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Theodore Roosevelt came of age and rose to prominence in the late 1800s and, arguably, launched what Time <\/em>magazine publisher H. R. Luce would later call the \u201cAmerican Century.\u201d As the Gilded Age faded, Roosevelt shaped America\u2019s entry into world affairs and created the impetus for a robust America First foreign policy and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. By sheer force of personality, he enlarged the stature of the presidency and the executive\u2019s role in shaping public policy. No stranger to controversy and conflict, Roosevelt spoiled for a fight and delighted in lacerating his enemies with calculated comments and ridicule. In short, Roosevelt would be equally at home in both the early twentieth and twenty-first century American politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Historian David S. Brown\u2019s newest work, In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace and Revolution<\/em><\/a>, is a fresh and timely biography that describes the \u201chard and dangerous endeavor\u201d of the life and times of the 26th President. By turns husband, father, cowboy, hunter, soldier, explorer, conservationist, legislator, administrator, reformer, statesman, peacemaker, and politician, the book recounts how Roosevelt created a legacy that endures in the twenty-first century and in the modern office of the American presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Politician<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Arena<\/em> traces Roosevelt\u2019s family history, the foundations of his multi-million (today billion) dollar fortune, his liberal education, travel abroad (including two tours of Europe before he was 15 years old), Harvard pedigree, and Brahmin social inheritance. These were among the conventions that marked a man in America\u2019s old money upper class at the turn-of-the-century. There was, however, nothing conventional about Roosevelt, and especially his meteoric rise in politics. While Brown acknowledges \u201cRoosevelt\u2019s auspicious timing\u2014\u2018Teddy\u2019s luck!\u2019 as Henry Adams had it,\u201d the author also makes it clear that Roosevelt possessed an uncommon political acumen. His first foray into politics only came after he had made a studied assessment of the Republican Association in New York City and allied himself with machine politicians \u201ceager to nominate a fresh face.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Elected to the New York Assembly in 1882, the twenty-three-year-old legislator sprang into the state capital ready \u201cto play up to the papers,\u201d and \u201cintroduce a slew of bills \u2026 that had absolutely no chance of being taken up by the Legislature,\u201d even as he \u201chappily posed as a crusader.\u201d This was the hugely public persona, Brown argues, that Roosevelt would hew to during his entire career in politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roosevelt\u2019s time in the assembly also occasioned the first of many of his savvy political alliances, in this case with New York Governor (and later president) Grover Cleveland, a Democrat. It would not be the last time in Roosevelt\u2019s political career, Brown notes, that he would seek out allies from among various political factions, but, for the most part, he understood the importance of being a party stalwart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The book reveals Roosevelt as a man of restless, powerful ambitions with real political skills. Brown shows him as a capable politician with \u201can uncanny ability to read the times,\u201d a progressive who extracted the social changes people wanted from the grudging powerbrokers of the age. Roosevelt proved to be a \u201cshrewd political fighter, understanding the all-important art of picking his battles.\u201d The author also describes how Roosevelt played machine politics to gain office by appointment and serve as head of the nation\u2019s Civil Service Commission (1889), police commissioner of New York City (1895), and undersecretary of the Navy (1897). Party politics would propel him into elected office as governor of New York (1898) and as vice president of the United States (1901). A bullet\u2014not the ballot\u2014would make him president when McKinley was assassinated before Roosevelt was elected to the office in his own right in 1904.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Party Leader, Progressive<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Roosevelt\u2019s accession to the presidency made him the de facto leader of the GOP. Brown, in several insightful passages, shows Roosevelt exerting influence in the party years before he became president. He paints a portrait of Roosevelt as a reliable if sometimes unwilling party loyalist, as \u201cthe rise of mass democracy made partisan loyalties the sine qua non for political advancement.\u201d Roosevelt, for example, abandoned fellow independent Republicans\u2014Mugwumps\u2014who bolted ranks to support Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 1884 presidential contest with GOP candidate James G. Blaine. When it came time for the machine to put up a mayoral candidate in the 1886 New York City election, Roosevelt accepted the nomination in a contest he knew he would not win. He became the party standard-bearer, a willing sacrificial lamb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The egotist in him craved praise and recognition and vengefully despised detractors.