Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  9 “The greatest service” TR, Letters, 7.102.

  10 That meant Ibid., 7.102–3.

  11 “Of course you must” Ibid., 7.101, 7.95.

  12 “He is evidently” Ibid., 7.96. For some sample vacillations by WHT, see Mowry, TR, 56.

  13 A poll conducted World’s Work, July 1910. Even fewer respondents expressed any concerns about TR breaking the two-term tradition of U.S. presidents.

  14 He was in receipt Lodge, Selections, 2.386–87.

  15 “My proper task” TR to Fremont Older, 18 Aug. 1910 (TRP).

  16 the Outlook offices At 287 Fourth Avenue, Manhattan.

  17 a Haynes-Apperson EKR to KR, 7 Aug. 1910 (KRP); W. C. Madden, Haynes-Apperson and America’s First Practical Automobile: A History (Jefferson, N.C., 2003), 92.

  18 On a visit TR, Letters, 7.115–16. Griscom went to Sagamore Hill to confide that while he was still a Taft man, he thought TR had behaved more honorably as leader of the Republican Party.

  19 Then Barnes announced The New York Times, 17 Aug. 1910; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 483.

  20 But he kept TR had made his vow of “two months’ ” silence on 18 June, which projected freedom to speak around 18 Aug.

  21 “Have you seen?” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 481.

  22 “It makes me ill” Ibid., 482.

  23 A news flash Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 483. TR made his vow to “close up like a native oyster” on 18 June 1910. Sullivan, Our Times, 4.442.

  24 “So they want” Literary Digest, 3 Sept. 1910.

  25 “Teddysee” The word is a coinage of the humorous poet Wallace Irwin (1876–1959), who later in the year published a Homeric account of TR’s post-presidential wanderings in 1909–1910 entitled The Teddysee. This book-length parody, forgotten now, is a classic of American satire, rising occasionally to heights of surreal imagination. See. e.g., 38–43 for an account of TR’s Western tour.

  26 “Ugh! I do dread” TR, Letters, 7.80.

  27 The truth was Ibid., 7.111–13; James Garfield diary, 10 Aug. 1910 (JRGP). TR’s left shinbone had been severely damaged in a trolley accident in Lenox, Mass., on 3 Sept. 1902. For an account of this near-fatal accident and its immediate effects, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 141–43, 146–49, 150. As will be seen, TR continued to be plagued by bone and malaria problems for the rest of his life.

  28 “It is incredible” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.449; Literary Digest, 10 Sept. 1910.

  29 “I don’t care that” Davis, Released for Publication, 200–201.

  30 insurgent candidates were registering The Iowa state convention earlier in the month dramatized the President’s unpopularity in the Midwest. Boos and catcalls drowned out a resolution to endorse WHT for reelection. A giant portrait of TR was then winched down over the platform, to a roar of applause. (Mowry, TR, 128.) See ibid., 129–30 for other progressive triumphs through Sept.

  31 his “credo” The word is that of James Garfield, who worked with Gifford Pinchot on TR’s Osawatomie address. Garfield diary, 11 Aug. 1910 (JRGP). See Davis, Released for Publication, 209–11 for TR’s elaborate, and unsuccessful, effort to keep the controversial paragraphs of his address at Denver from reporters.

  32 Riding across the prairie Quoted by Carey in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 236.

  33 Yet it had been there TR to Cal O’Laughlin in Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910. TR’s dream of leading cavalry volunteers into battle actually predated the Spanish-American War. EKR and Cecil Spring Rice used to call him in the 1890s “Theodore the Chilean volunteer” and “teaze [sic] him about his dream of leading a cavalry charge.” EKR to Spring Rice, 25 Mar. 1899 (CSR).

  34 “against popular rights” Bishop, TR, 2.301. See also TR, “Criticism of the Courts,” The Outlook, 24 Sept. 1910, and Murphy, “Mr. Roosevelt Is Guilty.” TR also attacked the Court’s decision in U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895). The Lochner case remains one of the most controversial in Supreme Court history. See David E. Bernstein, “Lochner v. New York: A Centennial Retrospective,” Washington University Law Review Quarterly, 85.5 (2005).

