Teddy Roosevelt has always been one of my favorite presidents. Reading this book has just reinforced and increased that feeling. How wonderful it would be to have such a man minus his 19th century sensibilities in our politics today. Of course, it was probably those 19th century sensibilities that made him the man he was.
This book is first and foremost a politic document, but that does not distract from its value. Mr. Roosevelt spends much time touting his accomplishments. When he praises someone it is with multiple superlatives. When he criticizes an individual it is with faint praise or kid gloves.
Born of wealthy parents Roosevelt could afford to pursue his interests without worrying about providing for the basic needs for his family. He was an avid outdoorsman, spent time as a rancher out west, led the famous group of volunteers, The Rough Riders, in the Spanish-American War, served in multiple capacities of public life ranging from Police Commissioner of New York to President of the United States.
He was first and foremost an advocate of the people, but did not believe in tolerating freeloaders. He was an aggressive reformer against the abuses of big corporations, but did not think they were bad just from sheer size. Appendix A of the book is a wonderful distillation of his stance on mega-corporations. In it he reproduces a speech by Senator Cushman K. Davis and adds commentary. Senator Davis was comparing unregulated large corporations to the feudalism of the middle ages. The parallels are astounding.
Mr. Roosevelt’s basic political philosophy might be capture in the following quote:
“We of the great modern democracies must strive unceasingly to make our several countries lands in which a poor man who works hard can live comfortably and honestly, and in which a rich man cannot live dishonestly nor in slothful avoidance of duty; and yet we must judge rich man and poor man alike by a standard which rests on conduct and not on caste, and we must frown with the same stern severity on the mean and vicious envy which hates and would plunder a man because he is well off and on the brutal and selfish arrogance which looks down on and exploits the man with whom life has gone hard.”
What a wonderful sentiment.
In that same vein:
“These men demanded for themselves immunity from governmental control which, if granted, would have been as wicked and as foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century. Many of them were evil men. Many others were just as good men as were some of these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was. There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.”
Can you imagine a politician in the America of 2014 uttering such words? They ring as true today as they did in the early 1900s.
Mr. Roosevelt was a sickly child. His interest in the outdoors and “manly” pursuits was probably an outgrowth of this. One of his interests that practiced for many years was boxing. Here is his take on that sport:
“Outside of this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing. But this is true of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports. Most certainly prize-fighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing as many forms of big business and of the legal work carried on in connection with big business.”
Another front where he was ahead of his times was women’s issue. I do not think he was a feminist, but certainly extraordinary sense of fair play carried over to this area also. Again to quote Mr. Roosevelt:
“Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly.
I always favored woman’s suffrage, but only tepidly, until my association with women like Jane Addams and Frances Kellor, who desired it as one means of enabling them to render better and more efficient service, changed me into a zealous instead of a lukewarm adherent of the cause—in spite of the fact that a few of the best women of the same type, women like Mary Antin, did not favor the movement.”
Here are two little snippets from the book that to me sum up Teddy Roosevelt:
“But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.”
‘There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire Bill Widener, of Widener’s Valley, Virginia, which sums up one’s duty in life: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”’
Again what wonderful sentiments these are for living one’s life.
If you enjoy history or politics from the first person preseptive, this is the book for you. It was a little wordy in parts as he insisted including correspondences in the whole, but this is a minor defect. I found it a very engaging read and worth my time.
This book is in the public domain and can be downloaded for free.
Audio book from LibriVox.org : Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography
e-Book from Gutenberg.org: Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography