Morris’ title refers to a comment from Henry James that fairly summed up his autocratic style of leadership as he tore through opposition-foreign and domestic-to achieve what he considered the only moral outcomes. As a politician and as a private person, the man was nervy. What comes across with striking clarity in this biography are two things: Roosevelt’s vigor and his endless supply of moral confidence. And yet he could not shake his disdain for an institution that despite its resources had produced only one of the three men most prominent in American colonialism-Secretary of War (later State) Elihu Root, Philippines Governor (later President) William Howard Taft and Governor of Cuba Gen.
Roosevelt’s senior thesis at Harvard had grown within a couple years of his graduation into a full-scale volume of naval history that remains today the definitive work in its field. It is a great irony that one of the United States’ most erudite presidents was also one of the least suited for the patient, critical style of university life. The previous installment of Morris’ Roosevelt trilogy, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980.
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 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. Eliot, Class of 1853, go wide by slamming a large pistol onto a guest room dresser and declaring his habit of packing heat in public places, including, it seems, Harvard’s normally gun-free commencement platform. 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 day, Roosevelt had made the eyes of Harvard President Charles W. 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.
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.
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