser sort.39 “Two or three nights a week I have to stay in town; Sunday I spend in the country; the other days I ride to and from the station on my bicycle, leaving my house at half past seven in the morning, spending a perfect whirl of eight hours in New York, and returning just in time for a short play with the children before I get dressed for supper.” The political fights were savage, and the press hounded him: “The World, Herald, Sun, Journal and Advertiser are shrieking with rage; the Staats-Zeitung is fairly epileptic; the Press stands by me nobly. The Tribune and the Times more tepidly; the Evening Post has been afraid of its life, and has taken refuge in editorials that are so colorless as to be comical.” The swirl of language gave him an adrenaline rush. “I don’t care a snap of my finger,” he swaggered; “I am going to fight no matter what the opposition is.”

When he later wrote in his autobiography about this period, he defined a literary credo that was only just coming into his mind as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth: “I have always had a horror of words that are not translated into deeds, of speech that does not result in action—in other words, I believe in realizable ideals and in realizing them, in preaching what can be practiced and then in practicing it.”⁴⁰ The man of action was thinking of ways to put language to work.

His mentor was the Danish immigrant writer Jacob Riis, whose best-seller How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York appeared first as a series in Scribner’s Magazine in 1889 and then as a book in 1890. Riis pointed the way for writers to use the language of law to bring about social change. On December 4, 1894, Roosevelt wrote a letter to Riis about Mayor-elect Strong: “From you I feel he could get information such as he could not get from anyone else about the condition of our schools and about what can be done. . . . I know hardly anyone who has done more than you have to give people an intelligent appreciation of the great social problems of the day and who has approached these problems with more common sense and sobriety.”⁴¹ Common sense and sobriety were always close to Roosevelt’s heart, and, over the years, Riis stayed in his mind. When he left New York to go to the Department of the Navy, he wrote, “For these last two years you have been my main prop and comfort.”42 In 1903, Riis would craft a biographical mash-note of sorts in Theodore Roosevelt: The Citizen, singing the praises of the president as Roosevelt began campaigning for his first actual election to the highest office.⁴³ And in his autobiography, Roosevelt would remember “Jacob Riis had drawn an indictment of the things that were wrong, pitifully and dreadfully wrong, with the tenement homes and the tenement lives of our wage-workers.”⁴⁴ It would be the job of government to answer that indictment with the language of law.

As Roosevelt considered how the other half lived in New York City in the 1890s, a period of financial depression throughout the country, he read the work of the young radical fiction writers of his day, all of them followers of the French novelist and theorist Émile Zola, whose Le roman expérimental urged them to turn their imaginations to social conditions of the working class. Zola called his theory “literary naturalism.” In a letter to Brander Matthews on December 7, 1894, Roosevelt considered such naturalistic tendencies in the fiction of Hamlin Garland, who called his own literary theory “veritism.” Garland published “Only a Lumber Jack” in Harper’s Weekly that month, and Roosevelt thought it a good story, not as morbid as Garland’s other work, but he had a considerable caveat: “It looks to me as though he were going to, in a somewhat different way, suffer as Howells has done, by taking a jaundiced view of life.”⁴⁵ William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly and arbiter of American realism, had put his pen into the service of social reform, a literary movement that irritated Roosevelt as a politician and more so as a reader. It is a battle he would wage all his life with Howells and Garland as well as with Zola, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.

Most writers depicted the plight of the poor without having had visceral encounters with poverty itself. “I am amused at one thing,” Roosevelt told Matthews: Garland’s absurd use of “greasy quilts” to signify discomfort and unhappiness. From his own experiences in the West, Roosevelt begged to differ. “Well, they are distressing to an overcivilized man; but for my own pleasure this year when I was out on the antelope plains I got into a country where I didn’t take my clothes off for ten days,” he roared. Greasy quilts offered a sense of holiday from the sort of respectable cleanliness Garland valued in Boston. But Roosevelt pulled back slightly from making full heroes of western men: “The life as a whole is a decidedly healthy and attractive one to men who do not feel the need of mental recreation and stimulus—and few of them do.”⁴⁶ As for Garland, he would do well to write stories and not literary philosophy, “where the propriety of his purpose is marred by the utter crudity of his half-baked ideas,” like those of the “veritists.”

