Bully, as Teddy Would Say: About Time for Roosevelt’s Presidential Library

The expansive history museum is in the Badlands, which made the man and made the president.

I always thought that the reason museums west of the Mississippi and inland from California didn’t have top Old Masters and Impressionists and Picassos and Matisses was that they got into the acquisitions game much later than we New Englanders and museums in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It’s true to an extent, but, having never been to the Great Plains or the Mountain States until this past summer, I hadn’t seen — in the flesh, so to speak — that people there live among such stunning grandeur. A Bierstadt, Church, or Cole would seem superfluous.

I thought about this when I visited the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library a few days before it opened in July. It’s in Medora in southwestern North Dakota. The Badlands — the Lakota longtimers and French trappers agreed they were bad places to visit, and, no, you wouldn’t want to live there — have an extraterrestrial look and palette I didn’t expect. That endless sweep of ravines and wind-sculpted, squat sandstone and clay buttes with rust, shadow blue, pastel pink, coal, and pale yellow. All awesome. And it’s the view from the new complex honoring and explaining and, for many, humanizing Roosevelt (1858–1919). The site shares billing with the man and, as Teddy himself said, he wouldn’t have been president were it not for his time there as a young widower in the mid-1880s.

On one side, the 93-acre site overlooks buttes and canyons in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. On the other, it faces plains that seem to reach the end of the world. Low to the ground, made of massed timber and covered with a walkable, planted green roof, the building looks like a hill made sleek by hundreds of centuries of wind. It looks like man bowing in deference to nature. Tens of thousands of native plants grow in soil topping the roof. It’s great and an essential part of the visit.

The international architectural firm Snøhetta designed it. They started as a Norwegian outfit but are everywhere now and are rightly famous for the entrance pavilion of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. The mission statement of the TR Library tells us it’s focused on conservation, leadership, and citizenship. Conservation makes sense, since he pried from Congress — or designated by executive order — protections governing 230 million acres. The complex is carbon-neutral, a luxury toot and a waste of money, but it also recycles, produces its own energy through thermal wells and sun, and uses rain for water.

The library is on a hill in Medora — year-round population 130 — a tiny, picture-postcard Western resort town founded in 1883 by a French marquis. Roosevelt first visited in 1883 on a hunting trip — an upper crust chap fancying himself a cowboy, a tourist playing rough, sleeping under the stars, shooting bison. He returned the next year to mourn the deaths of his wife and his mother. He stayed until 1886, becoming truly a cowboy and rancher, sweating and grinding grief from his system.

I’m not a TR fan. I imagine him as an epic busybody and disruptor, a habitual big stick, or the straw that has to stir the drink to feel content, types that the stand-patter in me doesn’t like. Trust-busting, park-making, and Nobel Peace Prize–winning are all fine and dandy. Running in 1912, splitting the Republican Party, and delivering the toxic Woodrow Wilson? Unforgivable. And Roosevelt was indeed a warmonger, itching to plunge us into a war to end all wars, a miasma and mirage. He was poised to run again in 1920. He was a spotlight addict.

Still, my mind’s open and I learned a lot. The building is as gorgeous inside as it is outside. The entrance courtyard is high-ceilinged, with rammed earth walls treated to look like the striations of color in the hills outdoors. There’s lots of wood, so it feels like an old Western lodge and not institutional at all. From the parking lot to the museum there are plenty of comfortable benches with views. It’s an indoor-outdoor place, always close to the Badlands.

The space is efficient, with an excellent café on the left, the admissions desk on the right, and a shop on the far right, so we don’t get a sense the place is about commerce. The galleries are chronological and well done, with artifacts, photographs, and letters in equipoise with engaging, succinct interpretation that keeps the narrative moving.

There’s young Teddy — a small, round face in a window as Lincoln’s funeral cortège passes his grandfather’s manse on Broadway and East 14th Street in Manhattan, on April 25, 1865. TR’s branch of the old Dutch Roosevelt family was among New York’s richest. His father had abolition sympathies but paid a substitute to serve in the Union Army during the Civil War. His mother was a Southern belle from Georgia and, as Teddy wrote, a Confederate sympathizer and “entirely unreconstructed.” David McCullough said that Margaret Mitchell based Scarlett O’Hara on her, at least in part, but I don’t think that’s true. Scarlett was the classic rich mean girl, prom-queen b****, and TR’s mother wasn’t that, at all.

Teddy was educated at home, a young naturalist, a collector, reader, and writer. He was a boy with unusual intensity. The family did the European Grand Tour from which he returned cosmopolitan. The Roosevelt Library re-creates an imaginary Victorian parlor with the family’s portraits and the bookshelves of the child-savant zoologist and taxidermist. His Harvard sophomore-year report card is on view. He excels in German but not so much in Themes, Harvard’s new class in writing about everyday experiences. His average — 82 — shows top-notch achievement, not genius but grasp and depth.

His 1880 senior thesis detailed his belief in absolute legal equality between men and women, in voting, pay, property rights, and he wanted to ditch “obey” from marriage vows. Not fringe or insurrectionist but farsighted. At Harvard, he studied under the direction of William James, whose philosophy of life — act from empirical evidence and experience, rather than from abstract reasoning and rules — validated his own instincts.

