Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  5 Actually, the content Douglas, Many-Sided Roosevelt, 251.

  6 Even so, Congress Washington Evening Times, 3 Dec. 1901.

  7 “The Congress assembles” The following extracts from TR’s Message are taken from TR, Works, vol. 17, 93–160.

  8 There was an “The sentence fell upon the House like a pall.” Washington Evening Times, 3 Dec. 1901.

  9 “The wind is sowed” TR, Works, vol. 17, 97. TR later confirmed that he was alluding to William Randolph Hearst, yellow-press lord and perennial political candidate.

  10 The House sat The word rapt is that of the New York World, 4 Dec. 1901. See also The New York Times, same date.

  11 At this, the spell New York World, 4 Dec. 1901.

  12 THE SENATE, in Washington Evening Times, 3 Dec. 1901.

  13 For a quarter New York Sun and New York Herald, 4 Dec. 1901.

  14 Mark Hanna sat Washington Evening Times, 4 Dec. 1901. See John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (New York, 1953), 220–22, for Lodge’s emotions during these early months of TR’s Presidency.

  15 As Roosevelt swung New York World, 4 Dec. 1901.

  16 SPOONER, AT FIFTY-EIGHT This profile is based on Walter Wellman, “Spooner of Wisconsin: A Sketch,” Review of Reviews, Aug. 1902; Thompson, Party Leaders, 47–51; Merrill, Republican Command, 32; O. O. Stealey, 130 Pen Pictures of Live Men (Washington, D.C., 1910); Peck, Twenty Years of the Republic, 426–31; Dorothy C. Fowler, John Coit Spooner, Defender of Presidents (New York, 1961), passim; and photographs in various publications.

  17 He was equally See, e.g., Spooner versus Senator Benjamin R. Tillman in The Washington Post, 28 Jan. 1902.

  18 But he had Wellman, “Spooner”; Merrill, Republican Command, 33–34, notes the corruption of Wisconsin politics in 1901. It was difficult at that time even for honest senators to escape the taint of corruption at home, since they were not directly elected, and served at the pleasure of state legislatures.

  19 His perambulation New York World, 4 Dec. 1901.

  20 “Allison could run” TR, Works, vol. 17, 103.

  21 This legerdepied Merrill, Republican Command, 30–31.

  22 Poised in his See, e.g., Leland L. Sage, William Boyd Allison: A Study in Practical Politics (Iowa City, 1956), 197, 250, 292, 294, 6; David J. Rothman, Politics and Power: The Senate, 1869–1901 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), 47.

  23 “All this is true” TR, Works, vol. 17, 104.

  24 In the front Nathaniel W. Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich: A Leader in American Politics (New York, 1930), 136; Coolidge, Old-Fashioned Senator, 61.

  25 There was something Coolidge, Old-Fashioned Senator, 65–67, 592; Thompson, Party Leaders, 34; George H. Mayer, The Republican Party, 1854–1966 (New York, 1966), 277; Merrill, Republican Command, 27–28; Claude G. Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era (Boston, 1932), 138–39.

  26 “There is a widespread” TR, Works, vol. 17, 104.

  27 “It is no” Ibid., 104–5.

  28 If Nelson W. Barry, Forty Years, 152; Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, 9, 172. 73 “The first essential” Ibid., 105.

  29 Aldrich’s was a Rothman, Politics and Power, 46; David S. Barry and Elihu Root in biographical file (NWA).

  30 His power derived Merrill, Republican Command, 24, 28; speech cards in NWA; Barry, Forty Years, 153. See, e.g., James Anthony Rosmond, “Nelson Aldrich, Theodore Roosevelt and the Tariff: A Study to 1905” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1974).

  31 Roosevelt, in contrast David S. Barry memo, biographical file (NWA).

  32 As far as Aldrich Merrill, Republican Command, 24–25.

  33 “The nation should” TR, Works, vol. 17, 106.

  34 Aldrich believed that Barry memo, biographical file (NWA).

  35 Since this was The term Majority Leader was not yet current. Neither was the convenient (and misleading) group term of “the Senate Four” for Aldrich, Spooner, Allison, and Platt. Although these men indeed worked closely together, they often differed on important issues—Aldrich and Allison on the tariff, e.g. Other Republican senators wielded great power in their personal fiefdoms: Henry Cabot Lodge on foreign policy, Eugene Hale on naval affairs, Hanna on labor, and so on. In a letter to his parents, written ca. Feb. 1903, the Chicago newspaper heir Medill McCormick defined the government of the United States as “an oligarchy tempered by the veto” (MHM).

  36 “I believe that” TR, Works, vol. 17, 106.

