Customer Reviews

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

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This is absolutely the most scandalous, revisionist, psyco-babble, biography I have ever encountered. TR's life, utterances, and actions are consistently taken out of context, as are those of his contemporaries.

The author psycho-analyzes TR by present day values, making him sound like a hopeless warmongering deviant, anti-feminist, racist, and a cruel father who drove a 10-year old TR jr. to a nervous breakdown.

She quotes "experts" whose credentials are not established, and totally fails to grasp TR's pivotal role in establishing his crendentials as a progressive, polymath genius, who authored 38 books, thousands of magazine articles, and wrote 18 million words in his comparatively short life.

Nowhere does she give him credit for any of his lasting accomplishments such as the aggressive application of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the Pure Food and Drug Act,the creation of a world class navy, the Panama Canal, the creation of our incomparable system of national parks and monuments...the list is endless. Instead she focuses on his imperial ambitions (TR did not want American colonies!!) and his "blood thirsty" propensities!

This book is so biased, so defective, so pitifully "PC" that is does not warrant purchase by any reasonable student of history. I pity her students at Wake Forest.

Having read only brief publications about TR, I can only claim partial qualification for this review. That said, I found this book to be highly insulting and disrespectful to the memory of Theodore Roosevelt. The author paints a picture of a man that was emotionally disturbed at best. How can she come to such far fetched conclusions when she has never even spoken to the man? The analytical process the author uses is abstract. Nearly every page is filled with modern feminist language that I found to be very out of place in a book that is supposed to be about an important American icon.
I'm truly sorry and ashamed that I even picked up this book, let alone read it. This is revisionism at it's most rank.

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 practiced as the embodiment of its new "manifest destiny," from gentleman Patroon and cowboy soldier, now seem so extreme that they could not have co-existed in one man. Indeed most modern biographers have difficulty explaining these extremes and tend to focus on one side or the other. And so most accounts are usually are just recitations of his activities, while this most contradictory of all presidents, who led us out of the era of the frontier and into the American Century seems lost to our comprehension. Watts makes TR make sense because her contextualization of his life in his times is completely convincing. Excellent illustrations.

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!

Having read over 20 biographies of TR over the years, I would have to say that this is the worst. The author utterly fails to assess TR in his "context", though she claims that this is her intent. She judges TR based on modern, "politically correct" sensibilities, and, naturally, finds him wanting. This book is more appropriate as required reading in the Women's Studies department at Wellesley College than for a student of history or devotee of 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.