If you like books -- and I mean the physical traits of books, books as objects in the world, not just for their prized intellectual content -- then you may enjoy a treat today, a special gift to yourself that I indulged in myself, the kind of extravagance that a few years ago was to be had exclusively by men and women of "large means.
" I am speaking of the "ownership" of a very special book, indeed a magnificent book, bound in a cover that no modern book could ever sport, literally gilded, and a book also with content that is meaningful, gripping, and insightful, writing that you will enjoy, ponder, and remember.
To find this treasure, go to The Internet Archive (just Google that term) and download, if you have 51 megabytes of space on your hard drive that you won't miss, your own PDF copy Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography in this very special memorial edition produced by Scribner: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (with illustrations), New York: 1922, Charles Scribner's Sons.
Now, to be clear, you will see dozens of editions of this popular autobiography when you visit The Internet Archive, and you must patiently search for this prize among them, a copy that was contributed by the University of California Library.
One way to be sure you recognize this gem among the flotsam of cheaper editions is that carries a little note that it has been downloaded by readers over one thousand times.
Take care that it is this very special Scribner's 1922 volume.
And pretend for a day that you are J.
P.
Morgan or Ned Harriman or John D.
Rockefeller and that you are adding this new treasure to your personal library.
I savored this hefty, green, hardcover beauty with embossed gold letters "TR" on the cover.
I took pleasure in its many of photographs, the wide margins, and the magnificent typeface.
It's amazing how these PDF copies approximate the actual presence of the book in your hands, minus the lovely smell of the high-grade paper and the caress of the cover and the spine.
Eyes alone will tell you what a magnificent edition of Roosevelt's personal summation of his life's work this is, published three years after Roosevelt's death by a great New York publisher to honor of one of our greatest presidents.
If you glance at the copyright page you will see that Roosevelt first published this book in 1913 when he was 55 years old.
You may well choose to read substantial portions of Roosevelt's biography on a desktop with a large screen.
But there may also come a moment when you want a sister edition of the book that you can put on your Kindle or your iPad, an edition that contains only the text, compact, something you can take to a comfortable armchair or to bed.
Indeed, there are days when it is only the text one wants, Roosevelt's words alone, and you go happily without the pleasant mise-en-scène of that PDF book facsimile.
To accomplish my second purpose, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg edition of the text.
What struck me most about my reading of this book was Roosevelt's candor and "reasonableness" as a politician.
This was my first exposure to his autobiography -- I read his four-volume The Winning Of The West years ago, my only direct experience of Teddy's prose before the autobiography.
Frankly, The Winning Of The West is an academic book that sometimes drags.
What I expected from Roosevelt's autobiography was that bluster and shouting and breaking of crockery so much in keeping with the caricature of Teddy Roosevelt as the Rough Rider, a man who rode roughshod over Washington as well as Cuba.
Perhaps, too, I was thinking of Alice Roosevelt Longworth's uncharitable remark about her dad -- that he "wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.
" Roosevelt lived large and had also a large ego.
That is not at all the Teddy Roosevelt that comes through in his autobiography.
On the contrary, he goes to great lengths to talk about the political and diplomatic knots he helped to untie, his efforts as a mediator, his skills as a global politician.
It is important to remember that Roosevelt had no presidential ambitions (that we know of) when he served as New York governor.
Indeed, he tried to avoid getting on the McKinley ticket as vice president.
Returning from his war service in the Caribbean, he was popular in Albany, except with the one man who counted: the "boss" of New York's Republican Party, Senator Thomas Platt.
It was Platt who engineered Teddy's nomination for the vice presidency in 1900, not because he thought the nation would benefit from a Roosevelt on the ticket, but simply to get him out of the governor's mansion in Albany.
Platt liked men he could control, and no one could control Roosevelt.
The McKinley/Roosevelt ticket beat William Jennings Bryan, the golden orator of his era, and Roosevelt settled in for the long and empty days of doing nothing as "veep.
" In those days, vice presidents had an office in the Capital and rarely, if ever, visited the White House, and certainly not without invitation.
Six months into his term, while he was on a fishing trip (Washington politicians in the first decade of the 20th century thought nothing, at the drop of a hat, of taking two or three weeks to go fishing), on September 6, 1901, President McKinley was grievously wounded by a lone gunman and later died.