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Brown also argues that Roosevelt\u2014the loyalist who maneuvered from within\u2014also became a change agent in tune with the shifting American scene. Equally at home with silk-stocking elites, artists, poets, soldiers, ranchers, and Dakota cowboys, Roosevelt grew to know and understand Americans from all walks of life. Alive to the growing concerns of a rising middle-class constituency, he looked askance at both socialists and at what he branded as the \u201cvulgar\u201d capitalists seeking profits at any cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The author recounts Roosevelt\u2019s political career as one of a maturing politician who came to grips with the social and economic turmoil in late nineteenth century America. In the face of what he described as the \u201cpernicious impact of monopolization upon consumers and workers,\u201d Roosevelt embraced, by degrees, a regulatory state model of government. Brown argues that Roosevelt came to embody the essence of the Progressive Era in his efforts to offer all Americans a \u201csquare deal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first among many in the GOP, he represented a break with laissez-faire traditionalists who favored policies to promote unbridled industrialization and the interests of capital. An unrelenting opponent of the stultifying results of patronage and the spoils system, he eventually railed against machine politics. Roosevelt proved to be the most vocal and enduring of the party\u2019s progressives, on the side of one faction that created a permanent fissure in the party:<\/p>\n\n\n\n This dissonance between factions would remain a feature of the party\u2019s institutional DNA \u2026 it anticipated the moderate Nelson Rockefeller (northeastern)\u2014versus\u2014Barry Goldwater (Sunbelt) struggle in 1964, and the still-longer contest for ideological supremacy between liberal and conservative Republicans in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Policymaker<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The author argues the case for Roosevelt as the right man at the right time, as the turn-of-the-century United States\u2014newly possessed of an overseas empire and on the cusp of the industrial age\u2014needed both an internationalist and a nationalist at the helm. Brown makes the astute assessment that Roosevelt assumed \u201cthe reins of government at the precise moment when his style of leadership, cautiously progressive and globally focused, met the culture half-way; TR spoke on behalf of a rising generation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was the first American president to take on the challenge of creating practices and policies to reflect the nation\u2019s new status as a rising great power. In the Arena<\/em> describes how Roosevelt disingenuously supported a breakaway Colombian province to create a newly independent Panamanian nation amenable to the construction of an interocean canal. A long-time \u201cbig navy\u201d advocate, as commander-in-chief, he defied Congress to countermand his orders and sent the US Navy\u2019s Great White Fleet on a globe-girdling cruise. It was, by his design, a demonstration of power on a voyage \u201cto speak softly and carry a big stick\u201d with visits to re-arming European powers and a restive Japan. Wary of foreign interference in the Americas, he issued the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and simply assumed the power to police the internal affairs of Caribbean countries and keep peace in the region. A keen observer of foreign affairs, Roosevelt brokered an end to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) and, for those efforts, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In the author\u2019s assessment, Roosevelt\u2019s foreign policy was \u201cby turns belligerent, pragmatic, and generally effective.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On the domestic front, the author describes how Roosevelt\u2019s public policymaking ended a crippling national coal mining strike and laid the groundwork for organized labor and collective bargaining. Boosted by the president, Congress pushed through legislation to regulate the railroads and passed the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act. That legislation solidified the authority of the central government\u2014and its readiness\u2014to regulate business and industry in the public interest. These and other measures to improve the lot of average Americans were, Brown argues, what Roosevelt saw as practical democratic alternatives to radicalism and to the collectivism demanded by a growing number of socialists. \u201cRoosevelt,\u201d in Brown\u2019s assessment, \u201cunderstood, as few of his predecessors had, the potential of the presidency to affect public policy,\u201d and thereby permanently altered the balance of power in Washington. The trend of power shifting to the Executive has, the author notes, continued to this day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Arena<\/em> is not a one-sided, adulatory record of Roosevelt\u2019s remarkable career. The author is an even-handed biographer and cites less than appealing incidents and aspects of Roosevelt\u2019s life and character. The egotist in him craved praise and recognition and vengefully despised detractors. The author recounts, for example, the self-centered Roosevelt\u2019s unseemly lobbying to be awarded the Medal of Honor for his charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba. He openly loathed Woodrow Wilson but still appealed to that president for a field officer\u2019s commission during WWI. Peckish with critics, he baited his opponents with name-calling\u2014the very well-read Roosevelt added \u201cmuckraker,\u201d \u201cweasel words,\u201d \u201clunatic fringe,\u201d \u201cpussyfooters,\u201d and \u201cloose cannon\u201d to the American lexicon. Brown\u2019s balanced and nuanced assessment of Roosevelt makes In the Arena<\/em> a worthwhile addition to other biographies, including Edmund Morris\u2019 magisterial trilogy<\/a> (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, Colonel Roosevelt<\/em>) and David McCullough\u2019s Roosevelt family biography, Mornings on Horseback<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Brown\u2019s writing is well-paced, free from windy passages, and often marked by apt phrasing. For example, he describes how \u201cthe Roosevelt White House, filled with six children, trembled with energy.\u201d However, the author is sometimes given to stilted writing. The Roosevelt children, to cite one instance, are \u201chis begats,\u201d with whom he \u201ccultivated \u2026 a gladsome routine.\u201d This, and the absence of a standard bibliography, is a small criticism. The book is a sturdy biography rooted in period history, based both on the author\u2019s carefully noted and attributed research and his extensive knowledge of the times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Arena <\/em>offers readers a compelling account of the \u201cstrenuous life\u201d of Theodore Roosevelt and a book remarkably relevant in recounting a historical precedent to the current American political scene. This, then, is the biography of a man in the arena whom Roosevelt himself described as one \u201cwho spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\n
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