American History Hit - The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

"Speak softly and carry a big stick."The youngest President ever, Lieutenant Colonel of the Rough Rider Regiment, uncle to Eleanor Roosevelt, fifth cousin to FDR, and a keen huntsman; Theodore Roosevelt is consistently remembered as one of the United States' top 5 Presidents.But how did he reach the White House? In this first of two episodes on Theodore Roosevelt, we are looking at his rise from sickly child to tough President.Don is joined by Michael Patrick Cullinane, historian of American politics, an award-winning author, and the Lowman Walton Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies at Dickinson State University.Michael's books on Roosevelt are 'Remembering Theodore Roosevelt' and 'Theodore Roosevelt's Ghost', his podcast is 'The Gilded Age and Progressive Era': https://shows.acast.com/gildedageandprogressiveeraProduced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AMERICANHISTORYYou can take part in our listener survey here.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. 28 East 20th Street, New York, 1871. In the nursery of the upper floors of a five-story brownstone in central Manhattan,

complete with a French-style roof, cast-iron balcony railings, and gothic moldings. A young boy sits in his bed, curtains drawn. Near-sighted, the boy can barely discern his surroundings in the dim light. Instead, as is his habit. He retreats into a world of imagination. Closing his eyes, he dreams he has. Robin Hood, racing through Sherwood Forest on heroic adventures, triumping over villains, robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Another moment, he's off on expedition to the deepest

of Africa, hunting wildebeests and cataloging new plants for study. Bullstered by his pillows, this sickly child has spent many hours alone in this room to ward off terrifying asthma attacks. He suffers from colds, coughs, nausea, and headaches. He has been visited by a train of doctors who have tried everything from bloodletting to electric shock to painful massages, black coffee, and even cigars. But lately, there's a new, more basic approach. Outside the window, on the porch of his nursery, his father has had a small gymnasium constructed. From this day on, young Tidi will spend his free time exercising, swinging between bars instead of the branches of his forest fantasies, building up his physical strength to match.

the rigor of his growing mind, preparing himself for the necessities of real life, a remarkable life, one that will carry him forth all the way to the highest office in the land. Good day, American History Hit listeners. I'm Don Wildman. Well, it's taken us more than a year to reach the midpoint of our chronology of U.S. presidents, but we are finally here. I'm not talking literally. I mean, we have 46 presidents over 248 years. Our official midpoint would be number 23, Grover Cleveland in his first term. Now, I'm speaking in a spiritual sense, where the American presidency becomes something new, leaps forward from its, at times, plotting past, into a modern future that reflects the boldness of a new and expansive nation. Of course,

several presidents would play pivotal roles in this evolution, but most agree it begins at the outset of the 20th century, and the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, our 25th Commander-in-Chief, a man of indomitable fortitude and dynamic energies, who was guided by powerful principles, personal and civic. It was Theodore Roosevelt who embodied a youthful America with a strenuous role to play on the global stage as much as at home. In his nearly two terms as president, from 1901 to 1980, TR touted a torch, spreading to a new world, egalitarian ideals of democracy and freedom for all mankind, while the old world began to resist its creaking aristocrat. traditions. Many presidents have carried that

chores, as I say, speaking about lofty ideals, but TR lived them. It's a storied life in so many ways. So we've separated this presidential tale into two episodes. Today is the rise of Teddy Roosevelt, and we'll follow through with our next episode, TR, President, and Adventure. It's a big life, and our award-winning guest and guide for both episodes is deeply invested in telling it. Michael Patrick Cullinane has written two books on the man,

TR, remembering Theodore Roosevelt, 2012, and Theodore Roosevelt's Ghost, 2017, a public historian and host of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, an excellent podcast I recommend. Michael has been the Loman-Walton Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies at Dickinson State University in North Dakota, the Blue Hawks, where is located the Theodore Roosevelt Center and the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library due to open in 2026. Greetings, Mike. Thanks for being with us. My pleasure to be here, Don. Thanks for having me. Mike, I've suggested as much with my intro, but it bears repetition. Theater Roosevelt was a living legend.

A man whose face is carved on Mount Rushmore with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, but he'd only died a few years before that sculpture was underway. So before we dive into the details of his life, how did Roosevelt become so iconic, so fast, do you think? Well, that's a really hard question to answer, I think. It's a good question, but it's a difficult one to answer in the sense that there's so much of TR, and I reckon that that's probably the way he became a living legend. So if you are a hunter or a burger, or if you are someone who's a political junkie,

or you're someone who follows sports, you can find an interest in Theodore Roosevelt. I mean, he saved football. He became, you know, a third-party candidate that went further than any third-party candidate had gone before. There's so much of him, really. Edmund Morris famously referred to Roosevelt as an American polygon, meaning that he had so many edges and sides to him that it was hard to define the man in any singular way.

