NOTES

The names of Roosevelt family members are abbreviated thus in the Notes:

TR	Theodore Roosevelt
EKR	Edith Kermit Roosevelt
ARL	Alice Roosevelt Longworth
TR. Jr.	Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (“Ted”)
EBR	Eleanor Butler Roosevelt (Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.)
KR	Kermit Roosevelt
ERD	Ethel Roosevelt Derby
ABR	Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt (“Archie”)
QR	Quentin Roosevelt

Two other monograms are used: WHT for William Howard Taft, and WW for Woodrow Wilson. Abbreviations denoting collections and repositories are listed above in Archives.

Contemporary (2010) dollar equivalents occasionally appear in parentheses after figures cited for TR’s lifetime. Unless otherwise indicated, these equivalents are taken from the annual CPI/GDP deflator indices posted on Measuring Worth (http://www.measuringworth.com/).

PROLOGUE

Chronological Note: On 23 Mar. 1909, twelve days after handing over the presidency to WHT, TR sailed from Hoboken, N.J., on the SS Hamburg. He used his hat to wigwag, in expert semaphore, “Goodbye and good luck.” Arriving in Naples on 4 Apr., he changed to another German steamship and sailed the following day via the Suez Canal to Mombasa. Disembarking there on 21 Apr., he boarded a special upland train at 2.30 p.m. on Thursday, 22 Apr.

1 Sitting above the cowcatcher This account of TR’s journey to the interior of British East Africa (later Kenya) is based on “Through the Pleistocene,” the first chapter of his book African Game Trails (1910), cited hereafter as vol. 5 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Memorial Edition (New York, 1923–26). Other documentary details come from reports in the East African Standard, 24 Apr. 1909; The Leader of British East Africa, 7 Aug. 1909; and Uganda Railway, British East Africa, a glossy booklet sent by TR to his publisher in 1909 (SCR). Minor descriptive touches derive from the author’s own native background in Kenya.

2 a “Royal” grade East African Standard, 24 Apr. 1909. TR’s great rifle, now privately owned, is illustrated and described in R. L. Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt Hunter-Conservationist, Boone and Crockett Club special edition, Missoula, Mont., 2009, 174–77. This book is an excellent pictorial record of TR’s expeditions.

3 It contrasts with See TR’s essay “The Pigskin Library,” TR, Works, 14.463ff. Forty-six surviving volumes are preserved in TRC, along with the aluminum valise. Matched against “the original list” of titles compiled by TR himself, they project a total of 73 volumes. For the genesis of the library, see Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, My Brother Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1921), 252–53. For TR’s current range of reading, see Biographical Note below, 590.

4 Less disconcerting TR, Works, 5.15–18.

5 “this great fragment” Ibid., 5.5, xxvi.

6 finding again the Dark Continent See Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (rev. ed., New York, 2001), 15.

7 “Doctor,” he had said Ibid., 129.

8 Hustling for votes This distaste for electoral politics, owing much to the corruption of the Gilded Age, was a comparatively recent phenomenon in TR’s immediate family. Several of his ancestors in revolutionary and federal times had been public men. See Carlton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858–1886 (New York, 1958), 3–6.

Biographical Note: Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, whose surname probably derived from a farm, Rosevelt (“Rose Field” on the island of Tholen in Zeeland, Holland), is established as the first American Roosevelt in Timothy Field Beard and Henry B. Hoff, “The Roosevelt Family,” The New York Genealogical and Biological Record, 118.4 (Oct. 1987), 1–2.

9 Not surprisingly Morris, Theodore Rex, 98–99, 180–81; Carl Cavanaugh Hodge, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Transoceanic Naval Arms Race, 1897–1909,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 30.1–2 (Winter–Spring, 2009); Peter Larsen, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Moroccan Crisis, 1904–1906” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), 307–8. For a compact study of TR’s personal style in foreign affairs, see Frederick W. Marks III, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (Lincoln, Neb., 1979).

10 His Nobel In the opinion of a modern expert on foreign policy, TR “approached the global balance of power with a sophistication matched by no other American president.” Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York, 1994), 41.

11 That does not stop him Theodore Roosevelt, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, Elting E. Morison, John Blum, et al., eds., 8 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1951–1954), 1.324. Henceforth TR, Letters.

12 Such are the intellectual TR quoted in memorandum, “Curtis at the Conference,” 20 Aug. 1887 (HKB). TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, 15 Feb. 1887; TR, Letters, 1.509; TR, Works, 5.4. For a typical statement of TR’s philosophy of activism, see TR, “Latitude and Longitude Among Reformers,” Works, 15.379.

13 Having spent much See David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents: A Special Relationship of Friends,” Transactions of the America Philosophical Society, n.s., 63, pt. 2 (1973). Great Britain and Germany had agreed in 1890 to partition inland East Africa, while allowing the sultanate of Zanzibar to continue in control of the coastal strip. Relations between the two protectorates were testy. Britain scored a strategic coup in 1903, when its 584-mile Mombasa–Kisumu railroad opened for business, with the intent of connecting British East Africa to Lake Victoria and the Nile. But the venture was hugely expensive, and looked unlikely ever to pay for itself unless enough white farmers could be coaxed to develop the countryside it traversed. Hence the eagerness of British imperialists to assist TR’s safari, in the hope he would encourage settlement of the Protectorate in his book—seen as a certain international bestseller.

14 “I am the only” TR en route to Africa, ca. 28 Mar. 1909, quoted in E. Alexander Powell, Yonder Lies Adventure (New York, 1932), 319.

15 Fifty-six eminent TR, Works, 5.24–25. The list of gun donors included the Duke and Duchess of Bedford; the Earls of Lonsdale and Warwick; Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India; Sir Edward Grey, British foreign minister; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, historian; and Col. J. H. Patterson, author of The Man-Eaters of Tsavo.

16 Germany’s current arms buildup Just before TR arrived in Mombasa, Austria-Hungary announced that it, too, would be laying down three new dreadnoughts. (The Leader of British East Africa, 10 Apr. 1909.) For a compact account of the British-German “Navy Scare of 1909,” see chap. 33 of Robert Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War (New York, 1991).

17 His safari has generated TR’s financial arrangement with the Smithsonian was that he would pay all safari expenses incurred by himself and KR (about two-fifths of a total estimated cost of $50,000), leaving museum fund-raisers to cover the rest. This presupposed $20,000 from him ($385,000 in today’s [2010] dollars) and $30,000 ($533,000) from his sponsors, but early on it became clear that the safari was going to cost twice as much as he had planned. He was therefore obliged to solicit further funds, including $27,000 ($480,000) from Carnegie. All monetary equivalents are from Measuring Worth (http://www.measuringworth.com/).

18 He wants to show Morris, The Rise of TR, 27; Sylvia Jukes Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (New York, 1980), 23–26; TR to EKR, n.d., ca. 7 Aug. 1909 (KRP).

19 “Jambo Bwana King ya Amerik!” “Greetings, Lord King of America!” Quoted in Bartle Bull, Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure (New York, 1988), 169.

20 the largest safari yet mounted For detailed accounts of the expedition, supplementary to TR’s own, see Bull, Safari, chap. 5, Wilson, TR Hunter-Conservationist, chap. 9, and Tweed Roosevelt, “Theodore Roosevelt’s African Safari,” in Natalie Naylor et al., eds., Theodore Roosevelt: Many-Sided American (Interlaken, N.Y., 1992), 413–32. The size and scope of TR’s safari remains a record in Kenya history.

21 a third term in 1908 TR’s first term must be understood to have been the three and a half executive years he inherited from William McKinley, and his second the four years he won in the election of 1904. In his lifetime, there was no constitutional limit to the number of terms a president could serve.

22 Mount Kenya In 1909, Kenya was spelled Kenia, and denoted only the highlands of British East Africa. Ten years later, the entire region down to the coast was renamed “Kenya Colony and Protectorate.”

23 “If I am where” Robinson, My Brother TR, 251.

24 He has, besides Bull, Safari, 160–63; Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana, Ill., 1985), 26–37, 169–82. TR’s youthful 622-item “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” featuring an impressive collection of Nile bird skins, was accepted by the Smithsonian in 1882. For TR’s conservation record as President, see Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York, 2009). The classic work on the hunter-conservationist paradox is John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, 3rd ed. (Corvallis, Ore., 2001).

25 this highly professional expedition TR, Works, 5.5–6; Kermit Roosevelt, The Long Trail (New York, 1921), 44–45.

26 His son may not qualify KR to EKR, 10 Aug. 1909 (KRP); Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 298. In the early days of the expedition, KR’s title of Bwana Mdogo became Bwana Maridadi (“Master Dandy”), a change not entirely to TR’s liking. However, the mandolin-strumming youth soon won general respect.

27 How Edith Roosevelt feels Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 347–49; EKR to Mrs. William D. Foulke, 7 Apr. 1909, Foulke Papers, Library of Congress.

28 By now she should Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 348; Archibald W. Butt, Taft and Roosevelt: The Intimate Letters of Archie Butt, Military Aide, 2 vols. (New York, 1930), 25.

29 My dear Theodore TR, Letters, 7.3–4.

30 “I am no hanger-on” Ibid., 6.1230.

31 there is one title TR to J. Alden Loring et al. on board SS Hamburg, quoted in Frederick S. Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him: The Personal Recollections of One Hundred and Fifty of His Friends and Associates (Philadelphia, 1927), 221–22. See also Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, A Biography (New York, 1931), 510. On the very day TR quit the White House, he had pleasedly patted the shoulder of a reporter addressing him as “Colonel.” “This man knows how to flatter me.” The New York Times, 6 Mar. 1909.

32 If war ever comes TR’s safari luggage contained a military greatcoat with gold braid round the sleeves. When preparing for his trip, he had to be dissuaded from ordering the elaborate dress uniform of a colonel of cavalry, to wear at formal events on his emergence from the jungle. EKR clinched the matter by threatening to match his outfit with that of a camp follower. (Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 333.) See Whitelaw Reid to TR (“My earnest advice would be not to wear it, since it would certainly attract enormous attention”), 23 Sept. 1908 (WR); Archibald Butt, The Letters of Archie Butt: Personal Aide to President Roosevelt, Lawrence F. Abbott, ed. (New York, 1924); Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 419.

33 “an outrage and an indecency” TR to Roy W. Howard of United Press, 16 Mar. 1909 (TRP). See also TR, Letters, 6.1403–5; Gary Rice, “Trailing a Celebrity: Press Coverage of Theodore Roosevelt’s African Safari, 1909–1910,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 22.3 (Fall 1996).

