Theodore Rex
Edmund Morris. New York: Random House, 2001. 772 pp. Notes. Bib. Index. $35.00 ($31.50).
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Ralph L. DeFalco III, U.S. Naval Reserve
Theodore Roosevelt peers out at us from the pages of history as toothy and grinning, solid and sturdy, bespectacled, and entirely familiar. We know Roosevelt the trust- buster, the conservationist, the peacemaker, and the President.
In the pages of Theodore Rex, we are offered the good fortune to know Roosevelt the man. Edmund Morris has written an exceptional biography of this larger-than- life American. In doing so, he returns to familiar ground. His earlier work, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979) earned Morris the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1980, and recognition as a deliberate scholar and writer.
Theodore Rex is the engaging study of Roosevelt during his presidency, from 1901 to 1909. It begins with Vice President Roosevelt’s wild nighttime ride in a buckboard and his desperate attempt to reach the dying President William McKinley. From his vacation place in the Adirondack Mountains, down dirt roads slick with heavy rain and across swollen creeks, Roosevelt spared neither the horses nor the worried drivers. Stung by rain, chilled by drizzle, with the path lit by the lantern he held aloft, Roosevelt demanded only more speed to take him to a waiting train. He never made it to McKinley’s bedside. An assassin’s bullet had made Roosevelt the President of the United States before he came down from the mountains.
The episode tells us much about Theodore Roosevelt. He was a driven man, fired not so much by his own ambition but by his profound sense of purpose and a sureness of his own destiny. Morris has an uncanny knack for using just the right episode, incident, or anecdote to uncover the essence of his subject. More important, he uses them as integral parts of the narrative. They never are a distraction.
Much comes to us in this fashion because Morris is a scholar and a diligent researcher. He combed through 60 archives, scores of key documents, and hundreds of books to create this unflinching assessment of the 26th President. The story also is told in his own words, for TR was a perpetual and gifted letter writer, his own speechwriter, and the author of 15 books. Years before sound bites, he already had perfected the power of the short, sure sentiment. When he used the phrase “square deal,” Americans everywhere nodded knowingly, because he expressed exactly what they felt. And no one could mistake the meaning of his admonition to “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Roosevelt as President in Theodore Rex is a remarkable man by any measure. He emerges in these pages as a diplomat canny enough to avoid war with the Great Powers of Europe and sure enough to demand the right to fortify the Panama Canal. He was a savvy foreign policy strategist with the courage to risk his reputation in negotiating peace between Japan and Russia in 1905. He also was a gritty realist who built a modern navy, second only to that of Great Britain, and then cunningly demonstrated its power and reach with a mission disguised as a globe-circling goodwill cruise.
The former Rough Rider had his enemies and detractors, too, and Morris weaves their stories into this work. Even the Republican Party often was arrayed against him. The white South, industrialists, timber barons, anti-imperialists, and isolationists all found something to despise. Allied with the new U.S. aristocracy and with the moneyed men of Wall Street, Congress tried to outmuscle the man who gloried in a boxing match and who loved to wrestle.
This wonderful work—a dull tome in the hands of a less skilled writer—is packed with evocative images, brilliantly drawn characterizations, and telling descriptions. Theodore Rex stands as an equal to Morris’s previous prize-winning volume. The greatest defect in this current work is that it ends too soon. Theodore Roosevelt was a powerful presence in U.S. life and national politics for more than a decade after he left the White House. One only can hope Morris does not take more than a decade to give us a third and final volume on this remarkable man’s life.
His Time in Hell: A Texas Marine in France
Warren R. Jackson. George B. Clark, ed. Novato, CA: Presidio, 2001. 249 pp. Photos. $24.95 ($22.45).
Reviewed by Michael D. Hull
U.S. Marine Corporal Warren Jackson reported, “The crack of our rifles, the hollow rattle of the enemy bullets striking the leaves . . . the dreadful crash of exploding shells—this din kept my ears ringing.
“Shell after shell dropped about us. Now one in front, another behind or on the side, ever with that hellish scream that accompanied them.”
And there was the French mud.
“Mud, mud, mud!” Jackson said. “Everything, everywhere was covered with mud. ... It was impossible to get away from or to forget that abiding, clinging, sticky mud.”
After enlisting in the Marine Corps on 10 June 1917 in Houston, Texas, and training at the sweltering makeshift Parris Island Depot, Jackson rode the Henderson (AP-1) to St. Nazaire, France, as a rifleman in the 95th Company of the 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment, 4th Marine Brigade.
He was promoted to corporal after action at Verdun, Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, Blanc Mont, and Meuse-Argonne, and received two Silver Star citations and the Croix de Guerre for gallantry. But he regarded himself as a survivor rather than a hero, as shown in this plainspoken but riveting chronicle of the young Texan’s “time in hell.”
