Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  25 ptomaine poisoning TR injudiciously ate lobster salad at an inland restaurant on 1 May, and the following evening, addressing a Liberty Loan rally in Boston, was overcome with violent abdominal pain and nausea. “He came near to having to leave the platform,” his host for the night recalled, “and only finished by one of those incredible acts of will, recalling the Hatha Yoga of India, by which he habitually … ignored physical pain and disability.” Before going to bed, TR dosed himself with one of his favorite medicines, ammonia. William Sturgis Bigelow to Hermann Hagedorn, 23 May 1919 (HH).

  26 Look now QR, “The Greatest Gift,” ms., ca. 1918 (TRC).

  27 “There is no” TR to Edith Wharton, 15 Aug. 1918 (EW); TR, Letters, 8.1403.

  28 Only those are fit TR, “The Great Adventure,” Metropolitan magazine, Oct. 1918. The article was prepublished in newspapers on 17 Sept. 1918, and is reprinted in TR, Works, 21.263ff.

  29 His tribute degenerated TR, Works, 21.266–67.

  30 Much more expressive Charles Lee interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, c. 1919, TRB.

  31 the Roosevelts declined TR, Letters, 8.1381; Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 203. The grave, which was elaborately rebuilt by the French after Chamery was retaken, no longer exists, since QR’s remains were transferred after World War II to the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. However, a roadside fountain in the village, installed by his mother, perpetuates QR’s memory, and the field where he died speaks for itself. Chamery is located on the modern D14 north of Jaulgonne-sur-Marne, between Cierges and Coulonges.

  32 Every cent would go TR, Letters, 8.1363–66.

  33 One of the movies The Fighting Roosevelts, directed by William Nigh, was released in 1919.

  34 On 4 September The New York Times, 5 Sept. 1918; TR, Letters, 8.1368.

  35 Archie had become EKR to ERD, “Wed.” [4 Sept.] 1918, photograph enclosed (ERDP); The New York Times, 3 Sept. 1918. ABR was still undergoing therapy at this institution four months later. The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1919.

  36 he had become addicted For an analysis of this phenomenon, see Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 232.

  37 “Fall has come” TR to KR, 13 Sept. 1918 (WFM).

  38 plenty of honor Richard Derby was also awarded a Croix de Guerre in 1918.

  39 “The Colonel sat” Rinehart, My Story, 260. This was on 16 Sept. 1918.

  40 he would tour The Liberty Loan campaign used hundreds of traveling celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford) to publicize and sell low-yield bonds for the prosecution of the war.

  41 On the twenty-eighth Leary, notebook 9 (JJL); TR to KR, 13 Sept. 1918 (KRP).

  42 As he traveled EKR to KR, 22 Sept. 1918 (KRP). The date of syndication was 17 Sept. 1918. (Bishop, TR, 2.458.) TR’s most recent royalty statement from Scribners totaled only $365. Charles Scribner to TR, 19 Sept. 1918 (SCR).

  43 “It’s pretty poor” TR to Belle Roosevelt, 27 Oct. 1918 (ABRP).

  44 On his way home Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, 410.

  45 “Have you got” Ibid., 473.

  46 He arrived back ERD to Richard Derby, 30 Oct. 1918 (ERDP).

  47 If the two physicians See below, 725.

  48 “restoration of peace” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 481.

  49 a bloody mess The American army took “three weeks and 100,000 casualties to achieve what Pershing … had thought they could do in a single day.” Cowley, The Great War, 427–29.

  50 “I regret greatly” The New York Times, 13 Oct. 1918.

  51 Similar statements Cowley, The Great War, 430; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 483; Strachan, The First World War, 324.

  52 Following up, Roosevelt TR, Letters, 8.1380–81.

  53 The President, goaded Warren (Pa.) Evening Times, 26 Oct. 1918.

  54 He had hated [Gilbert], The Mirrors of Washington, 34–38.

  55 Roosevelt sniffed Longworth, Crowded Hours, 274.

  56 “queer feelings” ERD to KR, 27 Oct. 1918 (KRP).

  57 Jokingly, he TR, Letters, 8.1383; Leary, Talks with T.R., 76.

  58 “I can see” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 428.