Roosevelt became overnight the youngest ever President of the United States.
He was 42.
Were Teddy Roosevelt a political figure in today's Washington, his progressive political platform would look to modern eyes more in synch with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP.
He would probably favor ObamaCare! But back in the first decade of the last century, it was the Republicans who favored those populist domestic programs, a political mix that came to be known as the Square Deal.
What was most significant to me in Roosevelt's political engineering of the Square Deal was the delicate amalgamation of interests he was able to bring about with both business and labor, then, as today, deeply antagonistic toward one another.
Only a skilled diplomat and negotiator could pull off such a feat.
Though he was a New York clubman and inherited great wealth (he certainly never needed gainful employment), Roosevelt held deep antipathy for the plutocrats of his age, embodied especially in the likes of J.
P.
Morgan, E.
H.
(Ned) Harriman, and John D.
Rockefeller, those viceroys of Wall Street overseeing vast industrial empires, men with more personal wealth than many small nations.
Roosevelt prosecuted these men mercilessly under the Sherman Act of 1890.
He called them "evil" and "undesirable citizens.
" His biggest scalps were probably those of Northern Securities and Rockefeller's Standard Oil companies.
Roosevelt also created the National Park Service and used federal monies to buy outright 150 million acres of forest for use by average Americans as parklands.
He helped build dams to irrigate the Great American Desert, lands that were deemed to be worthless before "reclamation" by conservationists.
In his foreign policy, Roosevelt had imperialist ambitions for the United States that would shock the Left and Right alike in today's world.
He was keen on annexing the Philippines outright, as well as Puerto Rico and swathes of Central America.
He created from nothing the modern nation of Panama by seizing territory from Colombia so that he could build (and control!) the Panama Canal.
Yet this all sounds quite reasonable when he talks about it in his own words.
Even the quotation for which he is most famous, cushioned within the context of his autobiography, sounds decorously paternal: "The only safe rule is to promise little, and faithfully to keep every promise; to speak softly and carry a big stick.
" Few will remember today that Theodore Roosevelt was an early recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him for yet another feat of diplomatic high wire dancing: the negotiation of the treaty of peace between Japan and Russia that ended the grisly Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the first serious conflict of the 20th century.
This is not the place for even the briefest outline of this ghastly war, but let us simply note that Japanese military casualties numbered 47,000 with another 27,000 killed by disease.
Estimates of the Russian dead number between 40,000 to 70,000.
And these were just the military casualties.
Roosevelt helped end this horror, taking the prize in Stockholm in 1905.
The most moving words in his book for me come toward the end of Roosevelt's narrative: "It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.
No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by.
But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.
" These words are haunting because Roosevelt could not have foreseen the toll that the coming war, the Great War, would take on his own family.
When hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914, Roosevelt argued for allying the United States with England and France to fight Germany.
He was critical of Woodrow Wilson for trying to maintain neutrality.
With America's entry into the war, Colonel Roosevelt (he much preferred being called "Colonel Roosevelt" to "Mister President") volunteered to create a new volunteer regiment.
He was curtly turned down.
Quentin Roosevelt, his son, was soon serving in France, where he died in 1918.
This was a blow from which the former Rough Rider could not and did not recover.
His spirit crushed, he succumbed to a fatal depression that never lifted.
He was soon hospitalized for a number of debilitating physical illnesses.
Theodore Roosevelt died of clots in his coronary artery on January 5, 1919, at his estate, Sagamore Hill, just months after his 60th birthday.
Happily, Roosevelt's autobiography takes us only to the end of his presidency.
Though he could easily have won and served a third term (he won only one presidential election), he decided to keep to President Washington's precedent and supported instead his dear friend William Howard Taft for the nomination in 1908.
Taft, like McKinley eight years before him, went on to defeat the hapless William Jennings Bryan yet again.
Though Roosevelt would later have significant disagreements with Taft, upon Taft's accession to the presidency Teddy took off for a full year's holiday in Africa on safari, shooting big game (a vacation which became the subject for yet another memoir).
If you are planning to read Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, there is perhaps no better preparation and introduction to that book than a quick review of Roosevelt's own autobiography.