  35 At 2:15 P.M. Nebraska State Journal, 1 Sep. 1910; Robert S. LaForte, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Osawatomie Speech,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, Summer 1996.

  36 Addressing himself The following extracts from TR’s “New Nationalism” address are taken from TR, Works, 19.10–30.

  37 “The essence of any struggle” William Harbaugh was the first to note the Marxian nature of these words in his TR, 367. He emphasizes, however, that TR’s speech overall was Jacksonian in invoking “equality of opportunity within a propertied framework.… Roosevelt preached no proletarian uprising and envisioned no broad destruction of private property. Nor, significantly, did he call for the upbuilding of labor as a countervailing force.”

  38 Gifford Pinchot sat LaForte, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Osawatomie Speech.” The original draft of the speech appears to have been written by Herbert Croly, author of The Promise of American Life, and the final version by Gifford Pinchot. (Miller, Gifford Pinchot, 234–35.) TR’s textual contributions were minor, but the ideology of all those who worked on the speech derived so much from the progressive agenda he had himself initiated as President that he may still be considered the fons et origo of New Nationalism.

  39 Throughout his address Nebraska State Journal, 1 Sept. 1910.

  40 Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” New York Evening Post, 31 Aug., Fort Wayne Sentinel, 1 Sept., The New York Times, 3 Sept. 1910; Harbaugh, TR, 369; Harper’s Weekly, 10 Sept., Literary Digest, 10 Sept., New York Tribune, 1 Sept. 1910.

  41 He never once New York Evening Post, 1 Sept. 1910.

  42 Roosevelt himself granted TR, Letters, 7.797; Bishop, TR, 2.303; Mowry, TR, 132.

  43 He tried to sound Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress (Washington, D.C., 1911), 12–34, 82–93; WHT to Charles P. Taft, 10 Sept. 1910 (WHTP). On 24 Sept. 1910, TR published a defensive essay, “Criticism of the Courts,” in The Outlook, attempting to show that what he had said in Denver and Osawatomie was less sensational than newspaper reports implied.

  44 “when a majority” James Bryce to Sir Edward Grey, Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 13.381. Bryce was an old friend of TR’s. They first met in 1887, when Bryce was researching his classic The American Commonwealth. “He has immense go and quickness—alertness—of mind.” Bryce to Cecil Spring Rice, 19 May 1887 (CSR).

  45 “A break between” Harper’s Weekly, 10 Sept. 1910.

  46 “When I see you” Lodge, Selections, 2.389–90.

  47 Roosevelt answered that TR, Letters, 7.123. In “Criticism of the Courts,” TR noted that Stephen A. Douglas, in debate, had attacked Abraham Lincoln for “making war” on the Supreme Court. “If for Abraham Lincoln’s name mine were substituted,” he wrote, “this para [of invective] would stand with hardly an alteration.” Throughout the campaign of 1910, TR did not hesitate to compare himself to the Emancipator.

  48 To Edith EKR to Jules Jusserand, 6 Oct. 1910 (JJJ); Abbott, Impressions of TR, 88–89; WHT to Charles P. Taft, 10 Sept. 1910 (WHTP).

  49 There was one By the end of Sept., African Game Trails, published on 24 Aug., had sold 25,000 copies. (Robert Bridges to TR, 4 Oct. 1910.) It went through five printings in 1910 alone. See, however, chap. 13 for its subsequent publishing history.

  50 “rather like the diary” Cecil to Florence Spring Rice, 1 Nov. 1910 (CSR).

  51 the author’s movie-camera memory See, e.g., TR, Works, 5.148ff.

