Word: rooseveltism
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Earnestness grows tiresome fast, however, and it is a strength of both the biographer and his subject that it is leavened with snapshots of Roosevelt’s extraordinary energy and curiosity. At various points in the narrative we are informed that Roosevelt was studying jujitsu, conducting ornithological surveys, reading unreal amounts of literature and nonfiction, steering submarines, publishing papers on natural history, setting the Guiness record for shaking hands and killing bears—all while in office. When he invited foreign emissaries for weekend jaunts, he advised them to wear clothes they didn’t care about...
...Ronald Reagan. The two presidents have much in common and are still very different: both had tremendous charisma and popularity—enough to merit personal biographies as much as political ones. Both presidents, as Morris’ title suggests, secretly wished to rule their country like kings. But Roosevelt has the edge on Reagan as a thinker and scholar, and unlike Reagan (who had such the soul of a performer that Morris himself felt it appropriate to make things up in his biography), Roosevelt spoke with nothing but guileless sincerity...
...criticized as a presidential hagiography. It is a portrait of a man of few obvious personal faults, and his political ones often seem irrelevant. Morris’ biography might have pointed out more prominently the ambiguous legacy of Roosevelt’s colonialism, or that it was not Roosevelt but his obesely benign successor William Howard Taft who had the most success busting trusts and regulating the robber barons. And he offers less psychologizing in this volume than in his account of Roosevelt’s early years; there is little talk, for instance, of Roosevelt’s father...
When President Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, returned to Mother Harvard to accept an honorary doctorate in 1902, he bellowed disapproval at his alma mater. Biographer Edmund Morris tells the story with typically vivid prose: “Harvard, to Theodore, was a temple defiled by mugwumps, who congregated here to exchange the dull coins of anti-imperialism. Roosevelt launched into a stentorian defense of his island administrations and the public servants who sacrificed their careers to help ‘weaker friends along the stony and difficult path of self-government.’” Earlier that...
...scene is a representative one in the political life of a man whose energy, earnestness and sheer charisma drove those who met him to awe. Morris’ new biography, Theodore Rex, covers in dramatic detail the Roosevelt administrations (1901-9) and, more importantly, their leader, whom more than one commentator characterized as the supreme political personality of his time. The previous installment of Morris’ Roosevelt trilogy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer Prize...