Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  93 One piece of good news Goetsch, Simeon Baldwin, 163–64.

  94 The governor-elect felt TR, Letters, 7.177.

  95 Gradually Roosevelt TR in The Outlook, 19 Nov. 1910; TR, Letters, 7.148, 163.

  96 And he was pleased On 24 Sept. 1910, Harper’s Weekly appropriated one of TR’s most cherished slogans in praising Wilson’s economic policy as “a square deal to both labor and capital.” Six days later, WW abandoned his lifetime opposition to state regulation of corporations.

  97 On 19 November The New York Times, 20 Nov. 1910; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 562.

  98 “I think you are a trump” TR, Letters, 7.176–77.

  99 That did not stop Amassa Thornton to WHT, 25 Nov. 1910 (WHTP); TR, Letters, 7.128, 135. Hughes had been sworn in as an associate justice on 10 Oct. 1910. TR’s admiration for White derived from the justice’s dissent in Lochner v. New York.

  100 Taft was happy TR, Letters, 7.180, 179; WHT to TR, 30 Nov. 1910 (WHTP). In a further gesture of goodwill, WHT sent EKR a mahogany settee that she had bought for the White House and regretted having to leave behind her. He personally paid for a duplicate settee to be installed in its place. Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 337–38.

  101 Notwithstanding their politesse Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 185, 504–73 passim. Apparently, even the President’s tongue was overweight, causing severe obstructive sleep apnea. For more on the alarming state of WHT’s health in the fall of 1910, see O’Toole, When Trumpets Call, 143–14.

  102 What I now TR to Eleanor B. Roosevelt, 27 Nov. 1910 (TRJP).

  CHAPTER 6: NOT A WORD, GENTLEMEN

  1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 59.

  2 his first attempt at autobiographical writing TR’s 1880 manuscript article, “Sou’-sou’westerly,” was finally published in Gray’s Sporting Journal, 13.3 (Fall 1988).

  3 But to older ears TR, Letters, 7.182, 196; Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 164.

  4 Henry Stimson, a close Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB); EKR diary, 23 Jan. 1911 (TRC).

  5 “You are now” George H. Haynes, The Life of Charles G. Washburn (Boston, 1931), 147.

  6 It had the used The word used is Washburn’s. Details in this paragraph not taken from his eyewitness description are from Baker, notebook K, 153–60 (RSB) and David A. Wallace, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site: Historic Furnishings Report, Vol. 1, Historical Data (Harpers Ferry, Va., 1989), 96ff.

  7 Their breeding showed According to ARL, TR thought that addressing servants by their first names, without an honorific, was demeaning.

  8 “I adhere to” Haynes, Washburn, 147.

  9 Because Roosevelt was TR, Works, 14.ix. Literary Digest referred to TR on 27 Nov. 1915 as “our nineteen-sided citizen.” TR himself remarked that “most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions,” implying that he did not. Harbaugh, TR, 384.

  10 “a changed man” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 579.

  11 “I don’t see” Ibid., 580–81.

  Historiographical Note: The year 1911 marks a climacteric in the life of Theodore Roosevelt. As Taft discerned, he needed philosophy to get through it, and rebuild his political personality while he adjusted to grandfatherhood and the closing-in of middle age. The Roosevelt that emerged from this period was, if not ambivalent about his future course in life, ambiguous enough politically that biographers have never achieved consensus as to whether that course was vainglorious or self-sacrificing. The philosophical historian David H. Burton suggests that this disagreement may be explained in terms of the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty. (“History, Hubris, and the Heisenberg Principle,” Thought, Mar. 1975.) Normally applied to physics, the principle also applies to the tension inherent in any biographical narrative between action and character. Heisenberg held (in Burton’s paraphrase) to “the practical impossibility of simultaneously stating the exact position and momentum of [any] object in question.” When a usually fast-moving man decelerates to near-stasis, as TR did after the election of 1910, it is easy to agree on where and what he is, as a sum of his experiences so far. But “a perfect measurement of position entails less than a perfect assessment of momentum.” Hence, Burton writes, “the perennial problem of historical subjectivity” in chronicling the later life of Theodore Roosevelt. Narrative biographers, preoccupied with “a past which is more or less fixed,” are confused by the non sequiturs of his post-1911 career, which ideological biographers twist into theory, at cost to general understanding. Whether the aging TR indeed brought “hubris” on himself, this biography will attempt to show.

