Things were bully

The expression Things were bully recurs as a jaunty measure of Theodore Roosevelt’s fortunes, but its meaning changes with the story it accompanies. At first it seems to confirm a world of energetic action and public success; later, its negation becomes a refrain for lost authority, physical suffering, and obscurity. The phrase’s decisive work is this reversal: what once sounded like uncomplicated triumph comes to expose how little the language of being bully can protect against change.

Early Triumph and Political Momentum

When Roosevelt returned home, one of his first interviews was with Lemuel Quigg, an emissary of Boss Platt. He also saw Boss Platt, though the narrative says he later forgot the meeting. The account moves briskly from this political encounter to Roosevelt writing a life of Oliver Cromwell, whom people said he resembled, and becoming governor. As governor, he double-crossed the Platt machine; the parenthetical suggestion that a righteous man may have a short memory gives the episode a dry edge. Boss Platt thought he had put Roosevelt aside by nominating him for the vice-presidency in 1900, but the next sentence overturns that calculation: Czolgocz made him president. Against this compressed rise, Things were bully sounds like a buoyant verdict on events that keep exceeding the plans made for Roosevelt.

The expression returns after the move from Sagamore Hill to the White House. Roosevelt takes foreign diplomats and army officers walking in Rock Creek Park, leading them through brambles, across stepping-stones, through fords, and up shaly banks. He shakes the Big Stick at wealthy wrongdoers. These images make his presidency physical and forceful: authority is presented through strenuous movement as well as political action. The repeated assurance that things were bully gathers those different kinds of performance into a single, confident rhythm.

That confidence is shadowed by the account of The Panama Revolution. Beneath it, the old and new canal companies were juggled, and forty million dollars vanished into the pockets of international bankers; nevertheless, Old Glory floated over the Canal Zone. The passage places national display beside financial disappearance rather than resolving the tension between them. In that setting, the refrain’s cheer can sound less like a neutral report than like an emphatic gloss laid over events whose benefits and costs do not align neatly.

The Refrain at Its High Point

After leaving the presidency to Taft, Roosevelt goes to Africa to hunt big game. The text gives the activity its own emphatic echo: big-game hunting was bully. Lions and elephants crash into the jungle underbrush after being struck by well-placed bullets, while newspapers light up with headlines. The repetition extends the phrase beyond politics into Roosevelt’s life as a public adventurer, joining the hunt, the press response, and his appetite for action in the same buoyant register.

The phrase’s recurrence matters because it is so compact. Rather than pause to explain Roosevelt’s confidence, the narrative attaches the expression to successive scenes: his political ascent, his forceful presidency, and the spectacle of the hunt. Its familiarity makes the account feel as if each new success simply confirms the last. But the later passages test that pattern, showing that the word’s easy assurance cannot keep its force indefinitely.

The Reversal of Fortune

The turn begins amid the triangular campaign. Perhaps the River of Doubt had been too much for a man of Roosevelt’s age; perhaps things were not so bully anymore. The narrative leaves the explanation uncertain even as it names immediate setbacks: Roosevelt loses his voice, then a maniac shoots him in the chest in Duluth. His life is saved by the thick bundle of manuscript he carries for a speech. He delivers the speech with the bullet still in him, hears frightened applause, and feels that ordinary people are praying for his recovery. Yet the passage says the spell has somehow broken. The public performance survives, but the old confidence no longer appears sufficient to restore the atmosphere around it.

The world war deepens the reversal. The Democrats sweep in, and the war drowns out what the narrative calls the righteous voice of the Happy Warrior amid exploding lyddite. Woodrow Wilson will not let Roosevelt lead a division, insisting that this is no amateur’s war; the account suggests that regular officers may remember the round robin at Santiago. Roosevelt can write magazine articles against the Huns and send his sons to war, but Quentin is killed. The sequence narrows the space for the public identity that the refrain once seemed to celebrate: political voice is drowned out, military participation is denied, and a son’s death enters the story.

From “Bully” to Endurance

On Armistice Day, Roosevelt is taken gravely ill to a hospital with inflammatory rheumatism. The narrative sets this condition against a long catalogue of roles and habits: naturalist, explorer, magazine writer, Sunday-school teacher, cowpuncher, moralist, politician, orator, denouncer of liars, and father who had pillow fights with his children. The catalogue recalls the restless abundance associated with the earlier refrain, but now it precedes an explicit correction: it is no longer the bully amateur’s world, and things are not bully anymore. The change in wording makes the expression register a historical and personal limit, not merely a temporary disappointment.

The final movement does not turn back to the old cheer. Roosevelt has grit, and he bears pain, obscurity, and the sense of being forgotten as he had borne the difficult portages while exploring the River of Doubt, along with the heat, fetid jungle mud, and an infected abscess in his leg. The remembered expedition supplies a comparison for endurance, not a restoration of the earlier verdict. Across its repetitions, Things were bully moves from breezy affirmation to bitter negation; by the end, the story’s emphasis falls instead on the capacity to bear what can no longer be called bully.