The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (78 page)

But Roosevelt remained in the pessimistic minority. His political instinct told him the tariff was too complex an issue to divide the electorate neatly.
⁹⁷
He had to admit that Blaine was a certainty for renomination, and stood at least an even chance of being elected. This made Roosevelt’s own hopes for appointive office even more forlorn than they had been the previous spring. President Blaine would be no more likely to favor him than President Cleveland. The Plumed Knight was a man of long memory: he would not forget the rejection of his advances in the mayoral campaign of 1886.

“I shall probably never be in politics again,” Roosevelt wrote sadly to an old Assembly friend. “My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it; I should like to write some book that would really take rank in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream.”

T
HUS, IN A CRYPTIC CONFESSION
dated 15 January 1888,
⁹⁸
did Roosevelt give his first hint that he was musing the major work of scholarship that would preoccupy him for the next seven years. Four volumes, perhaps eight, would be required to do the subject justice: his theme was enormous but vague. Within its blurry parameters (conforming roughly with the shape of the United States), he began to see heroic figures fighting, moving, pointing in one general direction.

The process of literary inspiration does not admit of much analysis. Writers themselves are often at a loss to say just when or why a given idea takes possession of them. Roosevelt, certainly, never indulged in such speculation.
⁹⁹
Yet it is possible to mention at least some of the fertilizing influences upon what he proudly called “my
magnum opus.”
¹⁰⁰
In those first weeks of 1888 he happened to be checking through a batch of page proofs from England, comprising several chapters of
The American Commonweath
, by James Bryce, M.P., whom he had met in London the previous winter. Bryce wanted his expert opinion on various passages dealing with municipal corruption. As Roosevelt read the proofs through, he realized that he held a masterpiece in his hands. It was, he decided, the most epochal study of American institutions since that of de Tocqueville; it made his own
Gouverneur Morris
(whose galleys also lay upon his desk) seem pathetically trivial in comparison.
¹⁰¹
Bryce’s reference to him, in a footnote, as “one of the ablest and most vivacious of the younger generation of American politicians” was flattering but ironic, given the present stagnation of his political career; it only served to increase his yearning to write a work “in the very first class,” which would earn him similar respect as an American historian.
¹⁰²

Back of this immediate ambition swirled a mass of past influences, with little in common except their general geographic orientation. Among them were his years in the West, living with the sons and grandsons of pioneers; his belief, inherited from Thomas Hart Benton, that America’s Manifest Destiny was to sweep Westward at the expense of weaker nations; his fascination with the racial variety of the West, and its forging of a characteristic frontier “type,” never seen in the Old World; his wide readings in Western history; his efforts, through the Boone & Crockett Club, to save Western wildlife and promote Western exploration—all these combined into one mighty concept which (the more he pondered it) he saw he might handle more authoritatively than anyone else. It was nothing less than the history of the spread of the United States across the American continent, from the day Daniel Boone first crossed the Alleghenies in 1774 to the day Davy Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836.
¹⁰³
He decided to call this grand work
The Winning of the West
.

His first act was to dedicate the book to the ailing Francis Parkman.
¹⁰⁴
Like most well-read men of his class, Roosevelt had been brought up on that writer’s majestic, seven-volume
History of France and England in North America
. Parkman was a scholar who combined faultless research with the narrative powers of a novelist. With that other sickly, half-blind recluse, William H. Prescott, he wrote sweeping sagas full of color and movement, in which men of overwhelming force bent nations to their will. Roosevelt set out to follow this example. Not for him the maunderings of the “institutional” historians, with their obsessive analyses of treaties and committee reports. He wanted his readers to smell the bitter smoke of campfires, see the sunset reddening the Mississippi, hear the tomahawk thud into bone. While reveling in such detail (which he would meticulously annotate, lest any pedant accuse him of fictionalizing), he would strive for Parkman’s epic vision, the ability to show vast international forces at work, whole empires contending for a continent.
¹⁰⁵

