An American-American Writer
The tragedy of Roosevelt seems to me to lie in this: That he was a man of remarkable literary talent who is known chiefly for his politics. . . . Roosevelt bore the hallmark of a genuine man of letters and, had he devoted his life altogether to composition, he would have gained for himself a position in American literature equaled by few other men. . . . Roosevelt slung a wicked pen.
{ Charles W. Ferguson, “Roosevelt—Man of Letters,” 1927 }1
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.
{ Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 1913 }2
Theodore Roosevelt could not stop writing, just as he could not stop talking and as he could not stop reading, the world he saw and heard flowing through him into language, pages and pages of prose. From the time he first scrawled his baby name “Tedie” (simplifying the spelling of Teedie) with a pencil, he wrote every day, often for much of the day, in letters and journals and field books, illustrated with sketches, and later, as he matured, he considered himself a literary man and worked hard to turn his experiments with language into art and income.3 Henry Adams famously dubbed Roosevelt “pure act” and dismissed him as a thinker and a writer, and yet, for Roosevelt, thinking was action, and the use of language was pure act. He made little distinction between thinking and saying or saying and writing or between writing and doing; writing for him was “the strenuous life,” the writer always in the “sweat and dust” of “the arena.” Over the course of his long and productive life, he seldom said a word that he or someone else didn’t write down.
In striking ways, his life in language was a monologue written in the moment or, soon after, in reflections that mimicked the moment, giving him as a writer a series of direct, seemingly honest glimpses of the world around him. His childhood writing came so rapidly that at times he drew symbols in the prose line and made maps and sketches to orient his reader, whoever that reader might have been. He began journal entries with a list of characters, as though he were writing a play: “When I put ‘we 3’ I mean Ellie Conie and I. When I put ‘big people’ I mean Papa Mama and Bamie.” Ellie was his younger brother Elliott, Conie his baby sister Corinne, and Bamie his older sister Anna.4 He even listed himself as the author: “Journal of Theodore Roosevelt of U.S.A. New York.” The journals were clearly not for his eyes only, rarely confessional or intimate, and the boy seemed not to have had his family in mind as readers. Tedie, even in these earliest of literary experiments, narrated his life to an outside reader, in some way for posterity, perhaps for us. In that spirit, we come to read him. Later in life, as he worked to meet publication deadlines for a wider audience, he packed a camera to capture images that the pen could not record as quickly as he moved, or to prove that his pen was telling the truth.
Tedie and his siblings were raised by parents who believed that education comes from genuine experience and had the money to provide years of travel and time for exploration of the wider world. The Roosevelt household was full of books. Free from the usual routines of American education, the children read novels and histories and poems of all sorts. Aloysius A. Norton, TR’s first literary biographer, pointed out that Theodore Sr. raised his children as he had been schooled, sending the boys for a time to his mentor John McMullen, who believed in a liberal education focused on transcendental notions of individualism, buffered by honesty and directness to “eliminate false pretentions and vanity.”5 Tedie’s asthma often kept him at home, where Aunt Anna Bulloch Gracie, his mother’s sister, taught the children how to read and write, and where later his sister Anna watched over his studies.
The boy read without prejudice or squeamishness. He adored the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, and the sea stories of Frederick Marryat, along with tales intended for girls, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Pussy Willow (1870), which begins: “I hope that you will all grow up to be nice good girls like her, with bright, healthy faces, and cheerful hearts, and the gift of always seeing The Bright Side of Everything.”6 Tedie enjoyed Adeline Dutton Train Whitney’s A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life, Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Louise Ouida’s Under Two Flags (a book that would surface in his own later writing).7 The Roosevelts subscribed to Our Young Folks, an Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls, which may well have introduced the Roosevelt children to writers who would become favorites, including Alcott, Longfellow, Stowe, and Mayne Reid.8 Dime novels, however, were taboo by Mother’s edict, and thus Tedie surreptitiously read any he could get his hands on and would binge on “cheap fiction” all his life. During the family tours of Europe, he read Reid’s adventure novels, along with the popular natural histories of John George Wood and the birding stories of John James Audubon, bundles of such books always accompanying the Roosevelt children. “I suppose we have read 50 since we left America,” he reported in his diary after four weeks in Europe.9 As a teenager, Theodore caught up on conventional studies at the Arthur Cutler School in New York in order to bring his academic training into line with what Harvard expected its young men to know as they entered college. Throughout his life, he never spent a day without a book in hand or in close reach, picking it up as respite from play or as reprieve from boredom or duty, filling each moment with language.
From his first tentative days with a pen at seven years old until his death at sixty, Roosevelt crafted language in many moods, at times lyrical and impressionistic, and at other times sober and scientific, and often, especially in later life, didactic and obdurate. He meant to be taken seriously and hoped to claim for himself a reputation as, what he quipped only slightly in jest, an “American-American” writer. His prose style is clear if not elegant, with a loose and repetitive structure that follows the sound of the American voice. The voices of Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, Jane Addams, Edith Wharton, and Booker T. Washington all come to mind in thinking about the prose style of Theodore Roosevelt.
