Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics by Michael Wolraich (review)

Readers have long trusted the adage of not judging a book by its cover, but there are also times when one can be deceived by a work’s title. At first glance, Michael Wolraich’s Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics, gives the impression that the work centers on the reform efforts of the former President, but the real star (and for Wolraich the unabashed hero) of the book is Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Unreasonable Men traces the evolution of the Progressive movement and the concomitant civil war within the Republican Party from Roosevelt’s presidency through the election of 1912. In addition to La Follette and Roosevelt, former Presidents William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson and perpetual presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan feature prominently in a work that often reads as a series of case studies of the politicians who dominated national politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Unreasonable Men consists of a series of vignettes or historical snapshots spanning from the state capitol in Madison to the Republican and Progressive party conventions in Chicago to Wall Street and the White House. Wolraich sets a scene in a particular place and time and deftly describes the actions of the main characters, but he does not linger long before moving on to the next scene in his story. This staccato effect makes for quick reading, but the emphasis on narrative comes at the expense of analysis. More specifically, one of the glaring shortcomings of this work is that it fails to provide the context for the Progressive reform movement that the author identifies as originating in the West and Midwest. Wolraich cites “the western states’ unrest” (69), “the tensions that had been brewing in the West” (105), and “the great wave of reform that was sweeping out of the West” (180), but he never explains the wellspring of this anger and why it was centered in the West. Furthermore, he never defines what the “West” encompasses: the Midwest, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains or all three?

It seems that in his enthusiasm to describe the Progressive wave that swept over the nation by the Fall of 1912, Wolraich didn’t want to pause and provide his readers with an explanation of this phenomenon. Because the political goals of Progressivism are so clearly admirable and self-evident to him, he seems to have given little thought as to why the Midwest gave birth to the movement. Iowa, for example, saw “shifting political conditions” (50), “had turned radical” (66), and in 1906 was home to a “Republican feud” (76), yet all three of these statements are made without context or elaboration. Without this understanding, readers cannot fully comprehend why Wolraich refers to Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich’s 1910 tour of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin as a foray “deep into enemy territory” (193) or why Roosevelt’s speaking tour in advance of that year’s mid-term elections focused on the West. Why did the challenge to the eastern, conservative “standpatters” of the GOP come from the midwestern, insurgent Progressives? This question lingers throughout Unreasonable Men and that Wolraich leaves it mostly unanswered will frustrate readers to the end.

While Wolraich may have given Roosevelt top billing in the book’s title, he clearly did not give the Rough Rider his heart. His sympathies clearly lie with La Follette, whom he portrays as the original Progressive reformer, while Roosevelt, despite his Progressive call to arms with his Osawatomie, Kansas speech of 1910, remains a hedger, a cautious compromiser, an opportunist, and a latecomer to the cause of sweeping reform. This characterization of Roosevelt’s relationship with Progressivism has some validity, but Wolraich does a disservice to Roosevelt’s reputation when he claims that he and his friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts “condescended to dirty themselves in the vulgar business...