Funny Teddy Roosevelt Stories Edmund Morris

Theodore Roosevelt, in a rare moment of repose

Editor's note: This is the twenty-sixth entry in the writer's year-long project to read one book about each of the U.S. Presidents in the year prior to Election Day 2016. You can also follow Marcus' progress at the @44in52 Twitter account and with this 44 in 52 Spreadsheet.

I'm not even sure where to start with Theodore Roosevelt. How do you distill such a complicated, breathtaking man into a few hundred words?

Hell, Edmund Morris devoted more than 2,000 pages to him in his acclaimed Roosevelt trilogy, and even that is probably not enough.

TR was one of my most anticipated reads in the project, if not the most anticipated. After two weeks spent slogging through the first 1,500 pages of Morris' trilogy, I feel like I'd been drenched by a storm of presidential history.

I mean that in the best way possible. It's the best way to describe TR: as a force of nature. He may not be the best president, but I'll be damned if he wasn't the most interesting.

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Instead of following my original plan of only reading the second book in Morris' trilogy, the one that focused on his time in the White House, I decided to read the first volume as well. This added substantially more work to a project that already has way too much reading in it, but I don't regret it one bit.

TR inspires people to go for the extra credit like this. In fact, my only regret is that I didn't have the time to read the third book. It will be top of the pile in my post-project reads.

Without digging into the first book, I wouldn't have the image of Roosevelt as an awkward adolescent, dirty and reeking of chemicals -- a result of his intense interest in wildlife and preserving specimens.

That weird kid in your neighborhood that killed frogs and cut them open to study their insides? That was Roosevelt.

I don't know why this image remains so firmly implanted in my mind. I was not that kid, as my mother is hopefully happy to confirm. But I'm also loud, bordering on obnoxious at times, and, yeah, I was a weird kid.

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It's a humanizing detail, especially for a man who overcame childhood illnesses and personal tragedies to be a part-time rancher in the West. He led the charge of San Juan Hill in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, he cracked down on corruption as a Federal Civil Service commissioner and New York Police commissioner, pushed for legislation in New York as an assemblyman and governor.

And of course, he took his whirlwind of power to the White House in the wake of President McKinley's assassination.

Reading about TR is both exhilarating and exhausting. The man is a motion blur. He was always moving, either literally in his many hunting and ranching trips, or metaphorically, fighting corporations, pushing through plans for the Panama Canal, and heralding a new era for conservation.

It helps that Morris' writing is so compelling, with brilliant, subtle touches of humor. He not only brings Roosevelt to life but manages to also bring him into focus. You probably already know that the teddy bear began as an homage to a bear killed by Roosevelt on a hunt. Talk about having an impact on world culture.

For all his faults -- like his views on race -- he was a force. Maybe that's why this second image that stays with me, perhaps my favorite presidential photo ever: Roosevelt at rest.

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The photo was taken during a presidential trip to Colorado. There happened to be several dogs around the site where Roosevelt was staying.

He was as voracious about reading as he was about everything else, so to catch him like this would hardly have been a surprise to his contemporaries. But after pages and pages of action, of reading about a man who is a swirl of energy who never stops, the photo is not only remarkable, but, again, reminds me a bit of myself.

Not to equate this project with Roosevelt's presidency (that takes an ego bigger than TR's), but I've spent endless days over the past several months reading for this project on my front porch stoop, my own dog slumped over lazily next to me, snoring, probably wishing I'd stop reading and take him to the damn park.

Again, it's all about humanizing a man who seemed so much larger than life, even while alive. When the legend is so much greater than the man, it's hard to find the ways to emotional connect with him. This moment of rest made it possible for me to make that connection with Roosevelt.

Roosevelt transformed the role of the presidency. Not just in the legislation he passed, or failed to, but in how he inhabited the role. Like Lincoln before him and FDR and Reagan after, TR became bigger than the office itself -- a fact which contributed to his downfall in later years.

An update on my schedule

I called a bit of an audible by choosing to read the two Morris books on Roosevelt (and really wish I could have squeezed in the third, but that will have to wait). To ensure I wouldn't be blowing the schedule too much -- remember, the plan is to read books about all 44 presidents in one year before election day 2016 -- I decided to reshuffle my schedule for the remaining 17 presidents.

At the beginning of this project, I made a schedule that gave me eight days per book. In fact, the year allowed for eight-and-a-third days per book. Over the course of 26 presidents, that added up to some extra days for which I hadn't accounted. I have now done so.

The reading tally below is still relevant, but the "days behind schedule" corresponds to the new schedule I built out in the spreadsheet for the final stretch of the project. It resets to zero with Roosevelt, but there's now no margin for error.

There's flexibility if I can get ahead or make up for lost time. But my buffer days are gone. After TR, the first truly modern president, we're in the home stretch.

Game on.

Days to read Washington: 16
Days to read Adams: 11
Days to read Jefferson: 10
Days to read Madison: 13
Days to read Monroe: 6
Days to read J. Q. Adams: 10
Days to read Jackson: 11
Days to read Van Buren: 9
Days to read W. Harrison: 6
Days to read Tyler: 3
Days to read Polk: 8
Days to read Taylor: 8
Days to read Fillmore: 14
Days to read Pierce: 1
Days to read Buchanan: 1
Days to read Lincoln: 12
Days to read Johnson: 8
Days to read Grant: 27
Days to read Hayes: 1
Days to read Garfield: 3
Days to read Arthur: 17
Days to hear Cleveland: 3
Days to read B. Harrison: 4
Days to read McKinley: 5
*Days to read T. Roosevelt: 15

Days behind schedule: 0

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Source: https://mashable.com/article/theodore-roosevelt-force-of-nature

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