Poetic Prose

Is it possible that non-fiction can constitute beautiful, poetic prose? Well, Hermann Hagedorn proves it can in The Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt. If the following prologue doesn't make you want to read this book, nothing will!

This is a book for boys and girls, for tomboys and for men.

Sentimentalists and slackers and folk who serve two masters will find nothing in it to appeal to them. But lovers of heroic tales will find the story, if not the telling of it, music and honey to their hearts so long as there is the need of intrepid fighters for right and justice in this world - and that will be a long time.

The story of Theodore Roosevelt is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided that he wanted to be like them. He had vision, he had will, he had persistence, and he succeeded. What the final historical estimate of Theodore Roosevelt will be we do not know. We only know that when he died he was known not only to Americans, but to the people of the four corners of the earth, as one of the world's greatest men. He was not a second Washington. He was not a second Lincoln. He was not a second Andrew Jackson. He was not a second anybody. He was Theodore Roosevelt, himself, unique. There has never been anybody like him in the past, and, though the world wait a long while, there will never be anyone like him in the future.

For he had something of the Prophet Ezekiel in him and something of Natty Bumppo, something of Hildebrand the valiant warrior, something of Olaf the sea-king, something of Cromwell, something of Charlemagne. He belongs to the Heroic Line, and we need not ask what those grand fellows would have thought of him.

For eight years before he died Theodore Roosevelt was beaten in every political campaign he entered. During those years he made "mistakes" that would have killed and buried twelve ordinary public men. He was placed on the shelf as a mummy a half-dozen times, yet to the end, every word he spoke was "news"; and when he went to a health farm and lost fourteen pounds, the newpapers carried the tidings on the front page, because they knew that the least thing that happened to "T.R." was more interesting to the average American citizen than a diplomatic secret or a battle. He was more conspicuous in retirement than most of our Presidents have been under the lime-light of office.

For Theodore Roosevelt was the epitome of the Great Hundred Million; the visible, individual expression of the American people in this first quarter of the twentieth century. He was the typical American. He had the virtue we like to call American, and he had the faults. He had energy, enterprise, chivalry, insatiable eagerness to know things, trust in men, idealism, optimism, fervor; some intolerance; vast common sense; deep tenderness with children; single-minded fury in battle. He had the gift of quick decision; a belief in cutting through if you couldn't satisfactorily go around; real respect for the other fellow as long as he was straight, and immeasurable contempt for him if he was crooked or a quitter; love of fair play, of hardship, of danger, of a good fight in a good cause. A level-headed winner, a loser who could grin, his glory was not that he was extraordinary, but that he was so complete an expression of the best aspirations of the average American. He was the fulfiller of our good intentions; he was the doer of heroic things we all want to do and somehow don't quite manage to accomplish.

He knew us and we knew him. He was human, he was our kind, and, being our kind, his success and his fame were somehow our successes and our fame likewise.

There is something magical about that. You can no more explain it than you can explain Theodore Roosevelt. And you cannot explain him any more than you can explain electricity or falling in love.

You can only tell his story, which we will now proceed to do.

Now that is the way the great story of a great man ought to be told! I'm only a few chapters in, but, for $3, the aesthetic and literary beauty of this biography may prove this to be my best book bargain ever!