Politics makes strange bedfellows, or so the saying goes. For Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) and Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), a shared antipathy to James G. Blaine—the presumptive Republican candidate for president in 1884—was the beginning of a lifelong professional and personal friendship, and it serves as the subject of Laurence Jurdem’s new and ambitious book The Rough Rider and the Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Friendship that Changed American History.

At first glance, there was nothing strange about their rapport. Both Harvard graduates, the two were intellectually gifted men from backgrounds of privilege in the old Northeastern monied elite. Both were firm believers in noblesse oblige; both were ardent nationalists with moderate reformist views and a commitment to morality in politics, something Senator Blaine was said to have lacked in his dealings with railroad interests. Significantly, both were members of a generation that regretted not having had the opportunity to prove its mettle under fire in the Civil War.

Yet, in personality, the two men could hardly have been more different. With Brahmin manners, Lodge was “unmitigated Boston,” in the waspish assessment of his close friend and mentor Henry Adams. During a low point in their relationship, Roosevelt described Lodge as being like a New England farm, “highly cultivated but entirely sterile.” A Senate colleague recalled that “Bad grammar, whether spoken or written, always annoyed him. . . . A split infinitive gave him positive pain, no matter who split it.” As for Roosevelt, in the words of his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth, “He wanted to be the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every wedding.” Impulsive, loud, and, according to Adams, a bit boorish in company, Roosevelt often acted the part of a bull in a china shop. Woodrow Wilson indulgently called Roosevelt “a great big boy”; the Republican Party boss Mark Hanna simply called him a “madman.”

The Republican Party boss Mark Hanna simply called him a “madman.”

From the very first, Cabot, as he was known, believed that his new friend was destined for great things, and he championed Roosevelt at every step along the cursus honorum or, more properly, up the greasy pole of Republican Party politics in the Gilded Age. A lawyer and academic historian by training, Cabot himself became a fixture in the Bay State’s Republican establishment. Ostracized by Boston’s liberal Mugwumps for his decision ultimately to support Blaine rather than the reformist Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 1884 election, he responded by becoming a fierce Republican partisan. This led him to a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1887 to 1893 and to five terms in the Senate, ending only with his death in 1924. There, Cabot championed an aggressive foreign policy that later generations might call “imperialistic” while exercising his formidable talents as a behind-the-scenes power broker. Throughout his career, Lodge fought to hold together the two wings of the party—the pro-business conservatives and the pro-regulation progressives—against a rising Democratic tide of populism at home and isolationism in foreign affairs.

Roosevelt began as the junior partner in the collaboration. When the two men first met, Roosevelt was headed to his ranchlands in the Dakota Territories to recover from a personal tragedy, the deaths of his wife and mother only hours apart on Valentine’s Day of 1884. He had just finished a term in the New York State Legislature on a good-government platform. Lodge’s overture to join forces against Blaine at the party convention presented a further diversion from personal sorrow. By 1889, the now-remarried Roosevelt was ready to return to public life and begged Lodge to help him find work to support his family and to absorb his prodigious energies. Lodge brought him to Washington, D.C., where their friendship thrived in long talks, horseback rides, dinner parties, and a deepening connection between their two families.

With Lodge’s influence, Roosevelt became a commissioner of the Civil Service Commission (1889–95) in the Harrison administration, although he wore out his welcome with his heavy-handed efforts to end the patronage system. (Roosevelt’s devotion to this cause is not without a degree of irony given his reliance on Lodge’s connections to build his own career.) After resigning from the commission, Roosevelt returned to New York City to become the president of its Board of Police Commissioners (1895–97), famously prowling the streets of Manhattan’s roughest neighborhoods at night with his friend Jacob Riis to see for himself how the other half lived. After Roosevelt alienated previously loyal Republican voters by enforcing Sunday closing laws on the city’s taverns, Lodge prudently engineered his appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy (1897–98) in the first McKinley administration.

“Is his wife dead? Has he quarreled with everybody? Is he quite mad?”

Sharing Lodge’s desire to make America a great power on the international stage, Roosevelt threw himself into strengthening the U.S. Navy. But when relations with Spain degenerated into what then–Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war,” Roosevelt did the unthinkable: he resigned from his desk job and formed the Rough Riders, a private army corps composed of his friends from around the country. Adams perfectly captured the reaction of Roosevelt’s Washington set: “Is his wife dead? Has he quarreled with everybody? Is he quite mad?” Even Lodge thought Roosevelt had lost his head and quite possibly his political career. But when Roosevelt became the hero of San Juan Hill, Lodge immediately recognized the possibilities. “You are one of the popular persons of the war and deserve to be,” he wrote, dangling the prospects of “pretty much anything” Roosevelt wanted in the way of political office. What the newly minted “colonel” (as he liked to be called) chose was the governorship of New York, a minefield of machine politics and corruption. It was not a happy match.

Recognizing that a second gubernatorial term was unlikely, Roosevelt again turned to Lodge, who managed to shoehorn his protégé into the 1900 vice-presidential nomination with the help of New York party bosses eager to be rid of their rambunctious governor. Faced with their machinations, Hanna (now an Ohio senator and William McKinley’s advisor) erupted, “What is the matter with all of you? Don’t any of you realize there is only one life between that madman and the presidency?” Six months into his second term, McKinley fell victim to an assassin’s bullet and Hanna’s worst fear was realized. Roosevelt suddenly found himself president. The power dynamic in Roosevelt’s relationship with Lodge turned on its head; now it was Lodge who was asking for favors.

