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The forgotten T.R. (Reconsiderations).

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EXACTLY 100 years after he became, at the age of 42, the youngest man ever to be sworn in as president of the United States, interest in Theodore Roosevelt is experiencing an unprecedented revival. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich loves Teddy; so does President Bush's campaign strategist, Karl Rove. Across the aisle, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt sings his praises, while former president Bill Clinton, tutored by Washington Post columnist and T.R. aficionado E. J. Dionne, sees him as a model for the exercise of energetic executive power.

Still, no politician has identified himself so directly with the Bull Moose as Republican war hero John McCain. Throughout his bid for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain lashed out in the manner of Roosevelt against the special interests that he claimed were corrupting American politics.

Through his support for campaign-finance reform, national service, and through his fervent love of country, McCain sought to renew in his fellow citizens, and especially the young, a sense of patriotism, duty, sacrifice, and honor. McCain's candidacy gained considerable momentum from a group of maverick intellectuals and journalists on the right, most notably, William Kristol and David Brooks. In a series of articles and editorials in the Weekly Standard, these self-styled advocates of a "national greatness conservatism supported McCain's candidacy and helped fan the Roosevelt revival. What they sought was a plausible Republican precedent for the vigorous exercise of national power and an alternative to the libertarian and big-business drift of the post-Reagan party establishment. Even after Bush's narrow victory, they continued to rail against the GOP domination by "special interests," and to criticize what they viewed as the growing isolationism of the Republican establishment.

Circumstances changed suddenly and dramatically on September 11. With George W. Bush adopting a more activist foreign policy and the nation rallying behind the president in time of war, McCain and his intellectual backers threw their support behind the president. But their goal has remained the same: To develop a set of domestic and foreign-policy initiatives that will capture the public imagination and complete the Reagan revolution by creating a permanent Republican majority. In their think tanks and Web sites, one appropriately named "Bull Moose," these conservatives urge the president to take a leaf or two out of T.R.'s Progressive playbook. The public seems equally enamored of Roosevelt, and has made the second installment of Edmund Morris's projected three-part biography of the twenty-sixth president a national bestseller. How can we explain Teddy Roosevelt's renewed appeal to citizens and politicians alike? And is a return to T.R.'s political principles what is most needed today?

The manly virtues

Part of the fascination with Roosevelt has always been his larger-than-life personality. A child of established wealth who found glory in cultivating the "iron" virtues of a sterner era, Roosevelt had nothing but contempt for the Gilded Age, when capitalist entrepreneurs such as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie far outshone the second-rate politicians of the day. "Purely commercial ideals," Roosevelt wrote, were "mean and sordid," producing weak and fearful men, "incapable of the thrill of generous emotion," and lacking in the capacity for nobility and greatness. The things that stirred T.R.'s romantic soul were different. He adored politics and the physicality of ranching. He organized and lead the volunteer cavalry regiment of Rough Riders in Cuba. He excoriated his enemies in the most colorful terms--"mollycoddle" and "goo-goo" (short for good-government types) were two of his more memorable neologisms. Roosevelt took on the trusts and their powerful heads. A frank advocate of America n power, he led the construction of the Panama Canal and sent the Navy around the world for the first time. His energy seemed never to flag. He shot big game in Africa, explored the then-uncharted Amazon River, and fathered many healthy children, delighting in their antics.

These aspects of Roosevelt's life have enduring appeal. But there are also significant parallels between his time and ours that help to explain his popularity today. The closing decades of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries were periods of enormous wealth creation and consolidation. In T.R.'s day, these tendencies prompted worries about the power of money and special interests to corrupt republican government, and the disinclination of the nation's leading citizens to do anything about it. Well-bred young men from respectable families regarded the rough and tumble of democratic politics as beneath them. In the decades following the Civil War, few men of the upper class concerned themselves with politics at all, and those who did were mostly, in Roosevelt's words, "well-meaning little men, with receding chins and small feet," zealous and idealistic, but totally ineffectual. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt memorably described them, they were "dudes that part their names in the middle."

Roosevelt set out to change all that when, fresh out of Harvard in 1880, he threw himself into ward politics in New York City and shortly thereafter was elected to the state legislature. Almost immediately, he made news by exposing the rampant bribery and extortion in the legislature. By standing up to the machine politicians and "special interests" that dominated New York politics, the young Roosevelt made politics once again respectable for a whole generation of eager reformers. In an era dominated by laissez-faire ideology, Roosevelt thought politicians could actually do something to make life better for the average citizen, and he had a rollicking good time trying.

As a wealthy New Yorker and an admirer of Alexander Hamilton, Roosevelt might have been expected to take a more sympathetic view of the kind of character produced in the commercial East. But in numerous speeches and shorter essays during the 1880s and 1890s, Roosevelt cast the prosperous East Coast as the symbol of all that was decadent and effeminate in post-Civil War America. In "The American Boy," Roosevelt invidiously compared the ways in which wealthy eastern lads amused themselves, such as playing billiards, with the rude but virile education of the frontier boy. And in "The Manly Virtues and Practical Ideals," written after his own transformative adventures in the West, Roosevelt opined that Americans must "be vigorous in mind and body, able to hold our own in rough conflict with our fellows, able to suffer punishment without flinching, and, at need, be able to repay it in kind with full interest." Such virile traits were precisely what a "peaceful and commercial civilization," rendered "cautious and timid," was all too inclined to dismiss. Living in a rougher age, pioneers, frontiersmen, and cowboys instinctively knew that they must cultivate the "manly virtues" or perish....