On August 6, Roosevelt wrote to the Atlantic Monthly editor Horace Elisha Scudder, recommending that he publish an article by the Evening Post reporter Joseph Lincoln Steffens about the police department. “He is a personal friend of mine; and he has seen all of our work at close quarters. He and Mr. Jacob Riis have been the two members of the Press who have most intimately seen almost all that went on here.”47 Later, in his autobiography, Steffens would recall the three of them: “It was all breathless and sudden, but Riis and I were soon describing the situation to him. . . . It was just as if we three were the police board, T.R., Riis, and I, and as we got T.R. calmed down we made him promise to go a bit slow, to consult with his colleagues also.”⁴⁸ Even as TR spent the week at Harvard for his fifteenth reunion among his Porcellian friends, he began police work on what he called “an ugly snag”: “I am working as I never worked before.”⁴⁹ The Sunday Excise Law banished alcohol sales on the Christian Sabbath, and Roosevelt, never a drinker himself, determined that the law would be followed, even though he thought it too strict.⁵⁰ A year of work as police commissioner wore on him, and he joked to Anna that the “screeching mendacity” of the Herald and the World had worn thin, and that his political successes were “gradually growing evident even to the dull public mind.”⁵¹

Astonishingly, in this year of sweat as a public servant, Roosevelt finished the proofs on the next volume of The Winning of the West. “I shall be through the hardest part of my work both literary and official; I shall then have finished a year of as hard work and of as much worry and responsibility as a man could well have.” He could not know, of course, that harder days were not far ahead, but the truth is that what Theodore Roosevelt most feared was a life with nothing to do.

Volume four of The Winning of the West was published in 1896, and an urbane review soon followed written by Stephen Beauregard Weeks, who had earned the first PhD in English from the University of North Carolina and then another in history from Johns Hopkins University. Writing for the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he neatly summed up Roosevelt’s long project “to tell the story of the invasion and taming of the western wilderness, the driving back of the Indian possessors, and the erection of free governments on the soil thus wrested at great expense of blood and treasure from the hands of the savage.”⁵² Crediting Roosevelt with using the Draper manuscripts (after Draper’s death) and attending more to his scholarly task than he had in the first two volumes, he admired the colorful stories and seemed amused by diatribes against other historians.

Weeks trained a scholarly eye on what the New York Times reviewer had hinted at: “The strength of the work lies in the constant cropping out of the author’s own participation in the border life of the present day.” Theodore Roosevelt felt utterly comfortable insinuating himself into the history he was telling. “From his own experience, example after example is drawn to illustrate situations that occurred in Kentucky and Tennessee a hundred years before,” Weeks noted. Roosevelt drew from his life in the Dakotas especially in his portrayal of the clash between Anglo-Saxons and Indians, where he wrote: “‘It is idle to dispute about the rights or wrongs of the contest. Two peoples, in two stages of culture which were separated by untold ages, stood face to face; one or the other had to perish: and the whites went forward from sheer necessity.’” Weeks observed, “There is no mistaking the tone of these sentences.” As for differences between the North and the South, Weeks put it simply: “The land to the north of Ohio represents the spirit of collectivism; the land to the south the spirit of individualism.” He understood the battle between Turner, who argued for the collective, and Roosevelt, who championed the individual.

Reviewing the same volume of The Winning of the West for the American Historical Association, Frederick Jackson Turner began in praise of Roosevelt: “He has rescued a whole movement in American development from the hands of unskillful annalists.”53 The work was innovative because the author pushed against the prejudices of established scholars who had relied on received knowledge: “He has made use of widely scattered original sources, not heretofore exploited.” Roosevelt’s prose moved with “graphic vigor,” and his mind ranged beyond local history into considerations of the wider world, especially involvements with France and Spain. Turner agreed with other reviewers that Roosevelt worked from firsthand experience in the American West and thus wrote with an integrity not earned by other eastern scholars. He admired the author’s sympathy with frontiersmen and agreed, for the most part, with his “courageous and virile” ways of depicting “Indian relations” in what he called “the wastes of the continent.” Turner, that is to say, shared Roosevelt’s prejudices. He saw verve in the narrative style (“It is the dramatic and picturesque aspects of the period that most interest him—the Indian fighting, the intrigues with Spain and the exploration of the far West”), a style at times without equal (“The campaigns of St. Clair and Wayne are not likely to be better presented than in the author’s pages”).

