Chapter 2

CIVILIZATION FOLLOWS THE SUN

“The vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled cannot be rightly understood if considered solely by itself. It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them. Its true significance will be lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who took part therein.”¹

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1889

They headed west, following the sun.

On July 1, 1905, the secretary of war, William Howard Taft, Alice Roosevelt, seven senators, and twenty-three congressmen—together with wives and aides—boarded a transcontinental train in Washington, D.C. Recalled Alice, “It was a huge Congressional party, a ‘junket’ if ever there was one. We left from the old Baltimore and Ohio Station that stood on what is now part of the park between the Capitol and the Union Station…. The Taft party was, I should say, about eighty strong.”² Alice noted, “It was the first time I had ever been farther west than the Mississippi and I had a little Atlas that I used to read… as though it were a romance. I would look at it and think I—I am actually here at this place on the map. Those were the days when Kipling made Empire and far-flung territory dreams to dazzle.”³

Princess Alice was traveling in style. “The luggage that I thought necessary for the trip included three large trunks and two equally large hat boxes, as well as a steamer trunk and many bags and boxes.”⁴ For his part, Taft brought along several trunks of clothes and a Black valet to help him dress. Both Big Bill and the Princess had their own private railroad carriages.

The two were not alone in their high style, and some taxpayers worried about the cost of the trip. The federal government then had much tighter purse strings than in later years. Only government officials had their fares paid, and everyone, including senators and even Big Bill, was required to pay for his own meals and personal expenses. Nor would Uncle Sam foot the bill for female accompaniment: Alice, like the other women in the party, paid her own way.

Regardless the source of cash, a San Francisco Examiner article entitled “Why Taft Pleases Steamer and Rail Folk” pointed out that this was “one of the most lucrative special parties ever hauled across the continent by the overland roads. The railroad fares totaled $14,440, which includes something like $2,100 for dining car service.” Added to that would be the “very snug sum” of twenty-eight thousand dollars for almost three months on the passenger ship Manchuria, not including tips estimated to total “$1,800… it being taken for granted they will observe the usual tipping custom aboard Pacific liners.”⁵ These were big numbers to the average U.S. workingman in 1905, who earned between two hundred and four hundred dollars a year.

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ALICE ROOSEVELT WAS A novelty, the twentieth century’s first female celebrity. Like an early Madonna or Britney, newspaper readers knew her by her first name and even the illiterate recognized her photo. President Roosevelt realized that when Alice went somewhere, the crowds and press followed. She was the very first child entrusted to represent a president.

Teddy had been correct when he had calculated that with Alice on the imperial cruise, the world’s newspapers would have more reason to print the family name. Reporters fluttered around her, eager to learn what the shapely girl wore, who sat near her, to whom she spoke, and what she said. Readers particularly loved it when Alice acted bolder than a twenty-one-year-old “girl” should, like when she welcomed the 1905 Fourth of July with a bang, going out to a car on the rear of the train after breakfast and taking potshots with her own revolver at receding telegraph poles. No one thought to ask why the president’s young daughter was packing her own pistol. Americans expected such risqué behavior from their Princess.

Alice’s public rambunctiousness was an outward reaction to her deep inner hurt over her cold and distant relationship with her domineering father. Her cousin Nicholas Roosevelt later wrote that Theodore Roosevelt’s relationship with his daughter “subtly warped the development of this brilliant but basically unhappy person.”⁶ Alice masked her pain by developing a tough and flamboyant outer layer.

Alice seemed doomed from the start. Before she was born, the future president and a woman named Edith Carow had been sweethearts as adolescents. They quarreled and broke up, but Edith continued to love Teddy. A few years later, Roosevelt married Alice Lee, who birthed Alice Lee Roosevelt on February 12, 1884. Two days later, Teddy’s wife died in her husband’s arms from complications resulting from her daughter’s birth. A year later, Teddy married Edith.

Alice never heard her father acknowledge her natural mother. After his presidency, Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography about the joys of family life and love between men and women, but he would not admit to having had a first wife. As Alice later explained, “My father didn’t want me to be… a guilty burden… on my stepmother. He obviously felt guilty about it, otherwise he would have said at least once that I had another parent. The curious thing is that he never seemed to realize that I was perfectly aware of it and developing a resentment.”⁷ A relative wrote, “The only rational explanation that I have heard is that T.R.’s determination to regard his first marriage and his life with Alice Lee as a chapter never to be reread was so great that he deliberately buried it in the recesses of his memory forever.”⁸ Added Alice: “He never even said her name, or that I even had a different mother…. He didn’t just never mention her to me, he never mentioned her to anyone. Never referred to her again.”⁹

Wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Edmund Morris of Alice’s stepmother: “Edith struck most strangers as snobbish…. ‘If they had our brains,’ she was wont to say of servants, ‘they’d have our place.’ ”¹⁰

Theodore Roosevelt left to Edith the emotionally challenging job of dealing with the rebellious child. Edith responded by bluntly telling Alice that if she did not stop being so selfish, the family would stop caring for her.

Teddy and Edith had five children of their own: Theodore III, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin. Young Alice often felt like an outcast as her brothers teased her about not having the same mother. Her brother Ted told Alice that Edith said that it was good that Alice Lee had died, because she would have been a boring wife for Teddy. Alice later said of Edith, “I think she always resented being the second choice and she never really forgave him his first marriage.”¹¹

Edith Roosevelt. She said of the servants, “If they had our brains, they’d have our place.” (Stringer/MPI/Getty Images)

Alice was frequently shunted off to relatives, with whom she often spent more time than with her father and stepmother. Carol Felsenthal writes in Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “Theodore Roosevelt gave few signs that he cared much about his oldest child.”¹²In one letter to Edith, Teddy wrote affectionately about all the children except Alice. And, as Alice confided to her diary, “Father doesn’t care for me…. We are not in the least congenial, and if I don’t care overmuch for him and don’t take any interest in the things he likes, why should he pay any attention to me or the things that I live for, except to look on them with disapproval.”¹³

The Roosevelt family. Quentin, Theodore, Theodore III, Archie, Alice, Kermit, Edith, and Ethel. (Library of Congress)

Among the things Alice rejected was her father’s devout faith. As a little girl Alice informed her father that his Christian beliefs were “sheer voodoo” and that she was “a pagan and meant it.”¹⁴ She would be the only one of his six children not to be confirmed.

