Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  15 Among the bale-sitters Edgar S. Wilson in Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 6, 375; Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., “Dinner at the White House: Theodore Roosevelt, Booker T. Washington and the South,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 18 (1958). The repercussions of the Crum appointment (which Dr. Washington had urged upon TR) are discussed below, in chap. 14.

  16 he elsewhere favored On 10 Nov., e.g., TR had replaced Alabama’s Lily White Republican Collector of Internal Revenue with a Booker T. Washington–endorsed Gold Democrat. The Washington Post, 11 Nov. 1902. See also Seth M. Scheiner, “President Roosevelt and the Negro, 1901–1909,” Journal of Negro History, July 1962.

  17 “drawing of the color” Booker T. Washington in Booker T. Washington Papers, vol. 6, 547. Scheiner, “President Roosevelt and the Negro,” claims that “something more than altruism” influenced TR’s Southern race policy. TR always denied that his motives were political (TR, Letters, vol. 3, 290–91, 387–88), but Scheiner cites evidence to the contrary. It suited him, e.g., to undermine the pro-Hanna Lily Whites of Alabama, whereas he appointed them freely in North Carolina in order to win the support of Senator Jeter Pritchard’s powerful machine. “His main purpose was to receive the support of Republican state organizations, not to aid or appoint Negroes.”

  18 Within the depot The ethnic composition of TR’s welcoming committee—a pair of whites to a score of blacks—reflected that of the Yazoo Delta. Washington Evening Star, 18 Nov. 1902.

  19 George H. Helm Gatewood, Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy, 96, 71; Washington Evening Star, 14 Nov. 1902; Denison, “President Roosevelt’s Mississippi Bear Hunt”; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 378.

  20 Shortly before four Gregory C. Wilson, “Bagging the First Teddy Bear,” unpub. research paper, 1979, AC; Washington Evening Star, 13 Nov. 1902. Charles Snyder, “TR,” paper read to the New England Ophthalmological Society, 13 Apr. 1959 (TRC).

  21 He stepped down The Washington Post, 17 Nov. 1902.

  22 THE NEXT FIVE Paul Schullery, ed., American Bears; Selections from the Writings of Theodore Roosevelt (Boulder, 1983), 10; Denison, “President Roosevelt’s Mississippi Bear Hunt.”

  23 “I am going” TR to Stuyvesant Fish, 6 Nov. 1902 (TRP). The hunt, organized by Fish, otherwise consisted of seven sporting gentlemen, TR’s personal physician, two Secret Service agents, and sundry guides and retainers.

  24 Embarrassingly, he Presidential scrapbook (TRP).

  25 Paradoxically, one Gregory C. Wilson, “The Birth of the Teddy Bear,” Bear Tracks: Official Newsletter of the Good Bears of the World, fall 1979; Holt Collier interview, Saturday Evening Post, 10 Apr. 1909.

  26 No sooner had Denison, “President Roosevelt’s Mississippi Bear Hunt.”

  27 Back at the Holt Collier interview, The Saturday Evening Post, 10 Apr. 1909. The sex of TR’s bear is a subject of debate. A hunter who has seen the skin judges it to have been that of a 246-pound female. Charles Moose interview with author, 10 Nov. 1988 (AC).

  28 “Put it out” The Washington Post, 15 Nov. 1902.

  29 Whether or not Clifford Berryman qu. in Marietta Andrews, My Studio Window: Sketches of the Pageant of Washington Life (New York, 1928), 172. The version of “Drawing the Line” most frequently reproduced is not the original Washington Post cartoon. Berryman seems to have produced a second version (with the bear as a cub), later in 1902—whether for publication or not is unclear. It is sometimes wrongly attributed to the Washington Evening Star. The “other” bear cartoon he drew for William E. Chandler is probably a third version, showing a pack of bear cubs joyfully escorting “Teddy” out of the forest (Presidential scrapbook [TRP]). According to Berryman, this one was “a hit.” In later years, the cartoonist so identified with the Teddy Bear that he used to sign his letters with it. Andrews, My Studio Window, 171.

  30 Three thousand Wilson, “Birth of the Teddy Bear”; Peggy and Alan Bialosky, eds., The Teddy Bear Catalogue: Care, Repair, and Love (New York, 1980), 12–21.

