470
PARTISAN REVIEW
drove him to seize upon the big issues. His letters in these two volumes
show him edging into the trust agitation, scenting the unrest and know–
ing that something had to be done. Even more striking is his under–
standing that the days of American isolation were over, that the U.S.
was irrevocably condemned to competition among the great world
powers. The Germans and, in the longer perspective, the Russians stood
athwart his conception of American interests. "I look upon them," he
wrote in 1897 of the Russians, "as a people ... with a great future, as
we have; but a people with poisons working in it."
If
Russia continues
in its despotic way, "she may put off the day of reckoning; but she
cannot ultimately avert it, and instead of occasionally having to go
through what Kansas has gone through with the populists she will
sometime experience a red terror which will make the French Revolu–
tion pale." And he understood too the new strategic significance of the
Pacific; if Russia "ever does take possession of Northern China and
drill the Northern Chinese to serve as her Army, she will indeed be a
formidable power."
America could not last in this dangerous new world, Roosevelt felt,
so long as bourgeois timidity and avarice prevailed over the martial
qualities indispensable for survival. Here, again, he called for a triumph
of will.
If
he could rebuild his own body by personal moral determina–
tion, could not the nation be restored by an invocation of the
"strenuous life"? In the end, he was a moralist in politics, a great
political educator, and, though his significant career lay largely beyond
the two volumes under review, we can see in these letters the essential
stirrings of preparation.
The two volumes, it should be added, are a triumph of the editorial
art. The notes of identification are compact, discreet and often witty;
and the essays on Roosevelt by Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum
have a penetration and detachment which put them in the same class
with the brilliant earlier essays by Stuart P. Sherman and Richard
Hofstadter. The only failure is the index, which for some reason does
not list all proper names mentioned in the letters and therefore will be
much less useful than an index should be.
Out of these volumes emerges above all a pragmatist's sense of the
power of will. T.R. and William James never had much personal con–
tact. Roosevelt's political and historical interests and his active dislike
of business domination drew him mUiCh more to Henry and Brooks
Adams. James, it is true, had been Roosevelt's anatomy instructor at
Harvard (where, a classmate later recalled, "T.R.
always
had the last
word"); but the two men later differed bitterly over the policy of
