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

Worth a Second Look

Sarah Watts, in Rough Rider in the White House, takes us on what she calls "a wild ride" (p. ix) through Theodore Roosevelt's life and thought, applying the latest psychological, social, and cultural theories about the United States in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to TR in the course of this journey. Basically, it is Watts's thesis that TR had a "dark " and " irrational" (p. 1) side. "This book tells the story of how Roosevelt's manly self struggled with doubt, anxiety, and loathing, and with a fearful child within" (p. 4), she writes.

Watts has enough material and insight to justify an essay, but not enough to sustain 241 pages of text. The book is repetitious, prolix, and larded with extraneous and tangential material. Moreover, many of her assertions are questionable, and some are just plain silly.

Twice we are told the same story about TR's daughter Alice. Early on in the book, Watts relates: "When Roosevelt's young teenage daughter Alice, who knew just how to tweak her father's fears, declared she was going to give birth to a monkey, the outlandish claim left him livid with anger since it raised the twin specters of bestial miscegenation and biological atavism in his immediate family" (p. 4). Then, down the road, we read this story about Alice again, but Alice is younger: "At age nine, she knew how to launch threats that aroused his sexual prejudices and fears with amazing accuracy. She announced that she no longer wished to be a girl and that she had decided to wear pants, bob her hair, and give birth to a monkey. . . . Her announcement that she would give birth to a monkey evoked in Roosevelt three of his era's most fundamental fears: the blurring of distinctions between humans and animals; Negroes, who were likened to apes; and child sexuality. Wittingly or unwittingly, Alice lent racial and bestial overtones to her father's fears of uncontrolled female sexuality, for, in order to bear a monkey child, Alice must presumably find a simian father " (p. 89).

These passages show an astonishing lack of either a sense of humor or understanding of children. Was Alice nine or a teenager? Was TR, the father of six lively children, really "livid with anger" or tortured by "fundamental fears" by the fantasies of one of his kids? Did Roosevelt, a respected field naturalist, actually worry about having a monkey for a son-in-law? Watts does not help the reader answer such obvious questions, because she gives no source or sources in her copious notes for this story or Roosevelt's reactions.

With all the space Watts devotes to discussing sex and gender, she is curiously silent about Roosevelt's relationship with his First Lady, Edith Kermit Roosevelt (a single reference to TR's wife of over thirty years is cited in the index), and to several key women advisors; and we learn little about his battles for women's suffrage and women in the labor movement. Nor does Watts come to terms with the fact that TR was very much a hero to the women as well as the men of his era.

Despite the title, Rough Rider in the White House has little to say about the military as such or the presidency. According to Watts, the military is TR's way for men to deal with problems of masculinity, as was also true of hunting. These claims are divorced from their cultural and historical contexts. The reader, for instance, might suppose from what Watts says that TR as president would build up the Army, which he did not, or that the United States had a large military...