Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography
by Henry F. Pringle
Summary
Henry Pringle set out to write about Theodore Roosevelt without the reverence that had shaped nearly every account published since Roosevelt's 1919 death, and the book announces that intention early by quoting the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice's private verdict that the president was about six years old, a line Pringle uses to frame Roosevelt's genuine achievements against a personality he treats as remarkably immature for a man who held the country's highest office. The book follows Roosevelt from a sickly, asthmatic childhood that he transformed through what he called the strenuous life into an energetic public figure, through the Rough Riders and the charge up San Juan Hill that made him a national hero, and into a presidency built on trust busting antitrust suits and an ambitious program of conservation.
Pringle gives real weight to the 1912 election, when Roosevelt, frustrated with what he saw as his handpicked successor William Howard Taft's excessive caution, split the Republican Party by running under his own Progressive banner, a decision that handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson and that Pringle presents as Roosevelt's ego overriding his own party loyalty and political judgment at once. The book does not deny Roosevelt's genuine accomplishments, the national parks, the antitrust record, the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the war between Russia and Japan, but it insists on reading them alongside a vanity and thirst for attention that Pringle argues shaped nearly every decision Roosevelt made in public life.
Reading it means encountering a genuinely skeptical biography years before that became the normal register for political biography, and it suits a reader more interested in a clear eyed accounting of a famous man's flaws than in celebration of his legend. Pringle's willingness to treat Roosevelt as a case study in personality as much as in policy marked a real departure from the admiring biography that had dominated Roosevelt's posthumous reputation, and the book helped establish a more critical mode later political biographers would adopt as standard practice.
Historical Context & Significance
Harcourt, Brace published Pringle's biography in 1931, and it won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, recognition for a book whose critical tone marked a real break from the largely admiring Roosevelt literature published in the years right after his death. Pringle built his career as a freelance journalist before turning to book length biography, later teaching journalism at Columbia University using a hands on method that sent his students out to report and critiqued the results as an editor would.
Pringle returned to presidential biography eight years later with a two volume study of William Howard Taft, granted access to the Taft family papers, and that book helped cement his reputation as one of the era's leading biographers of American presidents, though it never won a second Pulitzer the way some of his contemporaries' companion volumes did. The Roosevelt biography remains frequently cited for the skeptical model of political biography it helped establish, even as later historians have revisited Roosevelt's record with still more documentation than Pringle had access to.