Teddy Roosevelt Wanted to Charge the Germans in World War I

Teddy Roosevelt won the war with Spain. On this we can agree. He charged up San Juan hill and turned the tide of battle. It was the last time men on horseback would determine the outcome of a war involving the United States. But Roosevelt wasn't finished. Hew wanted to get his Rough Riders together again and turn the tide of World War I by charging the Germans. All he had to do was get permission from President Woodrow Wilson and he was ready to go overseas.

Roosevelt had become politically radioactive after losing the 1912 election for the Republicans. He had decided he wanted to run again and split the ticket. His hand picked successor William Howard Taft would have a been an easy win as Woodrow Wilson was an unknown quantity who had been President of Princeton and now the professorial Wilson was taking on a sitting President. Enter Roosevelt who decided he wanted to run again under his own party when he didn't get the nomination. The Bull Moose party Roosevelt formed was short lived and he handed the presidency to the Democrats.

So now he had to go to Wilson and plead to let him go commit suicide in France. World War I was vastly different than the war with Spain. Mustard gas, chlorine gas, tanks, flame throwers, machine guns. Millions of men died in a span of days. Roosevelt would not have gone five feet before he was cut down. But Teddy Roosevelt believed in action and he felt he could restore his political standing by winning the war for America. It was not to be. Woodrow Wilson said no. He did not want a dead president on his hands. Teddy Roosevelt never forgave him.

Forging A President

Teddy Roosevelts Prescription for all Ails Still Holds

Teddy Roosevelt was not well as a child or a young adult. He had acute asthma, Crones disease, insomnia. He was weak, thin, prone to depression and doctors didn't believe he would make it to adulthood. But his father famously told him, "Teddy you have the mind but not the body."  Enter Dr. Salter. Salter had a radical belief for the late eighteenth century and it said that the internal organs did not do well with the sedentary life. "Organs were made to work." Salter proclaimed and that meant action or the "vigorous life" as Roosevelt would later dub the life of action.  Teddy's father then added, "Without the body the mind cannot go far."

Roosevelt had his charge.  He began to box. He began gymnastics and weightlifting. This was at a time when few people exercised. Many believed exercise led to illness and certainly the Victorian upper classes of New York did not believe in getting sweaty. A constitutional consisted of walking to ones office or strolling into the parlor for some brandy and cigars. Cigars were what Teddy's parents had been giving him to ward off attacks of asthma that nearly suffocated the boy. That along with black coffee, opium, marijuana, Castor oil. Anything to stop the spasms of acute asthma. Nothing worked and so Teddy Roosevelt began the regimen his father and Salter prescribed and he began to slowly remake himself. Then he went West to the Badlands and for three years lived the wild life of a cowboy that completed Roosevelt's evolution into a man of action.

It is interesting that with all the hype over working out today we still see articles in the New York Times about the benefits of exercise. The latest said that strenuous exercise will slow down aging, ward off Alzheimer's. make us look and feel younger. It as if we are still trying to convince ourselves over a hundred years later that what Teddy Roosevelt found in the 1870s as a remedy to his ailments still holds. Without the body the mind cannot go far. True then and now.

Forging a President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt's Neurasthenia

A man named Charles Beard came up with a theory in the late nineteenth century to account for the sudden increase in people becoming depressed. To Beard this coincided with the closing of the American West. In 1890 the frontier was declared closed but this had not stopped men like Teddy Roosevelt from going West. Teddy went West to get away from the depression  and heartache of losing his wife and mother on the same day. Charles Beard saw what Roosevelt did in a bigger context.

Beard believe people were getting sick because they were using the mind over the body. He attributed nervousness, impotence, cancer, heart attacks, depression to the fact people were now working in offices in the East. Beard believed we had fundamentally changed from a people who were out working under Gods light in the fresh air to a people huddled away in offices who ran from work to home only to return the next day. We had become a people who rarely exercised and were bound up in knots The real life Beard said was out West. He called this disorder... neurasthenia.

Buffalo Bills Wild West show was built around people who pined for the frontier. William Cody's show basically said the real men were out there on horses saving people from the Indians not working in cramped offices. Teddy Roosevelt and others took this to heart and found themselves in the wide open plains of the West. Today we know Beards neurasthenia is real. And we know that  being outside in  nature is good and sitting in offices is not a a great thing.

Teddy Roosevelt returned after three years in the West a different man. The magic elixir of the West had cured his neurasthenia. Then he set aside millions of acres for future generations who would deal with the same malady under a much shorter name....stress.


Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt