Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena. Edited by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson

Kristen R Egan, Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena. Edited by Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson, Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 52, Issue 3, Autumn 2021, Pages 347–348, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whab052

Extract

While Teddy Roosevelt is one of America’s most well-known presidents, editors Char Miller and Clay S. Jenkinson suggest Roosevelt saw himself as a naturalist (p. xiii). Their interdisciplinary collection, Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena, chronologically tracks Roosevelt’s evolving environmentalism. By digging deeper than the heralded conservation policies of his presidency, a more nuanced vision of Roosevelt emerges; he is extraordinary but flawed, a figure who, as contributor Elliott West points out, reflects the changing America of the early twentieth century.

The collection contains eleven chapters organized into three parts. Part I, “Field Notes,” contains mostly biographical criticism. Darrin Lunde paints a picture of a young Roosevelt—a New Yorker whose boyhood curiosity for nature lead him to become a skilled hunter, taxidermist, and a budding naturalist with his own collection of specimens. The rest of Part I shows variations of this same individual: one who becomes a substantial ornithologist (Chapter 3), a writer who develops his own genre (Chapter 2), and a president who still spends time rock scrambling and swimming in Rock Creek Park in Washington D.C. (Chapter 4).