  37 THE SENATE WAS Profile of Aldrich based on biographical file (NWA); Steffens, Autobiography, 504; Ainslee’s Magazine, Dec. 1901; Bowers, Beveridge, 313–24; Merrill, Republican Command, 21–26; and photographs in various publications.

  38 There were a few Rothman, Politics and Power, 112, 136, 217, 112–15, 136, 183–86, 201.

  39 Orville Platt was Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, 203.

  40 What held them Rothman, Politics and Power, 111, 117.

  41 He granted TR, Works, vol. 17, 107–10.

  42 Clearly, neither subject Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 12, 24–26; Merrill, Republican Command, 26.

  43 “The railway” TR, Works, vol. 17, 116–17.

  44 “The doctrine of” Ibid., 124.

  45 “We are dealing” Ibid., 125.

  46 FOR ANOTHER HOUR Washington Evening Times, 3 Dec. 1901; Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana, 1985), 93.

  47 By two o’clock Washington Evening Times, 3 Dec. 1901; New York World, 4 Dec. 1901.

  48 “In the midst” TR, Works, vol. 17, 160.

  49 Each had an New York World and New York Herald, 4 Dec. 1901.

  50 Democratic leaders, too The Washington Post, 4 Dec. 1901.

  51 Members of the Literary Digest, 14 Dec. 1901. “Never in our history,” commented the New York Evening Post, “have we had a more striking example of great responsibility upon an imperious nature.” Negative comment was concentrated in the South.

  52 That night, Roosevelt Pittsburgh Times, 4 Dec. 1901; Review of Reviews, Jan. 1902; Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, 160; Washington Evening Times, 3 Dec. 1901, and New York Tribune, 4 Dec. 1901.

  53 “It is not” Chicago Record-Herald, 5 Dec. 1901.

  54 On 7 December Washington Evening Star, 7 Dec. 1901.

  55 The quickest way Review of Reviews, Jan. 1902. On 9 Dec., TR received a letter from the black politician Ralph Waldo Tyler, forwarded by Booker T. Washington, warning him that “Senator Hanna will be candidate for President.” Negro officeholders all over the South were prepared “to go to the next National convention with a solid delegation” in support of their patron. No doubt this letter added a spur to TR’s own patronage plans. For his bemused reaction, see TR, Letters, vol. 3, 206.

  56 A surprise choice Gage privately admitted that the contrast between TR’s galvanic personality and that of McKinley had left him with a feeling of “chronic sadness.” Gage to Charles G. Dawes, 11 Dec. 1901 (LCG).

  57 Charles Emory Smith Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 120; Blum, Republican Roosevelt, 42.

  58 It did not escape Merrill, Republican Command, 34. See Fowler, John Coit Spooner, chap. 10 on the LaFollette insurgency in Wisconsin—a phenomenon that was to have enormous, if delayed, consequences for TR’s political career.

  59 There was further Literary Digest, 28 Dec. 1901; Blum, Republican Roosevelt, 43; Merrill, Republican Command, 103–5. Attrition among Hanna-backed officeholders in the Postal Service began almost immediately. See the long list of new appointments in The Washington Post, 28 Jan. 1902.

  60 Yet another anti-Hanna James A. Kehl, Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matt Quay of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1955), 236; New York Evening Post, 10 Dec. 1901; L. Clarke Davis to John Hay, 10 Dec. 1901 (JH).

  61 ONE UNSEEMLY INCIDENT L. T. Michener to Eugene Hay, ca. 24 Dec. 1901 (copy in HKB).

  62 Roosevelt had developed Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 611; James B. Martin, “The Irresistible Force and the Immovable Object: Theodore Roosevelt and Lieutenant General Nelson A.
Miles,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, spring 1987. There is a comic description in Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary of General Miles “passing in review” before two observers and nearly blinding them with his effulgence. See the definition of story, example 3.

  63 What angered Roosevelt TR, Letters, vol. 3, 98, 241; Edward Ranson, “Nelson A. Miles as Commanding General, 1895–1903,” Military Affairs 29.4 (1966).

  64 Secrets embarrassing For more detail, see Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 1, 243ff. In Root’s later words, Miles was “a real difficulty, and must … be eliminated.” To Philip Jessup, 26 Oct. 1934 (PCJ).

  65 Miles played into Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 1, 248. This was the famous Samson-Schley dispute. For details, see Edward L. Beach, The United States Navy: 200 Years (New York, 1986), 361–68.

  66 His voice rose Annie Riley Hale, Bull Moose Trails (privately printed, 1912), 2–4, qu. two eyewitnesses. Ranson, “Nelson A. Miles,” prints a milder version of this interview. But all contemporary accounts have TR shouting loud enough to be heard outside the White House lawn. “Poor old Miles … it was a brutal thing” (L. T. Michener to Eugene Hay, ca. 24 Dec. 1901 [copy in HKB]).

