Presidents come and go, but monuments are always with us. There's a reason Theodore Roosevelt is the only 20th century President whose face is carved into Mount Rushmore, the only one who could hold his own with Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson. Roosevelt not only remade America, but he also charmed the pants off everybody while he did it. And just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of his strength and intellect and charisma still lingers. How many times over the years since have Americans settled their affections on some thoughtful, vigorous man who reminded them a bit of Roosevelt? What was Ernest Hemingway if not a later edition of Teddy, without the burden of office but still equipped with T.R.'s literate machismo? And who could look at John F. Kennedy, scrimmaging with his clan at Hyannis Port, and not be reminded of another young President, tussling with his kids at Sagamore Hill? Is it any surprise when more recent Presidents try to borrow a bit of his halo? Bill Clinton had Teddy's bust on his desk. George W. Bush let it be known that he spent last Christmas vacation reading a Roosevelt biography, his second since he got to the White House.
Teddy stays with us because he seems so much like one of us. Although he was born in 1858, it's the 20th century he decidedly belongs to, the century he brought America into on his terms. Roosevelt's years in the White House were one of those hinges upon which the whole of American history sometimes turns. When he arrived there, he already understood the energies that had been building in the U.S. for decades after the Civil War: the explosion of its industrial power, the ineluctable impulse to expand. He used his presidency to discharge those energies in ways that left the U.S. profoundly changed. Again and again, he framed the questions we still ask. How much influence should the government have over the economy? How much power should the U.S. exert in the wider world? What should we do to protect the environment? The answer he liked best--More--didn't satisfy everyone. It still doesn't. But anytime we offer our own, we know that we do it with him looking over our shoulders.
Where was his impact the greatest? Start with the economy. When Roosevelt first came to the presidency, after the assassination of William McKinley, the U.S. was emerging as one of the world's wealthiest nations. It was first in the world in its output of timber, steel, coal, iron. Since 1860 the population had doubled, exports had tripled. But that bounding growth had brought with it all the upheavals of an industrial age--poverty, child labor, dreadful factory conditions. Year after year, workers faced off against bosses with their fists clenched.
Roosevelt came to believe that government had the right to moderate the excesses of free enterprise. Although his exercises of power seem modest to us now--the breakup of monopolies, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the meat-inspection and industrial-safety laws--it was a shock to the system at the time. Roosevelt--a Republican!--insisted that one of the things government must govern is the economy. Today, when the Justice Department goes after Microsoft or Enron, when the Environmental Protection Agency adjusts mileage standards or the Fed tweaks the prime, somewhere his ghost is smiling.
By the time he returned to politics in 1912 to make an attempt at a third term in the White House, running under the banner of the Progressive Party, he felt free to set out an even more radical vision of what must be done. Social Security, regulation of stock trading, a minimum wage--those ideas would not be adopted until the presidency more than two decades later of his distant cousin Franklin. But T.R. set them seriously in motion.
As at home, so in the world: in all places Roosevelt was an activist. He was the first President to urge wholeheartedly that the U.S. accept its role as a global power. God knows, he accepted it. He looked at the U.S. the way we now understand the universe, as a thing that began expanding the moment it was born. (It tells you something that he never got over the habit of casting covetous glances toward Canada.) But not until just before he reached the presidency had the nation finally burst through its continental confines. In 1898 the Spanish-American War and its aftermath had placed under U.S. supervision a whole collection of territories and dependencies: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. Suddenly, to Roosevelt's utter delight, the U.S. was acting on a world stage, across two oceans. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy under McKinley--a job that should have been nearly meaningless but that he turned into a power center--he had urged on the war. As a Rough Rider, he had fought in it. As President, he would make Americans understand that their new global prominence was a long-term proposition.
He was right, of course. Roosevelt sounded the first chords of the American Century. But the Spanish-American War was a quick and easy victory. Although it was followed by a bloody anti-American insurgency in the Philippines, one that dragged on through Roosevelt's presidency, for the most part he did not live to see the lethal predicaments a global power can face. We can't know what he might have thought about Vietnam, much less Iraq. His expansionist impulse had its idealistic side; he too talked about spreading democracy. And you could see its legacy in developments after his death, like the Marshall Plan. But every time the U.S. contrived to overthrow an elected leader abroad who proved resistant to U.S. aims, some of Teddy's legacy was also at work. There could not have been a more literal legacy than the 1953 coup engineered by the U.S. to oust Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian Prime Minister who attempted to nationalize Iran's oil industry. The CIA officer in Tehran who choreographed the overthrow was Roosevelt's grandson Kermit.
Another of Roosevelt's legacies was an unambiguous gift to the future. Teddy was never more himself than when he was outdoors. He loved nature, knew the songs of dozens of birds, loved to ride, climb, hike and shoot. As a boy he wanted to be a naturalist, and as a President he became the first to make environmentalism a political issue. Under the tutelage of his friends--naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir, who convinced Teddy that the Federal Government would be a better protector of parkland than the states, and U.S. Forest Service chief Gifford Pinchot, who wanted strict controls over commercial use of woodlands--Roosevelt learned to shape his love of nature into a policy to defend it. The year after leaving the White House, he explained his philosophy to an audience in Kansas. He recognized the right, he said, even the "duty" of his generation to use the nation's natural resources. "But I do not recognize the right to waste them," he added. "Or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us."
We are those generations, and we have him to thank not only for the 150 national forests he created, the 51 national wildlife refuges, the five national parks, but also for the very idea that air, water, forests and animal life were somehow in our collective safekeeping. If he were alive today, he would be deeply interested in such matters as global warming and the preservation of species.
Roosevelt was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud's, but a less self-analytical man would be hard to imagine. He was outer directed in every way and keenly receptive to the possibilities of the moment. Henry Adams, the most nuanced mind of Roosevelt's day, was exactly right when he called him "pure act." Roosevelt entered the White House after three decades during which Congress had consistently had the upper hand over the President. He lost no time in making it plain that he was a different breed. The "imperial presidencies" that followed his, from those of Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, all owe something to his example. When Congress did nothing to curb the power of the trusts--huge monopolistic corporations--Roosevelt simply directed his Justice Department to start bringing suits. When Congress balked at embarking on the Panama Canal, Teddy found a way to go forward. "I took the Isthmus," he later explained, "started the canal and then left Congress--not to debate the canal, but to debate me." He added dryly, "But while the debate goes on, the canal does too." No one would ever have to wonder what he meant when he said, "While President, I have been President--emphatically."
He did everything emphatically. Above all, he had a supreme sense of the great future in store for the U.S. No one was ever more certain of the nation's destiny. Few Presidents were more formidable in shaping it. More than that, he gave the nation a picture of itself as a place that could not fail to succeed, because it produced people who were vigorous and commanding--people like Teddy Roosevelt. It's not just that he was excited to be an American. He made it more exciting to be one.
No comments:
Post a Comment