"Teedy" Roosevelt was born in 1858 on Manhattan Island to Theodore ("Thee") and Mittie (nee Bulloch) Roosevelt and grew up a sickly, timid child with few prospects for any physical accomplishments. His extended family was irreparably split by the Civil War - Mittie was a Georgia Native, and Thee reluctantly paid a substitute rather than fight his wife's family - and one of Theodore's clearest childhood memories was watching Lincoln's funeral procession from his parents' apartment on 5th avenue. His family's summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, called Tranquility, gave birth to TR's love for nature, and he spent most of his young life believing that he would one day become a biologist.
While his appetite for learning grew into a life-long love affair with literature of any kind (his is purported to have read nearly three hundred books a year), he was threatened with near invalidity by his severe asthma, for which the accepted treatment of the time was near invalidity: little physical exertion of any kind. Perhaps the most consequential conversation of Theodore's early life came when his father bucked contemporary medical consensus and gave him a blunt assessment of his physical prospects: "You have the mind, but you haven't the body. You must make your body." Teedy's relentless exercise regimen and overall constancy of physical and mental activity, which he called "The Strenuous Life," did in fact defeat his asthma "make his body," as his college boxing career can attest to.
Roosevelt's outsized personality characterized his Harvard days: he was known to sprint across campus and frustrate his professors with lectures of his own during classes, but eventually won the grudging respect of his classmates. During his time at Harvard, Theodore met Alice Hathaway Lee and relentlessly courted her in a way that was customary in their day, but would likely make modern readers squirm (Teddy was not one to take "no" for an answer). His advances were eventually rewarded and they were married. Theodore tragically lost both Alice and his mother within hours of one another in 1884, a loss from which Theodore never fully recovered. He named the baby girl Alice, but could only rarely bring himself to say her name from the pain his wife's memory brought him.
Roosevelt eventually sought comfort in the bleak landscape of North Dakota in an area that is now a national park named after him. Though his ranching business venture failed, Theodore gradually won the respect of more experienced ranchers much the same way he had in college: through a "strenuous life" that few could match. Edith Carow, Theodore's childhood friend, would become his second wife shortly afterward, and though Edith probably was intellectually Theodore's equal, she would content herself in her children and domestic life throughout their marriage.
On domestic issues, Roosevelt took his cue from Thee and lived out the "Nobless Oblige" ideals of public service on the part of those who had much. His early public career saw him rise to become a member of the New York state assembly, New York Police Commissioner and then United States Civil Service Commissioner.
He was an idealistic man living in decidedly unidealistic times - graft, nepotism and an overall resignation on the part of civil servants to the pressures of unjust dealings with the public was threatening to destroy common Americans' relationship with their government.
It was, However, a ripe opportunity for the ambitious Roosevelt, and his famous late-night haunts of New York alleyways in search of corrupt policemen rather than criminals reflects high standards and commitment to honest government that were both tone-deaf and admirable. He was able to cut through the moral cynicism of his day using the same willpower transformed his feeble body and won the love of his first wife. Bram Stoker expected Teddy would be president because he was a man "you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy."
Nobless Oblige, of course, implies a power-dominance relationship that both modern and past Americans find distasteful. He appealed to Americans from all walks of life, but Roosevelt held a deep conviction that he and his family belonged at the top of the socioeconomic food chain, and that his duty did not extend to actions that threatened that position. In tours of New York tenements led by his friend and famous photojournalist Jacob Riis, Roosevelt felt that while much could be done to help close the economic gap between slum-dwellers and his own class, the issue stemmed primarily from inferior breeding and racial inferiority.
Roosevelt's foreign policy began when he led an eclectic group of hand-picked soldiers during the Spanish-American War, earning himself and his "Rough Riders" fame in a foolish but successful charge up San Juan Hill. His account of the Rough Rider's exploits was so centered around himself that humorist Finley Peter Dunne famously quipped that instead of "The Rough Riders", a more appropriate title for the book would have been "Alone in Cuba."
While president, his approach to relations with our southern neighbors followed a similarly self-centered, paternalistic pattern. In Central America, Teddy was determined to "speak softly and carry a big stick," which often entailed treading on the sovereignty of other nations in order to promote America's interests in the region. In Panama, TR instigated a revolution in which pro-American freedom fighters toppled the established regime, allowing America sovereign control over the canal zone both during its construction and a future 63 years until it was returned to Panama in 1977. In his 1904 Corollary to the Monroe doctrine, Roosevelt sought to esablish America as the only nation capable of weilding the "big stick" that was needed to fend off European imperialist interest in South America and the Caribbean.
In many ways, Roosevelt's foreign policy fits into the turn-of-the-century Anglo-American global perspective. TR, in short, considered the "White Man's Burden" an indispensable part of the "Strenuous Life." I find in his sentiments a genuine concern for the well-being for humans, but comparatively little regard for human rights. A more cynical commentator might assert that the high-mindedness of TR's goals in Latin America were a thin veil for economic imperialism, but I would say that is unlikely. Based on his temperament, upbringing and political actions, I believe that Roosevelt genuinely felt that the imposition of Anglo-American values would benefit Central Americans.
To be sure, his vision was broad, but his methods were narrow, and his ability to be influenced by non-like minded people ensured that they remained narrow. Much in the same way that he felt warfare was essential to national vitality, so did he feel about American expansionism. Without new lands in his beloved Western US to conquer, hearts and minds abroad would have to become the new Frontier of Americanism, and Theodore Roosevelt, ever the student of history, saw himself as our Julius Caesar, with the people of Central America playing the part of the unfortunate Gauls.
The onward march of civilization and the subsequent destruction of traditional cultures has created a rift between the West and its former imperial holdings, as well as a rarely productive discussion within the Imperial powers themselves about how to deal with their complicated legacy. Perhaps the only president whose administration caused more damage to our relationship with Central America is James K. Polk, whose role in bringing about the Mexican-American War gained us the Southwest and the everlasting suspicion of Mexico.
TR embodies paternalistic Western Culture: confident, outward-looking, relentless, and often tone-deaf. Few can reasonably defend his forays into the affairs of other nations. While I believe TR himself would honestly say that he did not wish it to be so, his foreign legacy is one of imperial exploitation and economic subjugation. Our comparatively distant relations with our southern neighbors can reasonably be said to have their roots in TR's presidency. It must be said, however, that scorn for his clumsy foreign policy and off-putting domestic motivations must be tempered by his "Strenuous Life" ideals and outward-looking nature that I believe are at the heart of the American Character in the 20th Century.
Even his views on the beneficial aspects of war on the national spirit have their merit, not inasmuch as they are a fact, but in that they describe the way that crisis and struggle can act as a needed bonding agent for the modern nation-state. Much can be said by psychologists about the affect that his father's decision to forego military service had on Theodore. Had come of age twenty or forty years later, we might think of Theodore Roosevelt as one of America's great war heroes, living out the vocation in which he took the most pride.
He is a complicated person, as we all are, who strove to be the first true American Renaissance man, and few can deny that he at least comes close. Perhaps Teedy's legacy is represented best by his beloved National Parks, which he rightly felt were a tremendous gift that should be preserved for Americans regardless of background, but that should be under the care of enlightened (and preferably white) people, and by no means the property of the natives, whose culture and ancestral beliefs were largely swept away by the the combined weight of Theodore Roosevelt's personality and his country's cultural biases.