34 A touch bon marché EKR to KR, 19 Oct. 1917 (KRP). TR’s $50,000 contract in 1909 would be worth $888,000 in 2010. (Measuring Worth) “I think there is such a thing as making too much money out of a given feat,” TR rather embarrassedly wrote Henry Cabot Lodge. (Lodge, Selections, 2.305.) He was also earning $12,000 ($213,000) a year as contributing editor of The Outlook.

35 He rides out to hunt This excursion (24 Apr. 1909) is misdated in TR, Works, 5.27.

Chronological Note: In order to correct some confusion in earlier accounts, the following chronology gives the main dates, major kills, and general itinerary of the Smithsonian–Theodore Roosevelt Expedition. It is based on a compilation of TR’s safari diaries for 1909 and 1910 (TRC and TRB), supplemented by those of KR and F. Warrington Dawson, and articles in the East African newspapers. Capitalized place-names denote bases of operations.

1909

Apr. 21: TR arrives Mombasa; 22: overnight train inland; 23: arrives KAPITI depot.

FIRST SAFARI (5 WEEKS)

Apr. 24: begins to hunt and camp in KITANGA RANCH region; 29: 1st 2 lions. May 2: 2 lions, 1 lioness; 3: Bondini; 5: Kilima Kiu camp; 6: cow eland, rhino near Juja; 9: bull giraffe; 11: Potha camp; 12: visits U.S. Machakos mission; 13: JUJA FARM for 1 week; 16: cow rhino; 16: 1st hippo, Rewero River; 19: Nairobi Falls; 20: Kamiti camp; 21: 1st buffalo; 24: TR charged by buffalo; 25: breaks Kamiti camp; 26: NAIROBI for 8 days; stays at Government House; 27: governor’s reception, dance; 28: moves to McMillan townhouse; 31: dinner Norfolk Hotel.

SECOND SAFARI (7 WEEKS)

June 3: leaves NAIROBI, via U.S. Kijabe mission, en route SOTIK; 5: begins moonlight marches across “the Thirst”; 10: camps on southern Guaso Nyero (5 days); 14: kills lioness; welcomed by Masai; 15: limestone springs camp (9 days); 16: 3 giraffes; 18: rhino, topi, wildebeest; 20: rhino cow, calf; 23: lion; 24: Masai pool camp (3 days); 25: big maned lion; 27: plains camp (6 days); 29: 7 kills, including 1 rhino; 30:

First overseas mail. July 3: breaks camp; begins northward trek to Naivasha; 4: cow rhino; 6: rejoins naturalists at Guaso Nyero; 7: writing day; 11: reaches NAIVASHA; 12: camps on Attenborough Farm (12 days); 13: begins hippo hunting; 16: fever; 20: mass hippo kill; 23: employs Dawson as press secretary; 24: train to NAIROBI for 11-day stay in McMillan townhouse; 25ff: works on correspondence, chapters for Scribners. Aug. 3: dinner in his honor; speech, “Education in Africa.”

THIRD SAFARI (3 WEEKS)

Aug. 4: train via Kijabe mission (stone-laying ceremony) to NAIVASHA for 4 days; 8: leaves for Aberdare range; 11: arrives NYERI; Kikuyu dance welcome; 14: fever; ascends foothills of Mount Kenya; 18: begins elephant hunting; 19: 1st bull elephant; 22: returns NYERI to write.

FOURTH SAFARI (2 WEEKS)

Aug. 25: begins solo, 2-week hunt on the plains; 27: camps on headwater of northern GUASO NYERO; 29: trophy eland. Sept. 3: rejoined by main safari; 4: treks back north to Mount Kenya foothills; arrives MERU BOMA; 5: marching along equator; 7: begins 2-week hunt in and around Boma; 11: elephant bull; 13: elephant cow; 15: N’gouga Crater Lake; 16: rhino; 17: buffalo hunt; 21: safari divides; TR heads for 3-week hunt in GUASO NYERO valley. Oct. 15: arrives back in NYERI; receives mail; 17: crossing Aberdares; 20: returns NAIVASHA; 21: NAIROBI for 4-day stay.

SIXTH SAFARI (5 WEEKS)

Oct. 25: leaves NAIROBI for Londiani; 27: begins March to Mount Elgon highlands; 27: turns 51; 31: arrives UASIN GISHU plateau. Nov. 1: begins 4-week hunt for Victoria Nyanza fauna; giraffe camp; 9: moves to River ‘Nzoi; 9: follows honey-bird; 12: love letter to EKR; 14: meets up with American Museum of Natural History expedition; 15: 3 elephant cows; 18: arrives Lake Sergoi; 20: witnesses Nandi lion hunt; 26: returning to Londiani; 30: arrives Londiani; pays off, dismisses East African safari personnel; to Njoro for 10 days in and around Delamere ranch. Dec. 11: returns NAIROBI to prepare for Uganda safari (1 week).

SEVENTH SAFARI (9 WEEKS)

Dec. 17: farewell dinner; 18: departs NAIROBI by train via Nakuru for Kisumu; 19: arrives Kisumu; overnight steamer voyage across Lake Victoria to Entebbe, Uganda; 20: arrives Entebbe; reception by governor; dedicates mission; 21: in KAMPALA, prepares new safari team for northward trek; 23: begins 13-day march through sleeping sickness country; 28: kills charging elephant.

1910

Jan. 2: crosses Kafu into Unyoro kingdom; 5: arrives Butiaba, on Lake Albert; 7: embarks down White Nile; 8: stops at Wadelai; 9: arrives “Rhino Camp,” Lado Enclave; 10: begins 3-week hunt for white rhino. Feb. 1: hunts hippo; 3: sails on downriver; 4: arrives Nimule; 7: begins 10-day march past White Nile Rapids; 17: arrivesGONDOKORO.

EIGHTH SAFARI (8 DAYS)

Feb. 18: upriver to Rajaf; 19: arrives Rajaf; begins to hunt eland, bongo; 23: 5 bull eland; 26: returns Rajaf, on to GONDOKORO. Mar. 1: down the Nile on Dal for next fortnight; 14: arrives KHARTOUM, pays off remaining safari personnel; returns to public life.

36 his own Dutch surname See Biographical Note above, 582.

37 After two years of drought The Leader of British East Africa, 29 May 1909; TR, Works, 5.27, 23.

38 What he really wants TR, Works, 5.28, 45–46; Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Attractions of Camouflage,” American Art, Summer 1997.

39 Trippa, troppa TR, Works, 5.41 [sic]; Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York, 1913; Library of America, 2004), 251–52. TR quoted entirely from phonetic memory, not sure if his Dutch was correct or not (it wasn’t). A printed words-and-music version of this song in TRB begins, Trippel trippel toontjes, / Kippen in de boontjes. (“Wiggle, wiggle, little toes, / Snug inside their booties.”)

40 By “veldt law” Morris, The Rise of TR, 202–12; TR, Works, 5.29. TR’s 1909 diary from this day on is filled with diagrammatic sketches that meticulously show the order and point of entry of all the bullets that brought down his specimens (TRC). See 20.

41 He follows TR, Works, 5.70–71; TR in The Leader of British East Africa, 7 Aug. 1909.

42 Right in front TR, Works, 5.72–73.

43 He tries to notate Another of TR’s phonetic transcriptions on safari was of the following rendition, by African missionary-school students, of the U.S. national anthem: O se ka nyu si bai di mo nseli laiti / Wati so pulauli wi eli adi twayi laiti silasi gilemi. TR,Works, 5.365.

44 They cluster around TR, Works, 5.76–80; Kermit Roosevelt, The Long Trail, 68. For connoisseurs of hunting chants, TR’s was as follows: Whack! fal, lal, fal, lal, tal, ladeddy; / Whack! hurroo! for Lanigan’s ball. He probably learned the song as a child in 1863, when it was popularized by Bryant’s Minstrels in New York.

45 The firelight glows TR, Works, 5.80.

46 Like a python The general procedure of TR’s safari was to travel (camping frequently en route) for a month or more, before looping back to Kapiti or Nairobi to restock, ship specimens, and communicate with the outside world. Each foray focused on a particular group of museum-desired fauna.

47 As leader TR, Works, 5.459–68. After TR’s death, Charles William Beebe wrote that “he was one of the best field naturalists we have ever had in Africa.” TR, Works, 4.xiii.

48 But his main TR, Letters, 7.8–9, TR; Works, 5.62.

49 He is aware One admittedly “wrought up” description of a tropical storm pleased TR so much that he begged his editor not to delete it. TR, Letters, 7.33–34.

Biographical Note: TR took with him to Africa two custom-made, watertight, antproof steel-frame writing boxes, covered with black bridle leather and sling-strapped for portage. The boxes contained 30 thick manuscript pads, enough for 1,500 pages of copy, with commensurate numbers of carbon sheets and two dozen indelible pencils.

By June 1, he had completed six “chapters” of about 7,000 to 8,000 words each, and had decided on a title for his book: African Game Trails (TR, Letters, 7.16). Robert Bridges, TR’s editor at Scribners, was amazed at the steadiness, promptness, and copiousness of his dispatches. “I have always said that you are the best contributor we had” (Bridges to TR, 24 June 1909 [SCR]).

The Bridges/Roosevelt correspondence in SCR reveals TR’s professionalism as an author. For example, on 17 July 1909, he sends instructions as to how his text may be split or shortened for serialization (“In the book, of course, I want the chapters to appear just as I have written them”), suggests chapter titles and illustrations, indicates the probable subject matter of future installments, and urges early publication in hardcover (“I am told that no less than eight books on hunting and travelling in British East Africa have been or are now being written.… The object of course is to forestall our book.”) He requests a $20,000 contractual payment, suggests a negotiant (F. Warrington Dawson) for French serial and book rights, and repeatedly presses the value of his son’s photographs. “I regard this book as a serious thing,” he wrote in another letter. “I have put my very best into it and I cannot consent to have it appear in any but first class form.” TR to Bridges, 26 Mar. 1910 (SCR).

50 He is an honest writer See, e.g., TR, Works, 5.55: “Generally each head of game cost me a goodly number of bullets; but only twice did I wound animals which I failed to get.… Some of my successful shots at Grant’s gazelle and kongoni were made at three hundred, three hundred and fifty, or four hundred yards, but at such distances my proportion of misses was very large indeed—and there were altogether too many even at short ranges.”