And I think for that reason, he appeals continually to successive generations of Americans, as well as international audiences, too. What I love about the story we're about to tell, what I love about this man, is that he's sold as such a stereotype, you know, the big mustache, the whole thing, you know, he's just a man of the wilderness, the outdoorsman with a fringe jacket. But this guy is incredibly thoughtful, incredibly considered person with a very, very high intelligence and a remarkable writing skill. Yeah, let me put it out here, and people can argue with me about this if they want,

but I would say that Theodore Roosevelt is our most intellectual of presidents. And that might be controversial because, as you say, he's remembered as being a macho, macho man, but in reality, he wrote over 50 books, which, if you think about that alone, is incredible. He spoke multiple languages. He was a world traveler and explorer. his memory was so photographic that he could remember people, ideas, passages

from books, and I'm not just talking about reciting the Bible, which he was capable of doing. I'm talking about French literature. When the French ambassador visits Roosevelt for the first time, he starts talking about Plutarch and Chaucer, rattling off passages from ancient texts. He really is a misconception in the American mind.

Yeah, if you want to be moved, go sit in the rotunda, the Teddy Roosevelt Rotunda, at the Museum of natural history in New York City. I mean, just to get a scope of how broad this man really is, the quotations on the walls will move you. He's filled with ideals that really count, and you know, half of what you learned in Boy Scouts came from Teddy Roosevelt. But let's dive into his early years. Tell me about his childhood. Born of this wealthy Dutch ancestry, it's, you know, one of the wealthiest families in New York. What made the Roosevelt childhoods such a unique one for him?

The American Museum of Natural History is actually a really good way to get into Roosevelt's childhood because it's his father that actually helped co-found the American Museum of Natural History. The family itself is a mainstay of New York, spanning back to the 15th century, and they are really important political figures, business people. They start a plate glass company, which leads to their wealth, but then they get very involved in banking, and so they are not Nouveau-Rish, Gilded Age aristocrats. They are sort of old Knickerbocker stock in New York. And Roosevelt's father is heavily involved in the foundation and support of the Republican Party during the Civil War and plays a major philanthropic role in the city as well, not just helping out during the Civil War, but also supporting the newsboys who are unionizing at that time. He also creates the first orthopedic hospital in the city because his daughter has got a horrible back condition. And as I mentioned, the American Museum of Natural History because of his love and affection for animals and natural science. So the family is a really important part of the city, and the city shapes the family very much as well.

So Theodore Roosevelt is a product of New York City, as much as he might be later on, a product of North Dakota and America more broadly. But he is very much a product of the city. You can go see his house right there off of Gramercy Park. It sits right there down in the 20s, I think it is. His childhood, he was a sickly kid, wasn't he? A very bad asthma. This had a lot to do with how he was raised. his father made some strong recommendations to him.

Yeah, so the asthma is a great part of his story. And I think this is another way that he becomes so relatable. If anyone out there is sick and has worked hard to make themselves better, or at least give themselves the same opportunities as people that are healthy, Roosevelt is that case and point. I mean, so his father has a lot of things to try and make him better, including some things that we would see is radically wrong today. Like he used to give his son cigars to smoke,

hoping that the smoke would open up his lungs. That didn't work. but he did take him on long walks. And when Theodore Roosevelt couldn't get outside, he would watch from the window of his brownstone, the world as it unfolded around him. And he studied, this is where his study for natural sciences really comes into play.

He used to study birds. He would draw them, the different species, the colors, and then he would start to categorize them. So even by a young age, I'm talking about maybe about 11, 12 years old, Theodore Roosevelt can name animals in the Latin terms of genus and species, just by looking at them or in the case of birds by listening to them. So he had this incredible memory that allowed him to really excel in the natural sciences and learn how science operates as a matter of observation.

There's a very famous, yet somewhat obscure to many people, photograph of his house. And it's actually a photo of Lincoln's funeral procession going through New York City. And there's a picture of little TR up in the window of his bedroom, looking down on Lincoln's coffin going by, I guess the wagon going by. This man's life straddles so much fundamental American history. It's incredible. Well, I'm so glad you brought up that story, Don, because for years, I actually doubted that that was Young Theodore and his brother Elliot. I had real doubts about it, and we just

took a collection of Edmund Morris's and Sylvia Jukes-Marris' papers. They were the famous biographers of Theodore Roosevelt and Edith Roosevelt, his second wife. And what we found in there was definitive proof that that indeed was Theodore and Elliott, because Edith Roosevelt tells the story about how they locked her in the closet because she was crying so much at Lincoln passing by. But Theodore spans the time that we would call the Gilded Age in Progressive era, the post-Civil War period up until basically the 1920s. And really, I think he is emblematic of the period, whether it be the death of Lincoln, the changing of American politics, also just the changing of American society and culture as a result of industrialization, Roosevelt would have witnessed all of that.

