Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joshua Hawley is a graduate of Stanford University and the Yale Law School, and is currently judicial clerk to John G. Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States. He lives in St. Louis, MO.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Theodore Roosevelt

Yale University Press

Contents

Foreword, by David M. Kennedy..........................xiPreface................................................xvONE In the Father's House..............................1TWO A Small, Ornithological Boy........................20THREE Race and Destiny.................................32FOUR The Code of a Warrior.............................48FIVE Apostle of Expansion..............................75SIX The Fate of Coming Years...........................91SEVEN Master-Spirit....................................115EIGHT Warrior Republicanism............................138NINE The Progress of a Progressive.....................163TEN A Prophet's Return.................................190ELEVEN Battle for the Lord.............................207TWELVE The Valley of Vision............................235Epilogue...............................................260Author's Note..........................................269Notes..................................................271Index..................................................307

Chapter One

Toward morning the north wind slackened, and the dawn came milder than those before. Passengers on the ferry to Staten Island were relieved to find the bay relatively calm and the deck free of ice, though elsewhere the gale's handi-work lingered: tides in the East River, swelled to record levels by the October wind, remained high. Still, the morning of the twenty-seventh arrived as a reprieve, a temperate pause before the onset of a bitter season. The year was 1858. In a stately brownstone on East Twentieth Street, a young woman heavy with child set aside her breakfast and ordered a coach. Encouraged by the break in the weather, she would spend the day about town, while she still could.

New York was not a quiet city, not in cold weather or hot or at any time of the day. Over eight hundred thousand souls jostled and traded within its boundaries. Crowded factories clattered with activity hour by hour, slowing only when the workers stumbled home late to their tenements, those twenty-five-by-seventy-foot housing blocks on the city's lower east side that a working family might share with twenty-four others. The dockyards teemed with scores of newcomers fresh from Ireland, Scandinavia, central Europe, and other far regions of the globe, while vendors, panhandlers, and pickpockets roamed the streets between City Hall Park and lower Broadway. Merchants kept their offices farther downtown, and they could sometimes be seen in favorable weather walking about Battery Park with their wives between twelve and two in the afternoon.

Once near the heart of the thirteen states, New York sat now on the country's eastern periphery, its days as the nation's capital long past. It was a world unto itself, this city, profoundly different from any other place in America. Yet for all its difference-for the soot and smog of the wage-paying industries, for the working poor jammed together in makeshift housing, for the stunning ethnic diversity-the fate of New York remained inextricably bound with that of the nation beyond its cobblestone streets. And in 1858, the future of that nation seemed uncertain indeed.

A vast frontier beckoned America in the West, but its promise deepened, rather than relieved, the country's crisis of identity. Would chattel slavery be permitted to spread into the Western territories? With that question's answer rode the fate of the Union. Two days earlier, on the evening of October 25, William H. Seward of the fledgling Republican Party warned a mass audience in Rochester that America harbored competing political systems, one based on slave labor, the other on free, and they could not survive together. Either the sugar plantations of Louisiana would be tilled by free men, Seward predicted, or the wheat fields of the North would be worked by slaves.

He was not alone in his forecast. Northern preachers, abolitionists, free labor advocates, and unionists increasingly believed slavery to be incompatible with free government and healthy capitalism, while Southern slave owners and cultural apologists cast themselves as the defenders of order, aristocracy, and other social mores that made republican government possible. The independent gentleman essential in republican theory would disappear if Northern imperialism succeeded, charged John C. Calhoun and his intellectual apostles. Worse, every city would look like New York, crawling with foreigners and wage workers and municipal corruption. Chattel slavery was a bulwark against a future of deadening, soulless industrialism. It was a shield of the South's proud past, of its schools and churches and social structure. It was a defense of republican government against mass democracy.

Though they were not yet ready to label their Northern brethren as traitors to the Constitution sunk in "erroneous religious belief," those charges leveled by the South Carolina Convention in 1860 were not far off. For their part, many Northerners-many New Yorkers-could not yet imagine a war between the states. That there would be a fight for America's future of some sort was clear to most, however, and while newsboys shouted the headlines and New Yorkers went about their daily tasks, the city, like the country, waited this day in autumn, suspended between past and future at the turn of history.

In the early afternoon Martha Bulloch Roosevelt of East Twentieth Street cut short her shopping and returned to Number 28, suddenly tired. She took a light lunch of bread and butter with ginger preserves and climbed the stairs, heavily, to her bed. An hour later she was in the throes of childbirth. With some effort servants managed eventually to locate a neighborhood physician. He came to her bedside as darkness fell, in time to deliver a son-her first. The time was 7:45 in the evening, October 27, 1858. His name would be Theodore.

