TR's Personal Life:
Teddy strikes me as a man who grew up fundamentally insecure about his masculinity. He spends his youth looking up to his father, Thee, who is an early devotee of the Victorian ideal of "Muscular Christianity," the idea that it's virtuous to be a strong and vigorous man. As such, Thee is tormented his whole life by his failure to fight in the Civil War (though he does give massive support to the troops) as well as the fact that he was able to pay poorer men to be his substitutes. The relationship with his father is basically one of living to serve and even though Teddy was a sickly boy who couldn't keep up with the others in physical activities, he was the smartest and most pious. When his father died while he was at college (Harvard), he was crushed.
Teddy spent the first 15 years or so of his life as a complete weakling (his word not mine) and was regularly beaten up by other boys and his father even told him that his sickness was proof of sin. He never drank until his father died and even though he claimed that he beat his asthma with vigorous exercise, this is bullshit. He lived with it his whole life as well as other health problems, though I have a lot of respect for how he just kept on keeping on.
Otherwise, he strikes me as selfish in many ways. When he got into a fight with his future-wife, he shot a dog that barked at him as he galloped home. When he was married to his wife Edith, he regularly abandoned her to go out west, or to Africa, or Brazil, or elsewhere to camp and hunt and collect specimens for scientific research. He did so many dangerous things that I feel like are really selfish in that he would deprive his family of a son, brother, father, husband, etc. When his wife saw him thrown off a horse (which he said was nothing) she had a miscarriage. He loved his wife and sons but he encouraged his sons to all go off and fight in World War One, and his youngest, Quentin, was killed in action. He regretted this later on, but beforehand he said something to my recollection like, "I'd like to see the five of you come back losing 3 arms and 2 legs between you." I would dismiss it as a joke if this wasn't the man's entire life philosophy.
In sum, his personal life is vigorous and brave and admirable in many ways, but he's also a selfish and insecure dude.
TR's Political Life
I really enjoyed reading about Teddy's transformation politically. He started out in the 1880's or so as a young man (early 20's, wow!) in the New York State Assembly where he was a wealthy, conservative Republican. By the end of his life he was forced out of the Republican party and was a radical progressive fighting hard for the power of government to do good.
One thing that doesn't get enough credit is the role of women in aiding his career. His sisters, Bamie and Corinne, and his wife, Edith, dedicated themselves fully to making him succeed just as much as he did, if not more, and he would have never reached the heights he did without them. He was also integral in the women's movements of the time (Suffrage, Temperance, etc.) and advocated public whipping for wife beaters. Women played a much bigger role in this story than I expected.
The stuff about his political life is overwhelming in detail and is incredibly interesting, but the author, Kathleen Dalton summarized it very well in the epilogue:
- "Not a picture-perfect hero... He represents America's aggressiveness as well as its profoundly democratic spirit. Most of all, his life proved the malleability and importance of character and the need for the individual to feel an obligation to the community. Economic justice was his final ideal for America. In his maturity he thought the United States would be a less 'backward' and more democratic country if it equalized wealth and tamed its corporations. People came first, property second. Theodore Roosevelt's life, then, stands as prophecy unheard, yet even prophets speaking in the wilderness can be resurrected."Emphasis mine.
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