Theodore Roosevelt And Jerry Garcia: Brothers Under the Skin?

The leader of the Bull Moose party in 1912, and of the Dead in 1978.

(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS; © ROGER RESSMEYER/CORBIS)

While reading about the death of the renowned Theodore Roosevelt scholar John Gable last year, I noticed an odd thing. Dr. Gable had attended 13 Grateful Dead concerts.

The first was in Providence, Rhode Island, in April 1971, and the last was at the Nassau Coliseum in March 1994. Dr. Gable had verified his show total in his “commonplace book,” an idea he said he had borrowed from George Washington. Commonplace books, whose origins date back to the Renaissance, were originally used to help students understand all the innovations and achievements of their era. The commonplace books of men like Washington and Jefferson contained the words that motivated them and give historians a unique view of how these men actually viewed themselves.

That Dr. Gable, a man who reportedly wore his vest completely buttoned up even while walking on the beach, would choose to note in his commonplace book his Grateful Dead concert tally was highly surprising, to say the least. But he also revealed that he admired the work of Allen Ginsberg and even once met the famous Beat poet. I placed a call to Dr. Gable’s successor as executive director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, Edward Renehan, and was told that his predecessor had indeed loved “Jerry and the boys.”

Why would I be so interested in a connection between a Theodore Roosevelt scholar and the Grateful Dead? I went to 138 Dead shows myself (I keep a book of ticket stubs, rather than a commonplace book), and I thought I had met Deadheads from every possible walk of life. I once spoke with the late Peter Jennings at a show, and I attended another that Walter Cronkite attended. Athletes, actors, and elected politicians also proudly identify themselves as fans. But after I became interested in Theodore Roosevelt, I never thought that any of the authors I was reading might similarly appreciate the Dead’s music. I have written about the band for both books and magazines, but even a 95-page thesis on Roosevelt for my master’s degree didn’t trigger the idea that there might be a connection between these two subjects.

I first became fascinated by TR when I saw the 1997 film about him in PBS’s American Experience series. More than anything else, I was attracted to his attempt to squeeze every last moment out of the “strenuous life” he led. Amidst my many pictures of Jerry Garcia, I keep a page from the front of Nathan Miller’s biography of Roosevelt in a frame next to my bed. Under a photo of TR flashing his trademark smile are the words “Life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.” Both Theodore Roosevelt and Jerry Garcia are remembered for their desire to maximize their time on the planet.

Both these American icons are also revered for their inimitable style. I may not agree with or view a success all of Roosevelt’s actions while in office, but I appreciate the style with which he did them. This is not very different from the reasons I love the music of the Grateful Dead. They were famous for never playing the same set the same way over the course of 30 years. They were able to do this because they used their songs as the framework for lengthy improvisations, just as Miles Davis and John Coltrane did in jazz. From his lead guitar spot, Jerry Garcia was primarily responsible for the launch and landing of the Dead’s trademark jams. Sometimes these explorations would fail miserably, or even never get going to begin with. But when they worked there was nothing like them in music history. They were simply magic. It was the Dead’s courage in taking chances, night after night, that made me and countless others love them. As Jerry himself said, “You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”

Theodore Roosevelt and Jerry Garcia faced similar obstacles early in their lives. They both overcame severe childhood physical maladies. At the urging of his father, TR “remade himself” after being stricken with asthma. Jerry had to learn to play guitar without the middle finger of his right hand after it was accidentally chopped off with an ax by his brother, Tiff. In fact, Jerry’s famous guitar tone is undoubtedly a result of his efforts to compensate for his missing digit, just as many of TR’s attitudes and ideals were a result of his quest to “remake” his body.

Many Roosevelt fans also credit the human tornado that he was to his attempts to grapple with the deaths of his father, mother, and first wife. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he observed. Some of his personal and political actions may have been taken in search of his late father’s approval, or as attempts to outdo him. For instance his romantic notions about war as a proving ground can arguably be interpreted as growing from his desire to erase his father’s neglect to answer the call of the Civil War; Roosevelt, Sr., sent a substitute to fight instead.

