Although disconsolate about his initial avowal to eschew a third term even though it would have only been his second elected full term, once out of office TR pursued leisure experiences just as manically as he did his professional experiences. Joseph L. Gardner (Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President) provides a workmanlike account of TR’s last ten years. However, true to his word—a hallmark of his character, TR left office and adventured to Africa where he led the Smithsonian-Roosevelt African Expedition (1909–10). Then, he traveled to Europe; and, still later after his failed 1912 reelection bid, he would venture down the perilous Amazon’s unexplored “river of doubt.” Thompson devotes a full study (Theodore Roosevelt Abroad: Nature, Empire, and the Journey of an American President) of the first two of these three odysseys, after which TR concluded that his handpicked successor and erstwhile friend, Taft, was sabotaging his legacy. Thus, having honored his pledge not to run in 1908, TR again essayed the presidency in 1912 with his hard-charging “Bull Moose” campaign, which precipitated the Gotterdammerung of the Republican Party and its standard-bearer, Taft.
In the very recent Roosevelt’s Revolt: The 1912 Republican Convention and the Launch of the Bull Moose Party, John Skipper examines the 1912 Chicago GOP convention as the direct causality for formation of TR’s schematic “Bull Moose” party. The watershed 1912 presidential election witnessed signal changes in American politics in which stolid conservatism confronted irrepressible Progressivism. As a result, the election has received commensurate scrutiny by scholars: Michael Wolraich (Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics) analytically elucidates the unreasonableness of all four candidates. While self-righteously tub-thumping that he stood at Armageddon and fought for the Lord (Bull Moose on the Stump: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt), TR smeared Taft as the acme of “reaction and political crookedness.” Less analytical, but no less authoritative, Broderick’s Progressivism at Risk: Electing a President in 1912 postulates that all four candidates were progressive, but that Taft positioned himself as the alternative to Wilson and TR’s activism as well as to the intolerable socialism of long-shot Eugene Debs. Comparably, Chace’s 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—the Election That Changed the Country asserts the election perpetuated political and philosophical changes that resonate to our day: TR and Wilson’s Progressivism found later expression in FDR, Truman, and LBJ; and, Taft’s conservatism annealed into the neoconservatism of Reagan, Bush, et al. Additionally, preeminent TR scholar Gould (Four Hats in the Ring) expertly investigates the multivariate facets of the election and “combines lively anecdotes, the poetry and prose of the campaign, and insights into the clash of ideology and personality to craft a narrative that moves as fast as did the 1912 election itself.” Utilizing newly discovered sources that reveal the winner-take-all, bare-knuckles struggle in vivid relief, Cowan’s more recent Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary appropriates TR’s assertion to “let the people rule” by which he validated the precedent of a presidential primary election system.
Following his 1912 campaign debacle, TR again decamped to parts unknown: Candace Millard (River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey) painstakingly records TR’s harrowing, near-death experiences in coleading the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition to South America. This expedition would memorialize him and his son, expedition member Kermit Roosevelt, in the names of two Amazon tributaries, the Rio Roosevelt and the Rio Kermit. As he himself observed, this adventure—even at the cost of shortening his life—was his “last chance to be a boy,” a sentiment which Joseph Ornig and grandson Tweed Roosevelt reify in their My Last Chance to Be a Boy: Theodore Roosevelt’s South American Expedition of 1913–1914). Both these exciting page-turners share a generative affinity in being based on TR’s ever-present (although, in this case, termite-eaten) diaries as well as on letters and other firsthand accounts.
In his last years, TR remained a public figure, particularly in his conspicuously epic conflict against Wilson’s war shilly-shallying. John Milton Cooper (The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) candidly compares and contrasts the adversaries’ diametrically opposed political positions while postulating that both were “political architects for an entire century.” In like manner, David Pietrusza’s 2018 study (TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, the Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy) updates prior accounts of TR as an unrelentingly vocal opponent of Wilson’s pacific isolationism and, commensurately, as a vehement agitator for preparedness in the lead-up to WWI.