Turner’s hesitations were the same ones he had had with the previous volumes. The writing comes with “dash and lightness of touch” at the price of scholarly veracity: “He frequently fails to work his subject out into its less obvious relations; and the marks of actual haste are plain in careless proof-reading and citations.” At the heart of the story, Turner pointed to intrigues and conspiracies in the conquests of western territories, including those of Aaron Burr, Colonel Morgan, Elijah Clark, and especially George Rogers Clark. “Mr. Roosevelt’s account of George Rogers Clark’s relations to Genet in an effort to lead an expedition against the Spaniards at New Orleans, is of much value.” It is here that we see why the Draper materials were pivotal to the work Roosevelt was doing. “This part of Clark’s career has been ignored or glossed over by his admirers, but on the basis of the Draper Manuscripts, in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Mr. Roosevelt elucidates the interesting episode.” Turner’s main charge against Roosevelt—a considerable one for a historian basing his argument on the validity of his original sources—was that he simply had failed to work thoroughly. “If Mr. Roosevelt had given more painstaking attention . . . he might perhaps have secured important documents. . . . There is no evidence that he attempted to do this.”

Turner, however, heard a new note in Theodore Roosevelt’s prose: haec fabula docet—using narrative to preach a moral lesson. “He does not hesitate to use his pages as a means of impressing his views of parties and party policies upon his readers.” Turner caught Roosevelt, the politician, in the act of riding a hobbyhorse of his own, military preparedness, and quoted the insistent voice: “‘These facts may, with advantage, be pondered by those men of the present day who are either so ignorant or of such lukewarm patriotism that they do not wish to see the United States keep prepared for war.’” His story of how the West was won, that is to say, veered into a didactic rant, much like the one in his Naval War of 1812, on the wisdom and necessity of preparedness for war on land and most especially on water. “While one can appreciate the energetic Americanism of Mr. Roosevelt,” Turner scoffed, “one can also lament that he finds it necessary to use his history as the text for a sermon to a stiff-necked generation.” The historian had morphed into the politician.

Roosevelt shot back with a compliment, a whine, and then a volley. “You are a master of the subject, and therefore you can write the only kind of review I care to read.”54 He used the excuse of time: “I have been worked very hard indeed for the last eight years, and it was a physical impossibility to neglect my duties as Civil Service Commissioner or a Police Commissioner, so I either had to stop historical work entirely, or do just as I have done.” Then he grew feisty. He meant to sketch a narrative for a general reader, and for that task saw no reason to “again thrash out the straw” of scholarly debates. Academic minutiae may not yield truth and may blind one to the truth, he sneered. Turner had dismissed his chapters on the Louisiana Purchase and Aaron Burr’s conspiracy: “They add nothing of importance to the work of Henry Adams.” That line set Roosevelt off: “I must have failed to make clear my effort to accentuate the most important point in the whole affair, and the very point which Henry Adams failed to see, namely that the diplomatic discussion to which he devotes so much space, though extremely interesting, and indeed very important as determining the method of the transfer, 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.” Pedants like Henry Adams and Turner might thresh out the straw but never find the grain. He ended the letter abruptly—“There!”—and with a lie, “I have not written another critic of my work, but with you it is interesting to enter into a discussion.”

Turner agreed with Poole and establishment historians that Roosevelt simply could not stay on task: “But the special student must regret that Mr. Roosevelt does not find it possible to regard history as a more jealous mistress, and to give more time, greater thoroughness of investigation, particularly in foreign archives, and more sobriety of judgment to his work” (176).

Roosevelt was working for money in the 1890s and not earning as much as he hoped for. Writing to his friend Frederic Remington, whose first one-man show in 1890 made him a commercial success, he joked, “I ever so wished to be a millionaire or indeed any person other than a literary man with a large family of small children and a taste for practical politics and bear hunting, as when you have pictures to sell.”55 And then he added in admiration and envy: “It seems to me that you in your line, and Wister is his, are doing the best work in America today.” The young historian knew that he was not yet doing his best work and in truth did not yet know what his best line would be.