  Historiological Note: The most serious study of the TR/Teddy Bear phenomenon is Linda Mullins, The Teddy Bear Men: Theodore Roosevelt and Clifford Berryman (Cumberland, Md., 1987). See also the above-cited works of Wilson and Bialosky. Morris and Rose Michtom founded the Ideal Toy Company, largely on the strength of their stuffed-bear sales, in 1903. Family tradition claims that Michtom wrote TR asking for permission to call the bears “Teddy’s Bears,” and TR replied that if his name was worth anything, they were welcome to use it. The story is doubtful. There is no trace of TR’s letter in his conscientiously kept copybooks, and the Michtoms do not seem to have preserved what would be its priceless original. Furthermore, TR disliked being called “Teddy,” and had a strict policy of not endorsing any commercial products, even his own books, when in office. The probable truth is that the Stieff Company produced the first “Teddy Bears” (albeit modeled after bear cubs in the Stuttgart Zoo) in 1902, and that the Michtoms duplicated their design in 1902–1903. By 1904, Roosevelt “Bear Cub” associations were already noticeable in campaign tokens, and in 1906 “The Roosevelt Bears,” a cartoon feature, began to run in The New York Times. The strip was soon parlayed by Seymour Eaton into a wildly popular series of children’s books. An original 1903 Michtom thirty-inch-tall bear is now worth at least forty-five thousand dollars. With this note, the author formally withdraws from the field of Teddy Bear studies.

  31 EDITH ROOSEVELT RECEIVED TR returned to Washington on 21 Nov. 1902. For EKR’s extensive work with McKim, Mead & White on restoring the White House, see Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, chap. 19.

  32 Gone were the Restoration of the White House: Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of the Architects (Washington, D.C., 1903), passim; Charles Moore, “The Restoration of the White House,” Century, Apr. 1903; Seale, President’s House, vol. 2, 656–84; Ellen Maury Slayden, Washington Wife: Journal of Ellen Maury Slayden from 1897–1919 (New York, 1963), 46–47.

  33 For this improvement Restoration of the White House, 17–20, 9; The work, while complete in all essentials by late November 1902, continued for another two months. Washington Evening Star, 31 Jan. 1903.

  34 The pavilions flanked Moore, “Restoration”; Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 260.

  35 “The first impression” Moore, “Restoration”; Wister, Roosevelt, 108.

  36 Roosevelt, marching Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 253. Contrary to popular impression, only one of the game heads was a trophy of his.

  37 Breeding, however Wister, Roosevelt, 107.

  38 Upstairs, Edith All these apartments had en suite bathrooms. Seale, President’s House, vol. 2, 679.

  39 THE DOCUMENT WAS TR’s Second Annual Message is reprinted in TR, Works, vol. 17, 161–95.

  40 the United States and Mexico The dispute concerned the Pacific Pious Fund, an annual indemnity promised by Mexico “in perpetuity” to Franciscan friars, as compensation for monastic properties appropriated in 1842. Mexico stopped paying this award after the United States took over California. The Hague court found in favor of resumed payments by Mexico. The New York Times, 27 Dec. 1902.

  41 “As civilization grows,” TR, Works, vol. 17, 175.

  42 By this he The most exhaustive modern analysis of TR’s close-to-home foreign policy is Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean, the Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context (Baton Rouge, 1990).

  43 the covert diplomat Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), 452–53; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 52. The secret du roi involved covert, personal emissaries of the king, operating often at odds with his official diplomacy. See Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (New York, 1965), vol. 1, 76, 97. TR’s own preferred term was kitchen ambassadors. TR, Letters, vol. 4, 1102.

  44 Foreign policy was TR, Letters, vol. 1, 409. See Nelson M. Blake, “Ambassadors at the Court of Theodore Roosevelt,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1955, and Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt
and His English Correspondents.” For a French view of TR’s discreet diplomacy, see Serge Ricard, Théodore Roosevelt: principes et practique d’une politique étrangère (Aix-en-Provence, 1991).

  45 Not until after Qu. in E. Alexander Powell, Yonder Lies Adventure (New York, 1932), 312; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 358–59.

  46 The full extent

  Historiological Note: The best summary of archival lacunae attendant to the Venezuelan crisis is in Marks, Velvet on Iron, 42–47 and notes. To Marks’s list might be added a corresponding gap in the dispatches of French Ambassador Jules Cambon at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, and another (Oct.–Dec. 1902) in the normally copious correspondence between John Hay and Assistant Secretary of State Alvey A. Adee in JH. Elsewhere, this correspondence routinely refers to burnings and deletions. See also Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 407–8, and Edmund Morris, “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Venezuelan Crisis of 1902,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, winter 1989. Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 78–79, dismisses the evidence of these sources and states flatly that TR in later life “came to believe that he had in fact delivered a warning.”