In fact, he's born two years after Darwin publishes the origin of species, and that is something that is well very much shaped a young Theodore Roosevelt. So he's of his time for certain. Yep. Heads to Harvard, as so many rich boys do back then, and even today. His father dies in 1878. Some say this had a real impact on his decision to go into public service. Oh, I think absolutely without question. His father played a huge, part in his life. Remember, your listeners might not know this, but Theodore Roosevelt was not formally educated until he went to Harvard. So going away to Harvard was a big deal for him. He was home tutored, and going away was a big deal. Leaving his father was a big deal. His father was a major

influence and all the progressive things that I mentioned about his father earlier on. That was something that stuck with TR. He dies, as you say, in 1878, it's colon cancer. It's quite a horrible and painful death. And Roosevelt rushes home from Harvard. Doesn't get home before his father dies, unfortunately. And he lives with that, you know, basically saying that this is the great man that he wants to emulate. And he does try and do that in many ways, including even decisions that his father didn't make, like, say, going to war, in the civil war, his father hires an alternate, someone that he pays to go to the war for him. And that even stays with TR and his decisions to go to war later on in 1898. So his father is a major, major part of his life and his death

is a reckoning with how he is going to develop as a young man. So a major, happens in this young man's life, it's a day of tragedy on a proportion none of us can even conceive. Let's go through this methodically because it has everything to do with how he handles this kind of pressure in his life. Take us through what happens on the day that his mother dies and his wife dies. Well, yeah, I mean, maybe I should just take you back briefly just to say that he in college at Harvard, he is enchanted by Alice Hathaway Lee. And Alice Hathaway Lee is from a famous Boston Brahmin family, very wealthy, very progressive and civic-minded family, which certainly has some influence on TR. He's completely smitten with her. She holds him off for almost, well,

more than a year nearly, and finally succumbs to his charms, and they get married and they move to New York, and as young couples do, they plan their future. So he runs for New York Assembly, and then they plan a family, and Alice Lee is pregnant, and she, unbeknownst, to everyone at that time, she suffered from Bright's disease, which is a kidney disorder, and it makes childbirth extremely complicated. Well, Theodore Roosevelt is away in the New York Assembly in Albany. He gets word that his wife, Alice, is about to give birth, and so he's delighted. A second telegram comes to him, though, that says that his mother isn't doing well

and that he should get home immediately. So he races home and gets back to New York City to find, well, as Elliot famously says, his brother famously says, you know, there's a curse on this. his house because both his mother and his wife are deathly ill. So he meets his newborn baby for the first time and then he says goodbye to both his mother and his wife. And the trauma of losing both of them is such a deep cut to Theodore Roosevelt that he writes in his diary, A Big Black X, and simply says underneath it, the light of my life has gone out, which is a moving symbol of all that, but I don't even scratches the surface of the trauma and hurt and grief that he experienced that day.

Yeah, you have to imagine that this man was on top of the world. He's a naturally abelient guy who's gotten over a lot in his childhood. He's discovered himself to be a strapping young man. He's gone to Harvard. He's built himself up, both physically and mentally. And everything's going great for this guy. And then suddenly a crushing day, you know, tears him down. This is really fundamental to what goes on with him as a person and how he faces a dilemmas of this kind or this nature. And ironically, it all happened on Valentine's Day. I mean, that's how, you know, absurdly theatrical this all is. I mean, you can't write this stuff. On Valentine's Day, 1884, both his wife and his mother die on the same day. So as a result of this blow, how does he react?

He goes out west. Explain this choice and how he goes about this just practically. Well, he goes out He actually had been out west before. He went hunting buffalo through the North Dakota Badlands and into Montana, which is where he, I mean, T.R. was a hunter, and I think hunting was a cathartic exercise for him as much as anything else. And he remembers North Dakota from that hunt and the people that he met there. And he had been considering for some time purchasing a ranch out there. He sees going west as an opportunity to escape and to heal and to really actually. get away from people because when he goes out west, he goes to the town of Madora, which is where they are currently building the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. But Madora itself, which is not a

populist place, he found that too overwhelming and actually goes further into the badlands to a very remote spot, now known as the Elkhorn, which is where he would build a ranch. And this is a place of solitude, really. And he goes, as he famously says in one of his letters, Black Care knows no rider whose pace is fast enough. In other words, he's trying to outrun his grief, and he does do that to some success. One thing I will say is we often think that TR goes out west and then moves on, gets over his wife,