  Biographical Note: Anecdotes about TR’s memory are so numerous that it is difficult to select the best examples. He himself described it as “photographic” to Albert Shaw, editor of the American Review of Reviews, while his doctor, Alexander Lambert, noted that “his ear memory was as accurate as his eye memory.” Oscar Straus told James Morse that TR “read books not by lines but by pages, [and] could quote the exact words and imitate the tones of all who conversed with him.” Champ Clark once visited him in the White House to plead the case of a cadet who had
been court-martialed, along with six others, at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. On this minor matter, TR amazed the congressman by repeating “substantially the entire transcript[s]” of all seven cases, totaling some 49 pages of closely typed legal cap. George Smalley, foreign correspondent of The Times, watched the President receiving a series of senators, and was reminded of the omniscience that had made Léon Gambetta a master of French politics. “He knew as much as they did about their districts and candidates and local affairs.” On another occasion, TR learnedly lectured some Chinese diplomats on their society and its problems. He explained afterward that he was remembering a book he had read about China some time before, “And as I talked the pages of the book came before my eyes.” (He said the same in 1910, after treating members of the Hungarian parliament to a surprise flood of rhetoric on the Mongol invasions of the Danube Valley.) His memory for people was contextual as well as visual. In 1912, he recognized a train engineer he had seen ten years before in Lenox, Mass. “Do you wear over-alls?… There’s steam around you. Somewhere in New England.” When a high school graduate said shyly that he would not remember her, TR put his hand in front of his eyes and said, “Yes, you were in a rodeo in Denver two years ago and you were riding on a calico pony.” To an elderly correspondent that same year, he wrote: “I remember you very well, and to show it I will tell you that you were wounded at a battle in the Civil War, and stayed to look on at the fight, and then found your wounds so stiff that you could hardly move.”

  TR frequently flattered authors by quoting their work at length—in the case of the essayist Edward S. Martin, “word for word a bit of dialogue … that I suppose was ten lines long.” He astonished the humorist George Ade by recalling in detail a short story Ade himself had forgotten. When he met the poet Edgar Lee Masters, “he talked of [my] Spoon River Anthology, and seemed to know it all … some of it by heart.” TR’s memory in later life, however, was not infallible, and throughout his career he suffered from the selective amnesia characteristic of politicians. Albert Shaw, “Reminiscences of Theodore Roosevelt,” ts. (SHA); TR, Works, 3.xvi; James H. Morse diary (italics added), 9 Nov. 1911 (JHMD); Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York, 1912), 1.437–38; George W. Smalley, Anglo-American Memories: Second Series (New York, 1912), 378; Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 5.3 (Summer 1979); Stanley M. Isaacs interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, ca. 1920s (TRB); TR, Letters, 7.477; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 381, 382, 375, 389, and passim. See also Biographical Note below, 661.

  52 “So, with the lion-skin” TR, Works, 5.184.

  53 The Nation noted 22 Sept. 1910.

  54 he intended to Theodore Roosevelt and Edmund Heller, Life-Histories of African Game Animals, 2 vols. (New York, 1914).

  55 Lloyd Griscom arranged TR, Letters, 7.135; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 516–21.

  56 Covers were laid Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 517, 522–25; Patricia O’Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House (New York, 2005), 107–8. TR wrote Henry Cabot Lodge afterward, confirming that WHT had raised the subject of the convention. He quoted the President as saying that “Barnes and Company were crooks, and that he hoped we would beat them.” TR, Letters, 7.135.

  57 To Roosevelt’s annoyance TR told Ray Stannard Baker that he felt that WHT and his aides had entrapped him. “It happened once: but never again!” Baker, notebook K, 155 (RSB).

  58 “If you were” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 524.

  59 “Twenty years ago” Bishop, TR, 2.304.

  60 Now here he was The New York Times, 27 Sept. 1910; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 35ff.

  61 He did it by exuding New York Evening Post, 27 Sept., The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1910.

  62 He soothed it Ibid.; TR, Letters, 7.176.

  63 “We are against” The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1910.

  64 He paced the stage Davis, Released for Publication, 224–25. Writing about fourteen years after the event, Davis claimed that his editors in New York, unaffected by TR’s onstage personality, had found the speech itself too “dull and prosaic” to print. Davis remembered wrongly: it was published in full by The New York Times on 28 Sept. 1910.

  65 “Theodore,” said Elihu Root Overheard by William N. Chadbourne. Chadbourne interview, Apr.–May 1955 (TRB).

  66 “If it means” Elihu Root to Willard Bartlett, 1 Oct. 1910 (WB).

  67 “It shows an utter” The New York Times, 29 Sept. 1910. Two days earlier, the New York Evening Post described TR as “the big, overshadowing, indisputable ‘it’ of this gathering.”

