- Roosevelt, Theodore.
The Rough Riders.
Philadelphia: Pavilion Press, [1899] 2004. ISBN 1-4145-0492-6.
-
This is probably, by present-day standards, the most politically
incorrect book ever written by a United States President. The fact
that it was published and became a best-seller before his
election as Vice President in 1900 and President in 1904 indicates
how different the world was in the age in which Theodore Roosevelt
lived and helped define. T.R. was no chicken-hawk. After advocating
war with Spain as assistant secretary of the Navy in the McKinley
administration, as war approached, he left his desk job in Washington
to raise a volunteer regiment from the rough and ready horse- and
riflemen of his beloved Wild West, along with number of his fellow
Ivy Leaguers hungry for a piece of the action. This book chronicles
his adventures in raising, equipping, and training the regiment, and
its combat exploits in Cuba in 1898. The prose is pure T.R.
passionate purple; it was rumoured that when the book was
originally typeset the publisher had to send out for more copies of
the upper-case letter “I”. Almost every page contains some
remark or other which would end the career of what passes for
politicians in today's pale, emasculated world. What an age. What a
man! The bloodthirsty warrior who wrote this book would go on to win
the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1906
for brokering an end to the war between Russia and Japan.
This paperback edition from Pavilion Press is a sorry thing
physically. The text reads like something that's been OCR scanned
and never spelling checked or proofread—on p. 171, for example,
“antagonists” is printed as “antagon1sts”, and this is one of many
such errors. There's no excuse for this at all, since there's an
electronic text edition of The Rough Riders
freely available
from Project Gutenberg which is free of these errors,
and an
on-line
edition which lacks these flaws. The cover photo of
T.R. on his horse is a blow-up of a low-resolution
JPEG image with obvious pixels and compression artefacts.
Roosevelt's report to his commanding general
(pp. 163–170) detailing the logistical and administrative
screwups in the campaign is an excellent illustration of
the maxim that the one area in which government far surpasses
the capabilities of free enterprise is in the making of
messes.
February 2005 