The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
by Edmund Morris
Summary
Edmund Morris's biography follows Theodore Roosevelt from a childhood so weakened by asthma that his father built him a home gymnasium and hired him a boxing coach, through Harvard, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa despite struggling with Latin and Greek, and into a political career that began at twenty three when he won a seat in the New York State Assembly and immediately exposed a corrupt tax scheme involving the financier Jay Gould. The book follows Roosevelt through the crushing year of 1884, when his wife and his mother died in the same house on the same day, and into the Dakota Territory, where he spent the following years as a rancher, deputy sheriff and amateur naturalist before a brutal winter wiped out half his cattle investment and sent him back east.
Morris traces Roosevelt's return to public life through the United States Civil Service Commission, where he fought the spoils system his predecessors had tolerated, through his reform of the New York City Police Department, and into the Navy Department, where he pushed for war readiness before the sinking of the USS Maine. The book gives full weight to the Rough Riders and the charge up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill in 1898, a battle Roosevelt himself called the great day of his life, then follows him through the governorship of New York and the reluctant vice presidential campaign that put him one heartbeat from the presidency he assumed at forty two after William McKinley's assassination.
Morris writes with a novelist's pacing while working from Roosevelt's own voluminous letters and the record of everyone who crossed his path, and reading the book means following an already energetic, famous man's entire life before the presidency that made him a legend, presented with enough narrative drive that the ending, Roosevelt's sudden elevation to the White House, lands as genuine climax rather than a foregone conclusion. It suits a reader who wants the full, restless energy of Roosevelt's early decades rather than the presidency alone.
Historical Context & Significance
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the first year finalists were published alongside the winner; that year's finalists were Ernest Samuels for Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, Meryle Secrest for Being Bernard Berenson, and Geoffrey Wolff for The Duke of Deception. It was Morris's first book, and it also won the 1980 National Book Award for biography, a rare double for a debut.
Morris went on to write two further volumes on Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, covering the presidency, and Colonel Roosevelt, covering his later years, completing a trilogy widely used as the standard modern account of Roosevelt's life. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt itself remains the volume most credited with restoring serious literary attention to the years before he became president, the ones a shorter biography would compress into a single introductory chapter.