B
Y MID
-M
ARCH
he had a contract from Putnam’s—committing him rather ambitiously to deliver his first two volumes in the spring of 1889
¹⁰⁶
—and he plunged at once into the somewhat rodent-like life of a professional historian. He burrowed through piles of ancient letters, diaries, and newspapers in Tennessee, and unearthed many long-forgotten documents in Kentucky, including six volumes of Spanish government dispatches, and some misspelled but priceless pioneer autobiographies; he inquisitively searched some two or three hundred folios of Revolutionary manuscripts in Washington, and ferreted out thousands of letters by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, untouched by previous scholars; he devoured the published papers of the Federal, Virginia, and Georgia governments in New York, and pestered private collectors as far away as Wisconsin and California to send him their papers.
¹⁰⁷
By the end of April he had amassed the bulk of his source material, and began the actual writing of
The Winning of the West
on 1 May, at Sagamore Hill.
¹⁰⁸

As always, he found it difficult to marshal his superabundant thoughts on paper. A perusal of the manuscript of Volume One shows what agonies its magnificent opening chapter, “The Spread of
the English-Speaking Peoples,” cost him. A veritable thicket of verbal debris—interlineations, erasures, blots, and balloons—clogs every page: only the clearest prose is allowed to filter through.
¹⁰⁹

D
URING ALL THE SPRING
and summer of 1888 Roosevelt complained about the slowness of his progress on
The Winning of the West:
“it seems impossible to write more than a page or two a day.”
¹¹⁰
As if from another land, another century, he heard distant shouts that General Benjamin Harrison of Indiana had been nominated by the Republicans for the Presidency—James G. Blaine having withdrawn on the grounds that a once-defeated candidate might, after all, be a burden to the party. Other shouts, even more distant, told him that Grover Cleveland had been renominated by the Democrats. But he paid little attention, and hunched closer over his desk. “After all,” he told a friend, “I’m a literary feller, not a politician these days.”
¹¹¹

To maintain the Sagamore household and bolster Edith’s constant sense of financial insecurity, Roosevelt had to earn at least $4,000 in fees and royalties that year.
¹¹²
This meant a considerable amount of hackwork over and above his labors on
The Winning of the West
. Scarcely a month, accordingly, passed without at least one book or article from his pen. Although some of these had been written before—or published in a different form—merely to edit and proofread them made heavy inroads upon his time.

A survey of their various titles justifies his growing reputation as a Renaissance man. In February the
North American
printed his “Remarks on Copyright and Balloting,” while
Century
put out the first of six splendid essays on ranch life in the West. This series, which included his long-delayed account of the capture of Redhead Finnegan, continued through March, April, May (a month which also saw the publication of his
Gouverneur Morris)
, and June. The essays attracted the admiring attention of Walt Whitman, who wrote, “There is something alluring in the subject and the way it is handled: Roosevelt seems to have realized its character—its shape and size—to have honestly imbibed some of the spirit of that wild Western life.”
¹¹³

Roosevelt was silent in July and August, but came back resoundingly in September with “A Reply to Some Recent Criticism of America” in
Murray’s Magazine
. The piece was a brilliant and erudite attack upon Matthew Arnold and Lord Wolseley (“that flatulent conqueror of half-armed savages”) and became the talk of Washington and London. In October, Putnam’s put out his
Essays in Practical Politics
, being a reissue, in book form, of two long polemics on legislative and municipal corruption, “Phases of State Legislation” (1884) and “Machine Politics in New York City” (1886). Finally, in December, his six
Century
articles were revised and republished as
Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail
, in a deluxe gift edition, illustrated by Frederic Remington. It was greeted with enthusiastic reviews.
¹¹⁴

R
OOSEVELT’S NONLITERARY ACTIVITIES
through 1888 can be briefly summarized. The family man played host to Cecil Spring Rice and “delicious Cabotty,” piggybacked little Alice downstairs to breakfast every day, and noted approvingly that young Ted “plays more vigorously than any one I ever saw.” He worried sporadically about his brother Elliott, whose health was beginning to deteriorate from too much hard drinking and hard riding with the “fast” Meadowbrook set.
¹¹⁵

The end of August found Roosevelt the hunter in Idaho’s Kootenai country. He spent most of September in the mountains, sleeping above the snow-line without a jacket and feasting lustily on bear-meat. Returning East via Medora, Roosevelt the rancher was able to make some respectable sales of his remaining cattle. But Roosevelt the author was still so hard pressed for money that he rashly accepted an invitation to write a history of New York City for a British publisher. He begged for “a little lee-way … to finish up some matters which I
must
get through first.”
¹¹⁶