| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire. By Sarah Watts. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. x, 289 pp. $37.00, ISBN 0-226-87607-1.)
Gore Vidal identified Theodore Roosevelt as an "aristo-sissy" who "was able to do something about it" (1981; Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, 1952–1992, 1993, 729, 730). As to what one could do, Vidal proposed a rule of human nature that applied to Roosevelt's case: "Give a sissy a gun and he will kill everything in sight" (ibid., 733). Sarah Watts concurs in this analysis of Roosevelt and the men who flocked to him, all of them channeling forbidden desires to acceptable ends. Relying on psychology as well as discourse, Watts adduces a rule just as normative, if not so biting, as Vidal's: "Understanding libidinal energy this way suggests that male sexuality serves as a vital force constructing social identity and authority" (Watts, p. 12).	1
Watts argues that, although we know Roosevelt referred often to manliness, proper understanding of this trope and its appeal requires psychology, "the only discipline that targets the irrational as a formal subject of inquiry" (p. 14). In Watts's model, manhood—in all cultures an acquired status and thus unstable—requires special maintenance in a period of self-conscious modernity, with the untamed masses posing a threat to traditional forms of order. In such a time men crave a leader who can make use of masculinity; one accidentally became president in 1901.	. . .

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