However, as many previously referenced sources—and those to follow—attest, the dynamic TR was not temperamentally attuned to languish in any position: six months and ten days into his term, McKinley assassin Leon Czolgosz’s bullet would propel “Theodore Rex,” as Morris’s unequaled study designates him, into the presidency. Like Richard II’s metaphorical well buckets, Rauchway’s out-of-print treatise (Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America) scrupulously examines the sociocultural theatricalities incident to McKinley’s fall and TR’s ascendancy. In 1912, after having left the presidency three and a half years earlier, ironically, a former NY saloonkeeper, John Schrank, attempted to assassinate TR. In the meantime, for TR, the youngest and also the first modern president, the years of his political preparation abruptly concluded. Controversially, the “advent of Roosevelt,” as Henry Adams would phrase it, would energetically propel the United States onto the world stage as an emerging superpower. Within the context of a Rooseveltian imperium, Howard Beale’s collection of essays (Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power) addresses the twenty-sixth president’s hemispheric enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine and the international balance of power. From his perspective as associate editor of TR’s letters, Professor John Morton Blum (The Republican Roosevelt) would generate a discerning interpretation of Roosevelt qua politician. This very important book written—as the American Historical Review trumpets—”with learning, sympathy, understanding, and humor,” demonstrates TR’s masterful manipulation of Congress and his self-exploitation of world events. On both accounts, Michael J. Crawford’s intriguing The World Cruise of the Great White Fleet illustrates such mastery and TR’s “big stick” diplomacy. TR, who, ironically, reintroduced the bigger twenty-four-inch police “Billy” club, would certainly have agreed with any nominal “big stick” deterrence such as that articulated by one of his former police sergeants: “There’s more religion in the end of a nightstick than in any sermon.” Within the compass of the western hemisphere, that deterrence would inform the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which TR considered a “cardinal feature of American foreign policy.” In Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream, Gregg Jones peers into the souls of America and its president, whose imperialistic dreams—he and others contend—bedraggled the country’s honor. Correspondingly, revisionist historian Frederick W. Marks’s cogently argued study (Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt) posits a casuistic subversion of the velvet “moral quotient” implicit in TR’s foreign policy by the iron of U. S. national interest. To the ethical conundrum “to what degree were diehard nationalist Roosevelt’s public actions motived by a personal conception of morality?” Marks responds that historians, perhaps with worshipful reluctance to rap a demigod on the knuckles, deprecate Roosevelt the moralist in favor of Roosevelt the warrior.
Henry Adams once twitted that TR reveled in “‘at least one fight a week’ during his presidency.” Inarguably, domestic controversies—ranging from race/immigrant relations to “in God we trust” on coins—palsied his administration. Willard B. Gatewood examines seven such controversies in Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy: Episodes of the White House. Most biographies perfunctorily profile TR’s productive and influential presidency at the acme of his political career. By critical consensus, however, presidential historian and prolific TR authority Lewis L. Gould’s updated standard The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt constitutes “essential reading.” Bookending TR’s presidency with complementary accounts of McKinley’s and Taft’s presidencies, Gould would sum up his presidential studies with the survey The Modern American Presidency, a period commenced by TR. Later, Gould would also pen a complete Theodore Roosevelt biography and furnish a volume for the “American Presidential Elections” series (Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics). Upheaved by domestic and international circumstances, coming-of-age America itself inaugurated a period of unprecedented transformation coincident to TR’s presidency. As with Gould’s boarder survey, Stephen R. Graubard (The Presidents: The Transformation of the American Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush) scornfully documents U.S. imperialism as exemplified by the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, a highly ideologized carry-over from the McKinley administration. Several books examine the Roosevelt administration’s attendant sociopolitical and ethnocentric controversies: McFarland’s Mark Twain and the Colonel: Samuel Clemens, Theodore Roosevelt and the Arrival of a New Century adeptly appraises the Twain-Roosevelt hate-hate relationship, which Kinzer (The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire) also studiously examines within the context of his imperialistic Philippine policy. In her darker scholarly profile of TR’s masculine polity (Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire), Wake Forest history professor Sarah Watts brilliantly “articulate[s] the shared anxieties of his generation, and provide[s] its first seemingly coherent response to the current dislocations of modern society,” which Bowdoin Professor of Social Sciences Jean Yarbaugh (Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition) assesses as a “normative analysis of TR’s political philosophy.” TR bottomed his inherent moralizing self-righteousness on national interests and would forcibly transmute it into actionable expedients, Machiavellian or otherwise, to achieve American supremacy.