His literary range was wide within the confines of nonfiction prose as he mastered the art of writing journals, narratives, essays, speeches, books, and letters. Toward the end of his life, he boasted that he had written as many as 150,000 letters, from which Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Elting E. Morison, as head of the Theodore Roosevelt Research Project, culled an eight-volume selection.10 Collections of his letters, one recently assembled by Henry William Brands, tell stories worthy of any good novel because his writing was at its most vivid and witty when he was talking directly to someone he knew.11 During Roosevelt’s lifetime, his essays and narrative sketches appeared in all sorts of magazines, including the Outing Magazine, Forest and Stream, Century, the Atlantic Monthly, Cosmopolitan, the Independent, the Bookman, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and the Outlook, where he had an office in later years as a contributing editor. British reviewers in the Times thought of him as a journalist because he placed his early articles in popular magazines, before collecting them into books, a process that allowed him to earn money in one venue and again in another. All his life, he would look for ways to restate, rewrite, and repackage his prose, pushing nearly every single word into print.
Roosevelt crafted political speeches, hundreds of them, reading or reciting them at rallies large and small, and then weaving them into editorials and essays, many of them cobbled together into his books on statecraft. William Draper Lewis recalled an evening before a speech in Carnegie Hall on March 20, 1912, when in his “low-ceilinged study” at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt kept his Progressive Party friend up past midnight, emphatically reading lines from a long manuscript, some pages typed and others scrawled in pencil on soiled tissue paper. “What he wanted was not to be told what to say, but to be helped how to say it,” Lewis noted.12 Clear in Roosevelt’s mind was that the text he was crafting would be published in the morning newspapers before journalists weighed in on what they may have heard him say. He is best known today for the strident notes of his political prose, the sort of language he believed Americans wanted to hear from a leader, most especially from a president.
In various moods, Roosevelt turned his mind to writing about science and history, adventure and travel, as well as the personal delights of work and play. Harvard University professor Hermann Hagedorn, who became friends with Roosevelt in his last months, did more than any scholar to preserve and promote his literary voice in establishing the Roosevelt Memorial Association (chartered by an act of Congress on May 31, 1920, and renamed the Theodore Roosevelt Association in 1953) and edited the Memorial Edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in twenty-four volumes.13 The Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard University house a collection of his childhood writing and family correspondence, given by the Roosevelt Memorial Association in 1943. Roosevelt reigned in the years before presidential libraries became the norm, and he and his wife Edith Carow Roosevelt gave his presidential papers to the Library of Congress, where during the 1960s’ Presidential Papers Project they were preserved on 485 reels of microfilm that today are being digitized, together with the Houghton manuscripts and others, by the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, whose goal is to create a virtual archive, online and accessible to everybody, as well as to build the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota. The Theodore Roosevelt Almanac, too, offers online links to documents that define his various political and social roles—President, Politician, Soldier, Author, Outdoorsman, and Family—following a pattern set by the University of Chicago English professor Edward Wagenknecht in The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt (1958), dividing his life into categories—Action, Thought, Human Relations, Family, Spiritual Values, Public Affairs, and War and Peace.14 An astonishing array of texts is online in various and curious places, a cache that offers fresh ways to read what he had to say.
Roosevelt thought himself a literary man by the time he was thirty, publishing three books in 1888 that signaled the scope and variety of his prose: Essays on Practical Politics, a book made up of two seminal essays on governmental reform; Gouverneur Morris, the second of his academic histories about political life in America; and, closer to his heart, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, a second book about his life in the natural world. With those early successes in three distinct fields of writing, he wrote Jonas S. Van Duzer, a former colleague in the New York State Legislature, a reflective letter about his chances in life. “Like yourself, I shall probably never be in politics again,” Roosevelt began; he had been elected to the state legislature in 1882, 1883, and 1884, but had been bruised politically in a losing bid for mayor of New York City in 1886. And then Roosevelt turned an equally cold eye on his prospects as a writer: “My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it; I should like to write some book that would really rank as in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream.”15 Had he never become president of the United States, he might well be remembered as a literary man among those in the first class of American writers.