abandons his daughter. He leaves his daughter with his sister, Bami, his oldest sister. But in actuality, T.R. went back and forth between Medora and the Badlands and New York City. He never really abandons his daughter. I mean, that's a preposterous thing that historians have said before, and he does keep his hand in the news. New York City scene of both politics and society. But he gets away. I mean, it's an opportunity

for relief and escape. It's just an obscure sidebar here. But at this very time, 1884, the Dakota building is being completed on the western side of the new Central Park. I mean, the Dakota was a state of mind as much as it was an actual place. And I'm sure that romantic ideal appealed to him at the time. Oh, absolutely. I think Dakota has a territory rather than a state even. So it is a romantic place and I think he gets a lot out of it I mean he would famously say later that he would have never been president

had it not been for his time in the West and he plays up to that romance so I mean his expectations of what the West can do to a man are the same as what Frederick Jackson Turner said the West would do that it would remake Americans it would you know it would shape the country I mean the entire frontier thesis

that the West made America is wrapped up in TR's own life and that's why I say he's so emblematic of the period. Yeah, that's a good word for him, emblematic. You have to just imagine the context that this kid was raised in. I mean, in those days, Frederick Edwin Church's paintings were being used, along with so many other of that Hudson River School to really build the West up in people's minds, the imagery. And those would have been the events that he had gone to to see those amazing paintings and all this incredible light that they were saying was out there.

This was definitely part of his recovery and his grieving process. and it works. He buys a cattle ranch. He thinks about becoming a rancher, but he doesn't go that direction. He's pulled back to New York, isn't he? He is pulled back to New York. He does, actually, what I should say is he does buy the ranch. In fact, he buys two ranches. I think it's probably in the region of about three or four thousand cattle, although I don't know the total head count, but he's a terrible rancher. I mean, in terms of business, he's a terrible businessman. There's a massive winter storm in, I think it's 1887, 88, and he loses all of those cattle. And basically his investment is lost. So he's not great of this. He is pulled back to New York. Politics

actually brings him back. He's encouraged by his soon-to-be wife, Edith. He meets Edith, childhood friend, and he kind of rediscovered his passion for her in the absence of his first wife. She encourages him to run for the mayoral election in New York City, and he does terribly. He comes in third. He loses actually second place is Henry George, the famous writer about the single tax theory, the land tax, and Roosevelt really kind of feels like his career as a politician is over. By this time, most of the thrust that he has in his professional life is in writing, actually. By this time, he will have written about four or five major books, one on the War of 1812, two biographies, as well as working on this magnum opus, the winning of the West. So he's an excellent writer,

and he thinks that's where his fortunes lie. Yeah, I've never published a book. You have, what makes him such a good writer in your opinion? Well, you know, it's funny. He's actually a historian as well. And he writes that history narratives need to inspire the current generation. And I think he was of his time so much that what he wrote was inspirational to the people that were reading those books at that time. I don't necessarily write like that. I'm far too academic. He was writing for general audiences and he captured their imagination in a way that we might think of, you know, we can think of lots of writers nowadays that do that. But he was certainly one of that kind. It seems almost like a personal momentum with him.

Like he's like a river. You know, everything flows through the single channel of his existence. He can't help but blur the lines between things. That's my picture of this man as he's forming as a young man. And it will continue to be right through to his presidency, isn't it? Well, I think there are certain philosophical threads that run from beginning to end. I think he's got a firm belief in the duty that Americans have for their country. I think he's got a firm belief in a Christian morality.

I mean, he's actually quite a religious guy, even though we don't think of that. But he has a faith in also the order of society, and that if society can be organized and orderly, then it can do great things. And that sort of seems to be themes that run from the beginning to the end. But there are big differences in youth. I mean, he is sort of somewhat truculent in his youth and some outspoken bigotry in his youth, really, about Native Americans, about races more generally. I think that tempers as he gets older and he doesn't think in such stark terms.

And he doesn't actually, he's not quite the jingo as president that he is as a young man. As a young man, he's talking about America basically taking over the world. I think by the time he's president, he's much more cautious, much more thoughtful and considered. And I think in a lot of ways, that's emblematic of us. As we age and we get more sensible and we get more experienced, we have different views. But perhaps our core ideologies and our core philosophies remain the same. Yeah, he seems to wear it on his sleeve. Let's back to biographical details here.

By 1886, he is returned. He marries Edith Carrot, who he used to know, an old flame of his, and they have, as you say, five children, four boys and a girl. His biggest identity really is as a family man, as so many of us are, but he's a passionate father, which is his nicest, absolutely charm, most charming aspect of the man, in my opinion. Over the next decade, his career begins to get national. President Benjamin Harrison puts him on the Civil Service Reform Committee to tackle corruption. He is the commissioner of police in New York City for a time. He's pushing through merit-based reforms, rooting out graft and so forth. You're seeing all the seeds of this man's outlook in his municipal and state duties that actually end up being practiced as a president.

