SOURCE: "Theodore Roosevelt As Cultural Artifact," in Raritan: A Quarterly Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1990, 109-26.

In the following essay, Aaron charts the declining image and reputation of Roosevelt as a public figure.

Four gigantic presidential heads, the work of the American-born sculptor Gutzon Borglum, look out from the granite wall of South Dakota's Mt. Rushmore. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln cluster clubbably on their mountain eminence, but does the head of Theodore Roosevelt, replete with a cleverly simulated pince-nez, belong in this godlike company? Borglum thought so, and not merely because he believed in and practiced the Rooseveltian gospel of the "strenuous life" (Americans, he complained, didn't live vigorously enough) or because Roosevelt had been a personal friend. He simply considered him a great man, an "all-American President" under whose aegis two oceans had been linked and the United States transformed into a world power. Borglum saw nothing incongruous in...