Alice’s rebellious nature was far from private. She violated White House etiquette by eating asparagus with gloved fingers at an official dinner. She daringly used makeup, bet on horse races, and dangled her legs from grand pianos. Alice once appeared in public with a boa constrictor curled around her neck, and to one “dry” dinner party Alice smuggled small whiskey bottles in her gloves. At a time when automobiles were rare, Alice drove her car unchaperoned around Washington and was ticketed at least once for speeding. Alice wrote that Edith and Teddy requested “that I should not smoke ‘under their roof,’ [so] I smoked on the roof, up the chimney, out of doors and in other houses.”¹⁵ (She was even “asked to leave Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel for smoking in the lobby.”¹⁶) A friend called Alice “a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.”¹⁷Roosevelt once exclaimed to a visitor, “I can be President of the United States, or I can attend to Alice. I can’t do both!”¹⁸

Yet Roosevelt—who became president after a twenty-year career as a best-selling author and student of public relations—could not help but notice how the media loved this presidential wild child and how useful that might be. He asked his seventeen-year-old daughter to christen Prussian Kaiser Wilhelm’s American-made yacht “in the glare of international flashbulbs,” and the French ambassador noted it “was a means by which to reduce the hostility in the public sentiment between the two countries.”¹⁹ Pleased with her performance, Teddy then dispatched her to America’s newly acquired Caribbean possessions, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Although the teenager had once written, “I care for nothing except to amuse myself in a charmingly expensive way,”²⁰ she took a serious interest in what she was shown: “As the daughter of the President, I was supposed to have an intelligent interest in such things as training schools, sugar plantations and the experiments with yellow fever mosquitoes.”²¹ Teddy wrote her, “You were of real service down there because you made those people feel that you liked them and took an interest in them and your presence was accepted as a great compliment.”²²

Alice Roosevelt as a debutante, 1902. A friend called Alice “a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.” (Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Having proved useful, Alice was asked by her father to serve as the hostess on Secretary Taft’s Pacific voyage. She would not only be a convenient distraction, but an ocean away. After leaving Washington, Alice wrote, “My parting from my family… was really delicious, a casual peck on the cheek and a handshake, as if I was going to be gone six days. I wonder if they really care for me or I for them.”²³

Among those on the trip was Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. At thirty-four years of age, Nick was thirteen years Alice’s senior and only eleven years younger than her father. He had qualified for the trip because of his seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and because of his particular interest in Hawaii and the Philippines.

Nick was the fourth generation of Longworths in Cincinnati, a rich aristocrat who grew up on an estate, toured Europe, learned French and the classics, and summered in Newport, Rhode Island. He’d won election to Congress in 1902 and, being wealthy and dashing, was a big attraction for Alice.

The elder Roosevelts did not know the details of Alice and Nick’s romance, but if they had, it is likely they would have strongly disapproved. Edith warned Alice, “Your friend from Ohio drinks too much.”²⁴ He was also a gambler and womanizer, known to frequent Washington brothels and enjoy the prostitutes of K Street. Yet here the two were, setting off on a voyage that would take months and remove them both from Teddy’s supervision.

Congressman Nicholas Longworth aboard the Manchuria, 1905. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)

THE ARRIVAL OF THE train to the three-day stay in and the subsequent sailing from the city by the bay was perhaps San Francisco’s biggest news story since the gold rush. “It was San Francisco before the fire,” Alice later wrote. “I shall never forget those days. There was an exhilarating quality in the air, the place, the people, that kept me on my toes every moment of the time there.”²⁵

The San Francisco Chronicle’s page-one headline on July 5, 1905, was “San Francisco Welcomes President’s Daughter.”²⁶ At the time, there were no bridges connecting San Francisco to the mainland, so Alice detrained at the Oakland railroad terminus and took the ferryboat Berkeleyacross the bay to San Francisco’s Ferry Building. The press was surprised: the sophisticated Alice they’d known only from pictures looked like a schoolgirl in person. When reporters on the ferry tried to get close to her, Nick told them she did not wish to be interviewed, but eventually she relented, stating, “I am simply on a pleasure trip and I must refer all questions to Mr. Taft.”²⁷

“There was a great curiosity to see Alice Roosevelt,” Big Bill noted in an understatement.²⁸ Indeed, the public couldn’t get enough. Eager San Franciscans lined the streets for hours just to glimpse their Princess. Alice was followed everywhere, from the Palace Hotel, where she and Taft dined, to the University of California–Berkeley campus, where she was briefly overcome: “The wildest rumors were at once afloat,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, “one story being to the effect that the President’s daughter had a sunstroke. The truth is that she was not unwilling to find an excuse to snatch a few hours of quiet.”²⁹ One photo caption read “Miss Alice Roosevelt and Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, Who Is Very Attentive to the President’s Daughter.”³⁰

THE PRESS TREATED TAFT with great respect, one local paper commenting, “Secretary Taft has certainly made a great many friends since his arrival, and in the hotel corridors one now hears him frequently spoken of as a Presidential possibility.”³¹ Taft had first come to national attention as governor of the Philippines. As ruler of America’s largest colony, he had been in charge of America’s first attempt at nation building far from home. But recent reports from Manila had Taft “alarmed that the political edifice he had left behind was collapsing.”³² The cruise would be a good chance for him to check on things personally in the Philippines. In consultation with Roosevelt, Taft also took on presidential assignments in Japan, China, and Korea.

The official highlight of Big Bill’s San Francisco visit was an elaborate all-male banquet thrown in his honor at the Palace Hotel. The San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Three hundred and seventy-six guests sat down to the repast, among them being representatives of the leading interests of the Pacific Coast.”³³ When it came his turn to address the tuxedoed banqueters, Taft first praised those traveling with him to the Philippines:

I consider it a great triumph, that we have been able to enlist the interest and the sympathy of seven distinguished United States senators and twenty-three representatives of the House of Representatives of the United States, who have been willing at a very considerable cost to each person and also at a very considerable cost of time to devote a hundred days to going out into those islands in a season when we must expect storm and rain, in order that they may know the facts concerning them. I think it is an exceptional instance of the degree of self-sacrifice to which our legislators and those who are responsible to us for government are willing to make.³⁴

Taft referred to the Filipinos as “those wards of ours ten thousand miles away from here,” declaring that America had “a desire to do the best for those people.”³⁵ (The term wards was laden with meaning: former judge Taft and his audience knew that the United States Supreme Court had defined American Indians as “wards” of the federal government.) The problem—which he did not mention—was that the Filipino “wards” didn’t agree with the American sense of what was “best” for them.

In 1898, Filipino freedom fighters had expected that America would come to their aid in their patriotic revolution against their Spanish colonial masters. Instead, the Americans short-circuited the revolution and took the country for themselves. Related American military actions left more than two hundred fifty thousand Filipinos dead. Over the next seven years, many Filipinos came to associate Americans with torture, concentration camps, rape and murder of civilians, and destruction of their villages. But in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, Taft assured his audience that the real problem was the Filipinos themselves:

The problem in the Philippines is the problem of making the people whom we are to govern in those islands for their benefit believe that we are sincere when we tell them that we are there for their benefit, and make them patient while we are instructing them in self-government. You cannot make them patient unless you convince them of your good intentions. I am confronted with the repeated question, Shall we grant them independence at once or are we right to show them that they cannot be made fit for independence at once? They are not yet ready for independence and if they talk of independence at the present time it is mere wind.³⁶

When Big Bill said that Filipinos were not “fit for independence,” he could be confident that those in attendance understood why. A majority of Americans—young and old, the unschooled and the highly educated—believed that, over the millennia, succeeding generations of Whites had inherited the instincts of the superior man. The day before his Palace Hotel speech, Taft had told a Berkeley university audience, “Filipinos are not capable of self-government and cannot be for at least a generation to come.”³⁷ The young men listening understood that this was not a political judgment, but an organic truth, as Taft reminded the students, “it takes a thousand years to build up… an Anglo-Saxon frame of liberty.”³⁸

Teddy Roosevelt had built a dual career as a best-selling author and wildly popular president upon his image as a muscular White Christian man ready to civilize lesser races with the rifle. Like many Americans, Roosevelt held dearly to a powerful myth that proclaimed the White Christian male as the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. It was the myth that “civilization follows the sun.” The roots of this belief could be found in a concoction of history, fable, and fantasy.

