University Press, 1954. xii + 170 pp. Index. $3.50.)
John M. Blum's little volume is the most illuminating study of TheodoreRoosevelt that this reviewer has seen. It is not a biography nor yet a monograph, but what historians too seldom attempt, an appraisal, an interpretation. Though the title and emphasis indicate a study of Roosevelt as politician, the book is far more than that. As assistant editor of the Letters, Mr. Blum has for several years saturated himself in Rooseveltiana. Few have read as much of what Roosevelt wrote. But Mr. Blum has thought even more than he has read. The result is a penetrating analysis of the man, his motives, his thinking, and his actions, which attains in 161 pages an understanding that full biographies only rarely succeed in reaching. Besides, Mr. Blum writes as few historians can. His style is simple, direct, and lucid. Its staccato quality peculiarly fits the subject and it sparkles with felicitous phrases. Yet, unlike many writers who charm or provoke, Blum never lets a desire to do either lead him to unsupportable generalization. Indeed, one feels that every word is carefully chosen. Each section bristles with quotable sentences and with accurate, carefully pondered, succinct conclusions.The book is divided into nine chapters. The first explains Roosevelt's choice of politics as a career and his objectives. The second describes the background that made him inevitably a Republican, a party man, an expert administrator, and a professional public servant. The third discusses Roosevelt's relation to party, to the people, and to Congress, and makes clear his skill in dealing with all three. The most important chapters are the discussions of Roosevelt's concepts of the "uses of power" at home and of "concerts of power" abroad. A final chapter treats his break with Taft, his part in the Progressive movement, and his own decline toward the end when, through "his excursions into hate and his paeans to conformity," Blum says, "he disgraced not just his own but his nation's reputation."Here is no detractor nor yet a hero-worshiper. Blum, however, decidedly rehabilitates Theodore Roosevelt, and makes him both an important and an able leader. He tells in detail the story of Roosevelt's skilled wresting of power from Mark Hanna and of his wringing the Hepburn Act from a hostile Republican leadership in Congress. He explodes the claim of detractors that Roosevelt was outmaneuvered by Aldrich or that he was forced to a compromise that abandoned part of what he might have gotten. Roosevelt, after superb deployment of his forces, outgeneraled both the Democrats and Aldrich and got exactly what in the beginning he set out to obtain. In both of these narratives Roosevelt emerges a consummate politician, but also a politician with a conscience and a deep concern for the national well-being. Roosevelt never desired happiness for himself or others, Blum concludes, but concerned himself "with hard work, duty, power, order." Blum rightly at
