SARAH WATTS. Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. x, 289. $37.00

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In this fascinating study, Sarah Watts explores the “dark and irrational” (p. 1) side of Theodore Roosevelt. Employing a psychological and gender studies based approach, Watts probes Roosevelt's published and private writings, policies, and carefully crafted cowboy and warrior personae to examine “how Roosevelt's manly self struggled with doubt, anxiety, and loathing, and a fearful child within” (p. 4). More than just a psychological portrait of the twenty-sixth president, however, the book analyzes broader cultural anxieties about U.S. masculinity during the Gilded Age and Progressive era to reveal how Roosevelt's political life both helped shape and was molded by discourses of race and gender. According to Watts, Roosevelt battled twin demons throughout his life: “the civilized weakling and the manly beast” (p. 10). While her careful readings of popular literary and scientific works, paintings, sculpture, and mass media images demonstrate that fears about the emasculating effects of civilization and racial degeneration pervaded late Victorian culture, Watts provides strong evidence that Roosevelt's anxieties were also rooted in personal experience. From shame over his father's lack of military service in the Civil War to the physical weakness of his boyhood asthmatic body to memories of seeing an ape in the mirror while gazing at himself, Roosevelt's experiences as a child and young man pushed him to the hypermasculine pursuits of hunting, ranching, and wartime combat. Roosevelt's efforts to eliminate and control feminine and primitive elements within, Watts contends, affected his policies and political rhetoric in profound ways. Whether cracking down on prostitution, promoting physical culture, building the Great White Fleet, or calling for immigration restrictions or war with Germany, Roosevelt sought to purge internal national weakness while projecting hardened masculine strength to other nations.