ONCE UPON A TIME, the story went, an “Aryan race” sprang up in the Caucasus Mountains north of what is now Iran. (The word Iran derives from the word Aryan.) The Aryan was a beautiful human specimen: white-skinned, big-boned, sturdily built, blue-eyed, and unusually intelligent. He was a doer, a creator, a wanderer, a superior man with superior instincts, and, above all, a natural Civilizer. In time, the Aryan migrated north, south, east, and west. The ancient glories of China, India, and Egypt—indeed, all the world’s great civilizations—were the product of his genius.

During this era of great enlightenment and prosperity, the bright light of White Civilization blazed throughout the world. But over time came a fatal error: the pure White Aryan mixed his blood with non-White Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian females. The sad result of this miscegenation was plain to see: dirt and deterioration. History then recorded the long decline of those mongrelized civilizations.

Not all was lost, though. A group of Aryans had followed the sun westward from the Caucasus to the area of northern Europe we now call Germany. This Aryan tribe did not make the mistake of their brethren. Rather than mate with lesser-blooded peoples, these Aryans killed them. By eradicating the Others, the Aryans maintained the purity of their blood.

Through many mist-shrouded centuries in the dark German forests, the myth continued and the pure Aryan evolved into an even higher being: the Teuton. The clever Teuton demonstrated a unique genius for political organization. He paid no homage to kings or emperors. Instead, the Teuton consulted democratically among his own kind and slowly birthed embryonic institutions of liberty that would later manifest themselves elsewhere.

The original documentation of the Teuton was the book Germania (circa AD 98) by the Roman historian Caius Cornelius Tacitus. In Germania, Tacitus wrote that long ago “the peoples of Germany [were] a race untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves [with] a high moral code and a profound love of freedom and individual rights; important decisions were made by the whole community.”³⁹

Eventually the Teuton—with his Aryan-inherited civilizing instinct—spread out from the German forests. Those who ventured south invigorated Greece, Italy, and Spain. But these Teuton tribes made the same mistake as the earlier Aryans who founded China, India, and Egypt: instead of annihilating the non-White women, they slept with them, and the inferior blood of the darker Mediterranean races polluted the superior blood of the White Teuton. Thus the history of the Mediterranean countries is one of dissolution and nondemocratic impulses.

The Teutons that furthered the spread of pure Aryan civilization were the ones who continued to follow the sun to the west. They marched out of Germany’s forests and ventured to Europe’s western coast. Then they sailed across what would later be called the English Channel and landed in what would become the British Isles.

Lesser races already populated those islands, and had the Teuton bred with these non-Aryans, their pure blood would have been sullied and the great flow of civilization would have come to a halt.^* But luckily for world civilization, these Teutons obeyed their instincts. By methodical slaughter of native men, women, and children, they kept themselves pure. As these Germanic tribes spread westward and northerly, they gradually became known as Anglo-Saxons (a compound of two Germanic tribal names).

The Anglo-Saxon myth of White superiority hardened in the 1500s when King Henry VIII broke with the pope to create the Church of England. Royal propagandists blitzed the king’s subjects with the idea that the new Anglican Church was not a break with tradition, but a return to a better time: Henry promoted the Church of England to his subjects as a reconnection to a purer Anglo-Saxon tradition that had existed before the Norman conquest of 1066. The success of the king’s argument is revealed by an English pamphleteer writing in 1689 that those seeking wisdom in government should look “to Tacitus and as far as Germany to learn our English constitution.”⁴¹ Henry was long gone, but the myth had been reinforced and reinvigorated.

Thus, centuries of Aryan and Teuton history revealed the three Laws of Civilization:

1. The White race founded all civilizations.

2. When the White race maintains its Whiteness, civilization is maintained.

3. When the White race loses its Whiteness, civilization is lost.

A glance revealed the truth of these declarations: The Anglo-Saxons were a liberty-loving people who spawned the Magna Carta, debated laws in Parliament, produced exemplars like Shakespeare, and tinkered the Industrial Revolution to life. But woe to those who ignored civilization’s rules and went south to Africa or east to Egypt, India, and China. The Anglo-Saxon in those benighted countries were but small rays of light overwhelmed by the more populous dark races. There were just too many Africans, Indians, and Chinese to slaughter in order to establish superior civilizations. The best that could be hoped for was an archipelago of White settlement and the exploitation of local primitives in order to produce greater European riches.

Given such constraints, civilization and democracy could reach the next level of evolution only if the Anglo-Saxon moved westward. Progress sailed across the Atlantic with the White Christians who followed the sun west to North America. And once again—emulating their successful Aryan and Teuton forebears—the American Aryans eliminated the native population. From Plymouth Rock to San Francisco Bay, the settlers slaughtered Indian men, women, and children so democracy could take root and civilization as they understood it could sparkle from sea to shining sea.

REGINALD HORSMAN WRITES IN Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism that Whites in the New World believed “that they were acting as Englishmen—Englishmen contending for principles of popular government, freedom and liberty introduced into England more than a thousand years before by the high-minded, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany.”⁴² American colonists studied Samuel Squire’s An Enquiry into the Foundation of the English Constitution and learned “the ideas of Tacitus [and] the invincible love of liberty” that existed amidst the democratic Teutons.⁴³ One of the favorite sayings in Colonial America quoted Bishop Berkeley, the eighteenth-century philosopher:

Westward the course of empire takes its way

The first four acts already past

A fifth shall close the drama with the day

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.⁴⁴

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, was the “most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America.”⁴⁵ (It was Montesquieu who recommended the separation of powers now so central to the U.S. government.) Tacitus was one of Montesquieu’s favorite authors, and the Frenchman was inspired by “that beautiful system having been devised in the woods.”⁴⁶

While visiting Colonial America, another European observed: “An idea, strange as it is visionary, has entered into the minds of the generality of mankind, that empire is traveling westward; and everyone is looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give law to the rest of the world.”⁴⁷

He was not alone. Thomas Jefferson—who persuaded the trustees of the University of Virginia to offer the nation’s first course in the Anglo-Saxon language—justified Colonial America’s breaking its ties with Mother England as a return to a better time when his Aryan ancestors had lived in liberty. In 1774, he wrote A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a series of complaints against King George, which foreshadowed by two years his 1776 Declaration of Independence. Jefferson refers to “God” twice, but invokes England’s “Saxon ancestors” six times. In calling for a freer hand from the king, Jefferson writes of their shared “Saxon ancestors [who] had… left their native wilds and woods in the north of Europe, had [taken] the island of Britain… and had established there that system of laws which has so long been the glory and protection of that country.” Jefferson argued that since the original Saxons were ruled by “no superior and were [not] subject to feudal conditions,” the king should lighten his hold on his American colonies.⁴⁸

Two years later, in 1776, Jefferson wrote that he envisioned a new country warmed by the Aryan sun: “Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8^th century?”⁴⁹

On the original Fourth of July—July 4, 1776—the Continental Congress tasked Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson with suggestions for the design of the Great Seal of the United States. (For centuries nations had used seals to authenticate treaties and official documents.) Franklin suggested the image of Moses extending his hand over the sea with heavenly rays illuminating his path. Adams preferred young Hercules choosing between the easy downhill path of Vice and the rugged, uphill path of Virtue. Jefferson suggested the two Teuton brothers who had founded the Anglo-Saxon race. Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that Jefferson had proposed “Hengst and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”⁵⁰ (Congress rejected all three recommendations, and committees eventually worked out the present Great Seal of the United States.)

