He was the pioneer model of what almost all future presidents would be: the star performer in a government that would increasingly take on characteristics of show business. The president as performer was new to history. Before Roosevelt there had been the martyr Lincoln, the hero Grant, and a run of forgettable political tools, but stardom, which requires mass communications to create widespread public interest in certain individuals, was a twentieth-century development.
Nowadays it often involves creating an artificial persona for the politician or entertainer being fitted for stardom, but Roosevelt needed no image designers to make him fascinating to the crowd. The big teeth and eyeglasses made him a cartoonist’s delight. Striding through crowds, hand extended for shaking, telling one and all he was “dee-lighted”—he was born for the limelight. And what a master of the theatrical moment. Campaigning in 1912, he was shot while on his way to give a speech, but insisted on making his speech anyhow after telling the crowd he would be unable to speak loudly because “there is a bullet in my body.”
Everything worked to make him interesting to the public. He begat a national craze for the Teddy Bear. Millions called him by the chummy nickname “Teddy.” Henry Pringle’s 1931 biography says he “loathed” the name, but it was obviously a priceless political asset. His ultimatum to the Berber kidnapper Raisuli—“We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead”—may have arrived after Raisuli had already yielded, and may have been written by John Hay, but it expressed a muscular Americanism that millions associated with—well, Teddy.
The biographer’s problem with a subject as rich as Roosevelt is that no one else is allowed much breathing room. There is an array of powerful and fascinating men in Morris’s book—Elihu Root, Henry Adams, John Hay, Mark Hanna, Joe Cannon, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, and Henry Cabot Lodge among them—but Morris’s tight focus on Roosevelt reduces them to two-dimensional figures moving on and offstage only to advance the plot. Roosevelt seems to inhale everyone else in the vicinity. Perhaps he did so in real life. At times his friends may have seemed to themselves like minor characters in someone else’s life. Henry Adams was among the regulars at the White House table who listened to “uninhibited” Roosevelt monologues. “Theodore is never sober,” Adams wrote a correspondent, “only he is drunk with himself and not with rum…. He lectures me on history as though he were a high school pedagogue.”