It is a timeless book, and you are also free, if you choose, to read it in a format fit for any prince or plutocrat.
" I am speaking of the "ownership" of a very special book, indeed a magnificent book, bound in a cover that no modern book could ever sport, literally gilded, and a book also with content that is meaningful, gripping, and insightful, writing that you will enjoy, ponder, and remember.
To find this treasure, go to The Internet Archive (just Google that term) and download, if you have 51 megabytes of space on your hard drive that you won't miss, your own PDF copy Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography in this very special memorial edition produced by Scribner: Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (with illustrations), New York: 1922, Charles Scribner's Sons.
Now, to be clear, you will see dozens of editions of this popular autobiography when you visit The Internet Archive, and you must patiently search for this prize among them, a copy that was contributed by the University of California Library.
One way to be sure you recognize this gem among the flotsam of cheaper editions is that carries a little note that it has been downloaded by readers over one thousand times.
Take care that it is this very special Scribner's 1922 volume.
And pretend for a day that you are J.
P.
Morgan or Ned Harriman or John D.
Rockefeller and that you are adding this new treasure to your personal library.
I savored this hefty, green, hardcover beauty with embossed gold letters "TR" on the cover.
I took pleasure in its many of photographs, the wide margins, and the magnificent typeface.
It's amazing how these PDF copies approximate the actual presence of the book in your hands, minus the lovely smell of the high-grade paper and the caress of the cover and the spine.
Eyes alone will tell you what a magnificent edition of Roosevelt's personal summation of his life's work this is, published three years after Roosevelt's death by a great New York publisher to honor of one of our greatest presidents.
If you glance at the copyright page you will see that Roosevelt first published this book in 1913 when he was 55 years old.
You may well choose to read substantial portions of Roosevelt's biography on a desktop with a large screen.
But there may also come a moment when you want a sister edition of the book that you can put on your Kindle or your iPad, an edition that contains only the text, compact, something you can take to a comfortable armchair or to bed.
Indeed, there are days when it is only the text one wants, Roosevelt's words alone, and you go happily without the pleasant mise-en-scène of that PDF book facsimile.
To accomplish my second purpose, I downloaded the Project Gutenberg edition of the text.
What struck me most about my reading of this book was Roosevelt's candor and "reasonableness" as a politician.
This was my first exposure to his autobiography -- I read his four-volume The Winning Of The West years ago, my only direct experience of Teddy's prose before the autobiography.
Frankly, The Winning Of The West is an academic book that sometimes drags.
What I expected from Roosevelt's autobiography was that bluster and shouting and breaking of crockery so much in keeping with the caricature of Teddy Roosevelt as the Rough Rider, a man who rode roughshod over Washington as well as Cuba.
Perhaps, too, I was thinking of Alice Roosevelt Longworth's uncharitable remark about her dad -- that he "wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.
" Roosevelt lived large and had also a large ego.
That is not at all the Teddy Roosevelt that comes through in his autobiography.
On the contrary, he goes to great lengths to talk about the political and diplomatic knots he helped to untie, his efforts as a mediator, his skills as a global politician.
It is important to remember that Roosevelt had no presidential ambitions (that we know of) when he served as New York governor.
Indeed, he tried to avoid getting on the McKinley ticket as vice president.
Returning from his war service in the Caribbean, he was popular in Albany, except with the one man who counted: the "boss" of New York's Republican Party, Senator Thomas Platt.
It was Platt who engineered Teddy's nomination for the vice presidency in 1900, not because he thought the nation would benefit from a Roosevelt on the ticket, but simply to get him out of the governor's mansion in Albany.
Platt liked men he could control, and no one could control Roosevelt.
The McKinley/Roosevelt ticket beat William Jennings Bryan, the golden orator of his era, and Roosevelt settled in for the long and empty days of doing nothing as "veep.
" In those days, vice presidents had an office in the Capital and rarely, if ever, visited the White House, and certainly not without invitation.
Six months into his term, while he was on a fishing trip (Washington politicians in the first decade of the 20th century thought nothing, at the drop of a hat, of taking two or three weeks to go fishing), on September 6, 1901, President McKinley was grievously wounded by a lone gunman and later died.
Roosevelt became overnight the youngest ever President of the United States.
He was 42.