  68 “I do not think” Davis, Released for Publication, 225–26.

  69 “We have got” Literary Digest, 8 Oct. 1910.

  70 Home at Sagamore Hill Baker, notebook K, 153–57, 4 Oct. 1910 (RSB). Elihu Root’s response when Stimson reported that TR meant to take no future part in politics was “Bet you a dollar.” Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston, 1960), 136–38.

  71 “The time to beat” Mowry, TR, 154.

  72 Roosevelt spent Davis, Released for Publication, 263; Baker, notebook K, 173, 8 Oct. 1910 (RSB).

  73 On 22 October Charles C. Goetsch, Essays on Simeon Baldwin (West Hartford, Conn., 1981), 83–86, 142.

  74 “So far as I am aware” Goetsch, Simeon Baldwin, 85, 151–52.

  75 “When I’m mad at a man” Sullivan, Our Times, 3.232. In a letter to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 4 June 1930, Sullivan quotes TR as saying something almost identical to him (SULH).

  76 In an open letter The New York Times, 25 Oct. 1910.

  77 fellow-servant defense This argument, in tort suits prior to the establishment of workers’ compensation law, was based on the assumed liability of fellow employees, not their employer, for on-the-job accidents.

  78 In a return Goetsch, Simeon Baldwin, 153–56.

  79 “the felt necessities” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 5.

  80 “One thing always” TR, Letters, 7.162.

  81 “stewards for the public good” Goetsch, Simeon Baldwin, 99.

  82 two thousand words long TR’s letter to Baldwin is printed in TR, Letters, 7.149–52.

  83 Even in 1881 Morris, The Rise of TR, 118–19.

  Biographical Note: An essay by Robert B. Charles corrects the received idea, in the above and other Roosevelt biographies, that TR’s youthful legal studies were perfunctory. Charles discovered seven volumes of manuscript notes in the Columbia Law School Library that, in his words, “indicate that TR studied law with vigor.” Painstakingly organized and lucidly written over a period of two years, the notes total 1,189 pages and “lay a foundation for the belief that TR’s study … was broad, systematic, regular, [and] intended to prepare him for private practice.” Charles quotes a classmate’s description of TR: “He was very quick in comprehension, very articulate in examination, and the most rapid and voluminous reader of references in the school.” (Robert B. Charles, “Theodore Roosevelt, the Lawyer,” in Naylor et al., TR, 121–39.) See also Charles’s more extensive survey, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Study of Law: A Formative Venture.” (Unpublished ts. [TRC].) For an appreciation of TR’s judicial philosophy by Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 542, 737–38.

  84 “I shall waste” Goetsch, Simeon Baldwin, 159. With that, Baldwin privately retained as his counsel Alton B. Parker of New York. Parker could be relied on to go after Roosevelt with vigor, having been defeated by him in 1904 for the presidency of the United States. See also TR’s pre-election summary of his anti-constructionist views on the Constitution in The Outlook, 5 Nov. 1910.

  85 “Darn it, Henry” TR quoted in Stimson’s obituary, The New York Times, 21 Oct. 1950. TR’s spiritual and physical weariness in early Nov. 1910 is documented by Hamlin Garland in Companions on the Trail: A Literary Chronicle (New York, 1931), 451–53.

  86 The first Socialist Victor L. Berger.

  87 For the Republican Hechler, Insurgency, 187; B
utt, Taft and Roosevelt, 556.

  88 Roosevelt, in contrast TR, Letters, 7.156n. A cartoon by Jay Darling in the Des Moines Register showed Roosevelt attempting to drag the camel of New York politics through the eye of the needle of reform, while representatives of Wall Street, Tammany Hall, and the Old Guard hung heavily on its tail. Literary Digest, 19 Nov. 1910.

  89 Less than five months John Langdon Heaton, The Story of a Page: Thirty Years of Public Service and Public Discussion in the Editorial Pages of the New York World (New York, 1913), 336; Literary Digest, 19 Nov. 1910.

  90 “I am glad” EKR to KR, 31 Oct. 1910 (KRP).

  91 Only one journalist Sullivan, Our Times, 4.447.

  92 He suggested Ibid., 4.453–54.