The most famous father of his time, he is adored by his six children (although beautiful, willful "Princess" Alice rebelled against him) and accepted as an honorary member of the White House Gang of seditious small boys. He also bestows on countless Americans the richness of a personality without parallel-evangelical and passionate, yet lusty and funny adroitly political, winningly natural, intellectually overwhelming. He liberates Cuba, determines the route of the Panama Canal, mediates the great Anthracite Strike, and resolves the Venezuela Crisis of 1902-1903 with such masterful secrecy that the world at large is unaware how near the United States and Germany have come to war.ĭuring an epic national tour in the spring of 1903, TR's conservation philosophy (his single greatest gift to posterity) comes into full flower.
Next, he launches his famous prosecution of the Northern Securities Company, and follows up with landmark antitrust legislation. Within weeks of arrival in Washington, TR causes a nationwide sensation by becoming the first President to invite a black man to dinner in the White House. Wall Street, the white South, Western lumber barons, even his own Republican leadership in Congress strive to harness his steadily increasing power. It is not always a pretty story: one of the revelations here is that TR was hated and feared by a substantial minority of his fellow citizens. Theodore Rex (the title is taken from a quip by Henry James) tells the story of the following seven and a half years-years in which TR entertains, infuriates, amuses, strong-arms, and seduces the body politic into a state of almost total subservience to his will. (Trains rumble throughout this irresistibly moving narrative, as TR crosses and recrosses the nation.) Traveling south through a succession of haunting landscapes, TR encounters harbingers of all the major issues of the new century-Imperialism, Industrialism, Conservation, Immigration, Labor, Race-plus the overall challenge that intimidated McKinley: how to harness America's new power as the world's richest nation. It begins by following the new President (still the youngest in American history) as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, one hundred years ago.Ī detailed prologue describes TR's assumption of power and journey to Washington, with the assassinated President McKinley riding behind him like a ghost of the nineteenth century. The most eagerly awaited presidential biography in years, Theodore Rex is a sequel to Edmund Morris's classic bestseller The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
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