Meanwhile, the laws of the new nation followed the path of White supremacy. The legislation defining who could become an American citizen, the Naturalization Act of 1790, begins: “All free white persons…” While Congress debated whether Jews or Catholics could become citizens, “no member publicly questioned the idea of limiting citizenship to only ‘free white persons.’ ”⁵¹

Many Americans concluded that if the course of empire was westward and the United States the westernmost home of the Aryan, they were a chosen people with a continental, hemispheric, and global racial destiny. Even when the United States was a young country hugging the Atlantic, many envisioned the day the American Aryan would arrive on the Pacific coast. From there he would leap across the Pacific and fight his way through Asia, until he reached the original home of his Aryan parents in the Caucasus and a White band of civilization would bring peace to the world. Senator Thomas Hart Benton—a powerful early-nineteenth-century Washington figure who served on the Senate’s Military and Foreign Affairs committees—wrote of that happy time:

All obey the same impulse—that of going to the West; which, from the beginning of time has been the course of heavenly bodies, of the human race, and of science, civilization, and national power following in their train. In a few years the Rocky Mountains will be passed, and the children of Adam will have completed the circumambulation of the globe, by marching to the west until they arrive at the Pacific Ocean, in sight of the eastern shore of that Asia in which their first parents were originally planted.⁵²

Such sentiments were reinforced throughout popular culture. Jedidah Morse wrote the most popular geography books in the early 1800s, proclaiming: “It is well known that empire has been traveling from east to west. Probably her last and broadest seat will be America… the largest empire that ever existed…. The AMERICAN EMPIRE will comprehend millions of souls, west of the Mississippi.”⁵³ Walt Whitman’s most enduring work, Leaves of Grass, includes the poem “Facing West from California’s Shores,” with the lines: “Now I face home again, very pleas’d and joyous… round the earth having wander’d… Facing west from California’s shores… towards the house of maternity… the circle almost circled.”⁵⁴ In his groundbreaking The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote, “All other series of events—as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece, and that which resulted in the empire of Rome—only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to… the great stream of Anglo-Saxon emigration to the west.”⁵⁵

The great transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson was also under the Aryan spell:

It is race, is it not? That puts the hundred millions of India under the dominion of a remote island in the north of Europe. Race avails much, if that be true, which is alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons are Protestants; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the representative principle. Race is a controlling influence in the Jew, who for two millenniums, under every climate, has preserved the same character and employments. Race in the Negro is of appalling importance. The French in Canada, cut off from all intercourse with the parent people, have held their national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus ‘On the Manners of the Germans,’ not long since, in Missouri, and the heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resemblance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers, Suckers, and Badgers of the American woods.⁵⁶

Emerson was far from alone in such sentiments. Most scholarly American intellectuals of his time followed the sun. The 1800s saw the emergence of “social sciences” in America. Not surprisingly, they validated Aryan supremacy. One after another, White Christian males in America’s finest universities “discovered” that the Aryan was God’s highest creation, that the Negro was designed for servitude, and that the Indian was doomed to extinction. The author Thomas Gossett, in his thoughtful book Race: The History of an Idea in America, writes, “One does not have to read very far in the writings of nineteenth-century social scientists to discover the immense influence of race theories among them. In studying human societies, they generally assumed that they were also studying innate racial character.”⁵⁷

One of the social sciences popular in America for much of the nineteenth century was phrenology, the study of skulls. White Christian phrenologists observed that the Caucasian skull was the most symmetrical, and “since the circle was the most beautiful shape in nature, it followed that this cranium was the original type created by God.”⁵⁸ Samuel Morton of Philadelphia, America’s leading phrenologist, amassed the world’s largest skull collection. To calculate brain size he sealed all but one of a skull’s openings and filled it with mustard seed, then weighed the seed. He then correlated the amount of mustard seed with intelligence, morality, cultural development, and national character. Morton’s experiments proved that “eighty-four cubic inches of Indian brain had to compete against, and would eventually succumb before, ninety-six cubic inches of Teuton brain [which] comforted many Americans, for now they could find God’s hand and not their own directing the extinction of the Indian.”⁵⁹ In fact, the White skulls Morton examined “nearly all belonged to white men who had been hanged as felons. It would have been just as logical to conclude that a large head indicated criminal tendencies.”⁶⁰ (Morton replied that the skulls of noncriminal Whites would be even larger.)

One of the “bibles” of American scientific thought in the nineteenth century was the best-selling book Types of Mankind. Published to acclaim in 1854, it went through twelve printings and was used as a standard text into the twentieth century. Types of Mankind held that only the White race was civilized and that “wherever in the history of the world the inferior races have been conquered and mixed in with the Caucasians, the latter have sunk into barbarism.”⁶¹ The resulting barbaric races “never can again rise until the present races are exterminated and the Caucasian substituted.”⁶² Describing Native Americans, the book stated:

He can no more be civilized than a leopard can change his spots. His race is run, and probably he has performed his earthly mission. He is now gradually disappearing, to give place to a higher order of beings. The order of nature must have its course…. Some are born to rule, and others to be ruled. No two distinctly marked races can dwell together on equal terms. Some races, moreover, appear destined to live and prosper for a time, until the destroying race comes, which is to exterminate and supplant them.⁶³

This best-selling science textbook argued that exterminating the Indian was philanthropic: “A great aim of philanthropy should be to keep the ruling races of the world as pure and wise as possible, for it is only through them that the others can be made prosperous and happy.”⁶⁴

Such beliefs ruled America. As the California governor, Peter Burnett, put it in his 1851 Governor’s Message, “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected…. The inevitable destiny of the [White] race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert.”⁶⁵ Lewis Morgan, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the founder of anthropology in the United States, observed, “The Aryan family represents the central stream of progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming control of the earth.”⁶⁶

* * *

BIG BILL’S SAN FRANCISCO audiences were proud to be descendants of history’s master race. The crowds that greeted Taft were far from alone in this conceit: the myth was embedded in children’s books, tomes of science and literature, sermons from the pulpit, speeches in the halls of Congress, and in everyday conversations at the kitchen table.

And how could the idea be creditably challenged? The White British had the largest seagoing empire, and the Russians—a White race—controlled the world’s most extensive land empire. Europe’s “scramble for Africa” had made Black Africans subjects to the White man. And the president of the United States firmly believed the myth to be an essential truth, a law of nature no less universal than gravity. During the Roosevelt administration, the center of world commerce and power was shifting from one Anglo-Saxon city—London—to another—New York. Westward went the sun indeed.

On its way from Washington, D.C., to California, Alice’s train had rumbled across a continent that had recently heard the thunder of buffalo hooves. The Indian survivors of the American race–cleansing were locked up as noncitizen, nonvoting prisoners in squalid reservations. And while Lincoln had technically freed the slaves, by 1905 disenfranchisement and restrictive Jim Crow laws invisibly reshackled the American Black man, and the local lynching tree had plenty of branches left.

