Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire

By Sarah Watts

Book Overview

Who was Theodore Roosevelt? Most of us think of him as one of America's greatest presidents, a champion of progressive politics, and a master statesman. But many feared the political power that Roosevelt wielded. Woodrow Wilson once called him "the most dangerous man of the age." Mark Twain thought him "clearly insane." William James scorned the "flood of bellicose emotion" he let loose during his presidency. Even his biographer, Edmund Morris, is astonished at Roosevelt's "irrational love of battle."

In this book, Sarah Watts probes this dark side of the Rough Rider, presenting a fascinating psychological portrait of a man whose personal obsession with masculinity profoundly influenced the fate of a nation. Drawing on his own writings and on media representations of him, Watts attributes the wide appeal of Roosevelt's style of manhood to the way it addressed the hopes and anxieties of men of his time. Like many of his contemporaries, Roosevelt struggled with what it meant to be a man in the modern era. He saw two foes within himself: a fragile weakling and a primitive beast. The weakling he punished and toughened with rigorous, manly pursuits such as hunting, horseback riding, and war. The beast he unleashed through brutal criticism of homosexuals, immigrants, pacifists, and sissies--anyone who might tarnish the nation's veneer of strength and vigor. With his unabashed paeans to violence and aggressive politics, Roosevelt ultimately offered American men a chance to project their longings and fears onto the nation and its policies. In this way he harnessed the primitive energy of men's desires to propel the march of American civilization--over the bodies of anyone who might stand in its way.

Written with passion and precision, this powerful revisioning of an American icon will forever alter the way we see Theodore Roosevelt and his political legacy.

"A superb scholarly study of how Roosevelt built his political base on the aspiration and fears of men in a rapidly changing nation and world."--Charles K. Piehl, Library Journal

"A thought-provoking and innovative study of the dark side of Roosevelt's personality. . . . Watt's] arguments are clear, passionate, and thoroughly supported."--Elizabeth A. Bennion, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226876098
• ISBN13: 9780226876092
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 299 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.7" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Brilliantly insightful

To judge from at least some of the other reviews of this book, some readers are offended by Watts' steadfast refusal to engage in presidential hagiography. Bravo for her. The best history and the best biography seek to explain and teach about the complexities of our past and the figures that shaped it. Not a single reviewer takes her to task for allegedly inadequate research, perhaps because her notes clearly indicate that she has mastered the primary sources on Roosevelt and has a clear command of the secondary literature. Watts' carefully documented and researched book is the first to tackle head-on one of this country's most complex and contradictory presidents: Teddy Roosevelt. She suggests that his contradictions shaped, and continue to shape public discourse and politics into the 21st century -- weakling and superman, imperialist and hunter, progressive and conservative, idealist and realist. One need look no farther than the anguished debate about American imperialism and the Iraq war taking place today, or -- indeed -- the debate about whether John Kerry was "man enough" to lead this country to see that Watts has landed on a compelling argument and written a brilliantly creative biography. I would argue that, as the angry reactions this book seems to have provoked show, she has also hit a nerve. Well done!

Cowboy Soldier Sets The Stage

In ROUGH RIDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE Sarah Watts unravels the contradictory strands of Theodore Roosevelt's character, a character forged at the first flexing of America's imperial muscle, and in so doing uncovers the roots of the United States' bipolar political discourse of the twentieth century. She amply proves her thesis that "Although Roosevelt was progressive and optimistic his political vision encompassed his darker, emotional, anti-liberal worldview of men and nations struggling against the forces of evil" (page 2). This political vision would serve, and to an unlikely extent, still serves as America's domestic and foreign policy, she suggests. Watts makes this argument implicitly throughout most of the work, however, late in the book she does allow this ghost assertion to manifest itself: "For the remainder of the twentieth century, modernism continued to deprived men of viable lives and to force them into compromises that many consider feminizing and emasculating. As the middle class searched for meaning in a world of bureaucracy and consumerism, and as purchasing power and real wages began their long decline after 1972, men still needed a muscular proving ground on which to inscribe their anti-modern revolt, and the appeal of violence on an official level never diminshed" (page 240). Indeed, she suggests that the conservative backlash of the past 25 years has borrowed much of the bellicose rhetoric and militaristic ethos of Roosevelt, as well as the sorting of citizens into the deserving and undeserving groups by wealth, ethnic and racial background, and social position. As Watts says with respect to non-white, non Anglo-Saxon males, "Roosevelt's exclusionary language had helped to create an intolerant social milieu and a punitive psychological one" (page 240). As Watt's points out, "(Roosevelt's) vision of manhood rested on the notion of a once strong, but now fragile and ever weakening male self, a notion that arose from his own emotional preoccupations, particularly his disgust for his own and other men's physical inferiority, his pervasive sexual priggishness, his anxiety about future sexual and racial degeneracy, and his fears of an interior cowardice that might be exposed to the outside world" (page 4). And, further, she notes that "Throughout his life, Roosevelt met every appearance of this weakened self with aggressive disciplines and punishments," and that ""No matter how he toughened himself, however, he could not escape living in a Victorian world in which normalcy was at stake and monstrosity was everywhere" (page 4-5). This Victorian world, she claims, has been recently been resuscitated as a political dreamspace in our political discourse. Watts clearly shows that "Roosevelt was the first president to articulate the shared anxieties of his generation, and he provided its first seemingly coherent response to the current dislocations of modern society" (page 2). In retrospect, the bipolar extremes that Roosevelt pract

New look at TR.

This is a great book, but knowing the author personally, my opinion is probably biased. Just because Theodore Roosevelt is viewed as an American hero does not remove him from criticism. The author of the other review has no idea what he/she is writing about when he/she says that he pitties the students at Wake Forest. Dr. Watts is one of the most caring and thought provoking professors a student could hope for.