Biographical Note: Asked if he considered himself a good shot, he joked, “No, but I shoot often.” Lord Cranworth, Sir Frederick Jackson, and Bartle Bull have harshly criticized TR for this profligacy. Before losing the sight of his left eye, he had been a good marksman, managing once to put five bullets through the same target hole. But lack of target practice caused him to grow rusty as President—so much so that in 1908, he called in Admiral W. S. Sims, the navy’s ranking gunnery expert, to prepare him for Africa. Sims set up “a little apparatus” on the upper floor of the White House, consisting of a clamped gun firing at a revolving needle at 60-foot range. “We put the President on the machine,” he told a dinner audience long afterward, “and from the point of view of a rhinoceros, he did not shoot for sour apples.” TR’s half-blindness caused him problems in the early stages of his safari, but he shot better with practice, getting about half of his trophies at ranges of 200+ yards. After his death, the professional hunter Stewart Edward White pointed out that target shooting and game shooting are two very different skills. “So far from being a poor shot, [TR] was an exceedingly good game-shot, a much better game-shot than the majority of riflemen.” Sims to Roosevelt Memorial Association, 1926, quoted in “The Story of the Roosevelt Medals,” ts. (TRB); Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 223; Bull, Safari, 173, 180–81; TR, Works, 2.xxiii–xxiv.

51 his indelible pencil A holograph chapter of African Game Trails, still in the original pad, is preserved in TRBU, and an almost complete copy of the original (top-sheet) ms. is in TRC.

52 One copy of each Bibliographical note by R. W. G. Vail enclosed in TRC ms. of African Game Trails; Lawrence F. Abbott, Impressions of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1919), 173–74; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 364ff.; TR, Letters, 7.19–21. It took about a month for one of TR’s envelopes to reach New York. By early July, Scribners already had six chapters in hand. “You can’t imagine how pleased we are to have so much good material in so early,” Robert Bridges wrote him (9 July 1909 [SCR]).

53 As he falls TR, Works, 5.90–91, 187–88, 132–34, 155–56, 163–67. TR’s account of his hunt after buffalo, arguably the most dangerous game in Africa, is modest. “We walked toward them, rather expecting a charge; but when we were still over two hundred yards away they started back for the swamp, and we began firing.” The African hunters with him admitted afterward to feelings of panic as the buffalo massed to charge them on the open plain. TR took command, shouting an order that kept them standing still until the buffalo swerved into the papyrus. “We lost our heads, but the Colonel kept his, and saved us all from certain death.” F. Warrington Dawson, quoting his own diary, 31 May 1909, in “Opportunity and Theodore Roosevelt,” prepublication ts., 35–36 (KRP).

54 In a sudden TR, Works, 5.205–6.

55 But he is looking Ibid., 5.280.

56 Then, curling up Ibid., 5.450; KR diary, 15 July 1909 (KRP). KR photographed this incident.

57 zero at the bone The phrase is Emily Dickinson’s. TR sweated out this and other attacks of chronic fever with the aid of whiskey from Dr. Mearns’s medicine chest—the only alcohol he was seen to take on safari. With quaint precision, he calculated his consumption at “just six ounces in eleven months.” Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 333; TR, Works, 5.450. By May 1915, this had changed in his memory to “seven tablespoons of brandy.” See 278.

58 Although he assures himself TR, Letters, 7.22. Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 38, puts TR’s total as of 20 May 1909 at “some 60 specimens of big game, including about 20 species.” Nine days later, The Leader of British East Africa reported his big-game bag had risen to 86 specimens. TR and KR together shot, by mid-July 1909, 12 lion, 7 rhino, 6 giraffes, 6 topi, 5 buffalo, 4 eland, and 3 hippos, plus numerous other lesser species and an indeterminate quantity of game for food.

59 The trouble with such luck The New York Times commented on a report that TR had shot 18 antelope and 2 wildebeest on his first major hunt: “It really does seem to be a good deal of killing for a faunal naturalist.” William J. Long wrote in the San FranciscoExaminer, “The worst thing about the whole bloody business … is not the killing of a few hundred wild animals … but the brutalizing influence which [such] reports have upon thousands of American boys.” Rice, “Trailing a Celebrity.”

60 scrawled trophy tally For a sample such press release, see TR, 18 June 1909, quoted in Rice, “Trailing a Celebrity.”

61 their avid interest In the case of local reporters, the interest was by no means friendly. Both The Leader of British East Africa (Nairobi) and the East African Standard (Nairobi) were enraged by TR’s press ban. The former felt that it “bode[d] a lack of consideration … not far short of contempt” (24 Apr. 1909).

62 The fact is George Juergens, News from the White House: The Presidential Press Relationship in the Progressive Era (Chicago, 1981), 14–21 and passim. See also TR, Letters, 3.252–53, and Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years (New York, 1939), 151.

63 American editors TR noticed an unusual number of “vacationing” journalists aboard the SS Hamburg when he crossed the Atlantic eastbound in April. TR, Letters, 6.1403. For WHT’s unhappy relationship with the press, see Juergens, News from the WhiteHouse, 91ff.

64 Hence the presence Dawson had met TR at Messina with a letter of recommendation from Henry White, the American ambassador in Paris. He had volunteered his services as TR’s safari press secretary, only to be rebuffed: “You may come with me as far as the African coast, if you promise not to follow me afterward and not to ask for any interviews.” But TR raised no objections when Dawson set himself up as a correspondent covering the safari out of Nairobi: “You see, you happen to be a gentleman.” (Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 11–26.) TR also developed a soft spot for W. Robert Foran of the New York Sun, to whom he extended similar privileges. (TR to Foran, 17 July 1909 [TRP].) Although Foran never became as intimate with the Colonel as Dawson, he followed him for much longer, even chartering a “ghost” safari at the end of 1909 to report on TR’s final expedition down the White Nile. See Bull, Safari, 176.

65 That hippo “bull” TR, Works, 5.214–16; Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 43. Another “joke” image that caused TR some irritation was that of Bwana Tumbu (“Boss with Big Belly”), his supposed nickname among the porters on safari. It appears to have been coined by reporters in the United States.

66 The lake lies almost still TR, Works, 5.216–17.

67 Darkness falls Ibid.; Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 45–48. Dawson describes TR as “in a state of such depression as I have never witnessed in that hardy and optimistic nature … positively haggard.” (Ibid., 48.) See also Dale B. Randall, Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson: The Record of a Friendship (Durham, N.C., 1968), 25.

68 He need not worry The New York Times, 22 July 1909; F. Warrington Dawson diary, 23 July 9, Dawson Papers, Duke University.

69 The letters, dictated Lodge, Selections, 2.330–35; John C. O’Laughlin to TR, 30 July 1909 (OL); Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 37.

70 “Remember that I never” Henry Cabot Lodge, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884–1918 (New York, 1925), 2.344–45. In this same letter, TR writes in response to a forwarded article reviewing his presidency, “It almost frightened me to realize how completely the past was past as far as I was concerned.”

71 He admits Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 58, 63. According to TR, his safari received no periodicals except for occasional ancient issues of the Owego Gazette addressed to Dr. Loring.

72 one startling remark TR, Letters, 7.21 (italics added). See also Allan Nevins, Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy (New York, 1930), 297–99. Dawson may be excused for inattention if this was the day, cited by him afterward, when TR kept him “taking dictation … from 9 in the morning until 2:20 at night, our only pause being meals.” (Randall, Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson, 25.) However, Dawson, in his memoir, exaggerates the extent of his secretarial services to TR. He does not appear to have seen the Colonel again before a family emergency called him home in the early fall of 1909.

73 He is nearer death TR, Works, 5.245. The packthread simile is TR’s.

74 There are no bullets Lodge, Selections, 2.333; TR, Works, 5.414, 244–45. In 1919, Cuninghame was still marveling at TR’s “complete coolness” in a situation of extreme danger (they were surrounded by a rampaging herd of cows and young bulls), not to mention his eccentric behavior afterward. “I never saw a man so boyishly jubilant, waving his hat and dancing about.… Half an hour later, when we were back in camp … he sat down in a chair and began to read Balzac.” R. J. Cuninghame interview, The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1919.

75 Hunters’ etiquette TR, Works, 5.246.

76 Soon they were all splashed Ibid., 5.247.

77 Blood, nakedness Perhaps the most powerful indictment of TR the hunter was penned in 1907 by Rev. William J. Long, whom TR had himself pilloried as a “nature faker” in love with sentimental theories of animal behavior. Replying to the President’s attacks, Long wrote in an open letter, “Who is he to write, ‘I don’t believe that some of these nature-writers know the heart of wild things’? As to that, I find after carefully reading two of his big books, that every time Mr. Roosevelt gets near the heart of a wild thing he invariably puts a bullet through it.” Mark Sullivan, Our Times (New York, 1930), 3.155.

78 “Life is hard and cruel” TR, Works, 5.196. As with ugliness, so with beauty. Warrington Dawson noticed that TR admired even the most peaceful sunset as “action,” a conflict of colors as night vanquished day. Big-game hunting had sharpened the Colonel’s aesthetic awareness, given him “a faculty beyond ordinary faculties, a state of mind distinctly creative and in many ways similar to … the artistic.” Dawson, “Opportunity and TR,” 68.

79 he has already read TR to ERD, 24 June 1909 (ERDP); TR, Works, 14.465, 5.158. TR knew Khayyam’s Rubaiyat in several versions, and complained that the Edward Fitzgerald edition was more realization than translation. He constantly quoted Lewis Carroll, remarking on safari, for example, that he felt “the way Alice did in Looking-Glass country, when the elephants ‘did bother so.’ ” TR, Works, 5.295.

Biographical Note: At the end of his safari TR wrote an essay about his compulsion to read in the wilderness. He cited, from memory, a classical canon including the Bible and Apocrypha, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Theocritus, Euripides, Polybius, Arrian, and Dante’s Divine Comedy (all in translation). In German, he read the Nibelungenlied, plus the poetry of Schiller, Koerner, and Heine. In French, he read the essays of Montaigne, Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Le chevalier des Touches, the elder Dumas’s Les louves de Machecoul and Tartarin de Tarascon, Flaubert’sSalammbô, and Arthur de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines. It is unclear whether he read Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi in Italian, although as President, he did manage Michaelis’s L’Origine degli Indo-Europei. (TR, Letters, 4.795.) He listed the poems of Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Kipling, Browning, Longfellow, Emerson, Poe, and George Cabot Lodge. He did not detail his academic reading, apart from Alexander Sutherland’s The Origin and the Growth of the Moral Instinct, “because as yet scientific books rarely have literary value.” He confessed to an enjoyment of popular fiction, ranging from Harris’s Tales of Uncle Remus to Owen Wister’sThe Virginian and Emily Eden’s The Semi-Attached Couple, but also cited the Finnish historical novels of Zacharias Topelius, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Gogol’s Taras Bulba, reread “because I wished to get the Cossack view of what was described by Sienkiewicz from the Polish side.” See TR, “The Pigskin Library,” Works, 14.463–74. See also the much longer reading list, compiled for Nicholas Murray Butler in 1903. (TR, Letters, 3.641–44.) For an extensive survey of TR the reader, see chap. 2, “The World of Thought,” in Edward Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1958, Guilford, Conn., 2008).