  47 ROOSEVELT HAD SEEN In 1902, sixty-two million bolivars was the equivalent of twenty-five million U.S. dollars. The Washington Post, 19 Nov. 1902. For a detailed background to the Venezuela crisis of 1902, see Holger Herwig, Germany’s Vision of Empire in Venezuela (Princeton, N.J., 1986), chap. 3.

  48 These powers D. M. Platt, “The Allied Coercion of Venezuela, 1902–1903: A Reassessment,” Inter-American Economic Affairs, spring 1962, notes that, contrary to traditional opinion, Germany, not Britain, was the aggressor against Venezuela throughout 1902.

  49 The President sympathized TR to Cecil Spring Rice, 13 Aug. 1897, in Stephen Gwynn, ed., The Letters and Friendships of Cecil Spring Rice: A Record (Boston, 1929), vol. 1, 229–30. TR could even be said to have invited the action by stating in his First Annual Message, “We do not guarantee any [Latin American] State against punishment if it misconducts itself, providing that punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American power” (TR, Works, vol. 17, 135). But as will be seen, he expected the built-in warning to be heeded to the letter. For TR the diplomatic moralist, see Marks, Velvet on Iron, chap. 3.

  50 Ever the stern TR, Letters, vol. 3, 116. TR was not alone in his contempt for Castro, “that unspeakably villainous little monkey.” The Venezuela leader was reviled with near unanimity by contemporary diplomats, and modern historians have endorsed their verdict. See Herwig, Germany’s Vision of Empire, 86–87.

  51 Baron von Sternburg Emil Witte, Revelations of a German Attaché: Ten Years of German-American Diplomacy (New York, 1916), 78, describes von Sternburg as “a sworn enemy of all writing.” See Stefan H. Rinke, “The German Ambassador Hermann Speck von Sternburg and Theodore Roosevelt, 1889–1908,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, winter 1991, and Rinke’s master’s thesis, “Between Success and Failure: The Diplomatic Career of Ambassador Hermann Speck von Sternburg and German-American Relations, 1903–1908” (Bowling Green State University, 1989).

  52 When Roosevelt condoned TR, Works, vol. 17, 135.

  53 a secret memorandum Henry C. Taylor to TR, ca. late Nov. 1902 (TRP).

  54 “The first method” Ibid.; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 98; Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, 102–11.

  55 Part of him TR, Letters, vol. 3, 98, 108; Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 2, 10; Morris, “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days.’ ”

  56 The adjective temporary Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 400; Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 1, 246; Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (New York, 1967), 7–21; Review of Reviews, Jan. 1901; John C. G. Röhl, ed., Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations—The Corfu Papers (Cambridge, 1982), 144. TR had been hearing from Cecil Spring Rice about German colonial ambitions in Latin America since at least 1897 (see, e.g., Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 1, 227). Vice Admiral Büschel, chief German naval war planner, summarized his country’s 1902–1903 policy vis-à-vis the United States in language that requires no translation: “Feste Position in Westinden. Freie Hand in Südamerika. Aufgabe der Monroe Doktrine.” Qu. in Paul M. Kennedy, ed., The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London, 1979), 57.

  57 What better place In March 1901, John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root had been alarmed by reports that a German gunboat was making hydro-graphic surveys of the Margarita Islands (Richard W. Turk, “Defending the New Empire, 1900–1914,” in Kenneth J. Hagan, ed., In Peace and War: Interpretations of American Naval History [Westport, Conn., 1984], 189). Their scare communicated itself to TR. “The only power which may be a menace to us in anything like the immediate future is Germany,” he wrote (TR, Letters, vol. 3, 32). In July 1901, he warned Karl Bünz, Germany’s Consul General in New York, that his country must not think of acquiring “a foot of soil in any shape or way in South America.” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 98.

  58 idea of the Weltpolitik Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 55; Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 143ff.; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 6. The Kaiser’s brother had actually intended to propose “a German sphere of influence” in South America to TR on his recent state visit, until silenced by von Bülow. J. Lepsius et al., Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914 (Berlin, 1922–1927), vol. 17, 243.

  59 Germany, therefore According to Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 46, the German high command also regarded war with the United States around this time as “a distinct possibility.” See also ibid., 42–46, and John A. S. Grenville and George B. Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873–1917 (New Haven, 1966), 305–7.

  60 “For the first” TR, Works, vol. 17, 182.

  61 Coincidentally or not Seward W. Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt, the American Navy, and the Venezuela Crisis of 1902–1903,” American Historical Review, Apr. 1946.

