Hefty ‘Wilderness Warrior’ gives Teddy Roosevelt his due

Published 2:08 pm Monday, September 13, 2010

How closely is greatness connected with mental instability? Is it possible to live a deeply impassioned life and maintain the kind of ballast needed to run a country?

These are the perhaps-inadvertent questions brought to the fore in Douglas Brinkley’s new biography “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” ($34.99.)

A word of warning at the outset: This is a physically massive book. At 940 pages, a disciplined editing job should have lightened the reader’s burden by at least 100 pages. For example, readers endure a pagelong discussion of Frederic Remington’s art when TR’s Rough Riders present the future president with a Remington bronze. Interesting. Not necessary.

That said, “Wilderness Warrior” is magnificent. Brinkley catches the full-blown spirit of the manic, insomniac president who left us with many splendid gifts — national parks, state parks, wildlife refuges, park rangers, national forests and monuments, a wilderness ethic, a wildlife conservation ethic and the idea of clean water.

“Wilderness Warrior” is also groundbreaking. Other TR biographies treat his passion for conservation as an aside to his “real” interests of expansionism and trust-busting. Writes Brinkley: “As he took his oath of office (for the vice-presidency) his primary concern wasn’t Spindletop or J.P. Morgan; it was conservation.” He makes his case thoroughly.

TR was a little bit nuts, which Brinkley brings out with some wonderful sentences: “Roosevelt orated on his fortieth birthday from the back of a train … pounding his fist, spittle flying, speaking of the greatness of the American flag.

In another scene, TR leads his men off ships onto Cuban soil, soon to lead his San Juan charge. A horse drowns in the rough surf. “Roosevelt, his mind unsteadied, went berserk,” Brinkley writes. “Roosevelt kept shouting, ‘Stop that goddamned animal torture!”’

Hmmm. Only hours later, those same animals would be cut down by sabers and bullets and left to die hot, slow and probably quite painful deaths.

This is TR at his most intriguing: Throughout his life, he never reconciled his immense idealism with his pure physicality. Despite his compulsive intellectual life — he read everything from Western dime novels to complex scientific tracts and wrote 18 books of his own — he insisted on living like a Wild West cowboy with nothing to lose but his saddle and his horse.

But TR was consistent in his teetering between an appealing and progressive concept of universal democracy, in which even the littlest little guy gets to be counted, and his vigorous steam-roller approach to life, which Brinkley admits could sometimes border on the fascistic.

He was the least fearful (and least politic) president America has ever enjoyed. The man’s compulsively biological approach to life, whether studying birds or building up his own muscles, permeated every second of his presidency. No other author has done the excellent job Brinkley does in bringing this truth into focus.

This begs the question: Is this what we want in a president? TR is fashionable today among the chattering classes (myself included), but would we like his reincarnation in the White House? Unfortunately, in today’s world, his impulsive behavior could quickly lead to world disaster. On the other hand, his outright glee in battling the powerful corporate interests that had usurped democracy has endeared him to the nation forever as a model of truly honorable behavior in a president.