80 His ear for sounds TR, Works, 5.37, 387, 353, 96, 121. TR was amused to hear some Kenyan settlers referring to tree hyraxes as “Teddy bears.” Ibid., 352.

81 One sound falls TR to ERD, 24 June 1919; TR to ABR, 21 Jan. 1910, privately held.

82 He is proud TR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 21 June 1909 (TRC); TR, Letters, 7.30. See also TR’s admiring portrait of KR on safari in TR, Works, 4.120–21.

83 Possibly the image See Putnam, TR, 157ff, or Morris, The Rise of TR, 75–77.

84 He has grown used TR’s desire to escape public attention while on safari was periodically frustrated by social invitations, which he felt he had to accept, from government authorities in Nairobi and from prominent settlers in the “White Highlands.” On 3 Aug., for example, he was guest of honor at a banquet in Nairobi’s Railway Institute, attended by the Protectorate’s elite, in various stages of inebriation. He was presented with a rhinoceros foot, and sat through a flattering address printed on silk and read by the public recorder. An extract from his speech in response, “Education in Africa,” is quoted on page 22. (The Leader of British East Africa, 7 Aug. 1909.) As a result of his stays on local ranches, he formed lasting friendships with such colonial notables as Governor Sir Percy Girouard, Lord Delamere, Lord Cranworth, Sir Alfred Pease, and Sir William Northrup McMillan—into whose family his granddaughter Grace would one day marry.

85 He has to laugh TR, Works, 5.161–62.

86 Snug in his tent Ibid., 5.262.

87 He has to drive Ibid.

88 It is plain to him Ibid., 5.37; The Leader of British East Africa, 7 Aug. 1909. The only blanket order J. Alden Loring could recall TR issuing on safari was a ban on the whipping of porters, although it was a punishment sanctioned by the British East Africa administration. Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 216.

89 the Song of Solomon TR to Lawrence F. Abbott, 21 Oct. 1909 (ABB). TR, who had not read the Bible through before he went to Africa, boggled at some of its racier parts. “I must say that it contains matter that I should not care to have my children read until they had reached the years of discretion.” To J. Alden Loring, quoted in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 220.

90 Oh, sweetest of all For more of the text of this letter, see Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 351–52. It was one of the very few billets-doux from TR that EKR, after his death, did not destroy. Had their daughter Ethel not saved a handful, one of the great loves in American history would be undocumented.

91 Moving on to Londiani KR diary, 30 Nov. 1909 (KRP); The Leader of British East Africa, 7 Aug. 1909; TR, Letters, 7.39–40.

92 From now on TR, Works, 5.357.

93 He is generous Lawrence F. Abbott wrote, after a few months of handling TR’s finances, “He had less interest in money, as mere money, than almost any man that I have ever known.” Impressions of TR, 210.

94 totaling almost $40,000 In contemporary (2010) dollars, this sacrifice amounted to $711,000 (Measuring Worth). As President, TR earned $50,000 ($888,000) a year. He felt that his prize money, totaling almost $37,000 ($696,000) in 1906, had been earned while he was a public servant, and therefore was not his personal property. He directed that it be used to endow a foundation dealing with what he then considered to be the largest problem of the age—labor/capital strife. See Morris, Theodore Rex, 473, 723. For the later history of this bequest, see 539.

95 He is therefore relieved TR, Letters, 7.13–15, 24–25, 36–37. For an extended account of Carnegie’s infatuation with TR as a potential “Great Peace Maker,” see Joseph F. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1970, 1989), 924–35.

96 “The very large edition” Robert Bridges to TR, 21 Oct. 1909, 10 Feb. 1910 (SCR). In this letter, Bridges tried to interest TR in a follow-up travel series focusing on the American Southwest. “We should of course be willing to pay a very large sum for it.” When TR showed no enthusiasm, Bridges offered a staggering $5,000 per article. TR declined, but, as will be seen, eventually did write some Southwestern pieces for Scribner’s Magazine.

97 In Nairobi’s little bookstore TR, Letters, 7.44; Randall, Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson, 28; TR, Works, 5.357, 14.463–64.

98 It is elephant country TR, Works, 5.373–75, 423.

99 He is in superb health The sentence in African Game Trails, “An elderly man with a varied past which includes rheumatism does not vault lightly into the saddle, as his sons, for instance, can” is an example of TR’s self-mocking humor. In a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge dated 5 Feb. 1910, he reports that while he and Kermit remained healthy, all the other members of his party “have been down with fever of dysentery; one gun bearer has died of fever, four porters of dysentery and two have been mauled by beasts.” During their visit to one Ugandan village, “eight natives died of sleeping sickness.” TR, Letters, 7.47.

100 His stride is tireless E. M. Newman in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 223; TR, Works, 5.417. According to Newman, TR’s pace when marching “compelled the average man to maintain a dog trot to keep up with him.”

101 He looks better TR boasted on 21 Jan. 1910, “I have not for years passed nine months of such good health.” (TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles [ARC].) See also TR, Works, 5.298, 375–76; John C. O’Laughlin in the Chicago Tribune, 13 Mar. 1910.

102 Yet on the seventh day TR, Letters, 7.348–49.

103 a three-week halt TR states in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge that he is encamped “about two degrees north of the equator.” His actual position was nearer three degrees north, in the vicinity of the spot now known as Rhino Camp.

Biographical Note: Bartle Bull notes that TR’s bag of nine white rhinos, including four cows and a calf, exceeded his licensed quota by three. The species was then, as now, one of the most endangered in Africa. His excessive kill offended even the sensibilities of the time. “Do those nine white rhino ever cause ex-President Roosevelt a pang of conscience?” Lord Cranworth wrote in a 1912 memoir. “…  I venture to hope so.” (Bull, Safari, 179–80.) TR admits in African Game Trails that the white rhino was already virtually extinct in Africa outside of the Lado Enclave. It was, however, the only major game animal he had not yet collected for his sponsors. “We deemed it really important to get good groups for the National Museum in Washington and the American Museum in New York, and a head for National Collection of Heads and Horns [in] the Bronx Zoological Park.” Kermit killed at least one charging cow in self-defense. “He was sorry … but I was not, for it was a very fine specimen, with the front horn thirty-one inches long.” (TR, Works, 5.389, 399, 408.) The kills, plus five found skulls, enabled Edmund Heller to write a definitive Smithsonian study, “The White Rhinoceros.” See TR, Letters, 7.46. For the role unwittingly played by Winston Churchill in this hunt, see below, 604–605.

104 he feels that he has advanced TR, Letters, 7.348–49.

105 A letter from Henry Cabot Lodge Lodge, Selections, 2.357. “The country is crazy-mad about Father,” ERD wrote KR. Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 352.

106 “At present it does not” Lodge, Selections, 2.362. After reaching Gondokoro on 17 Feb., TR and KR took a final eight-day hunt for eland on the Belgian Congo side of the river. (TR, Works, 5.430–37.) At the end of the month he paid off his Uganda porters and sent them back to Kampala. On 28 Feb., he set sail from Gondokoro with KR and the naturalists aboard the Dal.

107 Three members Chicago Tribune, 12 Mar. 1910. Another correspondent described the barge as “a crowded cemetery for animals, with the lid off.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 Mar. 1910.

108 They listen frustrated John C. O’Laughlin in the Chicago Tribune, 12 Mar. 1910. See also John C. O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe with Roosevelt (Boston, 1910), 28–36. In letters home to his wife, 15, 20 Mar. 1910 (OL), O’Laughlin confidentially reported that “Mr. Roosevelt will run again in 1912.” There is no other evidence to suggest that TR admitted such an ambition so early.

109 the Nile birds he pursued TR, Works, 5.448. Three of TR’s youthful specimens, mounted by himself, are preserved in the American Museum of Natural History: an Egyptian spur-winged lapwing, a white-tailed lapwing, and a crocodile bird. For an account of his ornithological researches in Egypt and the Levant in 1872–1873, see Cutright, TR, 39–69.

110 “whirls and wakes” TR, Works, 5.448.

111 All that remains Ibid., 5.450–52; KR diary, 17 Feb. 1910 (KRP). The total bag of the Smithsonian–Theodore Roosevelt African Expedition, as it is now officially known, was 4,900 mammals, 4,000 birds, 500 fish, and 2,000 reptiles—approximately 11,400 items, plus 10,000 plant specimens and a small collection of ethnological objects.

112 “Kermit and I” TR, Works, 5.453. TR told John C. O’Laughlin at Gordon’s Tree, four miles south of Khartoum, that he had just finished the last chapter of his book. Chicago Tribune, 15 Mar. 1910.

113 “the twentieth century” TR, Letters, 7.149. The Dal can be seen approaching civilization in “TR’s Return from Africa,” a newsreel in Theodore Roosevelt on Film, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/.

CHAPTER 1: LOSS OF IMPERIAL WILL

1 Epigraph Edwin Arlington Robinson, Collected Poems (New York, 1922), 359.

2 He was informed Chicago Tribune and AP dispatch, 14 Apr. 1910. The governor of Khartoum was away at the time of TR’s visit.

3 On its boards Alan Moorehead, The White Nile (New York, 1971), 339–41.

4 Rebuilt by Kitchener Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), 15.773; ERD to Edwin Arlington Robinson, 21 Mar. 1910 (ERDP); TR, Letters, 7.349–51.

5 the blood of General Gordon TR to EKR, quoted in Earle Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, Private Citizen (New York, 1932), 106.

6 Khartoum’s North Station AP report, Chicago Tribune, 15 Mar. 1910.

7 That evening, Roosevelt Ibid.; Walter Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt,” in American Review of Reviews, 41.5 (10 May 1910).

8 He was not unwilling O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 41–42.

9 However, another contender Abbott, Impressions of TR, 214–16. TR’s contract with The Outlook had been negotiated while he was still President. According to Abbott, he had “half a dozen editorial articles … ready for publication” within five days of quitting the White House. The first, an attack on socialism, ran in the magazine on 20 Mar. 1909. Another, on Tolstoy (15 May 1909), criticized the novelist for “foolish and fantastic” pacifism, not to mention “a dark streak … of moral perversion.” (TR, Works, 14.417.) It was reprinted in Russia, and came to the attention of its subject. “An article on me by Roosevelt,” Tolstoy noted on 20 May 1909. “The article is silly, but I was pleased. It aroused my vanity.” (R. F. Christian, trans., Tolstoy’s Diaries [London, 1985], 2.614.) For more of TR’s views on Tolstoy, see Abbott, Impressions of TR, 188–91.

