Colonel Roosevelt

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Colonel Roosevelt Page 101

by Edmund Morris


  24 Roosevelt still talked Ibid., 334–35.

  25 He allowed Judge Elbert The New York Times, 19, 21 (editorial), and 22 Dec. 1915.

  26 “Behind it all” Leary, Talks with T.R., 49–50.

  27 “I dislike” Ibid., 51.

  28 When Roosevelt stepped The following account is based on Louis Achille, Visite de M. et de Mme. Roosevelt à la Martinique, 22 février 1916 (Fort-de-France, 1916), 1–14. Previously the Roosevelts had toured the islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. Kitts, Antigua, Guadeloupe, and Dominica, where TR was hailed (as he had been in British East Africa) as the “King of America.” The New York Times, 8, 4 Mar. 1915.

  29 Roosevelt had been the first Achille, Visite, 1–3. For the happy effect of the Mont Pelée eruption on TR’s plans for a Panama Canal, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 113.

  30 “Je vois que” Achille, Visite, 6.

  31 the governor recalled Ibid., 8–9.

  32 Vous nous donnez Ibid., 9. In reply, TR, speaking in French, said again how profoundly touched he had been to see Martinique’s young men preparing to fight for the rights of small as well as great nations. He raised his glass in salute: “Mesdames, Messieurs, je bois à la santé de la France toujours glorieuse et bientôt victorieuse.” Ibid., 13–14.

  33 After visiting For an account of this episode, see TR’s essay “A Naturalist’s Tropical Laboratory,” in TR, Works, 4.255–72. Beebe’s tribute to TR, “The Naturalist and Book-Lover: An Appreciation,” is printed as an introduction to this volume.

  34 No less a GOP The New York Times, 2 Mar. 1916. Gardner was also an outspoken advocate of preparedness. For more on his current political maneuverings, which greatly annoyed TR, see TR, Letters, 8.1034–35.

  35 They spent an afternoon TR, Works, 4.278–82.

  36 I MUST REQUEST Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 429–31; The New York Times, 10 Mar. 1916. The full text of TR’s cable is reprinted in TR, Letters, 8.1024–26.

  37 A joke went around Mowry, TR, 346.

  38 a surprise bestseller George H. Doran, Chronicles of Barabbas, 1884–1934 (New York, 1935), 217. Doran’s royalty statement to TR, 16 Oct. 1916, shows 12,128 copies of the original edition sold in North America (TRP). In mid-1916, according to Doran, the retail magnate Walter Scott underwrote a mass-market edition of Fear God at 50 cents a copy. The entire 100,000-copy print run sold out. The book was also published in Great Britain.

  39 “In America” Karp, The Politics of War, 222.

  40 Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid The raid occurred on 9 Mar. 1916, the same day TR issued his “Trinidad statement.” Mexican bandits had earlier, on 10 Jan., massacred 16 Texan businessmen en route to San Ysabel. WW declined military revenge, arguing that the Texans traveled at their own risk.

  41 “another Wilson” TR, Letters, 8.1026.

  42 mass of mail TR’s boom in the spring of 1916 increased his mail receipt to 1,000 letters a day. TR, Letters, 8.1039.

  43 “I don’t know” Edwin Arlington Robinson to KR, 23 Feb. 1913 (KRP).

  44 The Roosevelts had EKR to KR, 20 Jan. 1913 (KRP); Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (New York, 2007), 313–14. For a recent sampling of Robinson’s work, perceptively introduced, see Robert Mezey, ed., The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1999).

  45 He confessed The note has been lost, but its content may be extrapolated from TR’s reply, and the known circumstances of Robinson’s life.

  46 “Your letter” TR, Letters, 8.1024. TR added that he had used some lines of Robinson as the epigraph to A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. See TR, Works, 20.3.

  47 After that, from everywhere Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Man Against the Sky (New York, 1916), 97.

  48 Robinson had long ago Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Town Down the River (New York, 1910), 125–29; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 392.

