![]() ![]() ![]() He created his own special forces - the Rough Riders - and stampeded with them into Cuba, storming up San Juan Hill and seizing everlasting glory. As historians put it, those able to purchase a substitute exercised “the right of the rich to hire the poor to do fighting and dying,” a practice that became a factor in the New York Draft Riots of 1863.Įven without a biographer’s knowledgeable insight, you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to see why Mittie’s sickly, asthmatic son, Theodore, transformed his weak body into a muscular machine and charged into history, banging the drum for war in 1898. ![]() paid a substitute to serve for him during the Civil War.īrady provides no further information about this decision, which was not uncommon at the time but potentially subjected the Roosevelts to ridicule. So, to placate his wife, known to lock herself in a dark room for days, Theodore, Sr. Theodore’s mother, Mittie, to whom he referred as “an unreconstructed Southerner,” had insisted his father not enlist in the Union army and oppose her three brothers, fighting for the Confederacy. and dominated the lives of his four sons.īrady’s biography of Ted Jr., the first son of Theodore Roosevelt, offers only a few sentences about the cloud that hung over the patrician family. by Tim Brady, you understand why military service fired the passions of the 26th president of the U.S. After reading His Father’s Son: The Life of General Ted Roosevelt Jr. ![]()
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