10 Edith Kermit Roosevelt See Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 9–10.

11 In the event Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910.

12 They dismounted Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910; AP dispatch, 15 Mar., in ibid.; Morris, The Rise of TR, 685. Winston Churchill’s classic account of the Battle of Omdurman in his The River War: An Historical Account of the Recon-quest of the Soudan, 2 vols. (London, 1899).

13 Slatin certainly In a transcendent moment of tit for tat, years later, Slatin permitted the Mahdi’s skull to be handed over to Kitchener, who had to be persuaded not to use it as a drinking cup. Gordon Bank-Shepherd, Between Two Flags: The Life of Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha, GCVO, KCMG, CB (New York, 1973); Chicago Tribune, 16 Mar. 1910.

14 His soul revolted TR, Works, 5.438; TR, Letters, 8.946. To TR’s sardonic amusement, the Marquis de Mores, his youthful rival from Badlands days and a supporter of Arab independence, had been killed in 1896, while attempting to enlist in the Mahdi’s service. A band of Tuaregs had not been “able to appreciate the fine frenzy of his altruism.” Ibid.

15 If that was what The importation of large quantities of terrorist arms into Egypt, beginning in Dec. 1909, was publicized by S. Verdad in The New Age, 5 May 1910.

16 Omdurman fascinated Chicago Tribune, 17 Mar. 1910.

17 One long, anguished letter Pinchot to TR, 31 Dec. 1909 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.45–46; TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 21 Jan. 1910 (ARC).

18 “We have fallen” Pinchot to TR, 31 Dec. 1909 (TRP). See also William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (rev. ed., New York, 1975), 361–62, 78. Having already successfully hosted national and North American conservation conferences in May 1908 and Feb. 1909, TR suggested on the eve of his departure from office “that all nations should be invited to join together in conference on the subject of world resources … their inventory, conservation and wise utilization.” His idea was that the forty-five participant powers in the Hague Peace Conference should form the nucleus of a world conservation movement. In the event, he sent out invitations to fifty-eight nations, calling upon them to meet in the fall of 1909. Taft withdrew the invitations, and the world conference was aborted. Michael J. Lacey, “The Mysteries of Earth-Making Dissolve: A Study of Washington’s Intellectual Community and the Origins of American Environmentalism in the Late Nineteenth Century” (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1979), 401–3.

19 illegal coal claims Alaska’s Chugach National Forest had been expanded by TR on his last day in office. According to Pinchot, J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheim mining syndicate were involved in these fraudulent claims. (Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism [Washington, D.C., 2001], 209.) But as Pinchot himself made clear in testimony to Congress, the “central item” in his quarrel with Taft and Ballinger was their “reversals of water power policy” nationwide.

20 Taft, consequently, had had no choice For WHT’s own feeling, early in 1910, that “a complete break within the Republican party” was coming, see Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 272. For detailed accounts of the rivalry between Ballinger and Pinchot, 1909–1910, see Harold T. Pinkett, Gifford Pinchot: Private and Public Forester (Urbana, Ill., 1970), 116–29, and Miller, Gifford Pinchot, 209–17.

21 Taft had endorsed George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (New York, 1946, 1960), 52, 63–64. For a detailed account of the 1909 tariff battle in Congress, see Kenneth W. Hechler, Insurgency: Personalities and Politics of the Taft Era (New York, 1964), 92–145.

22 “Honored Sir” J. Corry Baker to TR, 6 Jan. 1910 (TRP).

23 “I flatter myself” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 179.

24 “My political career” Abbott, Impressions of TR, 53. “Don’t lay down,” one GOP politician begged TR. “The people will fall over one another in due time to follow your leadership.” William Bradford Jones to TR, 7 Jan. 1910 (TRP).

25 one delicate encounter The Washington Post, 18 Mar. 1910. See also The Times, 18 Mar. 1910, and TR, Letters, 7.350–51.

26 He had not hesitated Morris, Theodore Rex, 323–38, 347–51, 440–42; Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York, 2007), 309–16. Oren notes (316) that TR’s affirmation at the 1906 Algericas Conference of three key principles—minority rights, free U.S. trade, and support for the Anglo-French alliance—“would remain cornerstones of American diplomacy in the region for the next fifty years.”

27 On the morning KR diary, 18 Feb. 1910 (KRP); Abbott, Impressions of TR, 206–7. Frank Harper joined Abbott in Rome.

28 an ever-expanding grand tour See Wallace Irwin’s Homeric parody, The Teddysee (New York, 1910). This poem appeared first as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post.

29 Even the Calvinist Academy TR, Letters, 7.364–65.

30 I searched Abbott, Impressions of TR, 185. The work cited is W. E. H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, 2 vols. (New York, 1879). During this 22-hour journey, TR was also seen reading an account of Britain’s campaign against the Sudanese caliphate, and working on the text of his address to the University of Berlin. According to O’Laughlin, he toyed with the idea of delivering it in German. Chicago Tribune, 19 Mar. 1910.

31 Roosevelt was not new TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, 24 Aug. 1884, in Lodge, Selections, 1.9. “It was Lecky’s history of the Eighteenth Century that made me a Home Ruler,” he wrote John Morley in 1908. (TR, Letters, 7.) Lecky was an Irish Protestant, M.P. for Trinity College, Dublin, and one of the most distinguished scholars of the Victorian age. He merits rereading as the last great practitioner in English of history as literature. His Rationalism in Europe is available at Positive Atheism (http://www.positiveatheism.org).

32 two clerical provocations TR, Letters, 7.57; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 213–14.

33 “Moi-même, je suis libre-penseur” TR to Jules Cambon, quoted in Geneviève Tabouis, Jules Cambon par l’un des siens (Paris, 1938), 105.

34 He scoffed at theories For an extensive discussion of TR’s religious beliefs, see chap. 5, “The World of Spiritual Values” in Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR.

35 As President, he TR, Letters, 5.842–43. TR’s two main objections to “In God We Trust,” neither of which convinced Congress, were that “no legal warrant” justified engraving the pietism on American coins, and that doing so “cheapened” it by associating religion with commerce. For a detailed account, see Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy: Episodes of the White House Years (Baton Rouge, La., 1970), 213–35.

36 the gospel he preached Owen Wister, Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship (New York, 1930), 230; Marks, Velvet on Iron, chap. 3, “The Moral Quotient.”

37 Public works, for example Garstin and TR “exhaustively” discussed irrigation and Aswán on the last leg of the journey to Wadi Halfa. (Chicago Tribune, 19 Mar. 1910.) TR’s remark about the strategic value of Kitchener’s railroad is quoted in the same article.

38 There, on 21 March O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 55–56. It is not clear how this warning was transmitted to TR. The Egyptian nationalists may have heard of a remark he had made about Boutros Pasha’s assassin, at a dinner in Khartoum attended by hundreds of tarbooshed servants: “I would sentence him to be taken out and shot.” Abbott, Impressions of TR, 155.

39 “Theodore, what” Cleveland Dodge in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 223.

40 One thing he had TR, Letters, 7.359; The New York Times, 23 Mar. 1910. If TR had not quite “summoned” Pinchot, he had certainly written, in response to the latter’s cri de coeur of 31 Jan. 1909, “I do wish I could see you. Is there any chance of you meeting me in Europe?” TR, Letters, 7.51.

41 Roosevelt remained mute TR, Letters, 7.63–64.

42 Remembering the squalor Ibid., 7.63, 351–52. See Karl K. Barbir, “Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, the Middle East, and the Twentieth Century,” The Journal of Middle Eastern and North African Intellectual and Cultural Studies, 2.1 (Spring 2004). This useful article is marred by the inclusion of an alleged boast by TR that is so uncharacteristic in language and attitude that it cannot be credited without corroboration.

43 Roosevelt detected Lodge, Selections, 2.364. “I must say,” TR wrote Whitelaw Reid on 24 Mar., “I should greatly like to handle Egypt and India for a few months. At the end of that time I doubtless would be impeached by the House of Commons but I should have things moving in fine order first.” TR, Letters, 7.63.

44 But he saw TR, Letters, 7.351. In Power, Faith, and Fantasy, 258ff., Michael B. Oren makes clear the ambivalent attitude of most Americans toward Britain’s occupancy of Egypt in the last decades of the 19th century. TR’s contrasting sharp certainty in 1910 is seen as the consequence of his might-makes-right Middle Eastern policies as President. His Cairo speech, however, should also be related to his lifelong horror of terrorism, reawakened by his stay in General Gordon’s palace, and his tour of Omdurman in company with Slatin Pasha. See also TR’s 31 May 1910 Guildhall address, 72–74.

45 The real danger TR, Letters, 7.351.

46 Sir Eldon Gorst Ibid., 7.353.

47 Islamic fundamentalists Sheik Ali Youssuf in North American Review, June 1910; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 186–87.

48 Small and struggling Cairo University’s enrollment in 1910 was only 123 students, down disastrously from 403 in 1909. Egyptian State Information Service, winter 1998.

49 He tried not The word contempt was TR’s own. TR, Letters, 7.65.

50 Swinging into Theodore Roosevelt, African and European Addresses, Lawrence F. Abbott, ed. (New York, 1910), 26.

51 The tarboosh-wearers Sheik Ali Youssuf in North American Review, June 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 69. Abbott, a white Christian American in TR’s thrall, contradicts Youssuf’s account of derision among the Muslims.

52 All good men Abbott, Impressions of TR, 156–57.

53 Next day, comments The Times and The Washington Post, 30 Mar. 1910. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy (318) calls this “the first major anti-American demonstration ever in the Middle East.” Among the many outraged telegrams protesting TR’s speech was one reading (in French): “We see with sorrow that you have no accurate idea of the capacity of the Egyptians whom you have wounded in their feelings and their pride.” (Unsigned fragment, 29 Mar. 1910 [TRP].) Also preserved in TRP is a letter, 30 Mar. 1910, from the sirdar of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate: “You have assisted us more than you can possibly imagine, and I am proportionally grateful.” For a presentist critique of TR’s performance in Egypt, see Barbir, “Alfred Thayer Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, the Middle East, and the Twentieth Century.”

54 When he embarked Sheik Ali Youssuf in North American Review, June 1910. About a year later, TR recalled that his “good advice” to the Egyptians had been received “with well-dissembled gratitude.” TR, Works, 6.455.

CHAPTER 2: THE MOST FAMOUS MAN IN THE WORLD

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 75.

2 as if he were still Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt.”