Jerry Garcia was not nearly as close to his father, but he had to face his father’s death in an even more painful fashion. While on a childhood fishing trip, he witnessed his father’s drowning. After then living with his grandparents for a short period, he moved in with his mother at the hotel and bar she ran in San Francisco’s waterfront district. After that it was on to Palo Alto during the Beat period. Later the Dead would live at 710 Ashbury Street, next to the famous intersection with Haight that would come to represent the musical, political, and social revolutions of the 1960s counterculture.

Roosevelt, to cope with the immense grief caused by the deaths of his first wife and mother, took refuge in what he saw as America’s last great frontier, the Badlands of South Dakota. Just as he had remade his body during his childhood asthmatic bouts, he now rebuilt himself emotionally, philosophically, and politically. This was an even greater challenge. He had to face emotional pain that surpassed any of the physical frailties he had faced in his youth. But his harnessing of the nation’s pioneer spirit (as he saw it), transformed him into the public figure that would take American politics by storm. For the rest of his days he would keep a breakneck pace to try to stay clear of the “black care.”

In the 1960s the closest thing the United States had to the untamed world of the Badlands was Northern California. It was there that Jerry Garcia met Robert Hunter, the man who penned the words to the majority of his songs. They met while both were sleeping in their cars and living on canned fruit. How’s that for the frontier spirit? During the Grateful Dead’s formative years, Jerry’s ideals, attitudes, and musical style were shaped not only by other musicians but by poets, painters, and authors. He would always dabble in painting, although the world wouldn’t really see any of his work until it adorned a best-selling line of neckties.

The freedom espoused in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road was a profound influence on Jerry, and the band spent countless hours with Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s model for Dean Moriarity. “Cowboy Neal” was one of the “Merry Pranksters” led by the author Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Allen Ginsberg was another frequent visitor to the entourage that came to surround Jerry and the Dead. The psychedelic antics of this period were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s classic period piece The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Psychedelic antics? Electric Kool-Aid? Acid tests? How could these things possibly connect to Theodore Roosevelt? How could a true TR enthusiast draw any parallel between “that damned cowboy,” as the politician Mark Hanna called him, and a guitar player who died in a rehabilitation facility after failing to kick a nasty heroin habit? Roosevelt brought a libel suit against men who reported he had a drinking problem in his post-presidential years.

Jerry Garcia truly believed that psychedelics could open your eyes to life’s great adventure. In a 1972 interview with Yale Law Professor Charles Reich, he confessed that “to get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else.” On the other hand, I attended 138 Grateful Dead concerts, at least one of which I can confirm I shared with Dr. Gable, and was able to forget myself without doing drugs at a single one. Unfortunately, Jerry was never able to get truly high without drugs, and that need to expand boundaries led him to narcotics from the 1970s until the end of his life. His intake of increasingly harder and harder drugs became his attempt to cope, and his addiction, coupled with his legendary girth, ended up killing him.

As the band grew into a touring and moneymaking monster, he tried to take time off. The band even took a year-long hiatus in 1975, to try to scale things back a bit. In 1991 the other band members recognized that he needed to take a break and get some rest and help. But Jerry’s love of playing music and the need to feed the corporate beast kept him touring. These habits can prove fatal, especially when you are viewed as a guru by millions of fans and a provider of health insurance by the hundreds of employees who worked for the Grateful Dead organization. I don’t mean the traveling bazaar of Deadheads; I mean the highly profitable corporation that handled the legal merchandising of everything from Grateful Dead skis, golf balls, and Swiss army watches to baby clothes.

It is no secret that many of the same characteristics that made Theodore Roosevelt a legend also helped to tarnish that legend. His 1912 presidential campaign, chronicled so eloquently in Dr. Gable’s The Bull Moose Years and most recently in Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call, perfectly exemplified this. While we can now see the roots of the Progressive platform in TR’s schism from the Republican party, that break was seen at the time as a product of his inability to subordinate his massive ego. In exchange for becoming an American icon, TR was victimized and simplified by the mythmaking machine. When most Americans think of the figure that stares down from Mt. Rushmore they don’t consider the misogynist, jingoist, and racist elements of the Roosevelt myth.

