The Colonel in Mourning, Glory, and Decline

The new Theodore Roosevelt Library tells a gripping story, but will woke kooks hijack it? 

I loved my visit to the new Theodore Roosevelt Library in Medora in the Badlands, where I learned that TR (1859–1920) was a savant and dynamo even before, at 39, he charged up San Juan Hill. As soon as the Spanish American War started — and TR, in 1897 the assistant secretary of the Navy, was among the instigators — he organized the First U.S. Volunteer Calvary Regiment. He was always ready for battle as an expression — an extreme one — of manhood and Christian virtue.

The library does a rollicking good job animating Roosevelt’s gathering of his Ivy League buddies, cowboy and prospector friends from the Badlands, Native Americans, and Texas Rangers. Anyone horse-worthy and thirsty for wuppin’ Spanish ass was okayed to join the fight. Of course, the war was adventurism at its worst. We had zero business to be in the Philippines. Thousands of Americans died in the forgotten Tagalog Insurgency. In Havana Bay, the explosion of the USS Maine was an accident, the result of a coal-bin fire that triggered a gunpowder blast in the hold.

The Rough Riders episode is one of four anchor stories — the library’s four-act drama of his life. There are lots of peripheral, lead-up, and climb-the-ladder moments, but four stories take center stage. First, he started his Badlands years in mourning, shattered by the deaths of his mother and wife on the same day in 1884, after which he consigned himself to a crucible first of isolation and introspection and then of intense physical work and raw cowboy life. He emerged steeled and unstoppable and a real man as comfortable under the open skies, in manure, and among his fellow cowboys as he was in the salons of class and power. Second, his Rough Rider days made him a superstar. We also learn from his Cuba adventure that he could get things done, command men, and command headlines.

Next comes 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s just one life between this madman and the presidency,” warned Mark Hanna, Ohio’s sage, wheeler-dealer U.S. senator, and President McKinley’s guru, as then–Governor Roosevelt was about to be nominated as vice president in 1900. Fresh from San Juan Hill, TR had won New York’s governorship, barely, in 1898. But he overturned one too many apple carts in Albany, so the powerbrokers tried to shove him into obsolescence. Five miserable months with TR as VP ensued before Hanna’s nightmare turned real. With McKinley shot and dead, TR was in charge.

Thus begins Act III. The library’s textbook-perfect displays on his presidency are the policy meat of the galleries. His nearly eight years had two centers of gravity. First, he completed McKinley’s term without discarding McKinley’s agenda. Rather, he emphasized its Think Big, muscular, and free-enterprise aspects; he busted trusts and monopolies; and he got the Panama Canal moving. He intervened in a 1902 coal strike and tackled corruption in the Indian Service, the General Land Office, and the Post Office Department. He established the Department of Commerce and Labor, breaking the taboo against federal regulation of business. During his tenure in the late 1890s as president of New York City’s Board of Police Commissioners, he’d already worked closely with police reporter Jacob Riis on housing reform and corruption issues. Riis’s pioneering photojournalism work How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, had opened Roosevelt’s eyes to slum poverty and stirred his emotions.

Roosevelt romped in 1904, winning a full term in a landslide. The Great White Fleet’s muscle flex — the around-the-world voyage that TR ordered for 16 U.S. battleships between 1907 and 1909 — consumer protection, railroad regulation, his “Malefactors of Great Wealth” speech in 1907 denouncing unethical business leaders, robust application of the Monroe Doctrine, and support for an income tax and an inheritance tax followed. So did his busybody attempt to change the spelling of words such as “though” to “tho” and “pressed” to “prest,” a move for which he was pelted with scorn.

There’s a section on TR’s White House renovation — he didn’t get miles of permissions, either — and the Bully Pulpit, a feature of a new media age. Going to the people was a TR specialty. His was among the golden ages of American journalism. Reporters dug deeply — they weren’t lazy then or beholden to received wisdom — and TR cultivated them with relish. They were among his megaphones.

I’d heard about the library’s AI-generated avatar of our 26th president but wasn’t prepared for how much I enjoyed it. It’s in a gallery dressed as his White House office, where “TR” stands behind his desk, takes questions, and gives — at least to my two — persuasive though politic answers. I asked him what he didn’t like about Taft in 1912. Of course, TR wouldn’t admit that he missed the spotlight and still had a hunger for power, nor would he reveal his natural Harvard-bred, know-it-all, mean streak. “You need backbone, not just a kind heart,” he said. Fair enough. I also asked His Hologramhood why he was a Republican. “I supported a strong Union, and the Republican party gave me the platform for the Square Deal.”

Act IV is TR at his least appetizing. His post-presidency had its moments, the most stellar of which was his “Man in the Arena” speech in 1910, delivered at the Sorbonne. He’d just come back from a safari — lots of big animals shot for his entertainment — and was still feeling unfulfilled. It’s a good speech about morality, the threat to freedom from the superrich, and what equality means, and it sure wasn’t equity, which means all outcomes must be equal. DEI would have repelled him. He believed in merit and was a devout social Darwinist.

His best lines, about the duty of every citizen to be “the man in the arena,” principled and engaged, cover the wall of a gallery, with key phrases illuminated. “It is not the critic who counts,” it begins, and I’ll quibble with that. All good change comes from the man “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly,” the man with great enthusiasms and devotions who spends himself in a worthy cause. Such men are the achievers, not “those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” Of course, finishing a campaign speech in 1912 after having been shot, with a bullet in his chest, is something to be admired. His bloody shirt is on view.