IN HIS YOUTH AND later in college, Theodore Roosevelt had imbibed the Aryan myth. As a famous author he explained American history as part of the Aryan/Teuton/Anglo-Saxon flow of westering civilization. Then he fashioned a winning political persona as a White male brave enough to vanquish lesser races. Roosevelt, with impressive public-relations acumen, had publicly embraced the manly strenuous life. He was photographed more than any other president up to his day, and if you visit the many historical touchstones of his life or peruse the numerous biographies, you will see many images depicting him with a rifle in hand or on horseback. Though President Teddy installed the first White House tennis court and frequently played, he allowed no photographs of himself dressed in his custom tennis whites, fearful that such images might undermine efforts to portray him as utterly masculine.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1905. Long before Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush used their ranches for photo shoots, Theodore Roosevelt set the manly standard. As Roosevelt wrote, “You never saw a photograph of me playing tennis. I’m careful about that. Photographs on horseback, yes. Tennis, no.” (National Park Service)

* * *

THEODORE ROOSEVELT JR. WAS born in a New York City mansion on October 27, 1858, among the seventh generation of Roosevelts to be born on Manhattan island. His father, Theodore Sr., was a wealthy New York aristocrat.

The first Roosevelt—Klaes Martenszen von Rosenvolt—had immigrated to New Amsterdam (later New York City) from Holland in 1649.⁶⁷ Klaes and his descendants acquired vast tracts of land in the Hudson River valley north of Manhattan, which was worked by slaves. By the time of Teddy’s birth two hundred years later, the Roosevelt financial empire included vast holdings of stock, real estate, insurance, banking, and mining. Roosevelts had been elected as congressmen and appointed as judges. The family’s time and money helped create such storied New York institutions as Chemical National Bank, Roosevelt Hospital, Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Children’s Aid Society.

Theodore Roosevelt Sr. He prescribed the Bible for his sons’ minds and barbells for their bodies.

The Roosevelts were true aristocrats. Uniformed servants padded quietly about the family mansion, made beds, laid out their masters’ clothes, cleaned, and cooked. Teddy ate from fine china emblazoned with the family crest. The Roosevelts dressed for dinner, and finger bowls were only a tinkle of the server’s bell away.

Yet noble Theodore Sr. worried that his well-born sons might be doomed by this life of luxury, threatened by something called “overcivilization.” The theory was that the Aryan race evolved in successive stages, just as people grew from childhood to old age. The first stage was the savage. The savage was disorganized, and useless chaos reigned. The second stage was the barbarian. The barbarian made a valuable contribution to civilization because it was in this Genghis Khan–like stage that the “barbarian virtues” were formed. Barbarian virtues were the fighting qualities by which a race advanced and protected its flank. In 1899 governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York wrote to psychologist G. Stanley Hill: “Over-sentimentality, over-softness… and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”⁶⁸ The third and most desired stage was the civilized man, who loved peace but when provoked could manifest his barbarian virtues. The fourth evolutionary stage was a step over the cliff: overcivilization.

Overcivilization existed when the barbarian virtues were replaced by the easy life, and many believed that modern American life was getting “soft.” Instead of chopping wood, wrestling a heavy plow, and hunting for dinner, the modern American Aryan warmed himself with coal, worked at a desk, and ate hearty meals in cushy restaurants.

To combat this threatening condition, Theodore Sr. preached “muscular Christianity” that stressed “healthiness, manliness, athletic ability and courage in battle.”⁶⁹ Young Teddy learned from his father that Christ himself was not gentle, saintly, and long-suffering, but a soldier of vigor and righteousness. (During this era, muscular Christians founded the Young Men’s Christian Association [YMCA] and composed the virile religious anthem “Onward Christian Soldiers.”) Theodore Sr. dispensed his Christian duty by lecturing lower-class boys at the Children’s Aid Society and the Newsboys’ Lodging House, as well as teaching Sunday school. Teddy often tagged along, listening as his tall, bearded father prescribed Bibles for the boys’ minds and barbells for their bodies.

Theodore Roosevelt, age eleven. “The older races of the city made the mould into which the newer ones were poured,” wrote Manhattanite Teddy at the age of thirty-three in 1891.

Muscular Christianity was one solution to the bane of overcivilization. The other was “the nature cure”—romps in the woods that would make a boy manlier and therefore purer. Theodore Sr. took his children to the great outdoors for exercise and helped the Children’s Aid Society export ninety thousand pauper children to the Midwest countryside. Such efforts not only circumscribed Teddy’s childhood but would define his broader sense of the world.

Martha Bulloch, Teddy’s mother, in her early twenties. Martha grew up in Bulloch Hall near Atlanta. Some speculate that Martha and her mansion were Scarlett and Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s book Gone With the Wind.

* * *

TEDDY’S MOTHER, MARTHA BULLOCH Roosevelt, a Southern belle whose family owned an enormous plantation, further defined the future president’s worldview. Roswell, Georgia, from where she hailed, was founded in 1839 on land that had been seized from the Cherokee nation, which was uprooted by U.S. Army troops and marched forcibly to Oklahoma in the brutal journey now infamous as the “Trail of Tears.” Unable to adjust to chilly northern climes, her stern husband’s ways, and New York society, Martha was usually ill and required constant care. From her sickbed she captured young Teddy’s imagination by telling him stories of the thickheaded Bulloch slaves and the military exploits of her Bulloch relatives.

In story after story, the young boy heard about Martha’s forebears and their courage under fire, their fearlessness, and their willingness to kill if need be. In Martha’s accounts, two things became clear: first, that Teddy was part of a superior race; and second, that the most masculine men didn’t need barbells to prove their manliness—they had rifles.

His mother’s tales excited young Teddy, but her own fragility also reinforced the danger posed by weakness: Martha herself seemed a clear example within the Roosevelt home of the overcivilized woman. Unfortunately, young Teddy appeared to be a prime example of an overcivilized boy: a scrawny, sickly specimen who needed eyeglasses to see his own hands and who suffered from terrifying asthma attacks that at times left him an invalid. After one particularly severe attack, Theodore Sr. gathered up his sickly son, ran down the stairs and into the Roosevelt rig, then sped through the dark Manhattan streets, forcing a rush of air into Teddy’s tiny lungs.

Theodore Sr. installed gymnastic equipment on the back piazza of the Roosevelt mansion, but Teddy’s health was too fragile for a full regimen. Theodore Sr. even discussed sending his son west to Denver to cure his asthma. When Teddy was eight, his father dressed him in a velvet coat and sent him and his brother to an outside tutor. While Elliott flourished, sickly and nervous Teddy couldn’t undertake even this minor effort and had to be schooled from home. With his mother, he visited such fashionable health resorts as New Lebanon, Saratoga, Old Sweet Springs, and White Sulphur Springs. But many saw these elite watering holes as places where the effete became even more overcivilized.

Teddy was so frail that the Roosevelt family physician, Dr. John Metcalfe, recommended that he see the famous neurologist Dr. George Beard. (Beard would go on to write the best-selling book American Nervousness, which warned that overcivilization threatened the country’s future.) After examining the sickly lad, Beard gave Teddy to his partner, Dr. Alphonso Rockwell, who was known for treating high-strung, refined young aristocrats. Rockwell said Teddy suffered from “the handicap of riches” and told Beard that the youngster “ought to make his mark in the world; but the difficulty is, he has a rich father.”⁷⁰

Teddy was ten years old by now and must have been alarmed to hear doctors and his parents speak of him this way. And he must have been even more alarmed when Rockwell attached electrical equipment to his head, feet, and stomach and sent a jolt through his body to restore the boy’s “vital force” and cure his overcivilization.

