Larger Than Life

The end of American innocence is not an innocent notion. It suggests a nation permanently swaddled in amiable memories of the past. Each time America experiences a crisis, whether World War I, Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Watergate or Sept. 11, it is said to have been jolted into the roiling present. But this is quite wrong. The striking thing is not how pacific but how volatile the U.S. has been. Domestically, the country's past could be described as a series of economic booms and busts with successive waves of immigration ensuring ethnic and class conflict.

Nor has the U.S. been a shrinking violet abroad. From the outset, the United States relentlessly expanded, whether it was during the Mexican War or the conquest of Indian territories. The North's victory in the Civil War prompted Herman Melville to write in his "Battle Pieces" that the U.S. now wore empire on its brow. A new superpower had emerged from the conflict intent on increasing its power and influence abroad. Indeed, the turn of the century was the hinge of fate for the United States. No one did more to turn the republic into an empire than Theodore Roosevelt.

Edmund Morris and Louis Auchincloss provide a welcome opportunity to take a fresh look at Roosevelt. "Theodore Rex" (the name is Henry James') is the sequel to Morris' Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt." (A third volume is planned.) No, Morris does not appear as a fictitious character, as in his biography of Ronald Reagan. Here, Morris draws on the documents at hand, although in his zeal to create vivid drama, he sometimes embellishes historical fact with his own fanciful visions. He minutely traces Roosevelt's two tumultuous terms as president, beginning with his unexpected ascension in 1901 following the assassination of William McKinley.

It's all there, more or less: Roosevelt's views on race, his famous dinner in the White House with Booker T. Washington, his trust-busting, his grab of the Panama Canal, his negotiation of the 1905 Russo-Japanese Peace Treaty and his buildup of the Navy come in for close scrutiny.

Alas, for all its comprehensiveness, Morris' book ends up being something of a cartoon. Each chapter is broken into short scenes; some sections are only two or three sentences long. Morris has created a film script, not a history. There is, for a start, the perfumed prose which draws attention to itself. Morris offers a Walt Disney view of the high and mighty; the rumbustious Roosevelt, the conniving Sen. Mark Hanna, the retrograde industrialists.