  62 SEA POWER TR, Letters, vol. 3, 225, 217. For TR’s 1902 naval thinking, see his speech to the United States Naval Academy in TR, Presidential Addresses, vol. 1, 39–41; Gordon C. O’Gara, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of the Modern Navy (Princeton, N.J., 1969), 116; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 253–54; Beach, United States Navy, 390–97. Marks, Velvet on Iron, 40, shows how from Dec. 1901 on TR “accompanied every step in the diplomatic confrontation with a corresponding buildup of American sea power.”

  63 The most recent Review of Reviews, Apr. 1902; memorandum from Office of Naval Intelligence, 11 Feb. 1903 (TRP); Charles D. Sigsbee to TR, 22 Mar. 1902 (TRP).

  64 They sat Photograph in Ronald Spector, Professors of War: The Naval War College and the Development of the Naval Profession (Newport, R.I., 1977). United States Naval War College, Rules for the Conduct of War Games (Naval War College, R.I., 1902); Ronald Spector, “Roosevelt, the Navy, and the Venezuelan Controversy, 1902–1903,” American Neptune, Oct. 1972.

  65 Germany, the tacticians Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt”; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 367–70.

  66 HE WAS ABLE Amy S. Strachey, St. Loe Strachey: His Life and His Paper (New York, 1931), 142–43; Speck von Sternburg to TR, 19 Oct. 1902 (TRP); Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt, 28–29; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 50. On 29 Oct. 1902, Henry White wrote TR that Strachey’s White House invitation was “the greatest honor that has ever befallen him” (TRP).

  67 Strachey, through his He also had the reputation of being “Germany’s sharpest critic.” Review of Reviews, Dec. 1902.

  68 Awake, however Dewey was in full court uniform, having learned that the Roosevelts preferred their military aides that way. “They are getting to be quite a palace down there.” Mrs. Dewey diary, 25 Nov. 1902 (GD).

  69 As Roosevelt reminded TR, Letters, vol. 3, 275.

  70 But Dewey had John Garry Clifford, “Admiral Dewey and the Germans,” Mid-Atlantic 49 (1967). Like TR, Dewey had been monitoring the Venezuela situation for eleven months, in his capacity as President of the General Board of the Navy. Ronald Spector, Admiral of the New Empire: The Life and C
areer of George Dewey (Baton Rouge, 1974), 140–41.

  Chronological Note: The shared concern of President and Admiral can be traced back to Germany’s formation of Caribbean and South Atlantic Squadrons in 1901. The following chronology is instructive.

  13 Dec. 1901: Germany notifies the United States that she might have to “coerce” Venezuela and make a “temporary occupation” of her ports. 17 Dec. 1901: TR issues an executive order making Culebra, Puerto Rico, a naval base “in case of sudden war.” Jan. 1902: Navy Department advises TR of a plan for emergency deployment of warships in the Caribbean; Dewey warns that Venezuela situation looks dangerous, works out defense strategy centering on Virgin Islands; TR redoubles efforts to buy the islands from Denmark; German Embassy in Washington notifies Berlin of these developments; Wilhelmstrasse strategists refocus their contingency war plans on Long Island; Navy reports German espionage team in Port of Spain, Trinidad. February: State Department asks information on Venezuelan landing places and roads; TR appoints young, aggressive William H. Moody to be Secretary of the Navy. May: Naval intelligence reports German cruiser skulking in Venezuelan waters. June: Forthcoming assembly of “greatest fighting fleet in U.S. history” announced in world press; TR asks Dewey to command it; State Department perfects plan for defense of Venezuelan coast. July: Moody orders a similar plan providing for “offense”; TR urges Speck von Sternburg, in Europe, to visit White House: “I have very much I want to say to you” (19 July [TRP]); Dewey takes personal role in plotting maneuvers; Navy Department informed that TR is “deeply interested” in same; Germany informs Great Britain of willingness for joint reclamation measures against Venezuela. August: Imperialist expansion pressures increase on Wilhelmstrasse. 24 Sept.: TR has strategic conference with Dewey, and tells him “in strictest confidence—what had better not be written now” (Mrs. Dewey diary [GD]). 27 Oct.: TR presses for new naval bases in Cuba; two days later, he sounds out Balfour on the vulnerability of Dutch Caribbean colonies and invites Strachey to make “a flying visit” to the White House. All these activities, implying an extraordinary feeling of gathering crisis, predate the Anglo-German agreement to coerce Venezuela on 12 Nov. 1902.