Much like TR, Jerome John Garcia (he was named after the composer Jerome Kern) was far more than the literal and figurative caricature that was painted of him. For both of these men, deification came with a price. Of course, they both attracted cult-like followings during their lifetimes. They still do. To this day their images adorn countless memorabilia items. Can you imagine the marketing campaign that would surround TR if he lived today? Both men came along at the perfect time.

Their words continue to inspire. Roosevelt’s most poignant lessons for today’s executive were recently pulled together in the books Theodore Roosevelt On Leadership and The Man In The Arena, the latter a collection of writings and speeches that met with an enthusiastic response when it was distributed to U.S. troops abroad in 2003. Similarly, some of Jerry’s witticisms have found their way into The Wisdom Of Jerry Garcia. “If you’re able to enjoy something, to devote your life to it or a reasonable amount of time and energy, it will work out for you”; “Your best strength comes from having a secure knowledge about what’s going on, having a real solid foundation and knowing where you are”; “Let’s go for it, because what else do we have?”: These may not have the flair or eloquent language of Theodore Roosevelt at his best, but taken at face value they don’t seem that dissimilar from TR’s most memorable utterances.

Jerry Garcia’s true arena was the concert stage. Most of the lyrics he sang were penned by someone else, but it was his delivery that resonated with his listeners. His voice, never the technically strongest part of his musical equipment to begin with, grew ever more thin and raggedy with age. But he moved countless listeners because he made them believe he had actually experienced the things he was singing about, even when he hadn’t. It is staggering to think how many high school seniors have included something Jerry Garcia sang in their yearbook entries—not even counting “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Most of all Jerry Garcia will be remembered for his unmistakable guitar licks. His stage presence bordered on the grandfatherly even when he was young. But his fluid playing style was inimitable. When you hear him playing, you immediately know who it is. Theodore Roosevelt also became famous not only for what he did but how he did it. Those who were able to hear him personally were immediately struck by his high-pitched, staccato voice. For the rest of us, photographs provide evidence of the fist-pounding and thrusting of his famous delivery. History remembers both these men for their outlaw ideology, for actions and style that were all their own. But what they really had was an unquenchable thirst for life. That, more than anything, is what characterized their work.

Ultimately, the “great adventure” that Theodore Roosevelt called life’s journey is what truly connects these two figures. Just as elements of his “Rough Rider” image propelled him to the very end of his life, Jerry Garcia never stopped being the “good time pirate” he described himself as during the Grateful Dead’s formative years. Both men could have been more cautious and lived longer.

Had Roosevelt not traveled to Brazil’s River of Doubt in 1913, he might have lived long enough to make a last run for the presidency in 1920. But that simply wasn’t his style. He lived the “the strenuous life” to the very end. Jerry could also have played things a little safer. But then he would have stopped being what made him great. The real tragedy is that his style didn’t allow him to take better care of himself. However, Jerry Garcia died 11 years ago with a smile on his face. That’s the most definitive evidence that, like TR, he wouldn’t have done it any other way.

During the aforementioned 1972 conversation with Professor Charles Reich, Jerry Garcia offered up the closest thing he ever had to a governing philosophy: “Essentially, I think that life is a progressive matter. Going through life you find that there aren’t any true setbacks, you just continue to know more, to find more out. More stuff happens to you and more things become known to you. It’s continual.” If Theodore Roosevelt had been alive to hear that, he would probably have heartily concurred. The way it was expressed would have been unfamiliar, but there is no doubt he would have subscribed to the sentiment. In fact, that quotation sounds like something you could write in a commonplace book. You could even put it in a frame next to your bed. It just depends on your style—vest and pocket watch or T-shirt and shorts.

—Ross Warner writes often about the Grateful Dead.