Isolated, homebound, and often bedridden, young Teddy read widely and began to dream that he could fight and explore side by side with his literary heroes. The dime novels Teddy devoured were full of racial stereotypes: The Blacks were dim-witted, subservient, and comical. The Indians were treacherous, immoral creatures. The heroes were inevitably blond, blue-eyed frontiersmen who stood for righteousness. In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the author Mayne Reid’s books five times, writing that he had “so dearly loved” them as a child. Reid’s works—among them The Scalp Hunters, The Boy Hunters, The War Trail, and The Headless Horseman—were tales of gruesome combat to the death. In one, a mother helplessly watches an alligator kill her daughter, then uses her body as bait in order to take revenge on the reptile who murdered her child.

Teddy also thrilled to “The Saga of King Olaf,” a poem in which Longfellow celebrated Teutonic White supremacy. As a young teenager Roosevelt read Nibelungenlied—the German Iliad—which extolled Teutonic virility. Roosevelt quoted the work for the rest of his life, and the author Edmund Morris thought the Nibelungenlied so central to Teddy’s life that he used phrases from it as aphorisms to begin each chapter of his first Roosevelt biography.

In 1872, when Teddy was a scrawny boy of thirteen, his father’s patience wore out. He ordered Teddy to embrace manhood and thwart overcivilization with a rigorous bodybuilding program. Roosevelt later claimed that this cured his asthma. The truth was far different. After his death, his sister Corinne told a Teddy biographer: “I wish I could tell you something which really cured Theodore’s asthma, but he never did recover in a definite way—and indeed suffered from it all his life.”⁷¹ The confinement and dread had a major impact on his personality. As Roosevelt scholar Kathleen Dalton writes, “Theodore grew up encased in iron cages of Victorian thought about cultural evolution, overcivilization, race suicide, class, mob violence, manliness and womanliness. As a child and a teen he was incapable of bending open those iron cages.”⁷² Overcompensating, Teddy became increasingly aggressive. Family members noticed a righteous ruthlessness as he advocated his ideas of right and wrong.

Cosseted in the family mansion with little contact with the outside world, Teddy never attended a grade school or high school—private tutors came to him. As a result, Harvard was the first school Roosevelt attended. When he made his way north from his Manhattan home in 1876 at the age of eighteen, some family members worried that he couldn’t endure winter in Cambridge.

At Harvard, Teddy’s anatomy professor, William James, urged his students to regard manliness as their highest ideal. But for Teddy, that ideal was elusive. He was still hobbled by asthma and complained in letters about missing schoolwork due to persistent sickness. (His classmate Richard Weiling watched him grapple with weights in a gym and thought Roosevelt was a “humble-minded chap… to be willing to give such a lady-like exhibition in such a public place.”⁷³)

The young Manhattan aristocrat was very conscious of his status as a “gentleman,” cautious in his choice of friends, and quick to join socially prominent campus organizations. Roosevelt carefully researched the backgrounds of potential friends and considered only a few to be gentlemen. Writes Edmund Morris: “The truth is that Roosevelt from New York was much more at home with the languid fops of Harvard than his apologists would admit. He not only relished the company of rich young men, but moved immediately into the ranks of the very richest, and the most arrogantly fashionable.”⁷⁴

At Harvard, Roosevelt was in “an intellectual atmosphere pervasive with racially oriented topics and a campus dominated by intellectuals who subscribed to racially deterministic philosophies.”⁷⁵ Warren Zimmermann, a former U.S. ambassador and author of First Great Triumph, writes, “Hierarchical racial theories helped shape the intellectual formation of virtually every American who reached adulthood during the second half of the century. Without even trying, well-educated American politicians carried into their careers large doses of Anglo-Saxonism administered to them in their universities.”⁷⁶

Francis Parkman graduated from Harvard in 1845 and taught there. His best-selling histories were translated into many languages and illustrated by famous artists. Theodore Roosevelt would dedicate his The Winning of the West book series to Parkman, who had once written, “The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine and therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason and has the judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question.”⁷⁷

Teddy’s favorite Harvard professor was Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Shaler founded Harvard’s Natural History Society, of which Teddy was elected vice president. Professor Shaler, “one of the most respected professors on the faculty, taught white supremacy based on the racial heritage of England, [finding] non-Aryan peoples lacking in the correct ‘ancestral experience’ and impossible to Americanize.”⁷⁸

THERE WAS A TRADITION among highborn, wealthy college graduates to take off on a thrilling adventure, like a sea voyage, and turn it into a book. Teddy had become a millionaire at age twelve when his grandfather C. W. S. Roosevelt had died, and more inheritance came his way when Theodore Sr. died in 1878.⁷⁹ But Teddy had no personal history upon which to capitalize. He couldn’t write about his father, ashamed that he had bought his way out of the Civil War. His maternal Bulloch uncles had been Confederate secret agents, another unpromising angle; still, those uncles were the most compelling men in Theodore Roosevelt’s life, especially the older and more experienced Uncle Jimmie Bulloch. The U.S. Government considered Jimmie Bulloch to be a traitor to his country as a result of his anti-Union activities in the Civil War. He faced arrest in the United States and evaded American justice by living in England, where he is buried. He had served fourteen years in the U.S. Navy before the Civil War, a period when the War of 1812 stood alone as America’s biggest naval conflict. Uncle Jimmie’s tales about how the U.S. Navy bested England and the necessity of naval preparedness had made an indelible impression on Teddy. While still an undergraduate, Roosevelt began writing The Naval War of 1812, though he graduated from Harvard in 1880 with the manuscript incomplete.

With college finished, wealthy and idle Teddy headed off on vacation. As a child, Roosevelt had shot animals in a number of eastern states, in Europe, and in Egypt. Recently engaged to Alice Lee, he now went on a luxury hunting excursion in the Dakota Territory with his brother, Elliott. The idea of investing in the Dakota Territory was on rich men’s minds everywhere, and with the Roosevelt family fortune at hand, getting in was easy. Teddy invested “ten thousand dollars in the Teschmaker and Debillier Cattle Company, then running a herd on the ranges north of Cheyenne.⁸⁰

Further travel soon followed. Roosevelt married Alice on his twenty-second birthday, October 27, 1880. Several months later, in May of 1881, the newlyweds left for a costly five-month honeymoon in Europe. Teddy brought his draft chapters with him, and The Naval War of 1812 was finally published in 1882.

Roosevelt’s first book was a bold amalgam of a call for naval preparedness and Harvard’s follow-the-sun dogma. In its first chapter, Teddy made clear the “Racial Identity of the Contestants.”⁸¹ He noted differing levels of ability among combatants according to the purity of their Aryanized blood. Norsemen—very Teutonic—made “excellent sailors and fighters.” The non-Teutonic Portuguese and Italians “did not, as a rule, make the best kind of seamen [because] they were treacherous, fond of the knife, less ready with their hands, and likely to lose either their wits or their courage when in a tight place.”⁸² The finest sailors of all were the ones who had followed the sun farthest west: “the stern school in which the American was brought up forced him into habits of independent thought and action which it was impossible that the more protected Briton to possess…. He was shrewd, quiet and… rather moral…. There could not have been better material for a fighting crew.”⁸³

Alice Lee Roosevelt, Teddy’s first wife and Princess Alice’s mother. Father and daughter never discussed her. Roosevelt whitewashed his first wife’s memory from his life story, not even mentioning her in his autobiography. (Library of Congress)

The Naval War of 1812 made Teddy a nationally recognized advocate of a muscular navy, but it was a navy book with a narrow readership. Greater fame was still to come.