  12 now published in book form TR, The New Nationalism (New York, 1910).

  13 Many progressives Walter Johnson, William Allen White’s America (New York, 1947), 190; TR to KR, 27 Jan. 1915 (TRC).

  14 He knew that they TR, Letters, 7.208, 199; Hechler, Insurgency, 202. La Follette had indeed engineered the League’s creation as a vehicle for himself. Margulies, “La Follette.”

  15 La Follette begged La Follette to TR, 19 Jan. 1911, quoted in Pringle, TR, 549; TR, Letters, 7.163, 181. For an eloquent summary of TR’s political quandary at the end of 1911, see Harbaugh, TR, 372–73.

  16 La Follette wanted Robert M. La Follette, La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison, Wis., 1913), 495–96.

  17 the insurgents’ tendency to overreach “To put it baldly and briefly,” Owen Wister remarked of the referendum and the recall, “they express American impatience.” Wister, Roosevelt, 291.

  18 “I think” TR, Letters, 7.201–2.

  19 Roosevelt praised it Ibid., 7.206.

  20 “a virtual adjunct” WHT quoted in Pringle, Taft, 588.

  21 “to see radicalism” TR to the National Civic Foundation, 13 Jan. 1911, transcript in TRB; Morris, The Rise of TR, 123, 181–82; Hechler, Insurgency, 179–80.

  22 He is a sort Baker, notebook K, 165–66 (RSB).

  23 “If I go down” Davis, Released for Publication, 206.

  24 other progressive writers See, e.g., TR to Benjamin B. Lindsay, in TR, Letters, 7.298. TR openly used the pages of The Outlook to help Lindsay fight for child labor law reform in Colorado.

  25 “There is no fake” Hamilton W. Mabie, quoted in Garland, Companions on the Trail, 481.

  26 They knew that TR, Letters, 7.311.

  27 In January alone The Outlook, 11, 21, 28 Jan. 1910.

  28 Roosevelt was pleased Bull, Safari, 166; Charles Scribner to TR, 21 Feb. 1911 (SCR). $28,620 in 1911 equals about $498,000 in contemporary (2010) dollars (Measuring Worth).

  29 “It is a great” TR, Works, 6.458, 460.

  30 It styled itself John Hays Hammond, The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond (New York, 1935), 615.

  31 The word judicial Ibid., 613. Root had just been appointed a member of the Hague court of arbitration by WHT. He was also president of the Carnegie Endowment. For Root’s moderating influence on TR’s forceful foreign policy inclinations, see James R. Holmes, “Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root: International Lawmen,” World Affairs, 169.4 (Spring 2007).

  32 “If we do not” Pringle, Taft, 2.39.

  33 a word that the dictionary The 1910 edition of Webster’s Practical Dictionary helpfully defined righteous as “According with, or performing, that which is right.”

  34 A case in point TR, Letters, 7.243.

  35 “I most earnestly hope” Ibid., 7.243–44.

  Chronological Note: TR’s mention of Japan as a possible belligerent was prompted by a current severe strain in U.S.-Japanese relations. The divisive issue was the perennial one of repressive measures directed against Orientals living, or seeking to live, in California, Oregon, and Washington. TR considered this exclusionary policy “necessary and proper,” at least in regard to immigration. He admired the Japanese for their martial qualities, but “they are utterly cold-blooded where their own interest is concerned.” They were more likely, he felt, to attack the Asian mainland before they ever took o
n the United States. But, as he had prophetically remarked two years before, the U.S. Navy must never allow its Pacific fleet to become vulnerable. “If the Japanese could sink it, as they did the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, they could land a quarter of a million men on our [west] coast and it would take us several years and cost us an enormous sum in men and money to dislodge them.” TR, Letters, 7.239; TR to E. Alexander Powell, ca. 28 Mar. 1909, quoted in Powell, Yonder Lies Adventure, 318.

  36 “My brigade commanders” TR, Letters, 7.244.

