Roosevelt and Churchill in the Heroic Age

I have been reading Hero of the Empire by Candace Millard and it hit me that the similarities between Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt are many. Both men came of age in the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott the two polar explorers who set the bar for suffering and death with their exploration of the South Pole. The Heroic Age can be defined as men of a certain patrician class feeling it is their destiny to explore, fight, or rule. The heroic man knows not fear and usually puts himself in grave danger.

Take Winston Churchill in the Boar war where he is attacked on a troop train and by all rights should have died there. This is when he was a war corespondent who really should not have even been fighting but he wanted to find war and test himself and he ended up being captured. Once captured Churchill makes a daring escape and goes on the run. The fact he could be shot and killed at any moment is negated by the heroic mans feeling that he is special and Gods Will shall keep him safe. In Churchill's case this seems to be true.

Much the same for Teddy Roosevelt who goes west after his wife and mother die on the same day in 1883 and ends up in the Badlands ;a place Custer called hell with the fires out and then puts himself through every test a young dude from the East could find with the possibility of death or great injury. Fighting Indians, badmen, blizzards, heat, stampeding cattle, swollen rivers, wild horses, Roosevelt cheats death at every turn...yet he comes out unscathed. He has the sense he will not be harmed and three years later he returns to the East to eventually become President as  Churchill returns to become England's greatest prime minister.

The Heroic Age ended as modernism moved in. Men were no longer heroic, they were mortal. Such a pity.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The Day Your Book Comes Out: Forging A President

My book is out today. Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt is finally for sale. A release day is a funny thing. There has been a lot of anticipation, suspense, heartache, highs and lows, and then, then, the book comes out. And it does have a bit of anticlimax. There should be bells and shouting from the rooftops and of course that is why you do media. But in reality your book coming out is the end of a very long journey that began years before when you had the idea to put pen to paper or fingers to screen.

In the case of Forging A President I was intrigued by a biography of Teddy Roosevelt when I learned his mother and wife died on the same day and he went West for three years to the Dakota Territory or the Badlands. It is an amazing thing to think that this vigorous President had such tragedy at such a young age (26) and then went to the West to essentially become someone else. Add to this that he was a sickly asthmatic who literally had to fight for every breath prompting his father to once observe, "you have the mind but not the body Teddy, and without the body the mind cannot go far."

And from that moment I wanted to find out what happened to Teddy Roosevelt out West and how did it create this barrel chested persona who comes down to us through history. I do believe in destiny, anyone else would have been killed by the falling horses, the arrows from Indians, the six shooters pointed his way by bad men. And so you write the book, push the book, and then finally it comes out.  And like a child that grows up, the best you can do is give your book a good push... and let it go.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt