Theodore Roosevelt | Page 3

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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
AN INTIMATE BIOGRAPHY
BY
WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER
1919
PREFACE
In finishing the correction of the last proofs of this sketch, I perceive
that some of those who read it may suppose that I planned to write a
deliberate eulogy of Theodore Roosevelt. This is not true. I knew him
for forty years, but I never followed his political leadership. Our
political differences, however, never lessened our personal friendship.
Sometimes long intervals elapsed between our meetings, but when we
met it was always with the same intimacy, and when we wrote it was
with the same candor. I count it fortunate for me that during the last ten
years of his life, I was thrown more with Roosevelt than during all the
earlier period; and so I was able to observe him, to know his motives,
and to study his character during the chief crises of his later career,
when what he thought and did became an integral part of the
development of the United States.
After the outbreak of the World War, in 1914, he and I thought alike,
and if I mistake not, this closing phase of his life will come more and
more to be revered by his countrymen as an example of the highest
patriotism and courage. Regardless of popular lukewarmness at the
start, and of persistent official thwarting throughout, he roused the

conscience of the nation to a sense of its duty and of its honor. What
gratitude can repay one who rouses the con science of a nation?
Roosevelt sacrificed his life for patriotism as surely as if he had died
leading a charge in the Battle of the Marne.
The Great War has thrown all that went before it out of perspective. We
can never see the events of the preceding half-century in the same light
in which we saw them when they were fresh. Instinctively we appraise
them, and the men through whom they came to pass, by their relation to
the catastrophe. Did they lead up to it consciously or un consciously?
And as we judge the outcome of the war, our views of men take on
changed complexions. The war, as it appears now, was the culmination
of three different world-movements; it destroyed the attempt of German
Imperialism to conquer the world and to rivet upon it a Prussian
military despotism. Next, it set up Democracy as the ideal for all
peoples to live by. Finally, it revealed that the economic, industrial,
social, and moral concerns of men are deeper than the political. When I
came to review Roosevelt's career consecutively, for the purpose of this
biography, I saw that many of his acts and policies, which had been
misunderstood or misjudged at the time, were all the inevitable
expressions of the principle which was the master-motive of his life.
What we had imagined to be shrewd devices for winning a partisan
advantage, or for overthrowing