Historian John Milton Cooper on The Rough Riders

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JOHN COOPER: TR's cavalry company, the Rough Riders, somebody once called them "cowboys and bluebloods." They're drawn almost equally from out West, from Texas, Arizona, the Dakota territory, some of them have been sheriffs. They've been cowboys. You know, that's the image of them.

But you've also got a number of them who are Harvard athletes, Yalies, often they played polo or they've ridden to the hounds. So you've got those two sides in there. And that's what made them so interesting to the press. How this combines... And TR's very conscious and very proud of that, very proud of how he puts them together and he's especially proud of how "his kind," that is, these bluebloods from the northeast hold their own so well with the tough guys from out West.

Theodore Roosevelt was attracted by the grim side of war. It was the danger, the squalor, the physical combat, the possibility of being killed, the possibility of being seriously wounded. In fact, one of the things that he regretted, it seems very odd, was that he was never seriously wounded. I think he would have rather liked to have come back with missing an arm or missing a leg or some very prominent scar, something like that to prove this. Now he is a genuinely brave man. He risked his life, countless times going up San Juan Hill. I mean he -- and not unnecessarily either and he's not a man who exposes his troops unnecessarily, to danger. He's not a showboat commander in that way, but he is somebody who's -- he's genuinely brave. He's a genuinely inspiring leader. His pride in his role in the Spanish-American War was really justified.

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