3 He saw less TR, Letters, 7.354.

4 Moving on Ibid., 7.354–59; John C. O’Laughlin memo, ca. Apr. 1910 (OL). In an open letter to The Outlook, TR made sure that Catholics and Protestants back home understood his scruples. “The more an American sees of other countries the more profound must be his feelings of gratitude that in his own land there is not merely complete toleration but the heartiest goodwill and sympathy between sincere and honest men of different faith.” TR, Letters, 7.358.

5 He rejoiced TR, Letters, 7.359–60; KR diary, 4 Apr. 1910 (KRP); The New York Times, 5 Apr. 1910. Citations for the rest of this chapter frequently refer to TR’s two epistolary accounts of his European experiences, to Sir George Otto Trevelyan, 1 Oct. 1911, and to David Gray, 5 Oct. 1911. (TR, Letters, 7.348–99, 401–15.) Enormously long and often very funny, these letters have been separately published in Cowboys and Kings: Three Great Letters by Theodore Roosevelt, Elting E. Morison, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1954). More than any of TR’s other writings, they convey the full charm of his personality.

6 Roosevelt was unfazed TR, Letters, 7.362–63. Before leaving Rome on 7 Apr., TR lunched with the Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, whose works he had read, and learned from, as President. (Morris, Theodore Rex, 495–96; and Ferrero, “Theodore Roosevelt: A Characterization,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 9 [1910].) TR was determined to make his trip through Europe an intellectual as well as a political odyssey. “Cannot you arrange,” he typically wrote to the American ambassador in Sweden, “to have me see Sven Hedin, Nathorst, Colthorp, Nordenskiöld and Montelius? Cannot I see with the last-named the collection of Swedish antiquities, and I would also like to see the battle flags of Gustavus and Charles XII, and the tombs of the kings. Cannot I meet Professor and Mrs. Retzius?” TR to Charles H. Graves, 22 Apr. 1910 (TRP).

7 Edith’s unmarried younger sister See Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 350–51 and passim. There is a vignette of Emily Carow in O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 98: “She reminded me of a little humming bird as she flitted from side to side … pointing out the beauties of the landscape.”

8 Lanky, passionate Miller, Gifford Pinchot, prologue passim; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.386.

9 Roosevelt, in contrast Sullivan, Our Times, 4.486, describes Pinchot as one “whose eyes, as they pass through the world, instinctively look about for a hero, and for martyrdom in the hero’s service.” For a concise analysis of the relationship between Pinchot and TR, see Miller, Gifford Pinchot, 147–76.

10 “One of the best” Ibid., 233. A long political letter from TR to Henry Cabot Lodge, written this day, avoids any mention of Pinchot. TR, Letters, 7.69–74.

11 All warned Mowry, TR, 108, 125.

12 He was more Lodge, Selections, 2.367; TR, Letters, 7.336. See also Morris, Theodore Rex, 486–87.

13 Four days later EKR diary, 13 Apr. 1910 (TRC).

14 A familiar, courtly figure TR, Letters, 7.368; Henry White to Mrs. White, 15 Apr. 1910 (HW).

15 the great comet Halley’s Comet was just beginning its 1910 passage past the sun. It was observed in perihelion at 5° Aquarius over Curaçao on 19 Apr.

16 After a reunion Henry White to Mrs. White, 15 Apr. 1910 (HW); TR, Letters, 7.369.

17 He spoke in French Ibid.

18 Roosevelt had detected TR, Letters, 7.360–61. Tempora mutantur: “The times are changing.”

19 The best that could TR, Letters, 7.369, 409. TR was both right and wrong about Franz Ferdinand. The archduke was reactionary in the sense that he wanted to strengthen and centralize Austria-Hungary’s power over its restive Balkan neighbors. But he was liberal in believing that the only way to do this was to allow Slavs more representation in the imperial government.

20 Meeting later TR, Letters, 7.366.

21 At the same time Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century: Volume 1: 1900–1933 (Toronto, 1997), 188. Germany’s former chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, used the phrase “Nibelungen loyalty” to describe this compulsion. Michael Stürmer, The German Empire, 1870–1918 (New York, 2000), xxviii.

22 Roosevelt repeated TR, Letters, 7.377–78.

23 For the next thirty-six O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 105; Henry White to Henry Cabot Lodge, 23 Apr. 1910 (HCLP). “They [Europeans] look on him as the greatest man in the world, and think it strange that with his youth and energy he should be in private life.” (Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt.”) For TR’s half-puzzled, half-tickled reaction to his celebrity, see TR, Letters, 7.81.

24 He did not see Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981), xxvi–xxvii, 344; Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York, 1966), 329. The rising suicide rate by Austro-Hungarian youth had become such a problem, just as TR arrived in Vienna, that Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Society called a meeting to discuss its subconscious causes. For an intellectual history describing the comet-haunted year of 1910 as “the year when all [Europe’s] scaffolds began to crack,” see Thomas Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance (Berkeley, Calif., 1996).

25 All he knew On the same day that TR was entertained at Schönbrunn, a member of Serbia’s Black Hand terrorist group was arrested in Chiasso, Switzerland, on a charge of plotting to kill him. The New York Times, 17, 19 Mar. 1910.

26 Halfway through the banquet TR, Letters, 7.370.

27 Roosevelt was met TR, Letters, 7.372–73. Apponyi, surrounded by an official delegation, hailed TR as “one of the leading efficient forces for the moral improvement of the world.” (O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 111.) For the imperial-versus-royal paradox in the union of Austria and Hungary, see Andrew Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire (New York, 1995), 278–81.

28 He noticed TR, Letters, 7.372–73; KR diary (KRP); The Times, 19 Apr. 1910.

29 Multicultural himself Nicholas Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: The Man As I Knew Him (New York, 1967), 56; Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt”; TR, Letters, 7.374.

30 an extempore address TR, Letters, 7.374. TR, speaking from memory, wrongly attached the name of King Béla III, rather than Andrew II, to the Golden Bull. A sarcastic British correspondent, filing from Vienna, was thus able to report on the “fervor and inaccuracy” of his speech, as well as Apponyi’s “stage management” of the occasion. The Times, 20 Apr. 1910.

31 His carriage had to force The New York Times, 19 Apr. 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 114–15.

32 the most famous man in the world Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt.” As late as the early years of World War I, a friend of TR’s found that he could travel “all over Europe” with no other credential than a letter from the Colonel. Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 400.

33 “When he appears” The Times, 16 Apr. 1910.

34 “Like the elder” TR to Robert Bacon, TR, Letters, 7.65. For TR’s previous relationship with Bacon, his Harvard classmate and former secretary of state, see James Brown Scott, Robert Bacon: Life and Letters (New York, 1923), passim, and Morris,Theodore Rex, 167–68, 456–57.

35 Both ambassadors Scott, Bacon, 136–43. The last-named Frenchmen were favorites of TR’s. He had been corresponding with them for years, and admired their mix of mind and action. Estournelles de Constant, author of La conciliation internationale, had just become a fellow winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Coubertin, author of many books on education, was the founder of the modern Olympic Games.

36 “Quand on parle” TR quoted in Journal des Débats Politiques et Littéraires, 24 Apr. 1910. Jusserand compared TR’s way of searching for the mot juste in French to that of someone grasping at “a slippery piece of soap” in the bath. Wister, Roosevelt, 166.

37 Shortly before three Journal des Débats, 24 Apr., and The Times, 25 Apr. 1910.

38 he proceeded to read The following quotations from TR’s Sorbonne address are taken from the version in TR, Works, 15, 349–76.

39 This touched on “To them [the French] the German menace is like a constant nightmare, which may perhaps be explained by the fact that most of the older men know what an invasion means.” British naval attaché report, 22 Jan. 1910, quoted in Kenneth Bourne, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, pt. 1, ser. F, 13.100. (Hereafter Bourne, British Documents.)

40 Roosevelt bit off The Times, 25 Apr. 1910; Le Gaulois, quoted in Literary Digest, 21 May 1910.

41 It is not the critic TR, Works, 15.354. According to The Times, 25 Apr. 1910, TR won further ovations when he repeated one of his own paragraphs, a declaration that “property belongs to man and not man to property” in French. He resorted to antique French for a closing quote from Froissart: Le royaume de la France ne fut onques se déconfit qu’on n’y trouvât bien toujours á qui combattre (“The realm of France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for it.”) For a modern reprint of his speech, see John Allen Gable, ed., The Man in the Arena: Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt (Oyster Bay, N.Y., 1991). It is available on many Internet websites, and remains one of TR’s most-quoted orations.

42 one of his greatest rhetorical triumphs Journal des Débats, 24 Apr. 1910; Jules Jusserand to TR, 10 May 1910 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.379–80; The New York Times, 25 Apr. 1910. After TR’s departure, an American military officer in Paris reported that the Briand government had suppressed a “monster” May Day demonstration by socialist and revolutionary groups. For the first time in fifteen years, policemen were allowed to use firearms in their own self-defense. This policy was “freely attributed in intelligent quarters” to TR’s morale-boosting speech. Abbott, Impressions of TR, 166.

43 Only two Literary Digest, 18 June 1910; TR, Works, 15.645; Jules Jusserand to TR, 10 May 1910 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.77. “Never since Napoleon dawned on Europe, has such an impression been produced there as has been made by Theodore Roosevelt,”Le Temps commented.

44 He wanted to TR, Letters, 7.381. For an account of the Dreyfus case and its effect on French morale after 1906, see Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 171–226.

45 For two and a quarter hours The Times and The New York Times, 28 Apr. 1910. “The maneuver was necessarily too rapid,” TR told the military governor of Paris afterward. “You have made your men do in half an hour what should in reality take four hours.”The Times, 28 Apr. 1910.

46 two aides O’Laughlin continued to act as the semi-official chronicler of TR’s travels, in charge of a press contingent that grew to six by the time his tour reached Paris. Harper to Arthur Beaupré, 25 Apr. 1910 (TRP).

47 They traveled east ERD to Edwin Arlington Robinson, 28 Apr. 1910; TR, Letters, 7.382–83.

48 A sobering display TR could see from the bridge of his own ship the German imperial yacht Meteor, and a small launch named Alice Roosevelt in honor of his daughter. ARL had launched the Meteor from a New Jersey shipyard in 1902. There was some speculation that TR had been snubbed at Kiel by the no-show of a local resident, Prince Heinrich of Prussia. But a letter of profound apology from the prince (Wilhelm II’s brother), indicates that it was caused by a staff failure. Chicago Tribune, 3 May 1910; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 234–35; Heinrich (“Henry”) to TR, May 1910 (TRP).