  37 Edith saw no prospect EKR (writing en route) to Cecil Spring Rice, 5 Apr. 1910 (CSR). She added, however, “I wish I could tell you of all the men who beg to follow him to fight Japan or Mexico or anyone!”

  38 Roosevelt rolled on TR, Letters, 7.245; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 605–6.

  39 He pressed The New York Times, 19 Mar. 1911.

  40 “The Panama Canal I naturally” Stenographic transcript of TR’s speech, from his own typescript, reproduced in University of California Chronicle, Apr. 1911, and quoted in James F. Vivian, “The ‘Taking’ of the Panama Canal Zone: Myth and Reality,” Diplomatic History, 4 (Winter 1980).

  41 He had come to Berkeley EKR to Cecil Spring Rice, 5 Apr. 1910 (CSR); Horace M. Albright (eyewitness), “Memories of Theodore Roosevelt,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Winter 1987. TR’s five Earl Lectures at the Pacific Theological Seminary were published as Realizable Ideals (San Francisco, 1912), and reprinted in TR, Works, 15.575ff.

  42 Roosevelt was referring Morris, Theodore Rex, 84–85, 112–14.

  43 The revolution, he joked Vivian, “The ‘Taking’ of the Panama Canal Zone.”

  44 What his script said See the survey of reportage in ibid.

  45 If I had followed TR quoted in The New York Times, 24 Mar. 1911.

  46 cheated of its expectations See Morris, Theodore Rex, 271–97.

  47 agreed with Senator Root Undated speech draft ts., ca. May 1914 (PCK). Knox inserted the adverb practically by hand. He also altered the second sentence, deleting a direct reference to TR. As originally drafted, it read, “We did not take it from Colombia, we took it from the Panamans [sic], and it may be this was the sense in which Colonel Roosevelt made the statement that he took Panama.” Knox accepted that Colombia had suffered “serious damage” in the revolution of 1903, while “corresponding benefits accrued to us.” Quite apart from financial gains, the United States got “sovereignty and jurisdiction over a 10-mile zone in a dependent country,” hitherto tied to Bogotá. The United States therefore had a “moral” right to compensate Colombia “not for what she lost but what we gained.”

  48 the fuss his “boast” had caused A bitterly critical 1911 pamphlet, “I Took the Isthmus,” is preserved in the Pratt Collection at TRB. TR remained unapologetic about his speech at Berkeley. Vivian, in the essay cited above, strives to absolve him of indiscretion. But TR was always quick to correct misreports of his remarks, and his silence during the ensuing controversy seems significant. It is possible, as Vivian says, that “I took the Canal Zone” may have been a verbal slip (TR’s script is marked “read”). But a year later, TR firmly wrote, “In 1903 I took Panama” on the proof of an article submitted to him by Lawrence F. Abbott. See the facsimile in Abbott, Impressions of TR, 62. His handwriting speaks for itself, as does a sentence in his autobiography, “I took Panama without consulting the Cabinet.” See also TR, Works, 22.623, and TR to Albert Cross, 4 June 1912 (“I know plenty of people who … opposed the taking of the Panama Canal”), TR, Letters, 7.554. There is a further reference to “our taking … the Panama zone” in TR, Letters, 7.854.

  49 He had other priorities For TR’s appearance in Madison on behalf of La Follette, during which he privately expressed his disillusionment with WHT, see Belle and Fola La Follette, Robert M. La Follette, 2 vols. (New York, 1953), 1.327–29.

  50 Qui plantavit curabit “He who has planted will preserve,” TR’s family motto. In a long, ruminative letter to Lady Delamere, written before starting west, TR noted that he had enjoyed more years of power than either Hamilton or Lincoln. “For the last century none of the men who reached the summit had careers that lasted longer—I mean careers in the maturity of their success.” The letter is reproduced in Lord Charnwood, Theodore Roosevelt (Boston, 1923), 251ff.

  51 Old friends were not Bryce to Sir Edward Grey, 5 Apr. 1911, in Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 14.284; EKR to Cecil Spring Rice, 5 Apr. 1911 (CSR). Bryce compared TR’s political position, “mutatis mutandis, to that held in England by Mr. Gladstone from 1875 to 1880.” A suspicious Robert La Follette reached even further back in Victorian imagery to describe TR’s intentions regarding himself: “He is willing to have someone do the Light Brigade, stop Taft, and get shot.” Margulies, “La Follette.”