Jackson’s description of the 4th Marine Brigade’s costly capture of Belleau Wood in June 1918, blocking a major German offensive along the road to Paris, crackles with graphic immediacy.
“Bombardment followed bombardment,” he recorded. “There was no way to know when the wood might be swept with murderous machine-gun fire, or the deadly gas shells would leave destruction in their wake. They were soul-trying days. When a man left his hole, he did not know whether he would return or if a dozen bullets would cut him down.”
The Marines’ gallantry there was immortalized in the artwork of John W. Thomason and the classic Laurence Stallings-Maxwell Anderson play, What Price Glory?
Jackson, probably the only man in his company to emerge unscathed from combat and the terrible influenza epidemic of 1918, was not a lettered man, but he was intelligent, perceptive, and capable of clear elucidation. His writing is self-deprecating (admitting to frequent fear) and, while no literary milestone, his unvarnished record of the leatherneck experience on the Western Front in World War I is as vivid and affecting as we ever will see.
It ranks in honesty and impact, if not narrative polish, with Elton R. Mackin’s masterpiece about World War I Marines, Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993). Jackson’s memoir was edited with insight and understanding by George Clark, a New Hampshire-based Marine Corps historian who also has published books on “Old Breed” leathernecks in France and Nicaragua.
Jackson, who lived in Leming and Batesville, attended the Sam Houston Normal Institute in Houston, and later taught in Hull, near Beaumont. He wrote his manuscript in the late 1920s. It made its way to a special U.S. history collection at the University of Texas at Austin, and recently was discovered by Clark.
His Time in Hell is a powerful testament to the valor and fortitude of Warren Jack- son and his fellow leathernecks.
Die Schiffe der k.(u.) k. Kriegsmarine im Bild (Austro-Hungarian Warships in Photographs)
Volume 1: 1848-1895
Lothar Baumgartner and Erwin Sieche. Vienna: Verlagsbuchhandlung Stohr, 1999. 184 pp. Photos. Drawings. Maps. Index. Text in German and English. €45.80 or ($46.11).
Volume 2: 1896-1918
Lothar Baumgartner and Erwin Sieche. Vienna: Verlagsbuchhandlung Stohr, 2001. 384 pp. Photos. Drawings. Maps. Index. Text in German and English. €82.00 or ($82.56). Both volumes can be ordered from the publisher at www.buchhandlung-stoehr.at/.
Reviewed by Paul G. Halpern
These two well-produced volumes present photographs and drawings of the majority of ships that served in the k.u.k. Kriegsmarine, the Austro-Hungarian Navy. This Navy ceased to exist after the collapse of the Hapsburg Monarchy in 1918, but during much of the 19th century and World War I it was a well-led and -equipped force that had to be taken into account. The volumes are divided into chapters according to ship types, each chapter preceded by a short introductory text. The volumes conclude with a selection of reproductions of uniform plates in color and short sketches of the major yards.
The second volume is more than twice as large as the first and the textual material is more extensive. The chapter on submarines includes a graph of tonnage sunk by individual commanders and it is interesting to note that the second most successful U-boat commander during the war (missing first place by a narrow margin) was Austria’s Captain Georg von Trapp, the father of the von Trapp family singers (he is in two of the photographs). The uniform plates in volume 2 include distinctions of rank and specialty badges. There is also a chapter on the postwar fate of the ships and an extremely informative chapter, “Financiers and the Military-Industrial Complex,” that explains how the unprecedented naval expansion of the Hapsburg monarchy was financed and describes the relationship between banks, shipyards, and armaments firms such as Skoda. This elevates the volume well beyond the usual picture book.
The great strength of these volumes nevertheless resides in the photographs. The majority are from private collections that never have been published. Those in volume 1 are from a period of transition from sail to steam and the introduction of revolutionary weapons such as the torpedo. The ships that resulted from these technological developments often looked odd. The Hapsburg monarchy usually is not thought of having been in the forefront of technological progress, but the Austrian Navy regarded the torpedo as a potential force multiplier. The Whitehead factory at Fiume was located in Austrian territory and indeed an Austrian naval officer, Captain Johann Blasius Luppis, had an important role in conceiving and developing the torpedo in cooperation with Robert Whitehead. The little torpedo boats of the 1880s did not look very seaworthy in these interesting photographs, but the authors point out the boats might have been very effective in the maze of islands off the Dalmatian coast.
The ships in the second volume, which covers the World War I period, are much more familiar looking. It includes auxiliaries and small craft in addition to major warships and the Danube flotilla, and there are fascinating photographs of experimental craft such as an early version of a hovercraft. The photographs invite close examination with a magnifying glass and can reveal interesting details such as the telephone communications used with the quick-firing guns mounted on top of heavy gun turrets. These two volumes likely will be prized by ship lovers and those interested in the vanished world of the Austro- Hungarian monarchy and its fleet.