  49 The title poem Robinson, who was habitually self-mocking when commenting on his own work, joked that the purpose of this apocalyptic 300-line poem, one of the most difficult in the American canon, was “to cheer people up.” He added more seriously that he meant also “to indicate the futility of materialism as a thing to live by—even assuming the possible monstrous negation of having to die by it.” (To Albert R. Ledoux, 2 Mar. 1916 [EAR].) An earlier letter to Lewis Isaacs, written at the time of the poem’s composition (30 Aug. 1915), refers to the German threat to civilization, and another (6 Jan. 1916) makes plain his continuing awareness of TR as a force redux in American life: “Tell Marian [MacDowell] that if she keeps on hating me hard enough she will probably get over it in time—just as others are getting over hating the Colonel” (EAR).

  Images of the antithesis between mindless materialism at home and a distant Gotterdämmerung threatening the whole world, along with multiple references to “gods” and “gifts,” recur throughout The Man Against the Sky, arguably Robinson’s greatest cycle of poems. TR praised it highly in a letter to KR, 31 Mar. 1916 (KRP). For critical studies of the book, see R. Meredith Bedell, “Perception, Action, and Life in The Man Against the Sky,” Colby Library Quarterly, 11 (Mar. 1976), and Robert S. Fish, “A Dramatic and Rhetorical Analysis of ‘The Man Against the Sky’ and Other Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1970).

  50 They met in New York TR, Letters, 8.1029; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.200–201. For a detailed account of the lunch, see Jessup, Elihu Root, 2.344–47.

  51 The New York Times See Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 232–45, for the intraparty TR boom in 1916.

  52 Pancho Villa’s raid The New York Times, 16 Mar. 1916. Fortunately for his future career, Pershing had by this time managed to euphemize his original nickname of “Nigger Jack,” awarded to him when he commanded a regiment of black cavalry in the Indian Wars. Cowley, The Great War, 415.

  53 “into the Ewigkeit” TR to KR, 16 Jan. 1915 (TRC). A cartoon in the New York Sun on 22 Apr. 1916 showed TR, big stick in hand, contemplating the skeleton of a moose. The caption read “Alas poor Yorick.”

  54 But his boom Mowry, TR, 342–43; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 244–45; The New York Times, 1–10 Apr. 1916; TR, Letters, 8.1028.

  55 “You know, Colonel” The New York Times, 6 Apr. 1916.

  Biographical Note: A comic anecdote by Clara Barrus conveys TR’s tempestuous vigor at this time. On 4 Apr., “fairly bursting with energy and good cheer,” he attended a reception at the salon of the society painter Princess Elisabeth Lwoff-Parlaghy (a world-class eccentric in her own right, and something of a German appeaser). Having “talk[ed] his way through other people’s talk like a snow-plow going through a snow-bank,” TR bade adieu to the princess and began to descend to street level. “He halted abruptly on the steps, his eye arrested by the portrait of Andrew Carnegie which hung above the stairway. Shaking his fist close to the painted face, he exclaimed through his teeth, ‘You look just like what you are—you damned old pacifist!’ And down the stairs he bolted—the solemn, foreign-looking liveried flunkeys standing aghast at the explosion.… The perturbed princess almost screamed her query, ‘Wh—what was that he said?’ And when somebody repeated the remark without any elision, [she], speaking no word, said much in her quickened breath and dilating nostrils.” (Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. [New York, 1925, 1968], 2.230–31.)

  In the fall of 1918, Princess Lwoff asked TR to pose for what was to be his last portrait. Privately owned and held by the American Museum of Natural History, it is reproduced on the cover of this biography.

  56 The attack on Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 385

  57 On 18 April The New York Times, 19 Apr. 1916.

  58 a “town meeting” Ibid.

  59 Wilson entered Atlanta Constitution, 20 Apr. 1916; speech transcript in The New York Times, 20 Apr. 1916.

  60 ferryboats like the Sussex The sinking of the Sussex impoverished the world by more than the loss of a few American lives. Among many others drowned was the great Spanish composer Enrique Granados, whose op
era Goyescas had just been produced at the Metropolitan Opera.

  61 “I hope you” Atlanta Constitution, 20 Apr. 1916.

  62 Roosevelt was one The New York Times, 20 Apr. 1916.

  63 he had lost “He has become, in my judgment, almost wholly an evil influence in public affairs,” Ray Stannard Baker noted on 27 Apr. 1916, “an aggrieved and bitter man [who] belongs in the nineteenth, and not the twentieth century.” Notebook IX.118 (RSB).

  64 “there is in my” TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 24 Apr. 1916 (ARC); The New York Times, 20 Apr. 1916.

