McCain as Teddy Roosevelt; Or, the Unstable Jingo Card

by Demophilus

A few years ago I was doing some work on the Progressive Era and needed to read a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. I bought Edmund Morris' Theodore Rex and Kathleen Dalton's Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, and for some reason never got around to the latter, even though I've subsequently learned that Dalton's book is considered the best one-volume biography of Roosevelt and the one taken most seriously by academic historians.

So last night I decided to pull Dalton's biography off the shelf on which it had sat collecting dust and start reading it, chiefly because of John McCain's professed idolization of TR. Now, my line of thought went, would be a good time to brush up on what I know about Roosevelt as various references may be made to him as the campaign proceeds. And it might provide me with blog fodder.

The first thing I noticed (in Dalton's introduction) was how many of Roosevelt's critics were sure he was a crazed warmonger. Mark Twain said of TR that he was "clearly insane...and insanest upon war and its supreme glories." William Jennings Bryan said TR was "a man who loves war." Historian Thomas Bailey believed Roosevelt was possessed of an "almost pathological bellicosity." Of course, we know TR, whatever his enthusiasms and personal escapades, behaved rather honorably as president and won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a peace between Russia and Japan. His critics seriously misjudged him. Indeed, from what I can tell so far, Dalton's biography admirably corrects both the caricatures of TR purveyed by his detractors as, in her felicitous phrase summarizing the slurs, an "unstable jingo" and the Roosevelt hero worship of his admirers.

Funny, then, that just today Andrew Sullivan writes, "McCain's trigger-happy temperament, shallow understanding of the complexities and passion for military force as the answer to everything is the bigger risk. He is a recipe for more, wider and far more destructive warfare." Well, it seems like McCain has more in common with TR than we might have suspected, including reckless accusations of warmongering being hurled at him. McCain certainly is a fallible candidate, and I do not mind robust criticisms of his actual policy proposals. But I'd like to see Sullivan defend the point that McCain has a "passion for military force as the answer to everything..." Everything? Really?

Comments

[The Reticulator]

I've read the Morris bio but not the Dalton one. I admire the man, Theodore Roosevelt, but not the president. If McCain thinks he's following in the footsteps of TR, that's yet another reason not to vote for him (as if I need another). But TR is an interesting enough character that I'm always willing to read another biography of him. Thanks for the mention of Dalton's book.

I do think TR should be taken off of Mount Rushmore, to be replaced with the likeness of St Ronald.

[Demophilus]

Mr. Reticulator,

Yes, a TR style president would bother me -- I won't disagree with you on that point. And yet...I think there might be something to a type of conservative reformism that, while ceding to much to the questions and problems that concern liberals, is nonetheless preferable to what a full-blown left-wing progressive would give us. And in this election, McCain as a TR-style reformer might be the best we can hope for.

[The Editor]

Military force is how McCain beat skin cancer, fights earmarks, and pleasures his millionaire wife. So he does see it is the answer to a whole lot, if not quite everything.

And I think the arguments that TR was a militant come not as much from his actions as president, which, as you say, were moderate, but his actions as assistant secretary of the navy. In particular, was the way he did everything he could to start the Spanish American War.

Also, there was the time he was a New York Assemblyman in 1884, at a time when the U.S. was dangerously close to war with Britain, and he declared “Let the fight come if it must. I don’t care whether our seacoast cities are bombarded or not; we would take Canada”. That's a little warmongery....

Oh yeah, and he killed a god damned elephant.

If those aren't the marks of a belligerent, I don't know what is.

see: www.thewashingtonpugilist.com

[A. MacGarr]

John Lukacs on T.R.'s handling of the Russo-Japanese War:

"Theodore Roosevelt, too, was statesman enough to rise above the tides of American popular sentiment. During the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and 1905, that sentiment, including much of the press, seemed to relish the stunning Japanese triumphs, 'the gallant little Jap' pummeling the Russian Bear. Yet when Roosevelt accepted the chairmanship of the peace conference at Portsmouth, the Japanese were disappointed to find that he was not inclined to give them all that they wanted. He struck a kind of balance; he understood that in view of the rising naval and colonial power of the Japanese in the western Pacific it was not in the American interest to see the Russian presence there reduced to nothing."

Doesn't sound much like McCain to me.

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