The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners
by David Fromkin
The Penquin Press, 2008, 256pp.

Everyone is familiar with the old adage that you cannot judge a book solely by its cover. Cover art may be misleading, but authors choose their own titles and they ought to provide a reliable indication of what readers will find in the book. For fans and scholars of Theodore Roosevelt, and especially for those interested in his Dakota years, few titles hold as much allure as David Fromkin’s The King and the Cowboy. Yet once readers move beyond the cover into the body of the work, they will soon find themselves reminded of the wisdom of the time-tested adage. This is a work that will disappoint Roosevelt scholars both in its findings and in the discovery that its title, while enticing, is fundamentally unfair to Roosevelt and at odds with the arguments put forth by its author.

Fromkin has divided this slender volume into five parts, three of which are biographical sketches of his subjects: King Edward VII of Great Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. Wilhelm occupies such an important place in Fromkin’s story that the reader is left to wonder why the volume is not entitled The Kaiser, the King and the Cowboy. The work traces the evolution of each of these leaders from boyhood to their occupation of the highest office of their respective nations. Fromkin argues that by entering into a personal and secret “special relationship,” Roosevelt and Edward VII not only established a friendship between two Anglo-Saxon world leaders but laid the foundations of the very close ties between the United States and Great Britain, the “special relationship” that we now take wholly for granted. He closes his work by examining how this relationship played itself out on the world stage for the first time at the Algeciras Conference of 1906.

Britain and France, recently reconciled after centuries of enmity, rivalry and warfare, thwarted the efforts of imperial Germany and the Kaiser to drive a wedge between them over the issue of France’s colonial control of the North African nation of Morocco. Central to this successful diplomatic initiative was the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, who, Fromkin claims, was eager to have the United States play a more assertive role in international affairs, but who also felt constrained by the longstanding isolationism of the American populace. The fear of a political backlash led to the secretive nature of the President’s relationship with the British monarch and his strong, though un-public, approval of Britain’s new alliance with France. The Algeciras Conference not only cemented this alliance, but embittered the Germans and helped to create the divisions that would mark Europe during the Great War.

Fromkin’s biographical sketches are infused with a heavy dose of psychohistory as he dwells on each leader’s troubled relationship with his mother. King Edward’s mother Queen Victoria supposedly loathed her son. Kaiser Wilhelm hated his mother and Theodore Roosevelt saved the lion’s share of his childhood affection for his beloved father Thee, whom he called “the best man I ever knew.” “Between his mother, who either was, or played, the helpless female, and his manly father, Theodore Roosevelt Junior chose to follow in his father’s path. His mother represented invalidism: it defined what he deplored” (p. 123). In light of Fromkin’s considerable maternal, Neo-Freudian fixation, yet another alternative title for this work suggests itself: The King and the Cowboy: Or How I Learned to Stop Hating my Mother and Reorder the World.

In addition to chronicling each man’s history with his mother, Fromkin explores the love life and sexual peccadilloes of each of his subjects. In the case of Edward VII, the author has even chosen to include an illustration of the “chair of love” complete with “golden stirrups” constructed specifically for His Majesty’s Parisian bordello. Edward’s extramarital affairs are covered in extensive detail, which allows Fromkin to highlight the radical transformation that occurred when the King underwent a sea change from practicing debauchery to practicing diplomacy. The Kaiser’s affairs are also examined, but less extensively, while the twice married Roosevelt was the only one of these three Victorians whose moral scruples matched those of Victoria herself. Roosevelt’s personal morals were absolutist and unimpeachable.

In the course of subjecting Roosevelt to a Freudian analysis in a chapter entitled “Teedie in Love” (Chapter 17), Fromkin reveals that he does not have command of some of the milestone events of Roosevelt’s young life. “February 1884. Valentine’s Day. A daughter was born to Theodore and Alice” (p. 128). In fact, Roosevelt’s daughter was born two days earlier on February 12, 1884. He goes on to assert that “within hours of each other, his mother had died of typhoid and his wife had died in childbirth” (p. 128). While Roosevelt’s mother and wife had indeed died on the same day, February 14, his wife Alice Lee did not die from the complications of childbirth. She succumbed to a previously undetected case of Bright’s disease two days after the birth of her daughter.

