Charisma is what Teddy Roosevelt had.
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| Quentin Roosevelt |
Ebullience. Joy. Exuberant insistence.
"You must never forget: Theodore is six [years old]," his lifelong friend, Cecil Spring Rice, said of him when Roosevelt was in his 40's.
People gravitated toward him in any room, because he was having more fun than anyone else.
He created a fantasy world of heroes and giants and giant slayers and lived in it. He played cowboy and soldier and naturalist, explorer, big game hunter and philosopher and he was a dilletante in all these arenas.
He was a professional only in politics and writing.
He believed gentlemen ought to treat women as ladies and that ladies should produce lots of children, if they were well bred, intelligent and the right sort, which is to say, the right class of women. But he also supported the vote for women.
The best day of his life, he never tired of saying, was the day he got to play soldier and charged up San Juan hill in the Spanish American war in Cuba.
Make Believe Soldier
When he got a letter from his son, who he had pushed to join the Army air force, the letter describing Quentin's first "kill" of a German fighter plane, Teddy replied that no matter what happened now, Quentin had had that "crowded moment" of heroism and honor and glory and that is what men, real men, were made for.
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| A Real Man |
Teddy begged Woodrow Wilson to allow him to form a cavalry regiment, as he had done in the Spanish war, as Teddy dreamed of reliving those days of glory, but Wilson and his Secretary of War demurred, and when pushed they finally told Roosevelt he was too old and, in any case, cavalry charging across a field waving swords in the face of machine guns, artillery, tanks, barbed wire and trenches was simply suicidal, and what America needed were real soldiers, trained to fight a modern war, not men captured in arrested development playing out childhood fantasies. Undeterred, Teddy urged each of his sons to be the first to volunteer, the first on the front lines.
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| Quentin lying by his plane: 2 bullets in the brain |
Quentin, of course, did not last long. His honor devolved into a shattered corpse with two bullets in his head. He was found by his airplane and given a military funeral by the Germans, who also believed in honor, but who noted he was inexperienced and brought down by a professional German pilot, who actually knew what he was doing.
Teddy loathed and fulminated against weak, soft, quiet men, and particularly Woodrow Wilson, who was cerebral and without brass balls.
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| Playing Cowboy |
Like Trump, Teddy had no use for shithole nations, although he would never have been so vulgar to use that phrase, but the meaning was the same. He called the autocrats of Columbia "monkeys" and he thought that allowing dark races from Southern Europe freely into America was "racial suicide." On the other hand, Teddy respected certain Black men, who he had met on the range when he was playing cowboy, and he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House, which got him vilified in the South, where Senators speculated about this Black man rubbing his thigh under the dinner table along the thigh of Alice Roosevelt ("Princess Alice") Teddy's alluring daughter.
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| A Real Soldier, A Real Man |
So Teddy bloviated about how his sons were heroes, the first to answer the call of duty and honor and he pushed them all, shamelessly, to prove themselves in battle, as he had done and what did that get him?
A dead son.
Playing Frontiersman
A father, six years old until he was 60, and, ultimately a shattered boy man, whose recklessness and joy brought disaster to his family and, if there is any real thing as shame, then it should have brought shame to the man who thought he knew enough to instruct others about what a worthy life should be.
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