Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography
By . Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1919. 8vo, xx+474 pp. Illustrated. $5.00.
THIS is a ‘personal' rather than an ‘intimate’ biography, and the reader learns almost as much of Mr. Thayer’s views on recent public questions as of Roosevelt’s creed and conduct. The earlier chapters of the book are a gloss upon Roosevelt’s Autobiography, written by a college mate and a late admirer of the man and his work. The physically weak child, the home surroundings, and influence of the father, are retold, with added touches of a sister’s remembrance; the early taste for general reading and natural history, not precocious, but advanced, and resting on a good memory; the gradual gain of a vigorous body needing and craving exertion, and of an even more active brain capable of intense application; and a college experience where usual rather than unusual aptitude was shown, forming the story to the opening of Roosevelt’s political activities.
Beginning with leanings to reform and independence, he became a thorough party man, and the various steps in office, from member of the New York Assembly to President, are related in the notes of an uncompromising advocate who sees nothing to criticise except those who disagree with his view. The picture of Harvard College in the seventies, the defense of Roosevelt’s abandoning the ‘independents’ in the Blaine campaign of 1884, and an appreciation of the Winning of the West are Mr. Thayer’s; but the accounts of the Civil Service and the Police Commissioner, the Rough Rider and the Governor of New York, are Roosevelt’s, touched up by a hand which cannot bear to mar the picture of a paragon in American public life — the ‘greatest of modem democrats.’ The apologetic tone in dealing with ‘apparent ’ lapses in virtue — such as the Blaine incident, relations with Thomas Platt and wealthy malefactors — is concealed by vigorous epithets applied to critics and opponents. On questions of controversy, the writer shows no more hesitation than did his example.
It is when Mr. Thayer describes the period of the Presidency and beyond that his admiration for his subject carries him far into matters still debatable, and with an increasing fervor against those who differed in opinion from Roosevelt. The biographer of Hay shows the President taking important measures in foreign policy without the knowledge of the Secretary of State — the seizure of the Panama Canal tract and threats to the Kaiser are examples. Social conditions of unrest, the entrance of the United States as a ‘ world power,’ ready to ‘take up any burden which that distinction involved,’; the vigorous campaign for ‘righteousness’ which consolidated the money power, and led to the formation of the Progressive and the split in the Republican parties; the years before and during the war against German aggression, are interpreted by conversations with Roosevelt and interviews with his associates, giving little radically new, but all tending to show that he was the one man in the country to comprehend, and the only leader capable of handling the situation, Mr. Thayer shows the skill of a practised writer, and compresses in a paragraph what a volume could not adequately present. Pending the publication of the official biography, Mr. Thayer’s volume serves a purpose, and in no sense more than as a personal estimate of a complex character whose permanent influence it is yet too early to appraise.
W. C. F.