He believed in wide-ranging study of history, philosophy, science, and, most especially, imaginative literature. Even as academic education around him was fragmenting into specialized disciplines, he sought ways of bringing fields of study together. Take the hunting tale, for example. “The hunting book proper,” he argued in a 1911 column for the Outlook, “goes back at least to Xenophon.”16 Back, that is to say, to the Greeks, and he knew that from his early studies of the Greek language. Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato and student of Socrates, wrote in a relatively readable style, simple and direct, the sort of style that even a poor student in classical languages could manage. Theodore had asked his sister Anna to send him his copy of Xenophon during his freshmen year at Harvard, even as Greek was earning his lowest grade. Xenophon’s military memoirs, long histories, and, especially, tales of hunting and farming appealed to the young man, who would come to write in all these literary genres. His moral philosophy, too, would come to look much like Xenophon’s, based on self-control, the ethic of work, the ideal of service, and a strong belief in utilitarianism and egalitarianism. Xenophon’s “On Hunting” was the very sort of prose model that the young Harvard student was searching for. In later life, he argued that a thinker like Xenophon, schooled in many disciplines and thinking across them all, was hard to find in the modern stratified world. “The nature book proper, which treats with power and charm of outdoor life,” he cautioned, could not come from a mind steeped in only one field of study. The best writing comes “from the standpoint, not of the mere hunter or mere zoologist, but of the man of letters and learning who is in love with nature.” He credited John Burroughs with being the “highest expression” of the nature writer in American literature.
By 1912, Roosevelt’s work as a historian earned him the presidency of the American Historical Association, and from that bully pulpit he delivered a signature address, “History as Literature,” about the literary nature of all good writing. One stunning example for him was evolution. Scientists in the nineteenth century had “grasped the fact of evolution,” he noted. “Yet, where their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age.”17 That revolution in thought came precisely because “what Darwin and Huxley wrote was interesting to read.” Collections of data and specialized treatises may be useful but will not be read for long, he warned writers of all sorts. “The great speeches of statesmen and the great writings of historians can live only if they possess the deathless quality that inheres in all great literature,” he thundered. A real writer has “the power to embody ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men live before our eyes.”18
The question for the young Roosevelt was whether he could bring his own writing to vivid life, and his early reviewers, most of them humanities professors, took his literary measure. William Peterfield Trent, professor of English literature at Columbia University, reviewed Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, praising his ability to bring the past into relevance with the present and his characters to life; but Professor Trent kept his red pen in hand. “When he is at his best, Mr. Roosevelt writes as well as any man need desire to write,” he conceded, adding the caveat, “who is not aiming at that elusive glory of being considered a master of style.”19 The apprentice writer’s style “not infrequently shows traces of hurry,” the professor chided, and he often writes too much. That is not to say that Roosevelt wasn’t aiming for “elusive glory.”
“Roosevelt slung a wicked pen,” declared the literary critic Charles W. Ferguson in a 1927 retrospective, “Roosevelt—Man of Letters,” marking the publication of the National Edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, fitted into twenty volumes.20 He cast the president’s life as a “tragedy” for the writer, whose literary achievement was swallowed almost whole by his political accomplishments. “What I want to suggest is that, apart from being a patriot and a Republican, Roosevelt bore the hallmark of a genuine man of letters and, had he devoted his life altogether to composition, he would have gained for himself a position in American literature equaled by few other men.”21
His most enduringly popular book, The Rough Riders (1899), tells the story of his rugged regiment during the Spanish-American War, a tale so focused on himself that the satirist Finley Peter Dunne’s comic character Mr. Dooley, in reviewing the book, quipped, “But if I was him I’d call th’ book ‘Alone in Cubia,’” a line that delighted even President Roosevelt.22 Historians have admired his first published book, The Naval War of 1812 (1882), a meticulous study in the genre of naval history—ironically, British readers so admired the book that it became a guide for the writing of The Royal Navy, a History from the Earliest Times to the Present (1897) by William Laird Clowes, who invited Roosevelt to write the segment on the War of 1812. Brander Matthews, Columbia professor and president of the Modern Language Association in 1910, thought the book that ranked in the first class was Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, a long history written devotedly in the tradition of Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. The distinctive sound of Theodore Roosevelt’s political voice has influenced all sorts of writers, most especially Ernest Hemingway, whose ethos echoes The Strenuous Life. It is not too much to say that the western novel grew out of Theodore Roosevelt’s narrative sketches of ranch life and game hunting: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). Wesleyan University professor Richard Slotkin notes that Roosevelt, a founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, was the author of the frontier West’s “myth of origin.”23 His books, together with the work of the artist Frederic Remington and Owen Wister’s seminal western novel The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), fashioned the myth of the American West in the 1880s for readers across the nation and the world. Remington’s popular illustrations appeared in several of Roosevelt’s own books, and Wister, who was Roosevelt’s buddy from Harvard, dedicated the novel to him. Later in his writing career, Roosevelt’s African Game Trails (1910) and Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914) became models of how to tell expedition stories on a grand scale.
This book follows the arc and struggles of Roosevelt’s literary career. Early in life, he emulated the calm prose of a scientific naturalist; later he sought the stern objectivity of a historian; and after taking public office, he amplified and simplified his voice, believing that what people want from politicians are platitudes and iterations. All the time, in the background of his public persona, Theodore Roosevelt felt more at home in nature, travel, and adventure writing, an inclination that garnered more readers, then and now. As we count them, he wrote forty-two books and cowrote another six books. By any measure, he was a prolific writer, one who strove to push his ideas into imaginative prose, and we recognize, even in the shadow of his political life, a distinctive “American-American” voice.