The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris

If you are tired of hearing political opponents on both sides of the aisle lambasted with the same half-dozen dismal adjectives and muddled rhetoric, it is a boon to the soul to read that Theodore Roosevelt once referred to a New York politician as an “amiable old fuzzy wuzzy with sweetbread brains” and another as “a well-meaning, pin-headed, anarchistic crank, of hirsute and slab-sided aspect.” [xxxvii, Prologue] If that doesn’t sell you on wanting to read about this larger than life, technicolor person, you haven’t cringed while listening to the news often enough.

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is the first of Edmund Morris’s fantastic three part series on the life of Theodore Roosevelt. It covers his birth, through his vice presidency to McKinley.

Roosevelt was a sickly child, constantly suffering asthma attacks. His father told him that to survive he would need to strengthen his body, and this set Roosevelt on a lifelong charge into intense physical activity. He swam in cold rivers, was in the saddle day and night on hunts out in the Dakotas, boxed, climbed trees, and challenged every physical obstacle he came across. But the headlong charge wasn’t simply physical. He did all this while reading and writing voraciously. By the time he was in his late teens, he was one of the premier ornithologists in the country. He graduated at the top of his class in Harvard. He wrote a book on naval battles that changed naval tactics worldwide. The man was incredible in his capacity.

Fortunately, Morris is skilled enough with words himself to capture Roosevelt’s vivid figure with wit and style. He doesn’t moralize over Roosevelt but presents him as he was without apology. And Roosevelt, despite trends of thought which have fallen out of style since the early 1900s—notably a glorification of war, and a colonial mindset—is revealed in his sincere, vibrant self. The only problem with Edmund Morris’s book is that it makes me ever so much more so discontent with modern political discourse.