This is the beginning of the progressive era that he heads up. Yeah, I mean, this isn't really always seem like a sexy topic, civil service reform. I mean, it's not going to light anyone's world on fire, but it's actually central to who he is, I think. And in the sense that he believes in meritocracy, he believes in expertise. I mean, he's really an intellectual, as I said already, but he believes that surrounding himself with intellectuals is the way in which the best policy is going to get made. He deeply believes that the spoils system, which is the system by which people get appointed to offices by supporting a political party is corrupt. and flawed. And you can see this in New York throughout the 19th century when you have bosses

in the city that just continue to appoint more corrupt people to skim money off the top of these important posts or like the collector's jobs. And Roosevelt aims to stop all that and he does get that national job. It's actually the longest job that he holds outside of the presidency is

civil service commissioner. And he is popular with Harrison who appoints him as well as Cleveland, a Democrat who keeps him on after that. And so I think that's an interesting one, but the police commissioner one is also interesting because he's trying to root out corruption there too. He's going after cops that are not working on the beat or falling asleep, cops that are taking bribes from brothels. And all of this is part and parcel of the man himself,

anti-corruption and meritocracy. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It's this time frame that he becomes very intimately aware of the poverty in New York as well. There's a famous episode where there's a photographer. named Jacob Rees, who's been snoop it around the Lower East Side documenting the squalor that these people are living in. You know, by this time it had been decades of these impoverished conditions going on here. And finally, Theodore Roosevelt is taking notice of this and going around and seeing with his own eyes how people are living.

He's beginning to shift, isn't he, from, as you say, sort of a singularity of his vision politically to a broader one at this point. Yeah, I think this is also where. the rubber meets the road in the sense that he learned from his father why progressivism was important, but now he's going out and seeing it for himself. And he can, as a legislator, legislate against it, or as a federal wonk do work to save people from the labor issues that are going on. So in the case of Jacob Rees, it goes around tenements and finds where people are making the cigars and he sees the terrible conditions and he's gobsmacked by them. I mean, he's kind of aware of them because

he's reading the periodicals that talk about how terrible the conditions are for American immigrants, particularly in the slums, but in addition to all of that, he is realizing for himself how those conditions have implications for wider society, how they create crime in a city, how they lead to, you know, sanitary and health conditions for a city, and where they lead to the breakdown of law and order more generally, which, as I said, is something that he believes steadfastly in. So poverty for him is not just a social issue. It's a political issue, and it's one that he becomes intimately connected with as both police commissioner and later on as president. I've always wondered about the progressive era, the title of that. How much was that a product of the

times, or was that just historians naming it after the fact? I mean, were there editorials being written? Things got to change. We've got to fix things by new ideas. Was that in the air? Or did that sort of evolve organically? Oh, no. I think it was definitely in the air. I mean, the name was created by historians. I mean, if we think about it, you know, every era has their reformers and their reforms. I mean, there was just a lot. a lot of them at this time. The civil service movement was huge. The settlement movement, which was the creation of settlements in major cities like New York and Chicago like Hull House, where they would mix the classes together as a social experiment. The direct election of

senators, the idea that Americans might adopt national health care or inheritance taxes or progressive income taxes, all of these were in the air at that time. And Roosevelt latches on to some of them really, you know, steadfastly from the beginning. Others, you know, it would take him time to adopt, like, say, for example, women's suffrage. He's not an early adopter of women's suffrage, but by the end of his life, he's one of the biggest proponents. So it's an evolution, just like it was for Lincoln, I think, as, you know, he wasn't an abolitionist, but he freed the slaves. So, you know, this is how people operate. It's usually not an epiphany or something that happens early on that they adopt and then push through. It's, it's an evolution of

I think for TR, it's definitely that. He becomes the 33rd governor of New York, but he's a short term in that office because he's taken into the cabinet of the new president, William McKinley. He serves as the assistant secretary of the Navy. There's so many crazy echoes here because that's exactly what Franklin Roosevelt. His fifth cousin will be later on down the road. Fascinating conversation we don't have time for, but the fact is there are these two iconic presidents who are born of the same family tree.

they barely know each other, but it's pretty remarkable how many, how they resonate through to each other. Theodore Roosevelt was an enormous model for Franklin Roosevelt later on. He takes this job in McKinley's administration. What does he do with this? Assistant Secretary of the Navy, what's that job all about? It's a job that he really liked because he likes the Navy. He likes boats. He likes managing personnel. And that is largely what it is. It's dealing with the sort of high order technology that's coming out. There are new battleship designs that are coming out. There are new weaponry designs that are coming out. He's intimately involved with all of that. He also is intimately involved in personnel management. You know, he's really keen to rethink the way

both the Army and the Navy are going to manage staff. And this goes back to the point that I was making about meritocracy. He believes firmly in this idea that the best class of sailors are going to be the ones that prove themselves to be the best class of sailors. So he wants to dispose with ideas like seniority, which just promote people for sticking around in the job for a long time. And I think, you know, all of this is based on his worldview, that the Navy is an important part of an American Empire. And this really stems from his teachings of Alfred Terre Mahan, who was at the Naval College. And his idea was that a fleet of boats is going to be more important than anything else in the 20th century. And sure enough, he's right. I mean, that's absolutely correct.

