Dan Flores

That sentiment surfaced in a particularly troubling way in Roosevelt's public endorsement of a book by fellow Ivy Leaguer and conservationist Madison Grant.

Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, with its advocacy of eugenics, made enough of a white nationalist case to impress Adolf Hitler while getting ridiculed in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

The first time I visited the American Museum of Natural History, I'll confess to doing a double take of the statue of Teddy outside the main entrance.

It presented Roosevelt as the classic great man on horseback looking out over Manhattan's Central Park, innocent enough until you realized that he was being flanked and escorted by both Native and African Americans on foot on either side of him.

The effect in modern New York was jarring enough that in January of 2022, the statue was taken down.

John Muir got in a twist of the knife, too.

Making a case for protecting a much bigger piece of Yosemite, including the Tuolumne Canyon, soon to be the target of a dam, Muir and the president spent three nights camping in Yosemite without bodyguards.

That gave the legendary writer-activist, no shrinking violent himself, a chance to confront Roosevelt around their campfire.

His question was something many had wondered about, but only the Scottish poetico-trampo was willing to broach.

Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things?

Author of numerous books and magazine articles on hunting, probably already planning the African safari he would take as soon as he was out of office, Roosevelt's response was an evasive, Muir, I guess you're right.

Roosevelt then went on to support the O'Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite Park, and in an eight-month expedition to Africa in 1909, proceeded to shoot 5,013 mammals, 4,443 birds, and 2,322 reptiles and amphibians, all for science and the Smithsonian's cabinets, of course.

So then, like everyone else who lived in the past, Roosevelt's worldview did not always conform to our sense of right and wrong in the present.

But Teddy Roosevelt still works for me as an American hero.

The country lost something of incalculable value when, as the author of yet another book he titled The Strenuous Life, Teddy Roosevelt stepped away from the presidency in 1909 after serving only one full term, then went on his safari in Africa, followed by his exploration and mapping of the least known remaining source tributary of the Great Amazon River.

Back home, the most nature-obsessed president since Thomas Jefferson had turned the country over to his successor, Portly William Howard Taft, whose passion about outdoor endeavor was for the rugged and manly sport of golf.

Yeah, I mean, he becomes president when he's 42, and that's in 1901.

So those scenes in the beginning of this particular episode happen in the 80s.

And so it's like he, as you said, he's in his 20s.

And so he's a very young man, and he's sort of got what almost certainly one would argue is a kind of a manic depressive state.