49 signs of ominous enlargement The work of widening the Kaiser Wilhelm (now Kiel) Canal was completed by 1914.

50 King Frederick VIII TR, African and European Addresses, 138. Crown Princess Alexandra of Denmark was the daughter of Edward VII.

51 “as funny a kingdom” TR, Letters, 7.385–86. For an account of TR’s visit, and a discussion of the publicity his Nobel Prize brought to newly independent Norway, see Wayne Cole, Norway and the United States, 1905–1955: Two Democracies in Peace and War (Ames, Iowa, 1989).

52 The pesky little millionaire Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 931; TR, Letters, 7.47–49. For TR’s initial efforts to make the appeal seem to come from Elihu Root, see TR, Letters, 7.42, 55. For the presidential involvement with arms control (at the time of the Second Hague Peace Conference) that TR refers to, see Frederick C. Leiner, “The Unknown Effort: Theodore Roosevelt’s Battleship Plan and International Arms Limitation Talks, 1906–1907,” Military Affairs, 48.3 (1984), and Morris, Theodore Rex, 485, 726. For an amusing, recently discovered letter in which TR dismisses Carnegie as “a perfect goose” in public affairs, see Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 30.3 (Summer 2009), 20–23.

53 Christiana was Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 934; Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 278.

54 Roosevelt’s oration Chicago Tribune, 6 May 1910; TR, Works, 18.410.

55 He gave conditional TR, Works, 18.414.

56 “international police power” Ibid., 18.415.

57 “There’s a trace of the savage” Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 935, 980. For the unexpectedly favorable reaction of an influential Norwegian commentator to TR’s speech, see American Review of Reviews, 42.3 (Aug. 1910).

58 Coughing and feverish EKR to TR.Jr., 8 May 1910 (TRJP); The New York Times, 9 May 1910. “I don’t like living in these palaces because you can’t ring your bell and complain of your room!” TR quoted in Abbott, Impressions of TR, 296.

59 He sent a telegram TR, Letters, 7.390; New York Tribune, 8 May 1910.

60 It had shone Margot Asquith, The Autobiography of Margot Asquith (Boston, 1963), 269.

61 The first thing TR, Letters, 7.390; Wellman, “The Homecoming of Roosevelt.”

62 the foremost nation Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 291; Edward Grey, Twenty-five Years: 1892–1916 (New York, 1925), 2.22; TR, Letters, 7.391. Between 1900 and 1910, Germany’s steel production increased 1,355 percent to Britain’s 154 percent. For other statistics, see Giles MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser: The Life of Wilhelm II (New York, 2000), 321.

63 Germany’s fields and forests For a vivid picture of pre-war Germany, see Owen Wister, The Pentecost of Calamity (New York, 1917), 18–23. See also Modris Ecksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston,1989), 77–82.

64 There was a frenzied scurrying O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 148; EKR diary, 10 May 1910 (TRP).

65 Wilhelm II in 1910 TR, Letters, 7.393; John C. G. Röhl, ed., Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations—The Corfu Papers (Cambridge, UK, 1982), 3–10, 14–19; Ragnhild Fiebig von Hase, “The Uses of ‘Friendship’: The ‘Personal Regime’ of Wilhelm II and Theodore Roosevelt, 1901–1909,” in Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist, eds., The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, UK, 2004), 143–94.

66 Two years earlier MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser, chap. 12; John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge, UK, 1996).

67 a fantasist of Münchausian dimensions Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 87–88. TR had sensed the Kaiser’s reincarnation fantasy as long before as 1902. “He writes to me pretending that he is a [direct] descendant of Frederick the Great! I know better and feel inclined to tell him so.” See Morris, Theodore Rex, 185–86, and Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Time (New York, 1964, 1972), 85.

68 Were it not O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 148; Manchester Guardian, 20, 21 May 1910; James W. Gerard, Face to Face with Kaiserism (New York, 1918), 20.

69 They stood face-to-face Abbott, Impressions of TR, 252–53. Accounts vary as to how long this conversation lasted. TR remembered it as three hours, the New York Tribune reported “more than an hour,” and Stanley Shaw, in his William of Germany(London, 1913), wrote that “the shades of evening began to fall before it ended.” Abbott is precise in recalling that the party managed to catch its 4 p.m. train back to Berlin, but forgets that the Kaiser also escorted the Roosevelts on a tour of Sans Souci. Whatever the case, TR (who saw the Kaiser twice again) had plenty of time to take his measure, and write a perceptive portrait of him. TR, Letters, 7.394–99.

70 Reporting afterward TR, Letters, 7.395. For the epistolary relationship of TR and Trevelyan, see Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.”

71 At least we agreed TR, Letters, 7.396.

72 Roosevelt asked Ibid., 7.398. At a meeting of the Navy League in Berlin on 22 May 1910, Admiral Hans von Köster noted that every naval power was currently trying “to reach the highest possible degree of readiness for war.” Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. F, 21.77–78.

73 This sounded reasonable TR, Letters, 7.399.

74 By the time EKR diary, 10 May 1910 (TRC); Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910.

75 He cabled Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910; Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (New York, 1939), 542.

76 More vocal wear KR diary, 11 May 1910 (KRP); Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 150–51. TR’s “suite” was also accredited with naval and military aides-de-camp. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1910, 528.

77 “Roosevelt, mein Freund” There are various versions of the Kaiser’s words, overheard by many listeners. This version was repeated by Henry White to Lawrence Abbott on the evening after the ceremony. The phrase mein Freund struck White as unusually intimate for Wilhelm II, on such a military occasion. Nevins, Henry White, 302.

78 Roosevelt knew this Morris, Theodore Rex, 186; New York Tribune, 12 May 1910; O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 150.

79 Lifting his hat Chicago Tribune, 12 May 1910; Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 122–23.

Biographical Note: This paragraph represents the author’s interpretation of a curious passage that Looker wrote after interviewing EKR many years later. Since Looker had known all the Roosevelts intimately from his days as a member of the “White House Gang,” and since EKR endorsed his book with a personal letter (facsimile, 116), the passage deserves attention. In its entirety, it reads as follows: “In talks with his family he [TR] indicated that ‘the Kaiser most evidently showed, in company with some lesser sovereigns, a sort of double-barreled perspective as he went through this show. He was sitting on his horse seeing two different divisions of things happening about himself. One included his own observations of my own impressions of the pageant, the Staff’s impressions and his own as the various battle units passed by us all. The other was as if his mental ghost had spurred away from us, halted, faced about, and was now scrutinizing himself and all of us through foreign eyes in order to understand what the rest of the world would think. As if the rest of the world at this particular moment was the slightest bit interested or even amused! It was just the same dual thought that made it possible for him to look upon his own human acts in one way and upon such Imperial acts, as he selected from the point of view of his “divine right,” in another. He was actually, as far as I could discover, one of the last of those curious creatures who sincerely believed himself to be a demi-god.’ ”

80 When Edith saw Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 129–30. In 1912, TR told a reporter, “I tried him with everything I knew, but the only subject on which I could strike fire was war. He knows military history and technique. He knows armies, and that is all. I couldn’t get a spark from him on anything else.” Oscar King Davis, Released for Publication: Some Inside Political History of Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, 1898–1918 (Boston, 1925), 92.

81 He recovered Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1910. The text of TR’s Berlin University address is in TR, Works, 14.258–83.

82 Wilhelm had never Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1910.

83 “the great house of Hohenzollern” TR, Works, 14.259. TR was privately tickled to discover, in conversations with Wilhelm II, that “his own knowledge of Hohenzollern history was more detailed and accurate than that of the Emperor.” Albert Shaw, “Reminiscences of Theodore Roosevelt,” ts. in SHA.

84 The case of the Jew TR, Works, 14.264.

85 He listed the main “Practically all the theories of world-development and so forth which Mr. Roosevelt was expounding had been based on the works of the very men he was addressing.” An eyewitness, quoted in The New Age, 26 May 1910.

86 genus Americanus egotisticus This phrase was applied to TR by the Kaiser’s good friend Poultney Bigelow in Seventy Summers (London, 1925), 273–74.

87 But it was a warm afternoon Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1910.

88 newspapers gave it scant attention Admiral Köster stated on 22 May 1910 that representatives of the German Navy League had listened “with the greatest interest” to TR’s speech. A few words in particular (“Woe to the nation … whose citizens have lost their courage for battle and their martial spirit”) had “deeply implanted themselves in German hearts.” Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. F, 21.78.

89 substantive interviews O’Laughlin, From the Jungle Through Europe, 151–52.

90 a set of photographs For facsimiles, see Stefan Lorant, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 526–27. The original photographs are still on display at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

91 “Oh, no” TR, Letters, 7.83; John J. Leary, Talks with T.R. (Boston 1920), 41.

CHAPTER 3: HONORABILEM THEODORUM

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 3.

2 Roosevelt emerged The New York Times, 17 May 1910.

3 Reid had won TR, Letters, 7.401–2; Viscount Lee of Fareham, A Good Innings (privately printed, London, 1939), 1.415–16. The relationship of TR and Arthur Lee is fully detailed in this two-volume work. For an abridged version, see “A Good Innings”: The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, P.C., G.C.B., G.C.S.I., G.B.E., Alan Clark, ed. (London, 1974). See also the section on Lee in Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.” For TR and Reid, see David R. Contosa and Jessica R. Hawthorne, “Rise to World Power: Selected Letters of Whitelaw Reid, 1895–1912,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 76.2 (1986).

4 His Majesty turned TR, Letters, 7.402; The New York Times and New York Tribune, 17 May 1910.

5 Edward VII’s personal throat doctor The New York Times, 17 May 1910. One of Edward’s last acts had been to summon Ambassador Reid to Buckingham Palace, and, between spasms of coughing, plan the details of Roosevelt’s visit. Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid (New York, 1921), 2.411–12.

6 he was hard-pressed TR also found time to view, with EKR, Edward VII’s coffin lying in state at Buckingham Palace. The next day it was transferred to Westminster Hall.

7 “Confound these kings” Abbott, Impressions of TR, 294. Abbott left the king’s name blank, but he was identified in the press as Haakon of Norway.

8 She floated into KR diary, 16 May 1910 (KRP); Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours (New York, 1933), 177. ARL’s butterfly brilliance is communicated in Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth (London, 1981). The standard biography is Stacy Cordery, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, From White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (New York, 2007).

9 “a voodoo” Teague, Mrs. L., 140.

10 “one of the finest fellows” Henry White to Mrs. White, 18 May 1910 (HW); TR, Letters, 7.402.

11 Emerging one morning The New York Times, 20 May 1910; Henry White to EKR, 27 Nov. 1922 (correcting the account in Robinson, My Brother TR, 261–62). TRC.

