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 Great Adventures of Winston and Teddy

It was a heroic age. Men believed exploration of the South Pole was heroic. They believed freezing to death was heroic. They believed fighting in wars was heroic. The awful carnage of the twentieth century had yet to prove the utter futilty of war. Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt grew up in the heroic age and both men set out to prove themselves at a very young age.

Teddy lost his mother and wife the same day and went West for three years. He deliberately put himself in harms way and was nearly killed by a Grizzly Bear, shot by an armed man in a saloon, scalped by four Indians, and trampled by stampeding cattle. He was out to find the myth of the West and to that end he threw himself into one dangerous situation after another demanding that life give him back adventure and prove himself to himself.

Winston Churchill was not much different. He went off to the Boer War hoping to find adventure and to prove himself as a solider. What happened was he ended up a journalist but this didn't stop him from rescuing a train under attack and then getting captured by the Boers. Churchill believed he would survive when all around him were dying. He believed he was destined for greater things and that would see him through.

Both men demanded adventure from life and carried a sense of their own destiny. When one reads about Teddy out West or Winston in the Boer War in Africa you come away with a belief in destiny. How else can we explain survival against all odds.

Forging A President How the Wild West Created Teddy Roosevelt