If Theodore Roosevelt was, as he would later insist, a "straight New Yorker" by birth, he was first the child of another world: the house of Roosevelt. A member of the eighth generation of his family born in the United States, "Teedie" was named for his father, Theodore Roosevelt, Senior. As the choice suggested, the boy was expected from the beginning to follow his namesake in the Roosevelt world. This was a place of aristocratic leisure and high-minded charity, of uptown homes and European holidays, and of fervent, practiced religious devotion. Amid this world Teedie learned to walk and speak and read; he gained his first lessons in life and acquired the intellectual trappings that defined his later education and public career. "Most American boys of my age," Roosevelt said in retrospect, "were taught both by their surroundings and by their studies." This was especially true for him.

By early twenty-first century standards, his education was unconventional, and even in his day, even among his class, somewhat unusual. Before the age of thirteen, Teedie received no formal education. He never attended primary or secondary school. Instead, his instructors were his parents, his books, his travels and cultural milieu, and, after his thirteenth birthday, a series of private tutors handpicked by his father. With them he studied English, French, German, Latin, and some Greek. He read a bit of European history and mathematics, and enough science to whet a lifelong appetite. But his more important intellectual acquisitions were the core life convictions that he would use to arrange all his other knowledge. In this sense, his early lessons on manhood and God, science, race, and history were among his most significant. Roosevelt's instruction in these subjects in the years preceding his undergraduate career was neither discrete nor chronological. The areas of study overlapped and influenced one another; the lessons were given in various ways by multiple sources over Roosevelt's childhood and youth. But he learned these lessons well. Their echo could be heard years later in the railroad rate debate of 1905 and the Bull Moose crusade of 1912, in his public sermons and his private letters.

His upbringing made virility and faith, science and race, Roosevelt's enduring preoccupations, as they were his family's and his father's. The elder Theodore embraced a fervent Christianity of uncompromising piety and righteous works but worried that his children would be too weak to follow his way. As Teedie grew, the country's cultural consensus was fraying, at least among the Northeastern elite. Torn by religious heterodoxy, by growing popular materialism and the utilitarian philosophical systems that justified it, by ethnic diversity and the revolution in the biological sciences, the amalgam of Protestant Christianity, late Enlightenment rationalism, and republican political theory that served as America's public philosophy was coming apart. Philosophers, politicians, and scientists alike searched for replacements of one sort or another. They struggled to reconcile an older American concern with civic virtue, individualism, and self-government with a new pluralistic, scientific, industrialized America. They sought to preserve biblical mores without biblical religion. Roosevelt lived amid this great cultural conversation. He imbibed its terms and learned its cadences. Like those ideas he found and embraced in youth, as a man he too would straddle old and new. He would speak of faith, but he believed in a salvation found only on earth. He would employ the words of republican liberalism, but in the phrasing of a racialist. He talked as a conservative, but harbored the political ambitions of a radical. This assortment of paradoxes and projects Roosevelt shared with a number of other Americans from backgrounds similar to his, and he would lead them, these progressives, for a time. Their ideas-his ideas-would help make modern America and set the trajectory of twentieth century American politics, if perhaps in ways he did not quite expect. All of these consequences were products in one way or another of Roosevelt's education. It may have been unconventional, but it made the deepest of marks.

When he was small, still in dresses and his blond hair in bangs, Teedie learned to carry his father's Scriptures to him, in the evening, grasping the volume with his small hands. Theodore and his eldest son shared this ritual, and these moments, alone-Martha Roosevelt would not learn of this routine until war had taken her husband from the house and Teedie told the story, longing to see him. Twenty-seven years old when his first boy was born, the elder Theodore ever afterward strode across the landscape of his son's memory in the vigor of his early manhood, before the onset of the cancer that struck him down in middle age. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, handsome and gregarious, with a special gift for inspiring deep personal admiration, even awe. "My father," Roosevelt later attested, "was the best man I ever knew." He was also the man Teedie wanted most to please. "I am sure there is no one," he wrote his namesake from Harvard, "who has a Father who is also his best and most intimate friend.... I shall do my best to deserve your trust."

Teedie had picked a daunting idol to emulate. His father was the fifth son of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, the latest in a long line of determined, resourceful, prosperous Roosevelt men. The family had come to Manhattan when it was still called New Amsterdam, and though they infrequently ventured beyond its bounds, they made quite a name for themselves there. The Roosevelts had been bank presidents, engineers, state senators. Cornelius's brother James had served in the United States Congress and had been a member of the New York Board of Aldermen, a leader of the New York City faction in the state legislature, a Justice of the State Supreme Court, an ex-officio Judge of the State Court of Appeals, and a United States district attorney for the Southern District of New York. Yet even in the company of such distinguished forebears, Theodore Roosevelt, Senior, was a class to himself.