  65 Secretary Lansing replied Sullivan, Our Times, 5.132.

  66 “I have been” TR to Fanny Parsons, 30 May 1916 (PAR). For a letter from TR to Ford, considerably gentler than his speech, explaining why he found pacifism “the enemy of morality,” see TR, Letters, 8.1022.

  67 “It matters” Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle (New York, 1945), 287.

  68 “So sincerely” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 392.

  69 was willing to trade As a lollipop, TR let it be known that if elected in November, he would reappoint Elihu Root as his secretary of state. Albert Shaw, “Reminiscences of Theodore Roosevelt,” ms. (ASP).

  70 “All were united” Cecil to Florence Spring Rice, 8 June 1916 (CSR). For an eyewitness account of the Progressive proceedings, see Julian Street, “The Convention and the Colonel,” Collier’s Weekly, 57.5 (1 July 1916). TR characteristically cited this article as “The Colonel and the Convention.” TR, Letters, 8.1085.

  71 The European situation Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 144; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 397.

  72 Roosevelt had once taunted See 70.

  73 “They believed” Cecil to Florence Spring Rice, 8 June 1916 (CSR).

  74 “We all look” Adams, Letters, 5.323.

  75 By nine o’clock Mowry, TR, 351–52. TR’s preference was for Wood, as a preparedness man as committed as himself. He had already privately ascertained that Wood was willing to run. (Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 108.) Lodge he regarded merely as “a stopgap” who could not be nominated, but who would block the boom for Hughes, and then transfer his support back to TR. Thomas Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).

  76 another telegram declining TR, Letters, 8.1062–63.

  77 “Around me” Villard, Fighting Years, 316. See TR, Letters, 8.1074 for the devastated reactions of two Progressives, Thomas Robins and William Allen White.

  78 “Theodore” Robinson, My Brother TR, 303.

  79 With other family TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 16 June 1916 (ARC); Leary, Talks with T.R., 31; Micah 6:8.

  80 His secretary interrupted Leary, notebook 3, 18 June 1916 (JJL). A slightly different version of this conversation appears in Leary, Talks with T.R., 65–69.

  81 “If they were mine” Leary, notebook 3, 18 June 1916 (JJL).

  82 “Now, Theodore” Hermann Hagedorn (eyewitness) in Roosevelt House Bulletin, 6.10 (Fall 1948).

  CHAPTER 24: SHADOWS OF LOFTY WORDS

  1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 17.

  2 As a boy Kermit Roosevelt, Happy Hunting Grounds, 15–16.

  3 In recent years Morris, Theodore Rex, 424; TR, Letters, 8.1064–65; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 388ff.; TR, Letters, 8.887. See Edgar Lee Masters, “At Sagamore Hill” in Starved Rock (New York, 1919), 95ff., for an unforgettable account in verse of being received by TR.

  4 By good rights Robinson, My Brother TR, 324; Robert Frost, North of Boston (New York, 1915), 72. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, herself a published poet (The Call of Brotherhood and Other Poems [New York, 1913]) and officer of the Poetry Society, maintained a salon at her Madison Avenue home for bards visiting New York. TR’s encounter with Frost appears to have taken place in late 1916. For more on TR’s poetic tastes, see TR, Letters, 8.1228, and chap. 2, “The World of Thought,” in Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR.

  5 a severe attack of amnesia Leary, Talks with T.R., 62.

  6 On 26 June The New York Times, 27, 29 June 1916; TR, Letters, 8.1082–23; Leary, Talks with T.R., 52. It was a matter of some concern to the designers of Republican campaign buttons in 1916 that both Hughes and Fairbanks wore old-fashioned beards, as opposed to the smooth, contemporary-looking jawlines of Wilson and his running mate, Thomas R. Marshall. As a cabbie in Chicago remarked at the time of the GOP convention, “Americans had a right to see a man’s chin before being asked to vote for him.” Julian Street, “The Convention and the Colonel,” Collier’s Weekly, 57.5 (1 July 1916).

  7 “I don’t believe” Kenneth C. Kellar, Seth Bullock: Frontier Marshal (Aberdeen, S.D., 1872), 177.

  8 Kermit could try KR did so on 5 July, serving in the Sixth Business Man’s Regiment through 8 Aug.

  9 “The break seems” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 404–5.

