Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (review)

Rough Rider in the White House is as much, perhaps more, about the hang-ups of Victorian white males at the turn of the nineteenth century than about the twenty-sixth president. It is a carefully researched and documented study of the insecure masculinity of bourgeois Americans in the imperial age. Of course the ebullient apostle of the Strenuous Life offers ideal material for a detailed psycho-historical analysis of aggressive manhood in the changing socio-cultural environment of his era; McKinley, Taft, or Wilson would perhaps inadequately serve that purpose.

The problem with Theodore Roosevelt's thinking is that he was basically two-sided, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde in racial, social, and foreign policy matters; there was in him, among various ingredients, the generous reformer, the sophisticated diplomatist, the cultured man of letters, the rough Darwinist, the harsh eugenicist, the ruthless imperialist. I believe that failure to integrate—and relativize—all of these aspects is likely to result in misinterpretations of his complex personality.

Roosevelt's years of preparation from 1881 to 1901, on which Sarah Watts's book concentrates, indeed give the best clue to the dualism of his allegedly troubled self. They coincide with the genesis of a political persona in which the private individual is often indistinguishable from the public man. A self-righteous moralist bent on implementing "realizable ideals," the New York aristocrat in search of a style, who appropriated the frontier myth to the point of impersonating it and stole the show in the Cuban campaign, achieved political success thanks to an astonishing and endearing blend of intellectualism and virility that would win over both the urban East and the agrarian West and pursued an irresistible ascent over a twenty-year career in local and national politics, from the state assembly at Albany to the presidency. The Republican vice-presidential nominee promoted out of the way but propelled into the White House by a quirk of fate accidentally became chief executive in an age of painful and worrisome cultural, social, and economic mutations and upheavals, and turned out to be just the right man in the right place: he deftly combined and successfully embodied continuity and change, tradition and modernity, thus reassuring his countrymen and preparing them for the challenges of the new century.

Sarah Watts's salutary placing of Theodore Roosevelt in context throws useful informative light on his times, on the sexual inhibitions of middle-class white males, on the sublimation of their sexuality through various forms of violence, including war, on their fears regarding their insecure and uncertain identities seemingly threatened by homosexuals, prostitutes as well as dutiful spouses, degraded pauperized immigrants, and degenerate Negroids. But Roosevelt's priggishness, his own "ambiguities" (like his feminine side), his sermonizing on race suicide, or his racial biases are in my view overemphasized, if not exaggerated, like his curbing of "the beast in him." I believe the author tends to beg the question: she legitimately yet often erroneously, I think, reads between the lines. The twenty-sixth president, however, did share the prevalent values, prejudices, anxieties, and fears of his times, and Sarah Watts has contributed with her book to a better understanding of his extraordinary personality.