Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

TR’s good friend, emulated his host except for a pair of pink gloves. Asked why he retained these, he replied: “In case we should run into ladies.”
    More serious was TR’s passion for boxing, and his habit of sparring with younger and stronger men. He finally abandoned it after a young artillery captain smashed enough blood vessels in his left eye to cause permanent dimness. Ultimately, indeed, he lost all sight in that eye. He had the consideration to make sure that the officer’s name was never made public.
    Such an incident must have warned even an enthusiast like TR of the dangers of too great an emphasis on physical energy, for we find him writing to his German friend, Hermann von Sternberg, that if it was an excellent thing for him to go on a lion hunt or to ride a blooded hunter, “it would be a very bad thing indeed if I treated either exercise as anything but a diversion and as a means of refreshing me for doing double work in serious government business.” And at another time we see him reminding his son Teddie that athletic proficiency is a good servant but a bad master, and that Pliny had advised Trajan to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics to distract their minds and prevent their ever being dangerous to the Romans.
    No president, surely, could have worked harder at the job than TR, yet he was possessed with such a ranging curiosity that he wondered at times if he was giving the myriad political questions that came before him the entire absorption he supposed they deserved. “I do not regard them as being one-tenth or one-hundredth part as important as so many other questions in our life,” he once observed. And at another time: “I have had a most vivid realization of what it must have meant to Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the heartbreaking anxieties of the Civil War, to have to take up his time in trying to satisfy the candidates for postmaster in Chicago.” Yet, even dealing with the problems inherent under a free representative government, particularly in foreign relations, he reminded himself that it was “rather a comfort to feel that Russia, where freedom has been completely sacrificed, where the darkest and most reactionary tyranny reigns, has as yet been unable to do well in the exercise of these functions.”
    Always, in his work, he needed the constant distraction and stimulation of reading. He wrote to his friend, the British historian George Trevelyan: “To succeed in getting measures like these through [Congress] one has to be a rough-and-tumble man oneself, and I find it a great comfort to like all kinds of books, and to get half an hour or an hour’s complete rest and complete detachment from the fighting of the moment by plunging into the genius and misdeeds of Marlborough … or in short anything that Macaulay wrote … or any one of most of the novels of Scott, or some of the novels of Thackeray and Dickens.”
    Which brings us to those “measures” that he had to get through Congress. It is common in our time to regard the president as initiating not only legislation but a whole coordinated program of it. But it is well to remember that TR was considered unusual in his day for undertaking to alter the philosophy of government in its relation to the vast business enterprises that regarded themselves arrogantly as the true guardians of the American dream. What he accomplished in the seven years of his two terms seems small enough in contrast to the sweeping control exercised by Washington ever since the advent of the New Deal in 1933, but his importance is that of a pioneer. In his day he started a healthy discord between the “irresponsible demagogue,” as the tycoons called him, and the “malefactors of great wealth,” as he called them.
    To sum up the major legislative accomplishments of Roosevelt in his two terms of office one might list them as follows: the Elkins Law, against the