  67 “You have the” Isabel McKenna Duffield, Washington in the Nineties (San Francisco, 1929), 48; The Army and Navy Register, 4 Jan. 1902.

  68 PURGED, PERHAPS William Marion Reedy in St. Louis Mirror, 19 Dec. 1901. An extra contribution to TR’s bonhomie at this time might have been the successful appearance, in Britain, of his latest scholarly work, a chapter on the War of 1812 in the sixth volume of William Laird Clowes’s The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present (London, 1901). A lengthy review in The Atheneum, 28 Dec. 1901, rated it even higher than his “excellent” Naval War of 1812 (New York, 1882). “Twenty years ago he was remarkably fair and even-minded; now he writes from the standpoint of scientific neutrality, which conveys no hint of his nationality.… It is not easy to express in measured language our sense of the merit and importance of every line of this admirable essay.”

  69 Yet there was P. C. Knox to TR, 11 Dec. 1901 (TRP). See also Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 423.

  70 “I should say,” William Marion Reedy in St. Louis Mirror, 19 Dec. 1901.

  71 HOWLS OF MIRTH Joan Paterson Kerr, ed., A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (New York, 1995), 112–13; White House press release (hand-edited by TR), 25 Dec. 1901 (TRP).

  72 The band swung White House press release, 25 Dec. 1901 (TRP).

  CHAPTER 5: TURN OF A RISING TIDE

  1 Divvle a bit Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 57.

  2 WALTER WELLMAN, REPORTER Chicago Record-Herald, 16 Jan. 1902. TR amusedly told Hay that Senator Lodge was “frantic with fury” at press reports that he was “learning to ride, so as to go out with me,” qu. in Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 319.

  3 To Wellman and Unidentified news clip, 21 Nov. 1901, Presidential scrapbook (TRP); Leupp, The Man Roosevelt, 311–13.

  4 “You must always” Spring Rice to Valentine Chirol, qu. in Wagenknecht, Seven Worlds, 11.

  5 Charles William Eliot Qu. in Richard Olney to Grover Cleveland, 14 Jan. 1902 (GC); Ecclesiastes 10:16, qu. in ibid.

  6 It was the lunches “I feel as though I should bust,” he wrote Nannie Cabot Lodge, “if I am not able to discuss at length and without my usual cautious reserve several questions—Dewey, Schley, Hanna, Foraker, Cuba, Bagehot’s Shakespeare, the Hallstadt culture as connected with Homer’s Acheans, the latest phase of the Monroe Doctrine, and the Boston Mayoralty elections.” TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1442.

  7 The Washington social For descriptions of the 1902 season, which included Alice Roosevelt’s coming-out ball, see Rixey, Bamie, chap. 21, and Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 228–38.

  8 “Theodore is never” Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 345. See also “Wanted: A President,” The Washington Post, 1 Jan. 1902.

  9 Adams was back Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 322–23.

  10 The Fifty-seventh Ibid., 359; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 225–27.

  11 Roosevelt made it Amy Belle Cheney [secretary], memo, n.d. (HH); Robinson, My Brother, 229; TR qu. in Messmore Kendall, Never Let Weather Interfere (New York, 1946), 130. Koenig, Invisible Presidency, 151, claims that TR dictated as many as two or three hundred letters a day.

  12 He hesitated only See, e.g., TR, Letters, vol. 3, 239–40, 242. William James wrote approvingly of “the safety of his second thoughts.” Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James (Boston, 1926), vol. 2, 232.

  13 The President was Lewis F. Einstein, Roosevelt: His Mind in Action (Boston, 1930), 104; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 218.

  14 “Roosevelt,” declared George F. Parker, Recollections of Grover Cleveland (New York, 1911), 250.

  15 ON FRIDAY, 3 JANUARY The New York Times, 4 Jan. 1902; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 263.

  16 Hanna said that Dwight C. Miner, The Fight for the Panama Route (New York, 1940), 125. The reader should bear in mind a distinction, in the story here beginning, between the Isthmian Canal Commission (“Walker Commission”) and Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals (“Morgan Committee”).

  17 It had recommended New York Tribune, 4 Jan. 1902.

  18 At least one McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 293. Earlier that morning, Hanna had urgently summoned Spooner to a meeting behind closed doors with sympathetic members of the Isthmian Commission (JCS).

  19 On the very morning McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 266.

  20 “I want the report” Qu. in New York Herald, 17 Jan. 1902.

