Theodore Roosevelt: American Hero

I do not want to be vain, he told a friend, but I do not think that anyone else could have handled this regiment quite as I have handled it. And his men agreed. We were drawn to him, one remembered. We'd have gone to hell with him. Roosevelt craved above all awards the Medal of Honor and thought he deserved it and lobbied for it. Wrote incessant letters to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge and to others looking for that medal. The army did not like Roosevelt. He was a volunteer. He wasn't one of them. He really wasn't very disciplined about following orders. So they were damned if they were going to give Roosevelt this medal. Teddy Roosevelt, although he's a wonderful figure and a glamorous figure, is a dangerous figure in some ways. This glorification of war can't be a good thing in the long run. Most wars are prolonged and miserable and wretched with great loss of life. And to think that war could be as neat and tidy and kind of over so quickly and so happily as Teddy Roosevelt's war is an illusion. And it was an illusion that this country from time to time succumbs to. He wrote a book about it. The book is called The Rough Riders, published in 1899. The rumor is, whether this is true or not, I don't know, but it's a great story, that the printer had to order more type with the letter I on it because Roosevelt wrote about himself so much. And a friend of Roosevelt's, but not an uncritical one, wrote to Roosevelt congratulating him on the publication of The Rough Riders and said, but I would urge you to rename it Cuba had been liberated. It had been, the Secretary of State John Hayes said, a splendid little war. And Theodore Roosevelt had made himself an American hero. Even before he sailed for home, letters began to arrive urging him to run for governor of New York. So Roosevelt realized that that moment vindicated his father, launched him into the national scene, made him a hero for the rest of his life. It opened every subsequent door for him. He comes back from war and he senses that he is what America wants to be. Out of Roosevelt's self-importance, but also fed by a real adulation, there emerges a kind of cult of Roosevelt. People simply worshiped this guy in a cowboy hat, this easterner who had become a westerner, and represented all the things that were vital and vibrant and strong about America.