But unlike other biographers, Edmund Morris does not treat TR mainly as a politician. Then follows a detailed account of TR’s reluctant yet almost successful campaign for the White House in 1912. (TR’s fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt acknowledged that debt, adding that the Colonel “was the greatest man I ever knew.”) By the end of the summer, in his famous “New Nationalism” speech, he was the guiding spirit of the Progressive movement, which inspired much of the social agenda of the future New Deal.
Some readers will be repulsed by TR’s bloodlust, which this book does not prettify, yet there can be no denying that the Colonel passionately loved and understood every living thing that came his way: The text is rich in quotations from his marvelous nature writing.Īlthough TR intended to remain out of politics when he returned home in 1910, a fateful decision that spring drew him back into public life. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine?Ĭolonel Roosevelt begins with a prologue recounting what TR called his “journey into the Pleistocene”-a yearlong safari through East Africa, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian. Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, it recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history. This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, is itself the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Had he not died in 1919, at the early age of sixty, he would unquestionably have been reelected to a third term in the White House and completed the work he began in 1901 of establishing the United States as a model democracy, militarily strong and socially just. Had TR won his historic “Bull Moose” campaign in 1912 (when he outpolled the sitting president, William Howard Taft), he might have averted World War I, so great was his international influence. “If I see another king,” he joked, “I think I shall bite him.” Crowned heads vied to put him up in their palaces. When he toured Europe in 1910 as plain “Colonel Roosevelt,” he was hailed as the most famous man in the world. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office.
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