  21 Morgan hurried Hanna called to warn TR that Morgan was on his way down Pennsylvania Avenue, breathing fire (George Cortelyou telephone memorandum, 16 Jan. 1902 [TRP]). According to The Story of Panama: Hearings on the Rainey Resolution Before the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives (Washington, D.C., 1913), 166, TR summoned every member of the Commission to his office immediately after the House vote on 9 Jan. in order to canvass their individual views. He then held a full, secret meeting at which he instructed the Commission to think again and issue a “unanimous” recommendation.

  22 Shocked and depressed Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 36; New York Herald, 17 Jan. 1902. Lewis M. Haupt, the most pro-Nicaragua of the ICC’s eight members, held out until the report was ready for signing on Saturday. Admiral Walker then led him up and down the corridor outside the meeting room, saying that “the President was extremely anxious to have a unanimous report,” in view of anti-Panama sentiment in the Senate. Haupt reluctantly signed. Haupt to John T. Morgan, 13 Sept. 1903 (JTM).

  23 Experience had taught Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 74, 122; New York Herald, 21 Jan. 1902.

  24 “The commission thinks” Ibid. The Herald was a pro-Nicaragua paper.

  25 A “Panama boom” DuVal, Cadiz to Cathay, 157; New York Herald and The New York Times, 21 Jan. 1902.

  26 Harriman began to buy Specifically, a total of $166,613, which he later sold for a profit of $88,447.38. Photostats in New York World, 17 Oct. 1910. See also Cyrus Adler, Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters (New York, 1929), vol. 1, 207–8.

  27 of all the well-dressed Charles D. Ameringer, “The Panama Canal Lobby of Philippe Bunau-Varilla and William Nelson Cromwell,” American Historical Review, 68.2 (1963).

  28 Cromwell was the New York World, 4 Oct. 1908; photographs in various publications; Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 2, 318–19; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 272–73.

  29 If Cromwell’s Bunau-Varilla interviewed by Howard K. Beale, July 1936 (HKB).

  30 It was hard for Americans Bunau-Varilla, “Confidential for Mr. Lawrence F. Abbott” (PBV); McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 162, 290. John Bassett Moore, who worked closely with Bunau-Varilla in 1903–1904 (see below), observed, “He is one of the cleverest men I have ever met.” Moore to TR, 7 Jan. 1904 (TRP).

  31 Now forty-two McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 400–401; biographical sketch of Bunau-Varilla, ca. 1903, in JBM.

  32 Bunau-Varilla therefore Tra
vail pour la patrie means labor for the fatherland [France], a phrase obsessively repeated by Bunau-Varilla. William Glover Fletcher, “Canal Site Diplomacy: A Study in American Political Geography” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1940), 176. Fletcher interviewed and corresponded with Bunau-Varilla at length.

  33 As an engineer “Arbitrage Entre la Compagnie Nouvelle du Canal de Panama et MM. Sullivan et Cromwell,” deposition, 24 Oct. 1907 (PBV); New York Sun, 28 Dec. 1901; Edward P. Mitchell, Memories of an Editor (New York, 1924), 343.

  34 ON 24 JANUARY The Washington Post, 26 Jan. 1902. TR’s own gift was a meteorological map of the District of Columbia showing the White House to be an “Area of High Pressure.”

  35 AT THE END OF Story of Panama, 279; The Washington Post, 25 Jan. 1902.

  36 It was all very The Washington Post, 25 Jan. 1902; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 263.

  37 With new hearings The House voted for senatorial elections, and the Senate against. Direct election of senators was to become one of the major planks of the Progressive movement.

  38 “When you come” TR to Spooner, 28 Jan. 1902, qu. in Fowler, John Coit Spooner, 262. Miner, Fight for the Panama Route, 124–25, makes a convincing argument for TR’s sponsorship of the Spooner Amendment.

  39 “He really determines” Wilson, Papers, vol. 12, 262.

  40 From outer space Cartoon by Edward Kemble in Life, 30 Jan. 1902.

  41 A FEW DAYS TR, Letters, vol. 3, 229. The day before, he had been waited on by members of the Industrial Commission, who were about to publish their final report on the trusts. While favorable toward combination in general, the report did draw attention to the “vicious and intolerable” discriminatory practices of some interstate corporations, and echoed TR’s call for compulsory publicity of trust workings. Public Opinion, 20 Feb. 1902.

  42 It was 5 February Albert J. Beveridge to Albert Shaw, 10 Jan. 1902 (AJB); The Washington Post, 19 Feb. 1902.

  43 Any fool could Eitler, “Philander Chase Knox,” 61; Review of Reviews, Apr. 1902; H. B. Martin and Emlen H. Miller to TR, 30 Nov. and 9 Dec. 1901, Department of Justice files (NA).