RETURNED FROM HIS EUROPEAN vacation, Roosevelt headed to Columbia University to study law under Professor John Burgess. Today Columbia University’s website informs us that “Burgess ranks not only as the ‘father’ of American political science, but among the truly great figures in history who will be remembered for his work in founding and building up the school of Political Science at Columbia University.”⁸⁴ Professor Burgess’s political science course was Teddy’s favorite class at Columbia. Burgess remembered that Roosevelt “seemed to grasp everything instantly, [and] made notes rapidly and incessantly.”⁸⁵ For his part, Roosevelt “had an immense admiration and respect for Burgess.”⁸⁶

Professor John Burgess of Columbia University, who taught that only White people could rule because the Teuton had created the idea of the state. In 1910, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt wrote Burgess: “Your teaching was one of the formative influences in my life. You impressed me more than you’ll ever know.”

Burgess taught that “the United States Constitution… was the modern expression of Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic political genius—a genius which had originated in the black forests of Germany, spread through England and North America and expressed itself in the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution.”⁸⁷ Burgess taught that it was the mission of the White man to spread democracy around the world, and that since the state was an invention of the Teuton, the organs of state should be controlled only by those with Teutonic blood—no dark Others need apply.

At Columbia, as at Harvard, Teddy absorbed a scholarly, reasoned case for American world domination based upon the color of his skin and thus had acquired the prism through which he would judge people, events, and nations. As Thomas Dyer writes in Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race:

[Theodore Roosevelt] viewed the entire breadth of the American past through a racial lens. With constant, almost compulsive attention to underlying racial themes, he researched, analyzed, and synthesized the raw materials of history. The force of race in history occupied a singularly important place in Roosevelt’s broad intellectual outlook. In fact, race provided him with a window on the past through which he could examine the grand principles of historical development. None of human history really meant much, Roosevelt believed, if racial history were not thoroughly understood first.⁸⁸

In May of 1883, Alice told her twenty-five-year-old husband she was pregnant. Rich, restless, anxious to invest money, and worried about what fatherhood would mean, Teddy went to the Dakota Territory in September for a second time. Almost as soon as he arrived, he wrote Alice, “There was a chance to make a great deal of money, very safely, in the cattle business.”⁸⁹ Already having invested in a cattle company, he now bought a ranch as a business venture. The investment in this case was with public image in mind; Roosevelt told one of his ranch hands that his goal was to “try to keep in a position from which I may be able at some future time to again go into public life, or literary life.”⁹⁰

New York assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt. Other politicians mocked him as effeminate when he appeared on the New York assembly floor dressed in a purple satin suit and speaking in a high-pitched voice. To change that image, Roosevelt galloped west.

With his golden name and backed by family money, Teddy ran for New York State assemblyman from Manhattan County. He was elected in 1883 when he was twenty-three years old, the youngest person still to this day to be elected assemblyman in New York State. Roosevelt’s constituents were well-to-do Manhattanites, and Teddy allied himself with rich Protestants who looked down upon Catholics, Germans, and Irish and thought the Chinese were a dangerous contagion.

Teddy was an oddity in nineteenth-century Albany. Politics at that time was a game played by beer- and whiskey-drinking men, not aristocrats. To New York’s political press and players, Teddy was a shrimp-size dandy, dressed in tight-fitting, tailor-made suits, a rich daddy’s boy who read books and collected butterflies. Teddy made a bad first impression when he appeared on the assembly floor dressed in a purple satin suit, speaking in a high-pitched, Harvard-tinged voice. The other assemblymen took one look at the rich kid and laughed.

In 1880s Albany, it would have been acceptable to be wanting in areas of intelligence or legislative ability. But being seen as effeminate was a death sentence for an aspiring politician. This was, after all, forty years before American women were even allowed to vote. Roosevelt’s assembly colleagues hung the demeaning nickname “Oscar Wilde” on him, a mocking reference to the disgraced British homosexual. One newspaper went further, speculating whether Theodore was “given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane.”⁹¹

During the years 1884 to 1901—from the time young Teddy thought of how to reform his effeminate image to when he became a manly man president—William Cody’s extravaganza Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was the leading cultural sensation in the United States. At twenty-six years of age, William Cody had left the West, headed east, and “was the subject of a vast literature: fictionalized biographies by the score, dime novels, dramatic criticism, puff pieces extolling the heroism of Buffalo Bill [and he was] starring as himself in New York theatrical dramas about his life.”⁹²Drawing millions of spectators in America and Europe, Cody’s spectacle (three trains were required to transport the cast, staff, props, and livestock; the staging required almost twenty-three thousand yards of canvas and twenty miles of rope) helped create a lasting myth of the American frontier. The impact was global—Pope Leo XIII had personally blessed Cody’s entourage, and in England a grieving Queen Victoria made her first public appearance in twenty-five years to witness Cody’s magic.

The full title of Cody’s show was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: A History of American Civilization. Buffalo Bill was the embodiment of the blond Aryan who sowed civilization as he race-cleansed his way west. The show’s program touted “the rifle as an aid to Civilization [without which] we of America would not be today in possession of a free land and united country.”⁹³ The rifle’s bullet was “the pioneer of civilization [which] has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest and with the family bible and the schoolbook.”⁹⁴

Recognizing that a frontier adventure of his own could remedy his wimpish reputation, Roosevelt galloped west, following Buffalo Bill’s tracks. Thus began one of America’s great political makeovers. After returning to Manhattan in 1884, Teddy boasted to the New York Tribune: “It would electrify some of my friends who have accused me of presenting the kid-glove element in politics if they could see me galloping over the plains, day in and day out, clad in a buck-skin shirt and leather chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head.”⁹⁵ Wrote Roosevelt, “For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman…. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red… exactly as did the pioneers.”⁹⁶

“Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” William Cody, as Buffalo Bill, was the world’s most famous man. Cody created the American idea of the West. His Buffalo Bill character was the prime example of a White manly man who civilized savages. Theodore Roosevelt borrowed from Cody twice: his Ranchman Teddy persona and the “Rough Riders” moniker. Roosevelt was not the first nor the last to be influenced by the power of Cody’s imagery. Gene Autry, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood walked through celluloid landscapes first conjured in the nineteenth-century mind of William Cody. (Library of Congress)

In fact, Roosevelt had commuted west aboard deluxe Pullman cars, staying for short periods of time to check on his investments and gather material for his books. Ranchman Teddy was to Theodore Roosevelt what Buffalo Bill was to William Cody: a spectacular fiction concocted with an audience in mind.

When Alice died in 1884, Roosevelt’s first inclination was to flee, as he always had when troubled, and he again headed west. The next year, Teddy published Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Three years later, he published Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. Both books were action packed, beautifully illustrated adventure tales about the “real” West. Roosevelt wrote of hunting and bronco busting and described his rough-hewn ranch house with elk horns lining the walls and the buffalo robes he used to keep warm:

Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past…. Ranching is an occupation like those of vigorous, primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century; and the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman…. [The Ranchman] must not only be shrewd, thrifty, patient and enterprising, but he must also possess qualities of personal bravery, hardihood and self-reliance to a degree not demanded in the least by any mercantile occupation in a community long settled.⁹⁷

Even though Teddy spent much more time writing about the frontier than experiencing it, with these books he became a principal historian of the cowboy and a chief interpreter of the wild Western life.

