Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex is a sequel to Edmund Morris's classic best-seller The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It begins by following the new President (still the youngest in American history) as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, one hundred years ago. A detailed prologue describes TR's assumption of power and journey to Washington, with the assassinated President McKinley riding behind him like a ghost of the nineteenth century. Traveling south through a succession of haunting landscapes, TR encounters harbingers of all the major issues of the new century - Imperialism, Industrialism, Conservation, Immigration, Labor, Race - plus the overall challenge that intimidated McKinley: how to harness America's new power as the world's richest nation. Theodore Rex (the title is taken from a quip by Henry James) tells the story of the following seven and a half years - years in which TR entertains, infuriates, amuses, strong-arms, and seduces the body politic into a state of almost total subservience to his will.