Our Last Awesome President

Is there any possibility we Americans might consider setting aside our vast litany of grievances and partisan squabbles and unite under the shared opinion that Teddy Roosevelt was almost unspeakably awesome?

I say that knowing next to nothing about what his actual policies were. Frankly, at this point in history I'm not sure that they even matter so much as the immense persona of the man.

The best way I can explain it is this:

Some time ago in a bar, some friends and I were arguing about which celebrities, past and present, we'd like to have at our back in the event a random brawl broke out. Most of the choices were fairly predictable. Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Andre the Giant all made appearances in most everyone's top ten.

And then I proposed Teddy Roosevelt...

Silence fell around the table as everyone digested the idea of a pitched barroom battle with Teddy Roosevelt standing at your side, screaming "BULLY!" while throwing people through plate glass windows, the glare of neon bar signs glinting off of his monstrous teeth and bifocals.

It was decided that nobody, but NOBODY beats Teddy Roosevelt in a bar fight. Ever. Even if he's dead at the time:

He died in 1919, just 10 years after leaving office, but he accomplished enough in that decade to justify the thickness of this final volume, the last in Edmund Morris’s trilogy about the man for whom “a strenuous life” defined both his creed and his schedule.

The bare details are exhausting enough. Three weeks after attending the inauguration of William Howard Taft, his anointed successor, TR embarked on a year-long expedition in Africa. He and a teenaged son killed hundreds of large animals and sent some of their carcasses back to the Smithsonian, where, suitably stuffed, they continue to return tourists’ gaze. After the hunting ended, Roosevelt gave headline-grabbing speeches in Egypt and Germany and conducted a bit of diplomacy with various emperors and kings.

On returning to the States, he jumped back into political combat at the highest level. TR tried to wrest the 1912 Republican nomination from the unpopular Taft, who had turned his back on corporate reform. “We stand at Armageddon,” Roosevelt declared, “and we battle for the Lord.” When party bosses blocked his way, Roosevelt quickly organized his own Progressive Party; that November, he lost to Woodrow Wilson, leaving Taft behind in a humiliating third. TR quickly became the new president’s most influential critic—while also taking part in a campaign to get the nation prepared to enter World War I, barely surviving a scientific mission to chart a long, dangerous Brazilian river, and writing eight books and hundreds of articles on subjects ranging from zoology to modern art. Finally, after the U.S. declared war, TR made a desperate attempt to convince the administration he had long scorned to let him command a volunteer regiment in France. The offer was turned down.

Clearly had Roosevelt been allowed to command a regiment, Hitler would have stuck to crappy landscape painting.