Were Teddy Roosevelt a political figure in today's Washington, his progressive political platform would look to modern eyes more in synch with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP.
He would probably favor ObamaCare! But back in the first decade of the last century, it was the Republicans who favored those populist domestic programs, a political mix that came to be known as the Square Deal.
What was most significant to me in Roosevelt's political engineering of the Square Deal was the delicate amalgamation of interests he was able to bring about with both business and labor, then, as today, deeply antagonistic toward one another.
Only a skilled diplomat and negotiator could pull off such a feat.
Though he was a New York clubman and inherited great wealth (he certainly never needed gainful employment), Roosevelt held deep antipathy for the plutocrats of his age, embodied especially in the likes of J.
P.
Morgan, E.
H.
(Ned) Harriman, and John D.
Rockefeller, those viceroys of Wall Street overseeing vast industrial empires, men with more personal wealth than many small nations.
Roosevelt prosecuted these men mercilessly under the Sherman Act of 1890.
He called them "evil" and "undesirable citizens.
" His biggest scalps were probably those of Northern Securities and Rockefeller's Standard Oil companies.
Roosevelt also created the National Park Service and used federal monies to buy outright 150 million acres of forest for use by average Americans as parklands.
He helped build dams to irrigate the Great American Desert, lands that were deemed to be worthless before "reclamation" by conservationists.
In his foreign policy, Roosevelt had imperialist ambitions for the United States that would shock the Left and Right alike in today's world.
He was keen on annexing the Philippines outright, as well as Puerto Rico and swathes of Central America.
He created from nothing the modern nation of Panama by seizing territory from Colombia so that he could build (and control!) the Panama Canal.
Yet this all sounds quite reasonable when he talks about it in his own words.
Even the quotation for which he is most famous, cushioned within the context of his autobiography, sounds decorously paternal: "The only safe rule is to promise little, and faithfully to keep every promise; to speak softly and carry a big stick.
" Few will remember today that Theodore Roosevelt was an early recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to him for yet another feat of diplomatic high wire dancing: the negotiation of the treaty of peace between Japan and Russia that ended the grisly Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the first serious conflict of the 20th century.
This is not the place for even the briefest outline of this ghastly war, but let us simply note that Japanese military casualties numbered 47,000 with another 27,000 killed by disease.
Estimates of the Russian dead number between 40,000 to 70,000.
And these were just the military casualties.
Roosevelt helped end this horror, taking the prize in Stockholm in 1905.
The most moving words in his book for me come toward the end of Roosevelt's narrative: "It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.
No father and mother can hope to escape sorrow and anxiety, and there are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by.
But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.
" These words are haunting because Roosevelt could not have foreseen the toll that the coming war, the Great War, would take on his own family.
When hostilities broke out in Europe in 1914, Roosevelt argued for allying the United States with England and France to fight Germany.
He was critical of Woodrow Wilson for trying to maintain neutrality.
With America's entry into the war, Colonel Roosevelt (he much preferred being called "Colonel Roosevelt" to "Mister President") volunteered to create a new volunteer regiment.
He was curtly turned down.
Quentin Roosevelt, his son, was soon serving in France, where he died in 1918.
This was a blow from which the former Rough Rider could not and did not recover.
His spirit crushed, he succumbed to a fatal depression that never lifted.
He was soon hospitalized for a number of debilitating physical illnesses.
Theodore Roosevelt died of clots in his coronary artery on January 5, 1919, at his estate, Sagamore Hill, just months after his 60th birthday.
Happily, Roosevelt's autobiography takes us only to the end of his presidency.
Though he could easily have won and served a third term (he won only one presidential election), he decided to keep to President Washington's precedent and supported instead his dear friend William Howard Taft for the nomination in 1908.
Taft, like McKinley eight years before him, went on to defeat the hapless William Jennings Bryan yet again.
Though Roosevelt would later have significant disagreements with Taft, upon Taft's accession to the presidency Teddy took off for a full year's holiday in Africa on safari, shooting big game (a vacation which became the subject for yet another memoir).
If you are planning to read Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, there is perhaps no better preparation and introduction to that book than a quick review of Roosevelt's own autobiography.
It is a timeless book, and you are also free, if you choose, to read it in a format fit for any prince or plutocrat.
Source...