“The manly virtues

Part of the fascination with Roosevelt has always been his larger-than-life personality. A child of established wealth who found glory in cultivating the “iron” virtues of a sterner era, Roosevelt had nothing but contempt for the Gilded Age, when capitalist entrepreneurs such as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie far outshone the second-rate politicians of the day. “Purely commercial ideals,” Roosevelt wrote, were “mean and sordid,” producing weak and fearful men, “incapable of the thrill of generous emotion,” and lacking in the capacity for nobility and greatness… A frank advocate of America n power, he led the construction of the Panama Canal and sent the Navy around the world for the first time. His energy seemed never to flag. He shot big game in Africa, explored the then-uncharted Amazon River, and fathered many healthy children, delighting in their antics.

These aspects of Roosevelt’s life have enduring appeal. But there are also significant parallels between his time and ours that help to explain his popularity today. The closing decades of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were periods of enormous wealth creation and consolidation. In T.R.’s day, these tendencies prompted worries about the power of money and special interests to corrupt republican government, and the disinclination of the nation’s leading citizens to do anything about it. Well-bred young men from respectable families regarded the rough and tumble of democratic politics as beneath them. In the decades following the Civil War, few men of the upper class concerned themselves with politics at all, and those who did were mostly, in Roosevelt’s words, “well-meaning little men, with receding chins and small feet,” zealous and idealistic, but totally ineffectual. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt memorably described them, they were “dudes that part their names in the middle.”"