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

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

Teddy Roosevelt Facing Down a Grizzly Bear

Roosevelt and Merrifield spent the long night with fingers on their rifle triggers, but the bear did not come back. The next morning Merrifield picked up the bear’s trail over the pine needles and moss and led them through the woods. The hunters breathed in the cold, clean scent of pine needles as they crept forward. Roosevelt was following Merrifield “when in the middle of the thicket we crossed a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, passed by the upright stem of a great pine,” Roosevelt wrote later.6 “As soon as he was by it, he sank suddenly on one knee, turning half around, his face fairly aflame with excitement; and as I strode past him, with my rifle at the ready, there, not ten steps off, was the great bear, slowly rising from his bed among the young spruces.”

 To Merrifield’s surprise, Roosevelt walked past him briskly. The nine-foot, twelve-hundred-pound grizzly had already heard them and was back on his haunches, baring his needle-sharp teeth. “He had heard us but apparently hardly knew exactly where or what we were,” Roosevelt continued, “for he reared up on his haunches sideways to us, then he saw us and dropped down again on all fours, the shaggy hair on his neck and shoulders seeming to bristle as he turned toward us. As he sank down to his forefeet, I had raised the rifle.”8 Roosevelt’s heart was pounding and his mouth was dry as he faced down the fiercest creature in the West. He lifted his rifle, feeling his heart, telling himself that this was the moment; this was where the man confronted himself.

If he missed, he would be dead. Roosevelt aimed between the fierce gleaming eyes and fired. “Doubtless my face was pretty white,” he later wrote his sister, “but the blue barrel was as steady as a rock as I glanced along it until I could see the top of the bead fairly between his two sinister-looking eyes . . . ”

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt

The Day Teddy Roosevelt's Wife and Mother Died

                                                                             
Theodore Roosevelt clutched the two telegrams, shifting uncomfortably in the train—leaning forward, tapping his foot, trying to hurry on the frustratingly slow steam engine. Roosevelt was a man with a beautiful wife, a new baby, a brilliant political career, and the patronage and wealth of an aristocratic family behind him. Now, all this seemed in danger. The young assemblyman from Albany was making his way 145 miles south to Manhattan, where his wife and his mother both lay dying. On a clear day the train ride from Albany to Manhattan took five hours, but a heavy fog had been hovering over New York for days, seeming to portend what lay ahead for him. Teddy Roosevelt tapped his foot impatiently and stared at the first telegram. You have a baby girl. Congratulations. The second telegram told a much different story. Come at once. Mother and Alice gravely ill. The light went out for Roosevelt that day as he ran for the train. The man who valued action above all else could now do nothing but wait to be delivered to destiny.

Roosevelt stared out the window. The fog reminded him of when he was a boy and he would sleep sitting straight up because his asthma squeezed his small chest. On such nights, his father would take him out in his carriage. They would ride like the wind through the streets of New York. “Open your mouth Teddy! Open your mouth!” his father instructed. “Let the air in!” And, as in a primitive oxygen ventilator, he would open his mouth and feel the cool air go down his throat and inflate his lungs. The image of a man frantically driving a black, rain-slicked carriage through the night streets of New York, and a boy hanging off the side with his mouth open to the heavens—it was all his father could do, after walking up and down the hallway with him all night. The rich man’s son could get no air, and his father could only admonish the boy to open his mouth while he sped the horses savagely along. “Faster! Faster! For my son must breathe!” 

Now the train was pulling into Grand Central Station. The young dandy ran for his home in a fog so thick he could only grope his way toward 57th Street, where the lordly Roosevelt mansion commanded the street. Finally, he ran up the stairs to where his young wife, Alice, lay in bed. She was dying of Bright’s disease, an affliction of the kidneys causing fever, vomiting, terrible back pain, and bloody urine. They had just married the year before, but now the love of his life was dying in his arms. 

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt