BOO KS
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"the will to succeed": strictly, they were talking about quite different
things, but in a significant sense too they were interpreting a central
impulse of the times. The great exponent of this impulse in practice was
Theodore Roosevelt.
For Theodore Roosevelt his whole life-his style of personality,
his very physique-was a triumph of the will. He was a spindly boy,
nearsighted and asthmatic, interested in reading and in the study of
nature; but his physical weakness, he came to feel, invited aggression;
so he remade himself by sheer force of will, teaching himself to ride and
box and be tough. "I went in for boxing and wrestling a good deal,"
he writes in a letter of 1900, "and I really think that while this was partly
because I liked them as sports, it was even more because I intended to be
a middling decent fellow, and I did not intend that anyone should laugh
at me with impunity because I was decent." A deep interior anxiety
made him forever apprehensive over the possibility of ridicule;
2l.
deep
interior violence shaped his response.
He thus redesigned his personality; he wanted to do good and
feared being a sissy, and this was his solution. "My ordinary companions
in college would I think have had a tendency to look down upon me
for doing Sunday school work if I had not also been a corking boxer,
a good runner, and a genial member of the Porcellian Club." But
Roosevelt did not stop at being a muscular Christian, given to pugilism
and good works; he had a large vision. "It is exactly the same thing
with history," he continues in a strikingly characteristic vein. "In most
countries the 'Bourgeoisie'-the moral, respectable, commercial, middle
class-is looked upon with a certain contempt which is justified by
their timidity and unwarlikeness. But the minute a middle class produces
men like Hawkins and Frobisher on the seas, or men such as the average
Union soldier in the civil war, it acquires the hearty respect of others."
This introduces the second theme in the life of Roosevelt: the
dilemma of an aristocrat in a plutocracy. It obsessed his historical
speculation, dominated his politics and colored his personal relations.
He hated "the commercial and cheap altruistic spirit, the spirit of
the Birmingham school, the spirit of the banker, the broker, the mere
manufacturer, and mere merchant"; he detested "the stock-jobbing
timidity, the Baboo kind of statesmanship, which is clamored for . . .
by the men who put monetary gain before national honor." Possessing
himself the security of family and status, he was deeply affronted by
the domination in society of the men of business.
This was, of course, a predicament of the highest importance in
the intellectual life of late nineteenth-century America. The descendants