  10 Coincidentally David Jones, In Parenthesis (London, 1982), ix, cited in Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 211; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 397–98, 408. The death toll on 1 July 1916 was the highest of World War I. Quite apart from ground fire, the heavy-artillery rate was 60 shells a second.

  11 Roosevelt’s drive to raise The New York Times, 19, 20 June 1916. Bullock informed TR that South Dakota was good for a whole regiment. Kellar, Seth Bullock, 177.

  12 His letter to Baker TR, Letters, 8.1087–88.

  13 “in the event of” Ibid., 8.1091.

  14 memoirs of Baron Grivel Georges Lacour-Gayet, Mémoires du vice-amiral Baron Grivel (Paris, 1914).

  15 “Lafayettes of the Air” Collier’s Weekly, 29 July 1916.

  16 On 4 August The New York Times, 5 Aug., The Washington Post, 6 Aug. 1916; Whitney Museum of American Art, Flora Whitney Miller: Her Life, Her World (New York, 1987), 17. Hereafter Flora.

  17 He admitted TR, Letters, 8.1094; QR to ABR, 28 Dec. 1917 (ABRP). At Plattsburg, QR had been found unfit for rifle service because of defective vision, plus a tendency, when drilling, to toss rather than shoulder arms. John T. McGovern, Diogenes Discovers Us (Freeport, N.Y., 1933, 1967), 233.

  18 His ironic sense ABR found KR annoyingly sassy at Harvard. “Perhaps the main trouble is that he is generally funny and knows it, hence, when he cannot think of anything funny to say, he becomes fresh.” ABR to TR, 14 Nov. 1915 (KRP).

  19 fast-driving boys Three weeks after Flora’s ball, QR was ticketed for speeding by a policeman in Hicksville, Long Island. The New York Times, 25 Aug. 1916.

  20 Flora, who was Flora, passim. See also Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made (New York, 1999).

  21 Archie had briefly paid court QR to Flora Whitney, ca. 25 Oct. 1915 (FWM).

  22 “You get a” QR to KR, 2 Feb. 1916 (KRP).

  23 “We are all” Collier’s Weekly, 29 July 1916.

  24 Secretary Baker was pleased Frederick Palmer, Newton D. Baker: America at War (New York, 1931), 1.283–84.

  25 He told Kermit QR to KR, 2 Feb. 1916 (KRP). A period of hard study was especially desirable for QR, who for reasons best known to himself had devoted his entire Mathematics “A” examination sheet to a poem. (McGovern, Diogenes Discovers Us, 232.) It is reproduced in Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 28ff.

  26 “Roosevelt would be” TR, Letters, 8.1110; The New York Times, 1 Sept. 1916; Barrus, John Burroughs, 2.238.

  27 Quentin Roosevelt returned QR to Flora Whitney, 31 July, 24 Sept. 1917 (FWM).

  28 Roosevelt fretted TR, Letters, 8.1099, 1199, 1101.

  29 “from the bench” Congressional Quarterly, The CQ Guide to American Government (Washington, D.C. 1969), 93. Ironically, WW’s reputation as a “cold” politician was moderated by Hughes’s own icy public persona. When the latter lost his voice in transit across Illinois, Will H. Hays, a member of the RNC, remarked, “Thank God. We have a chance to carry Indiana.” (Thomas Robins interview, n.d. [TRB].) For an account of Hughes’s boxed-in campaign, See S. D. Lovell, The Presidential Election of 1916 (Carbondale, Ill., 1980).

  30 For the sake of Leary, Talks with T.R., 198; The New York Times, 4 Oct. 1917; Irwin, A Hist
ory of the Union League Club, 184–85.

  31 Four days later The New York Times, 8 Oct. 1916.

  32 It cruised into Syracuse Herald, 8 Oct. 1916; The New York Times, 8 Oct. 1916.

  33 He added, smiling Ibid.; Logansport (Ind.) Tribune (AP dispatch), 8 Oct. 1916.

  34 “The first British ship” The New York Times, 8 Oct. 1916.

  35 Throughout the day Newport Mercury, 14 Oct. 1916; The New York Times and Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, 9 Oct. 1916.

  36 President Wilson remained Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, 9 Oct. 1916.

  37 “Now the war” The New York Times, 11 Oct. 1916.

 

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