  52 He sought to please Stimson would not accept his appointment until he had talked it over with TR. (Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 655.) Many years later, he confirmed that he and Fisher had been appointed as “a sop to the progressives.” Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB).

  53 But Roosevelt felt James Garfield diary, 17 Feb. 1911 (JRGP).

  54 “up to the North Pole” The Washington Post, 15 Feb. 1911; Pringle, Taft, 592. For TR’s increasing doubts about Canadian reciprocity, see TR, Letters, 7.241, 297.

  55 On Capitol Hill The New York Times, 9, 23 Apr. 1911.

  56 “Not a word, gentlemen” The New York Times, 17 Apr. 1911.

  57 If anyone was James Garfield diary, 22–23 May 1911 (JRGP). At this time, WW was in the midst of his first, highly successful national speaking tour, espousing a progressive agenda that (apart from some unapologetic Bible-thumping) could have been written by TR. See August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York, 1991), 231–35. TR himself had been impressed with WW as a presidential possibility since early in the year. Johnson, William Allen White’s America, 192.

  58 a signed editorial TR, “The Arbitration Treaty with Great Britain,” The Outlook, 20 May 1911.

  59 a series of arbitration treaties Pringle, Taft, 738–41; TR, Letters, 7.296.

  60 “Personally, I don’t see” Pringle, Taft, 738–39.

  61 Roosevelt’s hottest language E.g., “Sentimentality is as much the antithesis and bane of healthy sentiment as bathos is of pathos.” TR, Works, 4.224.

  62 “The United States ought” TR, “The Arbitration Treaty with Great Britain,” The Outlook, 20 May 1911.

  63 a jubilee in Baltimore Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 672–74; William Manners, T.R. and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party (New York, 1969), 210. “They can investigate me until they are black in the face,” TR told John C. O’Laughlin on 2 June (OL).

  64 Taft advised him TR, Letters, 7.290; The New York Times, 7 June 1911.

  65 Roosevelt denied The New York Times, 7 June 1911; Harbaugh, TR, 374.

  66 “this huge big storm cloud” The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 6.444–45.

  67 escape the cataclysm In 1911, General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s book Deutschland und der Nächtse Krieg (Germany and the Next War) was published to enormous acclaim in Germany. This influential book persuaded citizens of the Reich that war was a “biological necessity,” creative as well and destructive, and therefore “an indispensable factor of culture.”

  68 Roosevelt believed TR to Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, quoted in Tyler Dennett, Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War (New York, 1925), 1.

  69 it reawakened moral fervor See, e.g., TR’s reaction to a speech by WHT in praise of pacifism. “Taft … committed himself without any qualification to the proposition that in any internecine or international war, the sorrow and the harm caused far outweighed any possible good that was ever accomplished.” (TR, Letters, 7.289.) See also TR’s address to the Sorbonne, 47.

  70 friends felt their gorges rise See, e.g., Elmer Ellis, Mr. Dooley’s America: A Life of Finley Peter Dunne (New Yo
rk, 1941), 171.

  71 He used the strongest TR, Letters, 1.509; New York World, 31 May 1911; TR to Hiram P. Collier, Letters, 7.281.

  72 Taft remarked WHT to Philander Knox, 9 Sept. 1911, quoted in Pringle, Taft, 748.

  73 There is nothing TR, Works, 5.227–28.

  CHAPTER 7: SHOWING THE WHITE FEATHER

  1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 55.

  2 He had flabbergasted his parents The New York Times, 5 June 1911. QR’s surviving school reports for 1910–1914, preserved at Sagamore Hill, show that he regularly stood first in his class.

  3 Always precocious Earle Looker, The White House Gang (New York, 1929), passim; TR, Letters, 7.235, 468.

  4 Archie, Quentin’s former TR to E. Alexander Powell (“My son Archie, a boy with a wooden head”); Powell, Yonder Lies Adventure, 310; TR, Letters, 7.261; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 321, 367. TR tutored ABR in history and civics, EKR in French. TR, Letters, 7.315.