  59 A well-wisher The New York Times, 29 Oct. 1918. TR later learned that on his birthday, Hamilton Coolidge had been killed in action, leaving behind an unfinished memoir of QR. See Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 213ff.

  60 Carnegie Hall was crammed The New York Times, 29 Oct. 1918.

  61 He spoke for more Ibid. This was not, as some accounts have claimed, TR’s last speech. He spoke again (with ABR) to a Boys’ Victory Mobilization meeting in Manhattan on 1 Nov., and returned to Carnegie Hall the next night to address the benefit for Negro War Relief.

  62 Over the next EKR to KR, 2 Nov. 1918 (KRP); Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 422.

  63 learning from newspapers Cowley, The Great War, 430; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 520; Syracuse Herald, 5 Nov. 1918.

  64 On election day The New York Times, 6 Nov. 1918; TR, Letters, 8.1397.

  65 “If I had been” Quoted in John H. Richards interview (HP). See also TR, Letters, 8.1396.

  66 Flat on his back TR, Letters, 8.1390; Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 111–13.

  67 Around three o’clock The New York Times, 12 Nov. 1918.

  68 Steam whistles Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 200; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.520–25; The New York Times and New York Tribune, 12 Nov. 1918.

  69 Dr. John H. Richards The New York Times, 12, 14 Nov. 1918.

  70 On 21 November Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 202.

  71 After some chat Ibid., 202–3.

  72 Garland came back EKR to KR, 24 Nov. 1918 (KRP); Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 204.

  73 Edith, Roosevelt said Ibid. The idea of doing something about QR’s grave nevertheless continued to haunt TR. On 3 Dec. he wrote Ted to ask if French authorities would let him buy the field himself, and perhaps inter there the bodies of “two or three others like Ham Coolidge.” (TR, Letters, 8.1411.) Nothing came of this plan.

  74 and a weak choice Hammond, Autobiography, 640. Even Colonel House, who was a delegation member along with White, Robert Lansing, and General Tasker H. Bliss, thought that WW should have sent a team consisting of three Democrats plus Root and WHT. Ibid., 639.

  75 Roosevelt was mostly Nevins, Henry White, 350ff.; Biddle, The Whitney Women, 49; TR, Letters, 8.1400. During his three-month spell of illness beginning in early Oct. 1918, TR dictated 22 articles for the Kansas City Star, plus others for Metropolitan magazine and a review for American Museum Journal of Leo G. Miller’s In the Wilds of South America. (“A Faunal Naturalist in South America,” TR, Works, 24.525–29.) The period also saw the publication, by Scribners, of the book version of The Great Adventure.

  76 He scoffed TR, Letters, 8.1400. The phrase self-determination was actually borrowed by WW from Lloyd George. Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 421. After the last League advocate left, a perplexed-looking TR remarked, “I want to get along with those fellows and especially Will Taft.…[But] if the League of Nations means that we will have to go to war every time a Jugo Slav wishes to slap a Czecho Slav in the face, then I won’t follow them.” Dr. John H. Richards interview, ts. (HP).

  77 Two of his future Abbott, Impressions of TR, 167; Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Notes and Anecdotes of Many Years (New York, 1925), 149–50.

  78 She was learning QR to ERD, 12 Feb. 1918 (ERDP).

  79 He did what TR, Letters, 8.1415. See also ibid., 8.1396–1411, and TR, “President Wilson and the Peace Conference,” Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, 272–77.

  Biographical Note: TR’s vision of the postwar world included (along with harshly punitive containment of Germany), “a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” But he insisted to an American rabbi that the latter state should have “full religious freedom,” and that American Jews who felt a “kinship” for it, rather than for the United States, should immigrate there and “become emphatically … foreigners.” He also favored an independent Armenia
and Ukraine, although he saw the latter joining Russia. He doubtfully agreed with James Bryce that there was “just a chance” that Arab lands freed from Ottoman oppression might develop a religious toleration to emulate that of Moorish civilization “in the golden days of Baghdad and Cordova.” Germany’s former colonies in Africa should become protectorates of strong powers experienced in colonial administration (Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal), rather than the kind of weak neutrals WW preferred, such as Holland and Sweden. The United States should remain disinterested in this reapportionment: the prime purpose of its defense and foreign policy must be to maintain a republican independence from Old World empires. (TR, Letters, 8.1372–97, 1400.) See also Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, 241–95.

