You need a subscription to read this whole story, but it challenges - or at least tries to put into context - the high ratings Theodore Roosevelt tends to receive from historians. As we mentioned in 2302, historians seem to have a bias in favor of people who give them juicy things to write about - and no one did that better than TR - but maybe this bias is unwarranted.
From the story's intro:
The reputation of Theodore Roosevelt has become as bloated as the man himself. No one of course can deny his fundamental significance in American history, as a central player in the transitions from republic to empire, laissez-faire to regulated capitalism, congressional government to imperial presidency. It should come as no surprise that professional historians still pay close attention to his career. What is surprising is the cult-like status that Roosevelt enjoys outside the academy, especially in Washington. In political discourse, his name evokes bipartisan affection, bordering on reverence; few presidents are safer for politicians of either party to cite as an inspiration. (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both claimed him as a model.) For several decades now, hardly a year has gone by without another PBS documentary or popular biography producing another brick in the ascending tower of tribute. Not bad for a man who, despite his undeniable bravery and public spirit, spent much of his life behaving like a bully, drunk on his own self-regard. How does one account for the contemporary adulation of this man?
The emergence of the T.R. cult coincided with the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. “America is back!” Reagan announced, reassuring his audiences that the national soul-searching of the Carter years was officially at an end. No more congressional inquiries into CIA crimes and imperial deceit; no more presidential admonitions about the need to recognize environmental limits. Cowboy capitalism and triumphalist nationalism were the order of the day. Rhetoricians of renewed national greatness, groping for historical antecedents, seized on the example of Theodore Roosevelt.
For the Republican right, the appropriation of Roosevelt was a tricky business. Free-market ideologues had to overlook his achievements in domestic policy, where at his best he re-asserted the claims of commonwealth against wealth, protecting wilderness from rapacious developers and disentangling Washington from its thralldom to Wall Street. But T.R.’s foreign policy perfectly suited the right-wing agenda. Driven by myopic imperial ambitions, a visceral longing for violent combat, and an obsessive need for action, he poisoned the diplomatic atmosphere with militaristic bluster throughout his career, from his advocacy of war with Spain in 1898 to his demands for American intervention in World War I and his final, furtive efforts to undermine Woodrow Wilson’s agenda at the Paris Peace Conference. He preferred doing to thinking and fighting to talking—much like the recent Decider-in-Chief.
