Colonel Roosevelt (140 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
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; Butt,
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.
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).
6: N
OT A
W
ORD
, G
ENTLEMEN
1
Epigraph
Robinson, C
ollected 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).