  79 Except for TR, Letters, 8.1415; John Milton Cooper, “If TR Had Gone Down with the Titanic: A Look at His Last Decade,” in Naylor et al., TR, 500, 511.

  80 “Since Quentin’s death” Bishop, TR, 2.468; White, Autobiography, 548–49. According to White, TR’s “rather radical” article draft called for an eight-hour day, old age pensions, and social insurance. It does not appear to have survived.

  81 “I tell you” Stanley Washburn Papers, Library of Congress.

  82 Roosevelt woke The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919. Reviewing TR’s final illness, this article refers to him suffering “from [a] pulmonary embolism at the Roosevelt Hospital three weeks ago,” i.e., mid-Dec. 1918. Other newspaper reports suggested it occurred around 4 Dec., but all concur that he was “in a critical condition” for some time.

  83 His temperature shot up Straus, Under Four Administrations, 391. This may have been during “a brief thirty-six hours” attack of “pneumonia” mentioned in Robinson, My Brother TR, 361.

  84 “Poor dear” The New York Times, 6 Dec. 1918 and 7 Jan. 1919; EKR to KR, 15 Dec. 1918 (KRP).

  85 He was buoyed TR, Letters, 8.1416–17.

  86 He would have to Ibid.

  87 “I am pretty low” Chanler, Roman Spring, 202.

  88 He did get better EKR to KR, 24 Dec. 1918 (KRP).

  89 Corinne came in Robinson, My Brother TR, 362.

  90 “Well, anyway” Ibid.

  91 “Don’t do that” Dr. John H. Richards interview, ts. (HP). According to the Roosevelt Hospital’s cautious discharge statement, the Colonel was expected to make a full recovery “in the time ordinarily taken for such cases” of inflammatory rheumatism, and should “be able to take up his usual duties in six weeks or two months.” The New York Times, 25 Dec. 1918.

  92 Alice, Ethel, Archie ERD to Richard Derby, 25 Dec. 1918 (ERDP); TR to KR, 27 Dec. 1918 (TRC).

  93 There was a ERD to Richard Derby, 25 Dec. 1918 (ERDP); ERD to KR, 25 Dec. 1918 (KRP); TR to KR, 27 Dec. 1918 (KRP).

  94 It had been Ethel’s Wallace, Sagamore Hill, 1.62–63.

  95 Propped up in 1918 furniture inventory in Wallace, Sagamore Hill, 1.71 and 335.

  96 Every morning The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919; EKR to KR, ca. 30 Dec. 1918 (KRP).

  97 It may have been ERD to Richard Derby, 31 Dec. 1918 (ERDP). See also Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 208–9.

  98 On New Year’s Day Josephine Stricker to AP, Steubenville (Ohio) Herald-Star, 6 Jan. 1919; Ferdinand C. Iglehart, Theodore Roosevelt: The Man As I Knew Him (New York, 1919), 281.

  99 “We all of us” Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, 292–95.

  Biographical Note: In his final comment on the world situation, TR observed that the concert of powers envisioned by WW was so vague that Germany, Russia, Turkey, and Mexico might believe they were welcome to join it, on equal terms with the United States, Britain, and France. But equality was not a right or a reward. Governments responsible for the recent war would have to earn full membership of the League of Nations, in part by paying “the sternest reparation … for such horrors as those committed in Belgium, Northern France, Armenia, and the sinking of the Lusitania.” Weak or neutral nations should not expect to have a “guiding voice” in the League’s strategic decisions. That was the prerogative of the strong nations who had fought for peace. As perhaps the strongest of the strong in 1919, the United States should henceforth police only its own hemisphere. The “civilized” powers of Europe and Asia would have to control their own forces of disorder. TR was confident that if WW made these strictures clear at the peace table, Clemenceau and Lloyd George would agree. “I believe that such an effort made moderately and sanely, but sincerely and with utter scorn for words that are not made good by deeds, will be productive of real and lasting international good.” (Ibid.)

