Review of Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life by Thomas Cullen Bailey and Katherine Joslin.

Theodore Roosevelt (TR), twenty-sixth president of the United States, 1901-1909, was one of the greatest characters in American history. Like the image of him chiseled into Mount Rushmore, he has been carved into the cultural landscape as well. Commonplace items, like the Teddy Bear, an sayings, like “good to the last drop” trace their origin directly to TR. In addition to being remembered as one of the best and most innovative politicians in the nation’s history, he is recognized by many Americans as a pioneering conservationist, father, war hero, peacemaker, sportsman, advocate of the strenuous life, and spokesman on varied sundry causes. Roosevelt is a well-published subject and has been the subject of many books, ranging from life-long biographies to histories of his presidency to detailed studies of such aspects as his concept of masculinity, racial views, efforts to clean up the New York City vice district, and college football regulations, just to name but a few. He was as ubiquitous in life as he is in our memory. Thanks to Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin we now have a work dedicated to TR the man of letters, probably one of the most overlooked aspects of his multi-faceted life. 

And, TR was a man of letters. He was not merely a politician who wrote, but an author who engaged in politics throughout his life. There were no ghost writers at Sagamore Hill! The two facets of TR’s life, as Bailey and Joslin demonstrate, were intertwined throughout. The young man who wrote The Naval War of 1812 (1882) supported American naval expansion. The middle-aged man who penned The Winning of the West (1889-1899) and The Rough Riders (1899) advocated for an aggressive American foreign policy that included imperial expansion abroad. The older man demanded the United States intervene in the Great War in the pages of America and the World War (1915). As there was a Roosevelt Corollary in politics, there was a Roosevelt Literary Doctrine, as he mentioned in a letter to his sister in 1896. In essence, it is that writing should be done to inspire action. 

It is odd that TR the author should have received so little attention in the last century since his passing. He penned hundreds of articles, reviews, and other shorter works, over a dozen books, in addition to the over 150,000 letters he wrote. The authors point out that many of his so-called “posterity letters” as historians have come to dub letters so obviously intended to be read by future generations, as well as their recipient, were literary products themselves. His contemporaries were more appreciative of this than subsequent generations. Within a decade of his death, his entire corpus of writings was collected into a couple of multi-volume series of “Works.” 

Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life is organized chronologically. It places his writing and reading in the context of what was happening his life that that same time. This gives it a very personable feel. One can see TR taking writing assignments simply because he needed the money. It also allows the reader to see how TR developed as a writer. He struggled early on. His biography Thomas Hart Benton (1885) is unfocused and more about the subject of manifest destiny than about the individual whose life he was ostensibly chronicling. The first two volumes of the Winning of the West were sloppy. Several reviewers, including historian Frederick Jackson Turner, called him to the carpet for misusing his primary sources. The second two volumes demonstrated marked improvement. He comes of age as an author with The Rough Riders (1899). Finally, this approach allows the authors to compare accounts TR provided in his several autobiographical accounts with what actually happened. In Through the Brazilian Wilderness (1914), for instance, TR wrote very confidently of events even as he had been delirious and unconscious. Where did he get that information from? There is no clear answer. His Autobiography (1913) is described as an apologia designed to explain and rationalize the actions of his presidency. If there is a cost to this approach it is that there is less analysis of topics that dominate current historiographical discussions of TR, such as his racism and how that affected his actions and policies.

Being a man of letters, however, is not simply about writing; it involves reading, intellectual engagement, and interaction with other authors. Bailey and Joslin amply prove the case that TR was such a man of letters. Despite the fact that TR famously read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina while in the Badlands, he did not confine himself solely to high-brow literature. In reality, he read widely and eclectically. To relax he devoured cheap detective novels, a genre not generally associated with the aristocratic TR. Non-fiction greatly interested him as well. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1889), Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power on History (1890), and Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909), to name a few, deeply impacted TR’s political philosophy. 

Roosevelt was certainly an engaged member of the community of writers. He counted Owen Wister, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams, among his closest friends. He corresponded with many more, dashing off letters of appreciation, encouragement, and sometimes criticism. During his presidency he was seen camping with John Burroughs and hiking Yosemite National Park with John Muir. Being Roosevelt, he also made his enemies. He despised Henry James for abandoning, as TR saw it, the United States for an expatriate’s life in Great Britain, and Mark Twain, whose anti-imperialism grated immensely on Roosevelt. 

As president, he certainly used the bully pulpit, as he referred to, to make pronouncements on authors and writing. Perhaps the greatest example was his vociferous attack on the “nature fakers” for writing what TR considered outlandish fictional accounts of wildlife passed on to the unsuspecting public as genuine natural history. No president had done anything like that before. He even attempted to re-write the language to make it more phonetic – or fonetic, as he would have preferred. He used his executive powers to benefit the literary community. He found civil service positions for writers he took a shine to. More broadly, he convinced Congress to re-write the copyright statutes that had been the law of the land since 1790. Congress obliged, and in the closing hours of his term, he signed the sweeping Copyright Act of 1909, something every writer in any medium should be very thankful for. 

Theodore Roosevelt: A Literary Life is an excellent work on a great man. One does not need to be fan of Roosevelt to appreciate it. Any lover of reading will enjoy its account of one of nation’s great and underappreciated authors and readers.