Edmund Morris
Biography
Like Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt is too large and varied a figure to be easily encompassed. This is the man who, while campaigning for President against his own chosen successor, was shot in the chest and then proceeded to give his scheduled speech anyway, with the bullet still in him. This is also the man whose collected published writings ran to twenty-four volumes; who explored an uncharted river through the Amazon rain forest; who won the Nobel Peace Prize; who made American conservationism a reality . . .
It's not surprising, then, that TR couldn't be captured in a single book. Colonel Roosevelt is the third and final volume of Edmund Morris's epic biography (the first two are The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex.) The adjectives it demands run towards "magisterial," "monumental," and "definitive." It's also vivid, multifaceted, and elegantly written in a sinuously literary register.
It's not an overblown newspaper report. Morris's aim is to be judicious, rather than impartial. As a writer with some evident pride in his own authorial chops, Morris feels free to critique Roosevelt's written output. Here a speech shows "Roosevelt's contempt for legalistic justice"; there another speech has "few passages of eloquence"; the book America and the World War has "some passages of real power," but "browsers glancing through its table of contents felt that they . . . would gain little by reading further." Outside of the literary, Morris's editorial specialty is the well-honed word or phrase, as when Woodrow Wilson "flee"s the White House, or is "professedly" bedridden.
It bears emphasizing that this linguistic scalpel is deployed carefully, and is not confined either to praising or to damning TR. The opinions of Roosevelt's foes, as well as his admirers, are given thoughtful weight, and in all cases the basis for their judgment is manifest. Thus, the naturalist John Burroughs can say
Roosevelt would be a really great man if he could be shorn of that lock of his hair in which that strong dash of the bully resides.and we know exactly what he means, just as we can simultaneously appreciate the tributes of Teddy's unabashed partisans. All in all there's no reason to doubt a contemporary journalist: Roosevelt was "the most interesting American."
Ken Burns's recent documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History is a superb introduction to Rooseveltology, though of course it's much less detailed than Morris's three-volume, 2000+-page biography. For Roosevelt's adventures in South America, don't miss Candace Millard's The River of Doubt.
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