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

Watts has provided a thought-provoking and innovative study of the dark side of Roosevelt's personality. While acknowledging his status as a progressive, pragmatic, disciplined member of the gentry, Watts investigates another dimension of his personality. Watts contends that dark irrational fears shaped Roosevelt's personal and political life, as well as the life of the nation. Other historians and biographers have reported Roosevelt's attraction to danger and violence, but this darker, emotional aspect of his personality had never been fully explored until now. Watts examines a wide range of primary and secondary sources to construct a psychological portrait of Roosevelt and to reveal how Roosevelt's deepest fears both reflected and shaped the politics and culture of his time.

Watts suggests that Roosevelt was driven by his own quest for masculinity, which he injected into the political life of the nation, making him the embodiment of the nation. Watts draws on psychological theories to argue that Roosevelt struggled with "doubt, anxiety, and loathing, and with a fearful child within" (4). His fears about his own fragility and cowardice drove him to participate in, and recommend, such "manly pursuits" as bodybuilding, hunting, and war. Such activities fought against weakness while channeling impulses toward violence and aggression into acceptable behaviors. As he fought the "twin demons" of weakness and beastliness, he urged the nation to fight its late nineteenth-century enemies of effeminacy, consumerism, pacifism, and eroticism (3).

Watts links Roosevelt's fears for the nation to a Victorian anthropology that envisioned human evolution as a process "fraught with the possibility of slipping backward" (5). This fear of "regression to a savage self" became a fear of lost civilization and racial identity. Roosevelt sought to produce a nation of "civilized warriors" who mastered their own passions—a "national fraternity of white men, strong and pure, immune to sexual allure, attuned to manners and social hygiene, procreative in race-improving ways, eager for suffering, and capable of astonishing violence" (8). As a "cowboy soldier," Roosevelt set an example for other men to follow. He combined strenuous activity with rigid self-discipline. Through his politics, Roosevelt encouraged men to project their fears outward onto such scapegoats as immigrants, homosexuals, pacifists, and "sissies."

Challenging the foreign-policy dichotomy of realism versus idealism, Watts argues that emotion may be as important as power and interest in shaping the nation's politics. Indeed, she states that behaviors based on "irrational and largely unconscious needs and desires" can collectively shape foreign policy (14). A case in point is Roosevelt's imperialism, in which the "weak invited domination by their very weakness" (24). Watts also demonstrates the power of emotion over domestic policy, showing how Roosevelt's fears of "race suicide" led to his fight against (and later for) women's suffrage and to his denunciation of socialism.

Though occasionally repetitive, Watts' arguments are clear, passionate, and thoroughly supported by a wide variety of historians, writers, poets, cartoonists, artists, journalists, sociologists, and psychologists of Roosevelt's era. Watts' examination of fantasy literature and art complement her analysis of Roosevelt's personal and public writings, as well as the writings of his contemporaries, family members, and friends. Watts provides a wealth of qualitative data in a fascinating book that rewards casual readers as well as scholars in a wide variety of disciplines.