In his quest to paint a picture of a triumvirate of leaders bedeviled by their wives and mothers, Fromkin distorts Roosevelt’s reaction to the events of February 12-14, 1884, asserting that “To compound the disaster, [Roosevelt] had been warned in advance—and had paid no heed,” and adding, “Instead of taking the warnings seriously, he dismissed them as the usual exaggerations of his womenfolk” (p. 128). While New York State Assemblyman Roosevelt had left his wife in the care of his family on the eve of their child’s birth, his reaction in Albany upon receiving a telegram informing him of her and his mother’s deteriorating conditions was anything but callous. He immediately left the capital for New York City and rushed to the bedsides of both of his “womenfolk.”

The author’s missteps in recounting Roosevelt’s life may stem from his lack of familiarity with the biographies that have examined his subject. The endnotes for chapters 16 and 17 consist entirely of citations of Kathleen Dalton’s Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. While Dalton’s biography has rightfully emerged as an important study of Roosevelt, any close examination of the multitude of personalities, influences and experiences that shaped the young Roosevelt cannot ignore the contributions of David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback (1981)and Edmund Morris’ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979). Yet neither work is cited in the endnotes of The King and the Cowboy and the work’s bibliography lists the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt as Theodore Morris. While Edmund Morris may confess to somewhat of an identity crisis after having spent much of the last thirty years with Roosevelt, at last report he had not become so much of a sympathetic biographer that he felt compelled to assume his subject’s first name.

Having assigned Roosevelt the title of “cowboy,” Fromkin must relate the formative western experiences that shaped the future president. In “Following the Western Star,” the chapter devoted to Roosevelt’s time in the Badlands of Dakota Territory, the author further demonstrates his weak grasp of Roosevelt’s chronology. “In 1883 he tried his hand at money making by investing in a cattle ranching business in the Dakota Territory. Shortly afterward he traveled out West himself, to inspect the business” (p. 141). Rather than investing in the far west sight unseen, Roosevelt actually concluded a September 1883 buffalo hunt in the Dakota badlands by impulsively devoting a considerable percentage of his inheritance to the purchase of an established cattle ranch at Chimney Butte, south of today’s Medora, North Dakota. The allure of the stark and promising land inspired Roosevelt’s investment; the investment did not induce the visit to the West.

Fromkin mischaracterizes the reasons behind Roosevelt’s time in the west with his repeated allusions to Roosevelt the investor: “At the crossroads of his life, in the early 1880s, Teddy went west to become a cattle rancher. He was a businessman” (p. 142). “Theodore Roosevelt was a New York investor who went West to supervise his ultimately unsuccessful investments in Dakota cattle ranches” (p. 149). “The ranch was a hired business and he was the owner and employer” (p. 149). This suggests that Roosevelt was primarily a businessman when it came to his Dakota ranches. By all accounts, Roosevelt was a lousy money manager and was not at all interested in a career as a businessman, and as his later political career would demonstrate, he harbored a selective yet powerful resentment against the business and investor classes. Roosevelt bought two Little Missouri River cattle ranches and threw himself into the life of the west because he fell in love with the landscape of the Dakota Badlands, because (in 1884) he needed their isolation to heal from the simultaneous loss of his wife and mother and because he wanted a chance to play the role of cowboy. His investment allowed him to pursue these much more meaningful pursuits while paying lip service to profits and returns.

While overstating the case for Roosevelt as an investor, Fromkin rather casually notes the important role adopted by Roosevelt in his stint as a deputy sheriff. “He did have occasion to take part in law enforcement” (p. 150). And Babe Ruth had occasion to take batting practice. From forming and leading the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association to tackle an epidemic of cattle and horse rustling, to his fist-first taming of a barroom bully in today’s Wibaux, Montana, to his legendary capture of the boat thieves in March 1886, Roosevelt was the embodiment of law enforcement in the Badlands during his time there. In later years, when Roosevelt returned to North Dakota on the campaign trail, he most often (and quite proudly) referred to himself as a former deputy sheriff. While Fromkin (and his editors) may not fully grasp the details of Roosevelt’s role as deputy sheriff—the dust jacket asserts that TR was a “deputy sheriff in the Montana badlands”—he rightly acknowledges that Roosevelt’s time on the frontier influenced his later view of the international arena as one in which there was a “showdown between good and evil” (p. 151).

