Theodore Roosevelt - Bibliography

The indispensable printed source is Elting E. Morison, John Morton Blum, and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., eds., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt , 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1951–1954); volumes 2, 4, 6, and 8 also contain perceptive essays by the editors. Henry Cabot Lodge, ed., Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918 , 2 vols. (New York, 1925), is far more limited and purposefully edited, but useful nevertheless. John M. Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1954; 2d ed., 1977), is a masterful analysis of Roosevelt the man and the president. Blum's chapter on Roosevelt in his The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (New York, 1980), fine-tunes the portrait. Morton Keller, ed., Theodore Roosevelt: A Profile (New York, 1967), contains sharply focused excerpts from a variety of books on Roosevelt himself and on the Progressive era.

The best single biography remains William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1961; rev. ed., 1975). But Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kans., 1991), provides more concentrated attention on the presidency than Harbaugh and more detail than the present article. For an account of the young T. R. see David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York, 1981). All Roosevelt's biographers continue to be indebted to the keen insights and comprehensive research in Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), for an understanding of T. R.'s foreign policy. Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt's Caribbean: The Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context (Baton Rouge, La., 1990), brings that part of the Roosevelt story in touch with more recent revisionist historiography. An important account of Roosevelt appears in John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), an excellent exercise in comparative biography. David H. Burton, The Learned Presidency: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson (Rutherford, N.J., 1988), treats the extraordinary succession of learned, even scholarly, presidents in that extraordinary era at the turn of the century when the well-earned credentials of intelligence were still important political assets.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston, 1973); George E. Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency (New York, 1970); and Richard E. Neustadt's pioneering study Presidential Power , 2 vols. (Durham, N.C., 1976), deal with Roosevelt only in passing but will help put his presidency in historical perspective, as will James David Barber, The Presidential Character (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), which offers a theoretical framework for "predicting performance in the White House." George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958), remains one of the best accounts of T. R.'s administration within the context of the Progressive era.

Richard M. Abrams, The Burdens of Progress: 1900–1929 (Glenview, Ill., 1978), provides a broader cultural and political context for understanding Roosevelt's personality and leadership. Robert H. Wiebe, "The House of Morgan and the Executive, 1905–1913," in American Historical Review 65 (1959), from which a part of the account of Roosevelt's consultations with Morgan was taken, should be supplemented by Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), while there is no better account of the conservation movement than Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959). Among the more recent works, Paul R. Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana, Ill., 1985), adds personal detail to the story that Hays treats with a broader brush.

Recent works include Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York, 2001), the second of a trilogy profiling the life of the president; this volume focuses on the presidency. The first volume of his early life is The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979). See also Louis Auchincloss, Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 2001), H. W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic (New York, 1997), and Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (1994).