  100 In a letter TR to George H. Moses, 3 Jan. 1919 (TRP).

  101 The effort of ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP). The following narrative of the events of 4–6 Jan. 1919 is based mainly on primary accounts by EKR and James Amos. These are: EKR to ERD, 3, 4, 5 Jan. 1919 (ERDP); EKR to KR, 6 Jan. 1919 and 25 Mar. 1923 (KRP); EKR to TR.Jr., 12 Jan. 1919 (TRJP); James Amos, “The Beloved Boss,” Collier’s Weekly, 7 Aug. 1926; Amos, Theodore Roosevelt: Hero to His Valet (New York, 1927), 154–58. There are two other near-primary accounts: ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP), and George Syran to Mr. and Mrs. Osbourne, 11 Jan. 1919, privately owned. Minor conflicts of chronology are resolved in favor of EKR’s recall. Individual sources are cited again below only for quotations. For Dr. Fuller’s report to the press, see The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919.

  102 Since none of their James Amos, “The Beloved Boss”; Amos, TR: Hero to His Valet. Amos had left the Roosevelts amicably in the fall of 1913, after more than ten years in their service. He continued, however, to serve them off and on, since TR often hired him as a valet-cum-bodyguard on long railroad trips.

  103 When Amos arrived Amos, “The Beloved Boss.”

  104 two or three letters See, e.g., TR to Edward N. Buxton, 5 Jan. 1919 [in EKR’s handwriting] (ERDP); Cutright, TR, 265; TR, Letters, 8.1422.

  105 correcting the typescript Henry J. Whigham interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, 12 Jan. 1949 (HH). This may have been the last manuscript TR actually touched. After his death a scribbled memo of uncertain date was found on his bedside table: Hays—see him; he must go to Washington for 10 days; see Senate & House; prevent split on domestic policies. (Reproduced in Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 624.) By publishing the memo at the end of TR, Letters, 8, the editors infuse it with a valedictory quality it may not deserve. It is unlikely TR wrote it any time in 1919, in view of the acute rheumatism that attacked his right hand on New Year’s Day.

  106 could not help kissing him ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP).

  107 “As it got dusk” EKR to TR.Jr., 12 Jan. 1919 (TRJP).

  108 They were still together EKR to KR, 6 Jan. 1919 (KRP); ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP).

  109 Leaving the nurse EKR to KR, 25 Mar. 1923 (KRP); ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP). The Orientalist William Sturgis Bigelow, a licensed physician, had recommended morphine to EKR after witnessing TR’s agonies with ptomaine poisoning earlier in the year. See above, 720. “I want you particularly to tell Dr. Bigelow,” she wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “that I did not forget the talk he and I had about the use of morphine, and after he [TR] had had 2 or 3 sleepless nights in succession, we gave him morphine the night before he died so that he was able to go to sleep and forget his pain.” Murakata, “TR and William Sturgis Bigelow.”

  110 Faller assented ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP).

  111 “James, don’t you” Amos, TR: Hero to His Valet, 156.

  112 He had to be George Syran to Mr. and Mrs. Osbourne, 11 Jan. 1919, privately owned. This letter, written only five days after TR’s death and reflecting conversations between Syran, Amos, and “downstairs” staff at Sagamore Hill, preconfirms almost all the details that Amos published eight years later in TR: Hero to His Valet.

  113 “James, will you” Amos, TR: Hero to His Valet, 156.

  114 A small lamp Ibid., 156; EKR to KR, 6 Jan. 1919 (KRP).

  115 “roughling” The word is so spelled by Syran, quoting Amos later
that morning.

  116 Each time he started Interviewed later that day, Amos said he counted five seconds between each of TR’s breaths. New York Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1919.

  117 At four o’clock Amos, TR: Hero to His Valet, 157; EKR to KR, 6 Jan. 1919 (KRP).

  EPILOGUE: IN MEMORIAM T.R.

  1 Theodore Roosevelt’s death certificate Copy in TRC.

  2 two consulting physicians John H. Richards and John A. Hartwell, of the Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

  3 They revealed New York Evening Post, 6 Jan., The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919.

  4 other observers New York Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1919, e.g. Altogether, TR had five narrow escapes from death: his streetcar accident in Sept. 1902, the assassination attempt of Oct. 1912, the septicemia crises of Apr. 1914 and Feb. 1918, and his first embolism attack in Dec. 1918.