0468
PARTISAN REVIEW
of the mild, settled and relatively cultured men of wealth of the pre–
Civil War period now found themselves confronted by the crude and
fierce world of the "robber barons." Their varied responses to this new
world supplied pervading themes for the writing and behavior of the
time. James Russell Lowell sought refuge in good old books; Henry
Adams in cynicism and disillusion; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in
skepticism and detachment; Henry James, Jr., in Europe. For all of
them, a sense of affirmative social function had waned, yet they would
not yield to the new forces. Others yielded, and became the agents,
the front men, the sages and instructors for the new masters.
Of those who would neither yield nor seek refuge, who sought to
confront their predicament squarely and directly, William James and
Theodore Roosevelt were clearly the most successful. Both their reputa–
tions have suffered perhaps as a result; their very attempts to come to
terms with their times produced in each a certain jocosity and even
vulgarity which, if for James an obvious rhetorical tactic, appears for
Roosevelt to have been an abiding and much-relished personal impulse.
Roosevelt's bluster and brag were increasingly offensive to later genera–
tions which had abandoned the big words and the manly virtues. By
1931,
Henry Pringle's brilliant and devastating biography seemed perman–
ently to diminish Roosevelt's place in history.
The new edition of Roosevelt's letters provides documentation for all
Henry Pringle's astringencies about the man. There is the intolerable
rhetoric of manliness: the praise for the rough, the virile, the clean–
living, the constant desire to administer a "sound drubbing" to the
"cowardly" and the "sentimental."
"If
we ever come to nothing as a
nation it will be because the teaching of Carl Schurz, President Eliot,
the
Evening Post
and the futile sentimentalists of the international
arbitration type, bears its legitimate fruit in producing a flabby, timid
type of character, which eats away the great fighting features of our
race."
This is all, of course, very funny, and it reaches its strident and
supposedly hilarious climax at San Juan Hill. Yet it must be remembered
that the Spanish were not shooting blank cartridges in Cuba, that men
were killed, and that Roosevelt at least had the courage to apply his
doctrine of the "strenuous life" to himself. And when Mr. Dooley sug–
gested that Roosevelt's book
The Rough Riders
should have been called
Alone in Cubia
or
Th' Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows,
Roosevelt could hardly have been more disarming. I "regret to state," he
wrote Finley Peter Dunne, "that my family and intimate friends are
delighted with your review of my book."