For TR, it’s downhill from there. There’s “Poor Fat Taft,” as we called him as kids, since both my grandfathers adored him and blamed Roosevelt for Woodrow Wilson’s win. The Colonel — a title TR liked, dating from his Rough Rider days — expected Taft, his handpicked successor, to be his toady. TR challenged Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination, and when he lost, rather than support Taft, he ran as a third-party candidate on the Bull Moose ticket, splitting the GOP vote. So we got Wilson, a horror, instead. TR wanted America in World War I as soon as the lights went out in Europe in 1914. He’d have loved the smell of napalm in the morning. Mark Twain called him “far and away the worst president we ever had,” an imperialist, “a showy charlatan.” Photos of the Colonel with his big-game kills are too repulsive to display. He was preparing another run in 1920 as a Republican. He would have carried lots of baggage as he faced a public hungry for a return to normalcy.

The TR Library isn’t really a library. Roosevelt’s presidential papers — letters, records, and files from his reign — aren’t there. Until FDR’s era, these documents went home with exiting presidents and were often destroyed — yes, the standard was to burn them — or scattered far and wide. FDR’s library next to his house in Hyde Park started the presidential library system. Of course, we’re well in the digital age now, so documents anywhere will, before long, be available everywhere.

What is the TR Library then? It’s a cutting-edge history museum, interactive and heavy on digital and video resources, conveying TR’s story and his times. It’s great in this respect. His time is so pivotal, and he was both a fascinating man and an icon of an era. It’s a teaching museum, and, even better, it pushes us to read and to learn on our own. The library is also the one place that centers his story. Some of the TR interactive features — a test-your-aim gizmo, a design-your-own-cattle-brand exercise, auditions for his Kitchen Cabinet — seem either for kids or trite, but there’s something for everyone.

The TR Library is also a platform and, as with everything they touch, left-wing kooks — the Trot wing in ascendance — will try to march through it and make it their mouthpiece. Is this already happening? There’s a lot of verbiage about spurs to action at the library. This makes me cringe and wonder. The main programmatic asset of the library now is the Good Citizen podcast, hosted by Ted Roosevelt V. I listened to the last three episodes and enjoyed them. That said, the list of podcast guests going back to 2023 seems heavy on left-wing establishment thinkers — they’re wrong about everything — and Green New Dealers, fantasists, preeners, or outright cons.

Roosevelt V’s business is climate-focused investing. He’s also the vice chairman of the TR Library board. For his podcast, I suggest he invite Francis Menton, of The Manhattan Contrarian, who’s done more than anyone to expose how absurd New York’s net-zero program is. Jason Hayes from the Heritage Foundation is an authority on grid reliability, affordable energy, and nuclear power. Lee Zeldin heads the EPA and has done much to free us from eco-loons and climate crooks. And wildfire safety through smart forest management would be a great topic. Not so long ago, environmental extremism cost billions, thousands of burnt homes, and many lives in Los Angeles and Hawaii.

Descendants sometimes see nonprofit boards as their playthings. I didn’t read Kermit Roosevelt III’s 2022 book, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story. He’s another trustee of the library. His publisher’s preview said something about white supremacy and, more toxic still, 14th Amendment supremacy. He was a law clerk for Justice Souter.

I would do two things and do them fast to enhance the library’s good sense. First, and this is tiny, I’d clip Joe Biden’s 20-second platitude from the wrap-up video at the end of the interpretive galleries. When he intoned, half the visitors in the space groaned in disgust. Biden was the antithesis of TR on every front. Second, and this ought to be a cinch, display James Earle Fraser’s bronze equestrian sculpture of Roosevelt from 1939. This handsome, effective sculpture stood in glory in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York until the BLM mass hysteria in 2020, when it became a target for the Hate America crowd. The museum and New York City sent it to Medora and the TR Library.

Its removal was an assault on both art and history. The protesters — spouting something about hierarchy, white supremacy, and colonialism — fail to grasp the concept of righteous leadership. The statue depicts TR on horseback with a Native American and a black man walking by his side. Of course there was a hierarchy. Roosevelt was a president, a man with power, an advocate and protector, and an example for other people with power. He’s forward-thinking, and he liberates the oppressed. Presidents aren’t our best buds. Like me, TR wasn’t a hugger. He merits reverence. Putting Poor Fat Taft, his unseemly love of war, and killing elephants for fun aside, he should be closer to the stars and blue skies.

The library promises to create a committee of “Indigenous, Tribal, and Black community representatives, historians, scholars, and artists” to recommend what’s to be done with the statue. What a joke. It’s had the thing for four years. Is a committee like this going to dare greatly or think boldly or take risks? I suggest putting it on view and letting it to speak for itself. Aggrieved community representatives? Their business model is being the squeaky wheel.

The galleries sometimes address, in passing, “a complicated legacy” related to TR and race and eugenics. The library won’t use “he was a man of his time” as an excuse, though on many fronts that’s a perfectly apt and fair assessment. Presentism is a plague among those, young and old, who don’t have the discernment to think how grim future judgments of them and their certainties might be.

The library needs to work on semantics. The Progressive era, really a movement, ran roughly and unevenly from the early 1890s to 1920 and dealt with urban poverty, graft, better working conditions, farm prices, free markets through antitrust laws, citizen legislating, and product safety. Today’s “progressives,” and it’s not a good term, are socialists, racialists, antisemites, and trans ideologues. They love open borders. They think we’re an oppressor nation. They’re prone to hoaxes and have contempt for people who work with their hands. They hate democracy unless it’s democracy where they win all the time. The library needs to apply some hygiene to its labels so today’s “progressives” can’t glom onto an earlier movement that did much good.