Teddy Roosevelt Would Thrash the Cad

It is an old term. Woodrow Wilson told some reporters that if they did not quit reporting on his first wife Ellen Wilson he would thrash them. It makes us think of a man with gloves slapping another man or someone whipping someone else. The technical definition is to beat someone with a stick or a whip. In the old Victorian sense of the word someone was thrashed for a slight on insult or an injury to honor. A thrashing was the warm up for a duel the ultimate settling of a slight. So now we really have a situation where someone needs to be thrashed.

Maybe Jeffry Lord on CNN should be thrashed for saying it is alright to imply that women are menstruating everywhere and bleeding from everywhere. Theodore Roosevelt would thrash Lord for that if not beat him to a pulp. Roosevelt confronted more than a few men who implied he was a coward and demanded retribution and even offered himself available for a duel. He in fact bought dueling pistols when he was a student at Harvard.

Another great word is cad. Definition: a man who misbehaves dishonorably especially toward a woman.  Cads are always thrashed sooner or later. There were certain lines that were not to be crossed. And when they were crossed the cad was thrashed. Lord says equality demands that men and women be treated equally and women should be able to take being insulted by powerful men.

What a cad.

Forging a President

Teddy Roosevelt Faces Down a Gun Slinger in the Wild West

He was out looking for horses and it was getting dark. Teddy Roosevelt saw a town in the distance, small yellow lights peeking out in the Badlands. He went into town and looked for a room to bed down for the night. When he walked into a saloon he heard shots and saw a man with two pistols shooting up the bar. Teddy went and sat behind a wood stove to warm himself when the gunman saw him. What did he see? A man in a sombrero in a buckskin coat with thick glasses. A dude from the East. A target

Four eyes is going to buy the man bellowed. Teddy rubbed his hands and kept his head down. The man staggered over looking down at the skinny man behind the stove. I said four eyes is going to buy he shouted waving his guns. Teddy breathed deeply. Well if I have to I have to he said, standing up. Teddy cold cocked the man with a right hook and then a left. The gunman fell to the ground and Roosevelt sprung on him but he was out.

The people from the saloon hustled the man out and put him on a night train out of town. Teddy got his room and enjoyed the thanks of the town people. The dude from the East had just knocked out a badman and his reputation went a little higher that night. The Wild West had begun forging the man who would be President one day.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Doing Radio Interviews for a Book

You have only fifteen minutes maybe less except for the shows that let you roll thirty minutes. Those are the ones where you can stretch your legs and get into the meat of the book but for  many drive time shows you have less than ten minutes to get your point across and if you blow it there is no do  over because it is live. And so you wait for the phone to ring and set yourself up in a quiet room and tell everyone you are on the radio and please don't open that door or call out my name while I'm on the phone.

So you have your coffee and your notes and you have to be careful not to ramble and not speak too fast but you don't want to squander your time either. Getting a book down to sound bytes that will come across while someone is driving down the expressway is tricky. You have to hit the high points and your book may be three hundred pages but you can only get across a few moments that will stay with the listener  and hopefully get him to buy your book.

So it is one minute now. You have two phones ready in case one fails. The producers usually call right on the minute. And there it is. Hi, Is this William? Yes. Ok. Sixty seconds and you are on. So now you can hear the show. It is buzzing in your ear. A commercial. And then you are on. You will either do this or not. The show sounds distant and then it gets loud, there is a long hiss and now you are live. And we have author William Hazelgrove and his new book Forging A President to tell us about Teddy Roosevelt, William, welcome to the show!

You're on.

The Marc Bernier Show interview on Forging

Order Forging A President

We Could Sure Use A Teddy Roosevelt Today

We could sure use Teddy Roosevelt about now. Think of a man who just lost his wife and child and who heads West to remake himself. He is then plunged into the Badlands and ends up facing down a badman in a saloon who calls him four eyes and demands he buy him a drink. Teddy Roosevelt is small and just there from New York and yet he stands up and knocks out the man cold.

Or when he goes to cross a river that is overflowing with ice and moving swiftly. Everyone tells him not to do it but he takes his horse and tries to cross it anyway and ends up being knocked off his horse and managing to cross the river anyway and not freeze to death. Or when he lassos another man and saves him from a swiftly moving river and hauls him to the shore.

Or when he goes after three  men who have stolen from him and follows them all across the Badlands and then captures them and takes them all the way back to the sheriff. Or when he faces down five Indians by himself and manages to hold them off and escape. What is it? Courage. Grit. Destiny. Fortitude. Morality. Take your pick.  But Teddy Roosevelt embodied the man who did what he believed was right regardless of the cost.

We could sure use a Teddy Roosevelt now.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

How Teddy Roosevelt Became A Cowboy

In 1883 Teddy Roosevelts mother and wife died the same day. Three months later he left for the South Dakota Territory.  By 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau would declare the American frontier finally closed. Frederick Jackson Turner affirmed this and claimed that the frontier experience, more than any other, had shaped America’s character; it had given the pioneer “a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Teddy Roosevelt went to the Badlands of the Dakotas at the tail end of the Wild West. The asthmatic with thick spectacles who stepped off the train in the town of Little Missouri bore little resemblance to the man who would return years later thick of chest and ready to tackle the world.

He came back as the Teddy Roosevelt we now recognize. The West remade Roosevelt, just as it had remade the country. Basically lawless and churchless, the West offered freedom unbounded if you were tough enough to take it. As he later wrote, “For cowboy work there is no need of special traits and special training, and young Easterners should be sure of themselves before trying it: the struggle for existence is very keen in the far West, and it is no place for men who lack the ruder, coarser virtues and physical qualities. . . . ” This held great appeal for young Roosevelt, who would find the essence of America in the frozen and baking terrain of the Badlands. Here the character of America presented itself to Roosevelt, and he essentially became that character.

The West delivered this one-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound man, this this “dude,” a great adventure: he faced down gunmen, grizzly bears, thieves, rustlers, unscrupulous ranchers, ruthless outlaws, and Indians. He had the breath knocked out of him by overturned horses, cracked a rib, dislocated a shoulder, and nearly froze to death more than once, getting lost in the hell that is the Badlands—all while fighting chronic asthma and ignoring a physician’s admonition to protect his weak heart and lead the sedentary life of a recluse. To recover from the twin blows of losing both his mother and his wife on the same day, and in his quest to find his way again, Theodore Roosevelt would push himself to the point where his broken heart would either heal or stop forever. The West was just the place for such a contest.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt