The Colonel in Mourning, Glory, and Decline

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 Cavalry 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.