When Amazon recommended Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet by Michael Patrick Cullinane, my first reaction was suspicion. The title sounded almost too perfectly calibrated to my interests. Theodore Roosevelt, presidential history, and tennis? I briefly wondered whether Amazon’s algorithm had correctly figured out what I would want to read, then served me some AI-generated slop that had hallucinated both the book and the underlying history.
It had not.
The Tennis Cabinet was quite real. In fact, Roosevelt himself used the name for the informal collection of men who played tennis with him and, far more importantly, helped him govern. Near the end of his presidency, he invited dozens of them to lunch at the White House and joked that the public would never appreciate how much his tennis partners had contributed to the success of his administration. Contemporary journalists used “Tennis Cabinet” somewhat dismissively. Cullinane’s book makes a persuasive case that the body deserved to be taken much more seriously.
That distinction is important because Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet is not really a book about tennis. There is some tennis in it, naturally. Edith Roosevelt had a grass court installed near her husband’s office because she was concerned about his workload and wanted him to get some recreation. Roosevelt apparently compensated for the intended relaxation by playing long and vigorously, often regardless of the weather.
The tennis itself, however, is incidental. What matters is what happened because of it. The sport provided Roosevelt with a social network that existed largely outside the formal structures of his administration. The men who joined him on the court became friends, sounding boards, sources of expertise, and eventually collaborators in carrying out his agenda. Cullinane credits members of this informal network with work involving corporate regulation, consumer protection, conservation, civil rights enforcement, government efficiency, and foreign policy.
That makes the Tennis Cabinet an interesting example of something recreational players still experience more than a century later. Tennis brings together people who might otherwise have little reason to know one another. Age, occupation, background, and social position can matter considerably less once two people walk onto a court. Roosevelt seems to have understood the possibilities created by those connections and used them on a scale considerably larger than simply organizing his next doubles match.
Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the Tennis Cabinet is how little it resembled a conventional political organization. It was not assembled around party loyalty. The group crossed political and ideological boundaries and included an extraordinary range of professional, geographic, and even national backgrounds.
French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand became such a trusted member of the group that Roosevelt called him the “Vice President of the Tennis Cabinet.” Henry Stimson was a corporate lawyer who would eventually serve in five presidential administrations. Seth Bullock was a legendary frontier lawman. Charles Patrick Neill was Commissioner of Labor. James Bronson Reynolds was a social reformer. Robert Bacon was a banker and Roosevelt’s college friend. William Henry Moody served on the Supreme Court. Jack Abernathy was a Texas wolf catcher.
It is difficult to imagine many circumstances in early twentieth-century America that would naturally put that collection of people together. Tennis did.
Cullinane organizes much of the book around the different kinds of people Roosevelt drew into his orbit: diplomats, outdoorsmen, bureaucrats, reformers, lawyers, and clerks. The structure gradually shifts attention away from Roosevelt himself. That is significant because Theodore Roosevelt is not an historical figure who has generally suffered from a lack of attention.
The familiar version of Roosevelt is intensely individualistic. He is the Rough Rider, conservationist, advocate of the strenuous life, and the man forever associated with the arena. His personality was so large that it becomes easy to imagine his presidency as another expression of personal force.
This book complicates that picture. Roosevelt certainly supplied plenty of force, but governing required people who could transform his ambitions into action. Cullinane’s larger project is to restore those people to a history in which Roosevelt’s enormous personality has tended to obscure them.
The result is less a reconsideration of Roosevelt’s political philosophy than a study of how political power actually gets exercised. Having an agenda is different from implementing one. Roosevelt needed people with specialized knowledge, institutional access, personal relationships, and the ability to make things happen throughout a rapidly expanding federal government.
Some of those relationships began or developed on a tennis court. That also makes the diversity of the Tennis Cabinet more than an entertaining collection of historical characters. Roosevelt surrounded himself with people who brought different experiences and perspectives into his administration. The French ambassador and the Texas wolf catcher make for an amusing contrast, but the larger point is that Roosevelt’s network was useful precisely because everyone in it did not come from the same place or perform the same function.
In the modern era, we talk constantly about professional networks, collaboration, informal communication, and the value of bringing people with different expertise together to solve difficult problems. Roosevelt was doing much the same thing, except one of his networking platforms happened to be a grass tennis court outside the White House.
Cullinane does not reduce these men to supporting characters in another Roosevelt biography. The book spends enough time with individual members of the Tennis Cabinet that they emerge as people with careers and accomplishments of their own. That sometimes means Roosevelt recedes surprisingly far into the background of a book carrying his name. That is exactly the point.
The book’s strongest argument may be that our tendency to remember history through its most recognizable individuals distorts our understanding of how things actually happened. Roosevelt remains responsible for the direction of his administration, but direction required implementation. The accomplishments associated with his presidency were produced by a network of people whose contributions have largely disappeared behind the president they served.
If you are primarily interested in tennis history, Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet probably isn’t the book you expect from the title. This is a book about American political history. Readers who love presidential history and the Progressive Era will find considerably more here than those looking for a conventional tennis book.
That said, I came away thinking the relative absence of tennis was itself revealing. Most of us who have spent enough time around the sport have experienced its connective power. We have played with people of different ages, professions, backgrounds, political views, and life experiences. Some become opponents. Some become teammates. Some become friends. Occasionally, those relationships extend far beyond the court.
Roosevelt understood that more than a century ago. His Tennis Cabinet demonstrates that the social infrastructure surrounding a sport can matter far more than the games themselves. Tennis gave Roosevelt access to people. Those people gave him information, expertise, friendship, and a means of turning presidential ambition into government action.
I started Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet wondering whether the whole thing was somehow too perfectly tailored to my interests to be real. I finished it convinced that the most interesting part of the story was not that Theodore Roosevelt played tennis in the White House. Rather, it was what he accomplished with the people he met on the court.
Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet (<- Sponsored Link)
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