Era of Theodore Roosevelt

Years ago, I picked up Harold Faulkner's "Politics, Reform and Expansion" to kill a little time. I didn't have any idea, but it was part of a group of books written decades ago and published by Harper and Row called the New American Nation Series. The books tell the story of US History in 40 odd volumes, written by prominent academia from the time. They have been revised occasionally as the decades passed. I cant really explain why I like the set so much, but I do. I suppose there's something deep inside my heart that yearns for the New Frontier Idealism when it seemed we were much more optimistic as a people. I think that's fine for all of us if we can recognize the limitations of thinking about it in those terms.... Over the years I started picking up the series here and there. The latest for me is George Mowry's book on the Theodore Roosevelt Era. The treatment of William Howard Taft is unkind, to say the least. Mowry paints a picture of a clueless and lazy fatdude, stuck in a bathtub of unoriginality who wrecks TR's hopes to reform big business by siding with monopolists and failing to lead his own politicalparty, which enjoyed unchallenged rule, until Taft destroyed it through inertia. Mowry seems unsure of what to make of Theodore Roosevelt. Like other historians, he seems to admire one side of the man and ignore the other. Was TR a reckless war monger or the Nobel Prize Winner? Was he a racist who believed African-Americans were some sort of inferior race or was he the man who appointed more blacks to offices than any other post-reconstruction Presidents? Meddling internationalist who believed US power was superior or protector of Venezuela against British intrusion? Roosevelt was a complicated man, an egotist and maybe one of the great ones. Before the politics of the book, Mowry talks about intellectual, social and religious tides that ring a little hollow to me. I do believe there are intellectual movements that have impact on what's going on in every time. How relevant are such things to the poor farmer raising his crop at the start of the 20th century? Maybe not enough for as much of the book to be devoted to the topic. We probably would have recieved more social history in another age. I am awe struck at the racism that ran through the time. We certainly were not taught how many racist notions were in the minds of the Progressives of the time. If you bear the time period in which it was written in context this book is a good pick-up, but the last word on scholarship didn't die with JFK .... You can find more modern things. I think Mowry's book is a good ancillary text to anything from today.