Roosevelt latches onto that idea early on and becomes one of the biggest proponents for naval expansion. And not only that, but preparedness, American preparedness. So when it comes to the war of 1898 against Spain, Roosevelt is setting up the Navy so that it can have some of the biggest successes in naval history. So when we get to say the Battle of Manila in 1898, Dewey's victory is as much a product of his brilliance of maneuvering as it is about Roosevelt telling him to stay cold and be ready. So 1898, the USS Maine explodes in Havana. A huge controversy, of course, in what really caused that explosion. Obviously, being the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, this would be a huge deal for TR. What's his view of this?

Does he go head first into this war? I mean, the destruction of the Maine is something that he saw as the thing that should have gotten America involved in the war right then and there. He had been arguing for the United States to get involved in Cuba for almost six months, before that, not quite, but around that. Because of course, the Cubans were being treated so badly by the Spanish. It was really a humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans had been relocated into concentration camps, and they were dying, you know, in spectacular numbers. And Roosevelt had thought that that was a terrible tragedy, and it argued that the U.S. should get involved and pushing the Spanish out then. But then when the main exploded, and it seemed

that it was a Spanish mind that likely did that, Roosevelt was incandescent with anger towards the Spanish, and he was urging McKinley to get involved to intervene in Cuba. McKinley, strangely enough, doesn't do that, despite all the pressure that's on him. The main blows up in February, and the war doesn't kick off. He doesn't, McKinley doesn't go to Congress with a war declaration until April. And that's because McKinley was involved in the civil war. He was a major. He saw the death and destruction that came with, and he didn't want to get America involved too quickly. Roosevelt, on the other hand, is quite insistent that the U.S. get involved. He's doing interviews with reporters saying that the U.S. should get involved.

But eventually, of course, McKinley does get pushed into the war, and Roosevelt is 100% ready to put himself in the line of fire when that war declaration is announced. One of the first big events happens in the Philippines. How do they get the ships to the Philippines so quickly? How is that the first major victory? Well, Roosevelt had the ships waiting in Hong Kong. I mean, I think he was expecting that the war wouldn't just be about Cuba. And this is, again, his foresight. While most of Americans were thinking the war is just going to be about Cuba, Roosevelt's thinking, well, the Spanish have an empire around the world. And it's not just Cuba. It's Guam. It's Puerto Rico. And it's this 5,000 island archipelago near China, the Philippines, which most Americans could not locate on a map. But Roosevelt had Admiral Duh, he wasn't. Admiral Dewey, he was Commodore Dewey then, had him hanging out in Hong Kong, cold up, and armed and ready to go. And so Dewey doesn't sail from San Francisco. He sails from Hong Kong to Manila, which is a much shorter journey. I guess we should explain that all these are

Spanish territories in those days, colonies. That's why the Philippines are a subject of concern. Was Roosevelt one of those who saw this as an imperial move for America? Did he see an empire in our future? Absolutely. And I think it's worth saying here that Obviously, empire is a loaded word. It's got a lot of different meanings, a lot of different understandings. Some view it positively, some negatively. There's a lot of negative connotations. But Roosevelt simply saw empire as the sort of natural extension of America.

I don't think Roosevelt saw empire as a dirty word like we might nowadays. For him, it was not only about expanding American power and its interests overseas, but it was about spreading the blessings of liberties, as he and others would have called it. He was hoping to spread democracy to the Philippines and to Puerto Rico. I mean, some of these places he expected would be made states of, in fact. He definitely was a jingo. He called himself a jingo, meaning that he saw the interests of America far beyond its own shores. And I think he would have definitely called himself an imperialist as well, but not with the connotations that we might have today.

Right. And we mentioned it before. I mean, there's a shift in this man, let alone the culture that he exists in. And it has resonated even through to recent times. There's a famous statue of him on the front steps of that museum, natural history museum, where he was, you know, side by side. He's on the horse, Native American by his left. I think it was African American on his right.

