A New Biography of Teddy Roosevelt, the ‘Man in the Arena,’ Draws Parallels to President Trump

Sometimes biographies are of the moment, hitting with a force that recalls that frequently quoted declaration in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun: “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In David S. Brown’s bracing biography of President Theodore Roosevelt, “In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace, and Revolution,” we are immersed in the life of a public figure and president who is our contemporary.Roosevelt so expanded the powers of the presidency that his cousin, FDR, acknowledged his administration as a precedent for the New Deal. The older Rooselvelt demolished Grover Cleveland’s anti-imperialistic policy and welcomed the annexation of Hawaii and the expansion of what Thomas Jefferson called an “empire of liberty,” creating a world class navy that he believed requisite for America as a world power.What troubles David S. Brown is Roosevelt’s imperial sense of himself, that he alone can fix it. Reading this biography I kept thinking about what is supposed to be unprecedented about President Trump, and sure enough Mr. Brown in his closing pages comes out with it, citing several parallels between Roosevelt and Mr. Trump’s policies that challenge the lament that the 47th president’s actions are unprecedented.Take, for example, this passage that Mr. Brown quotes from Roosevelt’s final annual message to Congress:“The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use. Concentrated power is palpable, visible, responsible, easily reached, quickly held to account. Power scattered through many administrators, many legislators, many men who work behind and through legislators and administrators, is impalpable, is unseen, is irresponsible, can not be reached, can not be held to account.” Roosevelt went on: “Democracy is in peril wherever the administration of political power is scattered, among a variety of men who work in secret, whose very names are unknown to the common people. It is not in peril from any man who derives authority from the people, who exercises it in sight of the people, and who is from time to time to give an account of its exercise to the people.”Roosevelt did not employ the term, “deep state,” but he might have appreciated that contemporary usage. His championing of executive power included an attack on the judiciary. He advocated the popular vote to recall judges. A staunch supporter of Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, was aghast at the frontal attack on the rule of law and the Constitution.Mr. Brown gives high marks to Roosevelt for improving the lives of American citizens through the use of government regulation, but he implicitly scoffs at the Rough Rider, playing cowboy and losing the equivalent today of hundreds of thousands of dollars on his ranching and cattle raising hobbies. He acknowledges Roosevelt as a great conservationist and yet is impelled to note how much he liked to kill and stuff animals, indulging in a blood lust that contradicted claims that he was advancing scientific study of wild life.Presidential biographies, in the main, have been far too reverential, and Mr. Brown just won’t have it, dismissing, for example, Roosevelt’s jingoistic rhetoric during World War I and calling Roosevelt, “for all his good intentions but a corpulent armchair general, a nineteenth-century bravo in a fading Brooks Brothers uniform.” We usually have to turn to novelists like Gore Vidal to get that sort of astringent analysis of American presidents.Biography, like history, has to perforce be written in the present, even though certain biographers and historians like to pretend to an objectivity that transcends the contemporary. Not Mr. Brown, setting Roosevelt and Mr. Trump side by side: “Both presidents exhibited an enormous, inexhaustible self-regard, and considered themselves tribunes of the people, speaking for non-elites in opposition to evils.” Both rose to power by attacking the elites of their own parties.Mr. Brown’s final sentence rings a sort of requiem for Roosevelt that is at the same time a portent of the future: “Enframed within the contours of a modern democratic republic, he lived instead a political existence, contemptuous of the congressional Old Guard, eager to bring his people to Armageddon, and, finally, to embrace a life, so he once said, rich with “‘hard and dangerous endeavor.’”Mr. Rollyson’s forthcoming book is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”

A New Biography of Teddy Roosevelt, the ‘Man in the Arena,’ Draws Parallels to President Trump

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