Ted Heads

Why does a man dead for more than a century still command this kind of devotion?

Theodore Roosevelt died in January 1919. More than a hundred years later, people still rise before dawn to hike the Badlands he loved, still hunt down first editions of his forgotten books, still make the pilgrimage to Sagamore Hill to stand quietly in the house where he lived. They quote him from memory. They argue about him at dinner. They organize their bookshelves, and sometimes their lives, around a president most of the country remembers only as a face on a mountain.

Who are these people, and what exactly are they in love with?

Ted Heads goes looking for the answer. It turns out there is a whole world of them: a sprawling, warm, slightly obsessive community of enthusiasts who have kept the flame burning through every decade since. Nobody ever gave them a name. So this book offers one.

Written as a curious traveler's field study rather than another biography, Ted Heads maps the landscape of Roosevelt devotion from the inside:

• The collector, tracking down letters, badges, and rifles as if assembling a relic of a saint.
• The reenactor, who steps into the pince-nez and the mustache and, for an afternoon, becomes him.
• The pilgrim, who plans a life around visiting the ranch, the birthplace, the grave, the newly opened museum in the Dakota Badlands.
• The scholar and the joiner, who keep the associations, the reading circles, and the arguments alive.

Along the way, the book asks the deeper question underneath the fandom: what is it about this restless, contradictory, larger-than-life man that still answers a hunger in people today? Why him, and why now?

Affectionate, funny, and genuinely curious, Ted Heads is a portrait of a subculture and the man at the center of it. It is for the lifelong devotee who has finally found a book that gets it, and for the curious reader who has always wondered what all the fuss is about.

Come meet the Ted Heads. You may recognize one. You may become one.