And he is leading, you know, as the white savior above, that is taken off a few years ago. It comes down with all that movement of taking down the statues. You can't see it. It's gone now. It's a great statue, by the way. It looked very, very striking. But it had quite a message of that doesn't fit anymore. And in that regard, what I'm trying to say is that he, this man really is.

is straddling the shifts. Back in those days, he's reading all kinds of stuff, you know, Anglo-Saxon superiority and those kinds of books. And then he grows up as well. I think, you know, he's also reading Jefferson, and he's reading Hamilton, and he's reading the founding fathers who refer to empire as the extension of a nation, of a state.

And, you know, I mean, Jefferson famously called it an empire for liberty. And I think Roosevelt sees it in that way, too, that he sees the expansion of democracy as being something that is only going to improve the world and its future. It's not something that's going to be, well, as we know, Empire has a lot of do with violence and oppression and dominance. And Roosevelt, I don't think, was thinking in those terms, even if, you know, that is what happened in some places like the Philippines. There is certainly American dominance and American violence there, too. But his ambitions, and I think his intent was more to spread the ideas of American democracy overseas.

Sure. The moderate view of this is that there's been this subconscious to the American nation from Jefferson writing, you know, all men are created equal when he is an enslaved himself, all the way through to these kinds of ideas of empire. All the while, they're underneath of that surface is this brewing idea of how we're going to change this and reform it down the line, whether it's conscious or not. It eventually happens. And that's the story of America, let alone these iconic leaders who would a lot to do with making it. At

some point, TR cannot stay out of the fight. This is, I guess, probably his most famous the most famous stereotype of this man is on horseback charging up the San Juan Hill, fighting the Spanish. Tell me how he came to have this unit called the Rough Riders

and step out of his life and go fight a war. Well, going back to the Navy position, he abandons that job as soon as the war is declared. And he decides at this stage he's going to petition all of his political friends to have a regiment, to lead a regiment. But what he realizes, too, is that he really doesn't have any military experience. And so he approaches a friend, actually the physician of the president of William McKinley, a guy called Leonard Wood, who had already had experience fighting wars in the Indian

wars, in the American West. And him and Roosevelt have very much the same ideas about American Empire and the war itself. And he asked Leonard Wood to be. the colonel of a regiment that he would then promote and help recruit for. And Wood agrees and the president agrees to allow these two to lead this regiment of troops. But it's clear that this regiment of troops is more Roosevelt's than Woods. In fact, the press latch on to this idea that it's Roosevelt's Roughriders. In fact, there's three different cavalry units. They all have different names named after the people that are leading them.

but Roosevelt's rough riders are the most sort of iconic cavalry unit during the war. They go train in San Antonio and then eventually deployed to Tampa where they're going to then get sent to Cuba to fight in the war. But they don't, as you point out, they don't bring an awful lot of horses with them. They can't fit them all on the boats. I mean, the planning for the war is an absolute disaster. There's tainted meat that's going to be sent over with the troops. There's tropical diseases that are going to cut the numbers of American soldiers.

more American soldiers die from malaria and dysentery than die from Spanish bullets in this war. So the planning of it is an absolute disaster. And Roosevelt does his very best for those troops that he's in command of, trains them well in Tampa and San Antonio, and then brings as many of them as they can to Cuba. And they fight a battle almost as soon as they deploy in Dachari in the southern coast of Cuba, and they lose a huge number in terms of the percentage of soldiers that were fighting. fighting, they lose a huge number straight away. So the war, before the glory of San Juan Heights,

before all of that, there is real trepidation about whether this is going to be a success at all. But Roosevelt very much stays the course and then famously takes his troops up what is called Kettle Hill, not San Juan Hill, but Kettle Hill. And he basically wins that hill, which allows the rest of the infantry regiments to capture San Juan Hill, which is right next to it, and then onwards to the capital, Santiago. The war heavily hinges on the capture of San Juan Heights, those two hills, Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill. How pivotal was this battle? The war couldn't be won without the Spanish being evacuated from those places. And those battles themselves are exceedingly dangerous because the Spanish have guns placed at the top of these hills. They

hold the high ground and they're firing down on infantry that are effectively running up the Hill. Roosevelt himself puts himself in huge danger because he's on a horse and he's charging up the hill and he doesn't yell charge. He yells, follow me. So, I mean, I imagine that the Spanish guns were fixated on getting him and they don't. He calls it famously his crowded hour and I'd say it was an absolute blur of a moment. But, you know, he has the presence of mind that when they get to the end of that battle to take this photo at the top of it and kind of like the photo of the flag raising at Iwojima, You know, that image of Roosevelt atop San Juan Heights is so iconic. And it becomes sort of the image of the war.

So, I mean, Dewey doesn't have that. Dewey's battle in Manila is so important. And it's a bloodless battle which he wipes out the Spanish fleet. But there's no photo of Dewey, you know, in Manila. But this photo of TR in Cuba makes him a celebrity overnight. Yeah. He is wounded. He gets shot in the elbow.