In discussing the international arena envisioned by his title characters, Fromkin stresses the departures they both made from their nations’ traditional foreign policies: “There is also a strong case for crediting both the American and the Englishman for having made a start—even if it was only a start—in pulling their respective countries out of their deep-rooted isolationism in foreign policy” (p. 215). Yet, in the case of the United States, the beginning of the end of American isolationism occurred in the McKinley, not the Roosevelt, administration. Roosevelt, who helped shaped McKinley administration policy as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and who implemented it in Cuba (his “crowded hour”), wholeheartedly embraced a role for the United States that his predecessor had only reluctantly undertaken. In the case of Britain, it seems hard to describe as “isolationist” a nation that at the turn of the century ruled 20% of the earth’s surface and 25% of its population. It is true that the British Empire had no peers and London’s gaze may have been directed away from Europe, but the Empire’s unprecedented size, reach and global scale surely could not have been attained by a nation committed to isolationism.

Fromkin also emphasizes Roosevelt’s and Edward VII’s commitment to forging closer ties between their respective nations. He notes that bo

h countries were open to creating what we now routinely call “the special relationship” at the turn of the twentieth century: “Opinion in both countries swung toward a closer friendship—and in favor of settling disputes between them by arbitration rather than by warfare” (p.108). But the path to a peaceful, if not yet intimate, relationship was forged much earlier—in the aftermath of the War of 1812. Great Britain and the United States settled the contentious issue of the Canadian boundary dispute diplomatically with treaties in 1819, 1842 and 1846, demilitarized the Great Lakes, and with the laying of the transcontinental undersea telegraph cable in 1866, helped overcome the distance that did so much to separate the two former adversaries. It must be remembered, too, that Roosevelt threaened war with Britain over the Alaska Boundary Dispute in 1903.

These issues of interpretation aside, Fromkin, a Professor of International Relations at Boston University, does seem on much firmer ground when he examines the intricacies of European statecraft in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Great War, and he provides a wonderfully succinct statement of President Roosevelt’s foreign policy. “His object was to be on top and to keep the peace by preparing for war. His policy was to preserve the world balance of power by supporting those countries that were on the way down, and therefore posed no threat—England and France—as against those, such as Germany and Japan, that were dangerously on the way up” (p. 217). And while Roosevelt and Edward may not have, as Fromkin asserts, written “the script of the twentieth century” (p. 224), TR certainly anticipated much of what transpired and he endeavored to steer his nation’s diplomacy to meet the threats he saw looming on the horizon.

In addition to relating a friendship between two men that forged a friendship between two nations, Fromkin also stresses the transformation and maturation that Roosevelt and Edward underwent on their ascent to power. “Both, it is true, were to an extent self-invented: Roosevelt as a Westerner, [The Prince of] Wales as a Frenchman. One had been accused of being a prig; the other was a confirmed philanderer. Roosevelt was not a mannerless savage; Edward was not a mindless playboy” (p. 217). And yet this book’s title seems to only acknowledge the maturation of Edward. He became the King while Roosevelt, in Fromkin’s analysis, remained the Cowboy. Wouldn’t a more accurate and fair title be The Playboy and the Cowboy or perhaps The King and the President?

Fromkin concludes the second to last chapter of his work (“Time Runs Out”) by recounting the May 1910 death and state funeral of King Edward VII. In particular he highlights a letter received by Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador to Great Britain, from none other than Theodore Roosevelt, who (at President Taft’s request) would assume the role of mourner-in-chief for the United States at the funeral. “The former deputy sheriff from the Western badlands told Cambon that he would ride through the palace gates mounted on horseback, ‘dressed in khaki and boots with a Buffalo Bill hat’ and armed with a saber and pistols” (p. 221). What Fromkin does not tell his readers is that Roosevelt did nothing of the sort. The formidable Edith Roosevelt vetoed that bad idea. What stands out in the photographs of the funeral procession is not a clownish, caricatured cowboy, but the pomp, pomposity, and grandiosity of the crowned heads of Europe marching line abreast, swords at the ready, uniforms festooned with unearned medals and decorations. Last in line is a regal, restrained, dignified gentleman in top hat and tails; a democrat, a republican, a former American President.