On January 6, 1919, Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep of an embolism. The next day’s New York Times front page blared: “Theodore Roosevelt Dies Suddenly at Oyster Bay Home; Nation Shocked, Pays Tribute to Former President.” After his death, Morris noted that the colonel’s legions of supporters “resorted to levels of hyperbole not heard since the assassination of Lincoln.” President, Noble Prize and posthumous Medal of Honor winner, man of letters, TR both constructed and burnished an insuperable legacy while alive. When dead, his reassessment began and with it—as Michael Cullinane’s new book comprehensively illustrates—the erratic vicissitudes accorded his reputation. In examining the idiosyncrasies of public memory, Cullinane furnishes “a compelling perspective on the last century of U.S. history as seen through the myriad interpretations of one of its most famous and indefatigable icons” (according to the publisher’s website). Quasi-psychohistorical presidential ranking studies invariably accord TR’s extraversion pride of place over FDR and JFK (see Bailey, Eland, Faber, Maranell; Murray; Ridings; Rubenzer; Schlesinger; Simon; Simonton; and, Valenty). Many of these assessments are forthright rebuttals of earlier assessments, but that does not obviate their importance within the compass of public memory. Tangentially, but no less interestingly, twenty-first-century psychologists Kashdan and Biswas-Diener address the positive and negative implications of the “Teddy Effect” of TR’s alleged Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (The Upside of Your Dark Side).
For latter politicians, TR’s presidency illuminated Santayanan historical fall points, which America should learn not to repeat. Perhaps musing on his own motivations in the century before TR, Goethe had declared that “a man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch.” So it may be with TR’s epochal accomplishments at a critical juncture in the nation’s history. Rego’s “intellectual biography,” American Ideal: Theodore Roosevelt’s Search for American Individualism, critically contextualizes the nation’s start-of-the-century idealism by demonstrating “the power of Roosevelt’s reconciliation of individualism with collective action, and traces the consistency of TR’s thought from his early writings on history and nature to his mature statements during and after his presidency.” In his own 1900 American ideals, and other essays, social and political, TR hints at the balancing act he accorded morality and political expediency. In it and his many other political philosophizings, he reveals a perplexing bargain: “neither is it difficult to succeed, after a fashion, in active life, if one is content to disregard the considerations which bind honorable and upright men.” In his own estimation, certainly, but also in the overall estimation of the intervening century, TR’s perduring legacy dictates that he triumphed as he had in all the other public and private perplexities of his life.
