|
|
|
Finding Theodore Roosevelt: A Personal and Political Story1
By Kathleen Dalton, Boston University
Editor's Note, by Nancy C. Unger: I first assigned Kathy Dalton's "Why America Loved Theodore Roosevelt" to represent the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in a course called "The Individual in American History" in 1990. Excited by Dalton's fresh approach to deepening the understanding of this complex man who had too often been reduced to caricature, I looked forward to her book-length biography, which finally appeared in 2002. It was well worth the wait.
In this essay, Dalton generously responds to this journal's request that she detail aspects of her journey to Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life with an eye to the contemporary challenges posed by biography. As I learned from my own experience writing about Robert and Belle La Follette, biography is a deceptively complicated genre. It becomes positively volatile when the subject is as quintessential to a period as Roosevelt is to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In relating her personal and political story, Dalton skillfully reveals the special challenges of recasting a strenuous life that has been told many times and about which many biographers and historians feel downright proprietary. She also provides valuable insight into the rewards of augmenting more traditional research methods with the many tools of understanding (especially gender studies) available to today's historian.
Dalton provides a thoughtful assessment of the many factors at work in the larger community of scholars. Moreover, her incisiveness and delightful writing style help to explain the phenomenal success of her complex and compelling portrait of Theodore Roosevelt.
|
|
|
|
A grand man-on-horseback statue of Theodore Roosevelt stands guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Its heroic magnitude should remind historians that cinematic stories about masterful men possessing larger-than-life powers compete quite well in the marketplace of ideas with interpretations that show "great" men as vulnerable and fallible. How could historians ever expect to win popular audiences from the latest opiate of the reading people, books about the dash and drama of great men? Men who dare to perform bold deeds appeal to much larger audiences than most other topics historians consider historically significant. Celebrationist history wins applause; long footnotes do not. In public squares across the globe, the man-on-horseback type evokes nationalism inspired by battles won. People in other countries also lie to themselves about their pasts.2 Why should it be different here? |
1
|
|
My search for Theodore Roosevelt did not begin with me standing as an admirer looking up in awe at his statue. Nor did it, indeed, start as an attempt to contradict the heroic stories so often told about him. That came later. I had been trained in my undergraduate days, as most historians were in the sixties and seventies, to dismiss him as a ridiculous jingo, an imperialist hardly worth knowing better. Leaders had betrayed us. Vietnam, perhaps even the whole Cold War mentality, put us in a frame of mind to deflate puffed up leaders. It was not uncommon in that era, when psychology often served as a tool of politics, to start with a historical figure's misguided policies and then read character analysis backward. For example, if Nixon's lies about his Cambodian incursions reflected a failed policy, then a biographer looked for the warping experiences of his youth to explain the sorry and sick character development that led to wrong politics. In the early seventies, as we read about the growth of the imperial presidency, Congress passed laws to limit the excesses of the Watergate and Vietnam eras. At the same moment, biography served to show how the emperor wore no clothes. In fact, in that age of diminished hopes, we had plenty of material to construct an array of portraits of presidents gone wrong. |
. . . |
There are about 9468 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