On the domestic front, other controversies obtained: Gerard Helferich’s An Unlikely Trust: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Improbable Partnership That Remade American Business recalls these antagonists “tacitly cooperat[ing] on economic issues, settling a catastrophic coal-mining strike, snuffing out the Panic of 1907, and forging a modern regulatory system that let Morgan’s trusts flourish benignly.” The inimitable Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book (Leadership: In Turbulent Times) diacritically surveys TR’s controversial management associated with the anthracite coal strike, which occurred shortly after he became president and immediately after a near-fatal trolley car accident that killed “Big Bill” Craig, his Secret Service agent—the first to die in action. Even TR’s passionate conservationism (The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, by Douglas Brinkley, and the more recent The Naturalist: Theodore Roosevelt, a Lifetime of Exploration, and the Triumph of American Natural History, by Darrin Lunde) provoked heated reactions: of the Grand Canyon, he would solemnly enjoin the nation: “Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it.” Yet, his drumhead dishonorable discharge of 167 black infantrymen of the segregated Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment was perhaps his most controversial action. Even today, the August 13, 1906, Brownsville Raid most detrimentally stigmatizes TR’s reputation. Republican senator Joseph B. Foraker vehemently opposed this blatant miscarriage of justice, but it was not until 1972—based on incontrovertible research from John D. Weaver’s landmark book The Brownsville Raid—that the Army reversed the dismissals and exonerated the soldiers. This controversy is most vexing to TR partisans in that it categorically contradicts what Dorsey (We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism) calls his “broker[age] of national identity.” With the first White House dinner invitation to a black man (Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation), such brokerage began shortly after his inauguration. At double the remove of TR to the Civil War, Thomas G. Dyer investigated this profoundly disturbing phenomenon. In his illuminating treatment Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, he “clarifies many of the relevant issues by viewing Roosevelt’s racial theory as an integrated whole.” Likewise, in The Racial Attitudes of American Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt, George Sinkler offers the extensive chapter “Theodore Roosevelt and the Matter of Race: Basic Approach,” where he concludes that, on balance, TR’s “great rule of righteousness, his merit approach to race relations, allowed him to view matters of race positively and flexibly.”
On the international front, still other controversies arose particularly relative to TR’s sometimes honor-bedraggling “big stick” diplomacy (Theodore Roosevelt and World Order: Police Power in International Relations). Denigrated by opponents as imperialistic adventurism, the loci of these “police actions” comprised the newly acquired Philippines, Cuba, Venezuela, Morocco, and Panama. In the case of the latter, Carlisle (The Cowboy and the Canal: How Theodore Roosevelt Cheated Colombia, Stole Panama and Bamboozled America) reveals the unabashedly braggadocian realpolitik of TR’s “taking of the canal.” Carlisle’s revelations build on University of New Orleans historian Richard Collins’s broader contextualization and the enduring legacy of TR’s Latin American policy (Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context). Of course, any general discussion of the history of the Panama Canal must mention McCullough’s The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914, “a grand-scale expert work” (Newsweek) that unstintingly “profiles TR’s Panamanian involvement as ‘Theodore the Spinner,’ a reference to fellow imperialist Kipling’s assessment that ‘… the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.’” Although peace activists reviled TR’s balance-of-power strategy, his most celebrated international diplomatic accomplishment—one for which he garnered the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, the first by an American—was his consummate negotiation of the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War.
Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition by 
The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 by 
