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

Did Teddy Roosevelt Hold off 5 Indians in the Badlands ?

Yes. It might have been four but no matter. The Dude newly arrived in the West was out looking for some horses when Indians appeared on the horizon and started galloping toward him. This is 1884 with Geronimo still on the loose and atrocities occurring on both sides. Men carried poison with them in case they were captured as stories of Indians cutting off men's organs while alive was well known. Enter Teddy Roosevelt to the Badlands fresh off the train from Manhattan. He had come out to find his piece of the West after his wife and mother died on the same day.

So the Indians with Winchesters raised charge Teddy. He swings down and puts his rifle across the pommel of his saddle and pins it to the center Indian. They stop and legend has it they professed they were friendly. The man with thick glasses from Manhattan would have none of it and told them to keep their distance. They then cussed at him and Teddy would later write he knew they had a good command of English then.

So how much danger was Teddy in? Possibly a lot. The Indians could have easily killed him and taken his horse and rifle and left his bones to rot in the Badlands. Cowboys were found many times scalped and worse after Indian encounters. So Roosevelt was smart to hold his ground. Apparently they then followed him but eventually gave it up. Teddy Roosevelt's stock went up in the West and the Roosevelt legend climbed just a little higher.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

Otto Warmbier Stirs a Sleeping Giant

I saw him when he was first arrested It did not look good. He was heading into hell. Otto Warmbier has died. He had so much brain damage the tissue in his brain had died from lack of blood flow. Heart attack or respiratory arrest the doctors said...after that they had no explanation. Teddy Roosevelt would have had a very simple answer for the North Koreans. Lock and load. He would have screamed from the rooftops to attack and would not have been satisfied until the first American soldiers hit the beach. Things were simpler in 1906.

Otto Warmbier took down a political poster and for that he was sentenced to fifteen years. This we know. It was their revenge. Now what? Remember the Maine. That started the war with with Spain. Teddy saw it as inevitable. The war had to be fought and settled. It was. Now we have the Koreans building an ICBM. Teddy would see this one way. The issue would have to be settled sooner or later. Might as well be sooner.

Something about a human face put on the nebulous war of words. Otto Warmbier is gone for taking a political poster down. But we know he was killed for much more. It was the only way to strike at a giant. Step on his toes, tweak his nose, spit in his eye. What does the giant do? When Teddy Roosevelt died Woodrow Wilson said, death had to take Roosevelt when he was sleeping, otherwise there would have been a fight...

Otto never woke up, but you never know when a sleeping giant might.

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

How the Wild West Remade Teddy Roosevelt

In 1890, the superintendent of the U.S. Census Bureau declared 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 in 1883 to recover from the death of his wife and his mother.  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 “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