11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
rip roaring account of the rough rider!, September 22, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (American Presidency Series) (Paperback)
If someone wants to get a one volume account on this exciting presidency, look no further. The author, Lewis Gould, shows how TR developed further the modern presidency, which began under his predecessor McKinley. One of our most fascinating presidents, there's a wonderful chapter on Roosevelt the Administrator. Excellent bibliography too!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Comprehensive but could use some additional background, September 23, 2011
Lewis Gould's volume on Roosevelt's presidency attempts to cram a lot of material into less than 300 pages of text. He succeeds in presenting a comprehensive survey of the "Republican Roosevelt's" time in office. Every event, major or minor, is covered to some extent. Tariffs, foreign policy, preservation and the Panama Canal all loom large. At the center of the story is Gould's concept of Roosevelt's "personalized presidency," which put Theodore (neither he nor anyone near him called him "Teddy") himself at the center of the action, putting his personal stamp on as much as possible.
Gould does well to present not only what Roosevelt did, but analyzes and explain his governing approach. For instance, conservation was driven by a desire to preserve resources for future use rather than some philosophical commitment to the environmental status quo. Here he differed from those such as John Muir, and it explains why he cooperated with lumber companies and others who sought to extract resources from the areas the administration was protecting. Similarly, his "trust busting" was not driven by an ideological concern about "big business" per se but the need to assert the federal government's control over them. Once accomplished by the Supreme Court's ruling in the Northern Securities case, Roosevelt convinced companies of the merits of working with the administration to form regulations by providing sensitive data, and he personally kept the Justice Department away from such "good trusts," which, Gould writes, he distinguished from "bad trusts" (presumably those that did not assist the new Bureau of Corporations).
On foreign policy, we're presented with an executive who "proceeded with moderation and caution in exercising presidential power on the world scene," whether the situation involved US interests directly (e.g., the Canadian border) or indirectly (European creditor nations' interaction with their Latin American debtors, the Russo-Japanese war). Again, these situations were resolved through highly pragmatic diplomacy rather than threats, contrary to the caricature that Roosevelt's critics painted of him as an uncontrollable, impetuous creature.
Unfortunately, Gould often accomplishes all of this in under 300 pages at the expense of context. The reader is given only a thumbnail biography of Roosevelt's life prior to his presidency, and an uninitiated reader will lack a feel for his personality and approach to challenges the way she would after reading Edmund Morris's Rise of Teddy Roosevelt for instance. With another President this might not matter quite so much, but given Gould's thesis of the "personalized presidency" a more thorough introduction to the man in order to understand the presidency would be in order. Gould also assumes that the reader will be fluent in the politics of the late 19th century, needing little explanation of why Roosevelt made a priority of controlling corporations or how politicized the tariff was.
Occasionally, Gould strikes a wrong note. For example, he credits the Treasury with calming the panic of 1907, and fails to refer at all to the crucial role of J.P. Morgan. In fact, it was Morgan's prominence over Treasury that convinced policy makers of the need for an effective centralized banking system, leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve system. Still, readers looking for a complete overview of Roosevelt's presidency and its impact on the office and our nation will be well served by this volume.
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