By 1881, he was in the New York Assembly, representing the Upper East Side’s Silk Stocking district, in what’s now East Midtown, a seat thought to be a sinecure for the dabblers-in-politics from top-tier families since no one from the Four Hundred — New York’s Gilded Age elite — was ever expected to get too deeply involved in so dirty a business. And no one expected a “cyclone assemblyman,” as he became known. A photograph of the young legislator is Dudley Do-Right meets the Arrow Shirt Man. TR is calm, cool, and collected, a righteous WASP who looks ready to pounce. He said he wanted to belong to the governing class as well as the upper class, even though he wore a monocle. He fought for civil service reform and helped secure a ban on cigar production in tenement apartments — at the time, one-third of New York’s cigars were manufactured by immigrant families, including children, rolling tobacco in their cramped, unsanitary apartments. He also tackled the railroad interests of “robber baron” Jay Gould and what TR called “that most dangerous of all classes, the wealthy criminal class.” Plus ça change . . .

He was no crank but both dogmatic and practical, magnetic and relentless. Then came February 14, 1884. “The light has gone out of my life,” reads an entry he wrote in his diary that night. The page is blank except for those words and a black X. The book is displayed in a case in a darkened room, alone except for to-the-point interpretation. Teddy had become a father two days before — daughter Alice — and he’d heard in Albany that his wife of four years, also named Alice, was struggling, as was his mother, both hit by typhoid fever. He rushed home, arriving in time to hold his mother’s hand as she died and, hours later, his wife’s as she died.

Young Lincoln had a bout with deep depression. Grant’s career plunged into an abyss before his stunning rise to save the Union. FDR had polio. TR faced a pitiless reversal of fortune. Each crisis was piercing and poignant, and each steeled the man, but not right away. At the Roosevelt Library, the diary gallery evokes hushed, dark Victorian rooms, the baritone ticks of an old clock, last breaths, and stunned silence.

General Alfred Sully, battling the Lakota in 1864, called the Badlands “Hell with the fires out,” Roosevelt saw a “strange, desolate beauty” in them as well. “The best way out is always through” is Robert Frost’s advice for overcoming adversity, and Roosevelt practiced that, there in the Badlands, from late 1884 into 1886, grappling with the deaths of his wife and his mother’s deaths.

The library creates a milieu in exhibits devoted to his everyday life in Elkhorn Ranch, around 35 miles from Medora. At 135 pounds — locals called him “the four-eyed dude” — TR, with hired help, built the Elkhorn ranch house, and he learned to fish, hunt, trap, and track to live. He learned how predation governed life in the Badlands. He learned about teamwork. In a large, dark gallery, seats that look like log posts face a sweeping night-blue wall where we see projections of TR diary entries and imagined scenes of the 1886 posse he led to catch boat thieves on the Little Missouri River, guarding them on the 100-mile ride to the hoosegow. It’s high drama and very effective, with video, text, design, and storytelling that puts us there.

One of the many strengths of the library is its focus on TR as a young man in a hurry who was stopped dead in his tracks and then picked himself up, to charge up not only San Juan Hill but up and through every challenge in his life and every civic wrong he saw. Young people today are not snowflakes, since snowflakes melt in the heat, and fast. No, we’re not that lucky. Instead, we have a crybaby culture, more intense and loud and enveloping than snowflakes. The younger you are, the harder you’re hit.

Roosevelt was, we know, sui generis. Not just a bull but a stampede in a china shop, he was whip-smart and needed no down time, and he was very privileged. For those of us who are merely human and not superhuman, he can still be an example. He didn’t just overcome adversity. He stormed it or, better still, lassoed it and tied it down. He’s right in calling himself a self-made man. If you believe you can, you’re halfway there. That became one of his mottos. And, in TR’s case, making the thinking and doing man meant making a strong body. He wasn’t just a gym rat. He took the strenuous life seriously, riding a horse for twelve hours straight, hauling and building, mastering his body, down to his considerable flair in jiujitsu. Pajama Boys, prepare for your morning hundred push-ups and cowboy coffee. Your latte days are done. Fare thee well, foam hearts.

Why Medora? First and foremost, it was the Badlands — not Manhattan, not Harvard, which, by the by, he belittled — that made the man. He absorbed their grit. The library is also very much a North Dakota project rooted in tourism and cachet development in a place newly enriched by an oil boom. Tiny Medora sits by the 70,000-acre national park. The town’s already on the map because of the Medora Musical, a summer theater specializing in Western, patriotic, and Gospel music with a loosely TR theme. An interstate highway runs near it. The Little Big Horn battlefield is 270 miles west. Mount Rushmore is 270 miles south. Medora is a hefty 450 miles from Yellowstone National Park, but that’s only a skip and a jump and then some by Big Country standards. The area is marketed, at least by the library, as the Teddy Triangle. The library’s prime mover and shaker is Doug Burgum, now secretary of the interior, but he was North Dakota’s governor as the library developed. He enlisted statewide and national support and TR family support for the project. It makes sense.