At first, Roosevelt trod gingerly through the political landscape, acutely aware that he had not been elected to the office he held. The night before his inauguration following his 1904 victory, however, Roosevelt exulted to Secretary Hay, “Tomorrow I shall come into office in my own right. Then watch out for me.” Roosevelt made good on the threat, revealing his true progressive colors and greatly expanding the reach of the federal government. He quickly threw his considerable weight behind his economic program, particularly in antitrust enforcement and railroad rate regulation as well as in protections for laboring people and federal food and drug inspection. Perhaps thinking of Roosevelt’s efforts to revise the rules of football and redesign a coin he disliked, House Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon put the matter pithily: “That fellow at the other end of the avenue wants everything from the birth of Christ to the death of the devil.” Lodge for his part fretted that Roosevelt’s inability to focus on anything but “malefactors of great wealth” alienated conservatives and jeopardized the Republican congressional majority.

Despite their disagreements, Roosevelt turned to Lodge to prevent a draft in his favor at the 1908 Republican convention. Instead, “the colonel” fulfilled the promise he made when he took office in 1904 to serve only one elected term. The Republican William Howard Taft succeeded him, and with typical fanfare Roosevelt set off on safari to Africa, with a final swing through Europe to pick up a Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of a dispute between Russia and Japan. Lodge’s letters kept him up to date on domestic developments throughout. By the time Roosevelt returned home, both men had soured on Taft, convinced he would not survive the Democratic Party’s populist onslaught in the next election. They agreed that Roosevelt should challenge Taft for the 1912 Republican
nomination.

The book also offers plenty of old-fashioned gossip.

As Roosevelt barnstormed the country for the nomination, it became clear that he had moved even further into the progressive camp, adopting some of the ideas of his populist opponents. The last straw may have come when he endorsed holding referenda to overturn judicial decisions deemed not in the public interest. To Lodge, this was beyond unacceptable. By the time Roosevelt withdrew from what he considered a corrupt Republican convention dominated by Taft-controlled party bosses, the rift was complete. Roosevelt ran on the independent Bull Moose ticket and, ever the Republican loyalist, Lodge backed Taft’s losing bid for a second term. Lodge and Roosevelt were eventually reconciled by their joint loathing for the succeeding Wilson administration, worried about its competence and troubled by its isolationist and racist policies. As Wilson reluctantly entered World War I, following German attacks on American merchant shipping, both Roosevelt and Lodge pressed for a more vigorous war effort, a more favorable peace for the Allies, and, above all, a vindication of America’s place on the world stage. To this day, Lodge remains best known for blocking Wilson’s League of Nations, which he considered a wrongful limitation of American sovereignty. Roosevelt did not live to see Lodge’s final triumph. In March 1920, when the Senate finally ended any prospect of American membership in the league, Roosevelt was already gone. He had died the year before at the age of sixty, brought low by the cumulative toll of physical injuries and Rabelaisian appetites. Lodge himself died four years later, having survived much of his world.

Laurence Jurdem’s new book is, in effect, the biography of this friendship. It intertwines the story of the two men’s personal lives and political relationship against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, a time of powerful party bosses, growing wealth inequality, rising immigration, populist rhetoric, gun violence against politicians, and substantial economic and foreign policy challenges. The book also offers plenty of old-fashioned gossip. Was Secretary Hay, once Lincoln’s private aide, really sleeping with Lodge’s wife, Nannie? What was the widowered Henry Adams’s relationship with the married but restless Lizzie Cameron? Did Lodge really relish English food above all? Jurdem, an adjunct professor of history at Fairfield University and Fordham, relies heavily on the extensive correspondence between the two men and their respective wives, siblings, associates, and families to bring their relationship into focus. The letters comprise everything from the entirely personal—condolence notes on the deaths of children, accounts of dinner parties and travels—to serious discussions of public policy and political options, woven throughout with the most profound professions of affection. So voluminous and polished is the correspondence that the reader is left to wonder how either man had time for anything else.

It would require a remarkable narrative talent to keep all these balls in the air at the same time. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, Jurdem does at times lose control of his account, a difficulty that becomes more pronounced as the book goes on. This manifests itself in a flagging focus, in which the prose becomes wobbly, pronouns lose their antecedents, inconsistent allegations appear in the same paragraph, and legal subjects are relegated to hazy treatment. Most seriously, perhaps, non-specialist readers are left to fend for themselves on important topics that are mentioned but not explained—say, the contents of Roosevelt’s Square Deal (conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection) or Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s career-ending comment about the sinking of the Lusitania (namely, that Germany was within its rights to torpedo non-combatant vessels and the passengers assumed the risk of travel). The project is nonetheless an admirable one; the profound friendship between these two political giants is a defining part of public life in the Gilded Age. And, on a personal level, the joy they took in one another, from their first meeting in 1884, calls to mind Henry Adams’s remark that “A new friend is always a miracle.”