UNTIL HIS DEATH, TEDDY would repeat these mythical accounts of his Western adventures, passing them along as fact. But despite his claims to the contrary, Roosevelt spent the majority of his “Western years” in Manhattan. Notes John Milton Cooper Jr. in The Warrior and the Priest, “His commitment to western ways was neither permanent nor deep. Between the summers of 1884 and 1886 he spent a total of fifteen months on his ranch. He did not stay for an entire winter in either year; his longest stretch there came between March and July 1886. The rest of the time he shuttled back and forth to the East Coast.”⁹⁸

Teddy would later dissemble that he had lived out West “for three years,” or the “major part of seven years and off and on for nearly fifteen years.”⁹⁹ But in 1884 he made only three trips to his ranches and lived more than two-thirds of the year in Manhattan, and in 1885 the proportion was about the same. The lone exception was in 1886 when he took two prolonged trips, visiting the West for twenty-five weeks. But except for sporadic hunting trips, after 1886 he became a full-time easterner again. Teddy’s “Western years” were career-building errands.

And he was hardly a pioneer. Teddy’s two friends—the author Owen Wister (The Virginian) and the sculptor Frederic Remington—were also rich East Coast kids who went west via elegant Pullman coach and Grand Hotel and then spun their short sojourns into careers as interpreters of the West. As Aspen is to a rich college graduate today, so the Dakota Territory was to young nineteenth-century mansion dwellers. “The number of Harvard graduates alone that appeared on the cattle frontier,” Edward White writes in The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience,“is ample testimony to the fact that long hours were spent in the Hasty Pudding Club by scions of wealthy families romanticizing the West as a place for adventure.”¹⁰⁰ (Cowpokes laughed when Roosevelt ordered one of his men to round up a stray cow with a patrician “Hasten forward quickly there.”¹⁰¹)

Teddy’s ranches went bust within two years and he finally abandoned the West. By the end of 1886, half his inheritance was gone. Teddy knew his ranching days were over. John Milton Cooper Jr. writes:

In his subsequent career on the national scene, no aspect of Roosevelt’s life except his war service made him more of a popular figure than his western sojourn. Nothing did more to make him appear a man of the people. He himself liked to recount how ranching had augmented politics in ridding him of all snobbish inclinations. Actually, his experience was more complicated. In going west, Roosevelt was following a well-beaten track among the upper crust on both sides of the Atlantic. One of his Dakota neighbors was a French marquis, while two others maintained dude ranches for scions of the best British and American families.¹⁰²

Teddy’s frontier life was more soft blankets than barbwire, but Roosevelt skillfully projected a different reality. Hermann Hagedorn—the first director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association—describes Teddy’s author photo for Hunting Trips of a Ranchman:

He solemnly dressed himself up in the buckskin shirt and the rest of [his] elaborate costume… and had himself photographed. There is something hilariously funny… The imitation grass not quite concealing the rug beneath, the painted background, the theatrical (slightly patched) rocks against which [Roosevelt] leans gazing dreamily across an imaginary prairie… with rifle ready and finger on the trigger, grimly facing dangerous game which is not there.¹⁰³

Yet the danger had been there—the danger that without sufficient masculinity, Teddy’s political career was doomed.

In 1886—one year into the creation of the Ranchman myth—Roosevelt ran for mayor of New York. Newspapers hailed the “blizzard-seasoned constitution” of the “Cowboy of the Dakotas.”¹⁰⁴ He began writing advice columns for men, such as “Who Should Go West?” in Harper’s Weekly.

In his two Ranchman books, Teddy established himself as a civilized man with barbarian virtues. In his next four books—a series entitled The Winning of the West—Teddy drew upon the civilization-follows-the-sun myth to glorify how the American Aryan civilized his continent.

In the very first sentence of his very first The Winning of the West book, Roosevelt declared his theme: “During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.”¹⁰⁵ “English-speaking peoples” was Teddy’s euphemism for the White inheritors of the Aryan tradition; “waste spaces” refers to where non-White Others lived or had lived until their righteous extermination. And Roosevelt certainly meant it when he wrote of “the world’s history”: “The vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled cannot be rightly understood if considered solely by itself. It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them. Its true significance will be lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who took part therein.”¹⁰⁶

William Cody’s “Buffalo Bill” (left) was a hunter. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Ranchman Teddy” (above) was a rancher, the next step up on the evolutionary ladder as understood in the agrarian nineteenth century: the hunter (Buffalo Bill) secures the wilderness and the rancher tames it. Theodore Roosevelt was not the only rich easterner who went west in pursuit of fame. The author Owen Wister (The Virginian) and the sculptor Frederic Remington were also rich East Coast men who went west via elegant Pullman coaches and grand hotels and then spun their short visits into careers as Western manly men. (Bettmann/Corbis)

Elsewhere the books are full of commentary in line with Aryan mythology:

The persistent Germans swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine and north of the Danube [to conquer] their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic.¹⁰⁷

There sprang up in conquered southern Britain… that branch of the Germanic stock which was in the end to grasp almost literally world-wide power, and by its over-shadowing growth to dwarf into comparative insignificance all its kindred folk.¹⁰⁸

After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began.¹⁰⁹

Roosevelt wrote that Indians’ “life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts¹¹⁰ [who] seemed to the White settlers devils and not men.”¹¹¹ Originally Teddy had planned to write a fifth The Winning of the West book, but just four years after the publication of his fourth, he became president.

ON JULY 8, 1905, the first morning rays of sun in the San Francisco harbor revealed busy Manchuria crew members scurrying about. They polished the twenty-seven-thousand-ton behemoth—it was sixty-five feet wide and the length of two football fields. Three thousand excited Californians came to the docks to see the American delegation off. Big Bill was aboard by midmorning. It was easy for the throng ashore to pick out the rotund 325-pound secretary of war as he mingled on deck with passengers and guests.

The Princess and her party reached the dock about noon. Alice was “attired in a simple traveling dress of gray, trimmed with dashes of deep blue here and there [with] an Eton jacket to match…. Her hat was of deep red straw.”¹¹² Noted the San Francisco Chronicle, “She ascended the gang plank alone, the crowd drawing back to allow her ample room. Just before stepping aboard, she paused, looked over her shoulder and beckoned to Representative Longworth to come to her side. Together they stepped on board and many romance-loving souls wondered if the incident foreshadowed the beginning of a yet pleasant voyage by these same fellow travelers.”¹¹³

SS Manchuria. In 1905 this Pacific & Ocean liner carried the largest delegation of American officials to Asia in U.S. history. (Courtesy of Jonathan Kinghorn)

Alice “found her spacious staterooms filled with a wealth of beautiful flowers.”¹¹⁴ On a table was an expensively produced souvenir guidebook entitled From Occident to Orient, Being the Itinerary of a Congressional Party Conducted to the Far East by Secretary of War Taft, 1905, as Guests of the Philippine Government. It was “handsomely illustrated with photographic scenes of the countries and three excellent maps showing the route to be traveled.”¹¹⁵

Alice then joined Big Bill on deck. The San Francisco Bulletin observed, “For a half hour she looked down upon the throng of 3,000 people on the dock, all of them straining to see the president’s daughter. As the whistles sounded at 1 o’clock, the hawsers of the big liner were cast loose and, in command of Captain Saunders, the Manchuria gracefully departed. In response to the cheer that went up, Miss Roosevelt waved her handkerchief and threw a kiss.”¹¹⁶

And then they headed west. Following the sun.