But it does really demonstrate the man's courage under fire, literally. that's probably a surprise even to himself because he had had no experience doing this. That's a remarkable factor to consider. He ends up getting the Medal of Honor posthumously by about 100 years in 2001. It's quite a misunderstood chapter in that it really, really mattered. It was part of a big attack on San Diego, the whole Capitol. So, you know, we all think of it as just this small skirmish kind of thing, but it's really quite a big deal and has everything to do with ending this war very quickly. It's a perfect war, isn't it?

It really ends after only a few months. It's about five months long. And we win handily, and we get a lot of territory out of it. It works out ideally for Theodore Roosevelt. Yeah, John Hay, who was the Secretary of State at the time and would be Secretary of State when TR takes over, famously called it the Splendid Little War. Now, you might remember John Hay. He was Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary during the Civil War.

So for him, a four-month war versus a four-year war. and one in which very few Americans died compared to the 600,000 that died in the Civil War, this was a huge victory. And it really, 1898 is a turning point. It puts the United States in the position of world power. They have an empire that stretches from the Philippines and the far east all the way to the Caribbean and arguably the entire Western Hemisphere. So their power is extensive after 1898. I'm cloudy after this. He comes back to his job. Is that how he returns to service or is this pure? Because the next thing that's going to happen to him is he becomes the vice president of the United States. But that's under the next administration of William McKinley.

So because of his newfound celebrity, because Roosevelt was a household name by that time, the Republicans in New York encourage him to run for governor of the state. The Republicans had a candidate who they knew that he was going to lose. He wasn't popular. So they need to refresh the ticket and they approach Roosevelt, which was like, you know, really biting down hard on your lip while asking him to do it. Because the guy who's going to ask him to do it is Thomas Collier-Platte. He's the boss of New York City Republicans and New York State Republicans. And Platt doesn't like Roosevelt. Roosevelt's a reformer. Platt is a party boss. He's corrupt. So I think asking Roosevelt was difficult for him, but he knew Roosevelt would win. And in fact, Roosevelt does win and does

accept the nomination on the basis that he could choose the people that he could appoint to party offices and Platt conceded that point. But the reason why Platt then turns on Roosevelt is because Roosevelt does prove to be incredibly independent as governor. And Platt wants to control the governor. So in order to get Roosevelt out of New York, he nominates Roosevelt to become vice president. And that will basically defang Roosevelt because the vice president's job is not one that has too much in the line of power or responsibility. So this is great. Platt wins. He gets Roosevelt on the ticket, secures the governorship for two years, and then gets to move Roosevelt on after that. Well, no wonder you wrote a biography about this guy. It's just amazing. The sequence of events

that goes into Theater Roosevelt's life are remarkable. And one really leads to the next. It's an incredible coherence when you look back on it. I suppose at the time it didn't feel that way. But he only spends a year, not even in the role as a governor, before he becomes the vice president. Then fate will really play its hand and something big will come. And then, That is our next episode. So let's, let's end there, Mike, for now, because we have a lot to talk about as the years unfold for Theodore Roosevelt. But you can say, I just want to make this comment at this point. What I really appreciate about this man's story looking back at it is its organic quality, that much of his fame came from real events and real courage and, you know, bold acts, but also from his own writing, which he really did. He didn't have a ghost writer writing these things. He was a brilliant. writer and a very studied man. And so when you look back at this celebrity of a politician, it's because of what he's done, not because of what he has gotten people to do for him. That's what I like about TR, and that's the authenticity of the man, isn't it?

I think he is authentic. I think you're absolutely right about that. I don't want to take away from what you said, because I think you are correct. I think we can also say that there's two things going on here. He's an incredible publicist. I mean, not only as a writer, is he a great publicist, but I mean, think, for example, if you've ever seen a photo, of TR in Western attire, those photos were almost always taken in a Brooklyn theater or a studio. You know, so he knew dressing up like this, because he didn't dress up like that. You didn't have tassels in the West back in the 1880s, right? But you see these photos of TR with tassels, leather jacket, this is made up.

Even the, you know, for example, the celebrity status that he begins to gain after the Spanish American War, he writes a book called The Rough Riders, which basically tells the story from his perspective. One of the commentators of the day said that it should have been. called Alone in Cuba, because he focuses so much on himself and his role. But I mean, if you're going to be a politician, if you're going to be someone who gets the mood of the people and understands how to reach them, you have to do these things. And he knew that. Yeah. Michael, Colonnais, we're going to wind this part one of Theodore Roosevelt's story up right now and invite

folks back to listen to the next episode, starring you, TR, President and Adventure, in which we talk about the nuts and bolts of his presidency and what came afterwards. Thanks a lot. Michael. Thanks, son. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend.

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