To his radiant, forceful personality Theodore added physical vigor and a natural athleticism: he was given to long horse rides in Central Park and to driving his four-in-hand trap at an adventurous pace through the streets of New York. His physical stamina was legendary. His older daughter remembered outings with her father so exhausting she would have cried had she not been loath to disappoint him. Then there was the way he bore the Roosevelt legacy, wielding it with such lan. The house on East Twentieth Street where Teedie entered the world had been a gift to Theodore from his father. In a display of generous largesse, C.V.S. Roosevelt had given Theodore's brother, Robert, the house next door. The front was brownstone rather than red brick, in keeping with the upper crust vogue of the 1850s. And while the living space was relatively modest, the extensive library, black haircloth upholstery, French Empire furniture, and coterie of servants betrayed Theodore's social standing: Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt was an exceptionally wealthy man, the Roosevelt family a multigeneration New York fixture, and Theodore himself a veritable prince of Manhattan.

He nominally found employment with his older brother James-there were five brothers in all-at the family's hardware business turned importing firm, Roosevelt & Son. But Theodore's most time-consuming activity was his philanthropy. The New York Newsboys' Lodging House, Miss Sattery's Night School for Little Italians, the Children's Aid Society, the New York Orthopedic Hospital, the Museum of Natural History, and the Sunday school program at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church all benefited from the copious attention, personal and financial, of Theodore Roosevelt. He had a particular way with children. The urchin, orphan newsboys, who could not have been more different from the heir to the Roosevelt fortune, thrilled to see him and could listen to his stories for hours. He helped find homes-and a new life-for many of them in the American West. He cut a striking figure, this great, bearded lion of a man, galloping through Central Park or dancing with his daughter in tailored evening attire at the Cotillion Club. He was perhaps the proudest-certainly the most inspiring-son of a storied family.

Theodore was not one to dispirit his own family with constant demands or unrealistic expectations. Nevertheless, the standard set by his example was high, and he made few if any efforts to ease the pressure. If being a Roosevelt came naturally to him, it was not, for all that, such an easy thing to be. For Teedie, the famous stamina that undergirded all his father's activities and enabled his remarkable works was particularly intimidating. The younger Roosevelt was a notoriously sickly child, plagued by asthma, poor eyesight, recurring headaches, diarrhea, fevers, and bad dreams, among other things. The man on horseback who carried all the city on his shoulders was a man Teedie could hardly hope to become. Yearn as he might to please his father and join him in his world, the path to Roosevelt manhood was closed to Teedie so long as physical fitness was the entrance fee.

The asthma was the worst of it. Teedie suffered his first attack in June of 1862 at three years old, while his father was away. He would battle the affliction the rest of his life. Once, while vacationing in Europe with his parents and siblings, his breathing became so labored nurses rubbed his chest until he coughed blood. Somewhat less severe but no less dismaying asthmatic fits regularly occasioned hurried trips out of the city and to the New York countryside or, better still, to the sea. The affliction disrupted family travel, ruined holidays, and largely prevented Teedie from attending school. Theodore thought perhaps a total change of climate would help his son and, partly for this reason, packed the family off to Europe for an extended vacation in 1869, six months after Teedie's eleventh birthday. Experience quickly exploded his theory. "On Saturday was exactly the fortnight since we reached Venice. These entire two weeks he has had nothing but diarrhea and threats of asthma," Martha Roosevelt wrote a friend from Italy. "[W]hat it is that keeps up the attacks is a mystery." Then, too, from the time he could toddle, Roosevelt had been thin and small for his age. While little brother Elliott grew tall and muscular, Teedie was still losing fistfights to younger boys at age fourteen.

Not surprisingly, Teedie evinced an early and lasting preoccupation with physical strength and prowess, apparent even before his adolescence. The journal the junior Roosevelt kept on his yearlong tour of the European continent from 1869 to 1870, among his earliest literary productions, makes vivid and repeated references to his conquests in war games and other physical contests. His playmates would be "forced to receive me as an honored soldier," after his victory in a romp of military make-believe, Teedie insisted to his diary while in Rome in January of 1870. February found Teedie reading a history of the Greek empire and directing imaginary imperial conquests in the parks of the Italian capital. The family left Rome in March, but Teedie's fascination with soldiers and conquest, military campaigns and other daring exploits involving physical strength, remained as intense as it had been throughout the trip.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Theodore Rooseveltby Joshua David Hawley Copyright © 2008 by Yale University . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.