12 inside information Wilhelm II to Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, misdated “5 May 1910,” in Edgar T. Dugdale, ed., German Diplomatic Documents 1871–1914 (London, 1930), 3.414.

13 It did not seem to cross his mind Nor, apparently, did the Kaiser notice that Roosevelt, criticizing two out-of-power Tories, had said nothing about his interview with Grey, the key figure in British foreign relations.

14 “I’m going to a Wake” Alice Hooper reporting to Frederick Jackson Turner in Dear Lady: The Letters of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alice Forbes Perkins Hooper, 1910–1932 (San Marino, Calif., 1970), 303. The very proper Mrs. Hooper remained “quite honestly shocked” nine years later.

15 “I hardly know” Unless otherwise identified, the following quotations by TR are taken from his narrative letter to David Gray (“For nobody’s eyes but yours”) in TR, Letters, 7.409–12. See also below, 625.

16 In contrast to The New York Times, 20 May 1910; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 296–97. According to Alice Hooper, Reid remained afraid until the final hour that TR would insist on wearing the uniform of an American colonel of cavalry. See above, 584, and Turner, Dear Lady, 303.

17 denying Achduke Franz TR got this story direct from the Kaiser. Abbott, Impressions of TR, 298–99.

18 Monarch vied with monarch TR’s stories were apparently well circulated in the royal courts of Europe. Wilhelm II’s favorite was the one of Ben Daniels, marshal of Dodge City, who got his ear “bit off” in the pursuit of frontier justice. Sullivan, Our Times, 4.435; TR, Letters, 7.367.

19 three more kings Nevins, Henry White, 304.

20 They knew TR, Letters, 7.366–67.

21 “glass coaches” Unless otherwise identified, the following quotations are taken from TR, Letters, 7.412–13.

22 Band music blared The following account of Edward VII’s funeral is based on the reporting of The Times, Pall Mall Gazette, and Manchester Guardian, supplemented by The New York Times and New York Tribune, 20, 21 May 1910. Indented quotations by TR continue to derive from his letter to David Gray, cited above.

23 the strange reticence For TR’s similar behavior in Buffalo after the death of President McKinley, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 11.

24 Pichon’s feelings overcame him TR told Mark Sullivan afterward that at the climax of Pichon’s rage, his hair “stood out like a head of lettuce.” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.436.

25 “One remembers” The New York Times, 21 May 1910. Pichon complained afterward that TR “did not exchange half a dozen words within him during the journey.” The New Age, 2 June 1910.

26 “destined to make history” New York Tribune, 21 May 1910.

27 The Tsar whom everybody Later Nicholas II regretted not attending, and in the spring of 1911 pressingly invited TR to visit Russia. But by then TR had had his fill of star-encrusted monarchs. TR, Letters, 7.302.

28 The midday heat Manchester Guardian, 21 May 1910.

29 Roosevelt suffered The New York Times, 20 May 1910.

30 The cloister of St. George’s Asquith, Autobiography, 271; Chicago Tribune and Manchester Guardian, 21 May 1910.

31 Not until Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, 20 May 1910; TR, Letters, 7413.

32 “Dear old Springy” For the relationship of TR and Spring Rice, see Morris, The Rise of TR, 357–59; Stephen Gwynn, ed., The Letters and Friendships of Cecil Spring Rice: A Record (Boston, 1929), passim; and Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.” On 24 May, TR and EKR visited the scene of their wedding, St. George’s Church in Hanover Square, incognito. They asked to see the register for 1886. The verger, indicating a marked page, informed them that it bore the signature of “Mr. Roosevelt, the former President of the United States, who was married here 23 years ago.” He remained unaware of the identity of his visitors until after they left. The New York Times, 25 May 1910.

33 Winston Churchill, whom he considered Lodge, Selections, 2.385.

Biographical Note: While in British East Africa, TR had drawn a sharp distinction between Churchill and an American novelist of the same name—“Winston Churchill the gentleman.” (Lodge, Selections, 2.349.) His strange dislike for the Englishman is easier to document than explain. Before listing some instances, their many similarities should be considered. They were both politicians of privileged background who swung leftward in mid-career, soldiers of heroic courage, men of letters celebrating the life of action. Hyperactive, garrulous, egotistical, and family-minded, they worshipped their respective early dying fathers and needed enemies to function at maximum efficiency. Power did not corrupt them.

Their first recorded meeting took place in Dec. 1900. Churchill, just elected to Parliament at age 26, was then on a speaking tour of America, and TR, at 41, was governor of New York and vice president–elect. He had read the younger man’s memoirs of military service in India and the Sudan, and regretted that he could not attend his Manhattan lecture. “I am really sorry as I am a great admirer of Mr. Churchill’s books, and should very much like to have a chance to meet him socially.” (TR, Letters, 2.1454.) The chance materialized later in the month, when Churchill dined with the Roosevelts in Albany and “incensed his hosts by slumping in his chair, puffing on a cigar, and refusing to get up when women came into the room.” (Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 539; for another abrasive encounter, see Robinson, My Brother TR, 189.) TR thought Churchill was interesting, but “not an attractive fellow.” (TR, Letters, 3.116–17.) His disapproval deepened in 1904, when Churchill, in what looked to TR like opportunism, bolted Britain’s foundering Conservative Party and joined the new Liberal government. In 1906, TR read Churchill’s biography of Lord Randolph Churchill, found it “vulgar,” and concluded that the author had inherited “levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle, and inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety.” (Lodge, Selections, 2.231–32.) Exactly the same accusations would one day be leveled against TR himself. In 1908, when TR was planning his safari, he read a first-serial account by Churchill of killing a white rhinoceros in the Lado Enclave, and was overcome by competitive bloodlust. “I should consider my entire African trip a success if I could get to that country and find the game as Mr. Churchill describes it.… The white rhino is the animal I care most to get—even more than the elephant.” (TR, Letters, 6.1383.) Churchill subsequently sent him a presentation copy of My African Journey, which TR acknowledged with ill grace: “I do not like Winston Churchill but I suppose ought to write him.” (TR, Letters, 6.1465, 1467.) As recorded above (592), he went on to kill nine white rhinos to Churchill’s one.

Churchill’s booziness and lack of consideration for other people were bound to irritate TR, who set great store by probity and good manners. Subconsciously, however, he may have been more disturbed by the many parallels between them. In 1898, for example, both men almost simultaneously participated in historic cavalry charges. Of the two engagements, that at Omdurman was much more bloody, and of their respective published accounts, Churchill’s was incomparably superior. It might be added that Churchill was capable of empathy with, even admiration for, his enemies, whereas TR always demonized them.

34 The foreign secretary approved Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.92. EKR and ARL worried about TR overplaying his role as an outsider. “Don’t try and talk through your nose and say ‘Amurika,’ ” they begged—in vain. Teague, Mrs. L, 137.

35 By then, Roosevelt Lee, A Good Innings, 1.416; TR quoted in Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time: Shown in His Own Letters (New York, 1920), 2.260. Seth Bullock, asked why TR had no patience for kings, said he thought the Colonel “preferred aces.” Kenneth C. Kellar, Seth Bullock: Frontier Marshal (Aberdeen, S.D., 1972), 165.

36 On 26 May The New York Times, 27 May 1910; Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 532–33; TR, Letters, 7.407. For TR’s improvised speech at the Cambridge Union, see TR, African and European Addresses, 143ff. It was a humorous response to a poem about his penchant for preaching, published in The Gownsman in advance of his arrival: Oh! We’re ready for you, Teddy, our sins are all reviewed, / We’ve put away our novels and our statues in the nude. / We’ve read your precious homilies, and hope to hear some more / At the coming visitation of the moral Theodore.

37 Coincidentally, he EKR diary, 28 May 1910 (TRC); Lee, A Good Innings, 1.423–24; TR, Letters, 7.405. See also [Harold Begbie], The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster (New York, 1921), 77–80.

38 “All I would do” TR, Letters, 7.405. See King Henry IV, Part I, act 3, scene 1.

39 The most distinguished of them [Begbie], Mirrors of Downing Street, 61–69; Kenneth Young, Arthur J. Balfour: The Happy Life of the Politician, Prime Minister, Statesman, and Philosopher, 1848–1930 (London, 1962).

40 “predestined to succumb” Dugdale, German Diplomatic Documents, 2.54. In a letter written shortly before Balfour’s speech, Cecil Spring Rice cited Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and Italy as being especially nervous, along with Austria. “These small states … are useful indicators, like the birds which stir and fuss when the tiger is on the move.” Gwynn, Cecil Spring Rice, 2.145.

41 Was the Tory Shortly before leaving Germany, TR had told the German Chancellor that “The mood of the British was such that an unforeseen event might lead to war. He criticized very sharply in this connection Mr. Balfour’s famous election speech.” Bethmann-Hollweg memo, 14 May 1910, quoted in Dugdale, German Diplomatic Documents, 3.413.

42 “So it is” TR, Letters, 6.962–63.

43 “It would be a fitting” Young, Balfour, 283.

44 For some reason Although the Balfour memorandum was marked “Not sent to Roosevelt,” Young surmises that the proposal itself did reach TR. There is, however, no copy in TRP, and no sign of a reply from TR in either TRP or AJB. The copy seen by Young is cited only as being in a set of “Royal papers,” which supports the supposition that it was intended for Edward VII’s eyes. Its wording and topical references further suggest that it was prepared later in 1909 than Young assumes—possibly even in early 1910. Balfour may have intended discussing his plan orally with TR, when they met at Chequers. Unfortunately neither man, nor Arthur Lee (who was responsible for sending Balfour’s book to TR in 1908), left a record of what they actually did discuss that weekend.

45 Arthur Lee was delighted Lee, A Good Innings, 1.422; Gwynn, Cecil Spring Rice, 2.115; TR, Letters, 6.1241, 7.403. The ambassador’s other nightmares included Slavs advancing west and Huns advancing north. See Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.”

46 “I never heard a man” J. S. Sandars to “E,” 29 May 1910 (AJB).

47 felt it his duty TR, Letters, 7.402–3.

48 He said he had just All quotations from TR’s Guildhall speech are taken from TR, African and European Addresses, 157ff. Extra details, including audience reaction, are from Manchester Guardian, 1 June 1910.

49 “This will cause” Lee, A Good Innings, 1.425. At one point in TR’s address, Balfour emitted “an audible ‘Haw haw!’ ”—presumably his Etonian way of enunciating “Hear, hear!” Otherwise, he and Grey presented stiff faces during the speech—Grey so much so that an American reporter was convinced that he disapproved. The foreign minister, however, later wrote: “I listened to it with a glow of satisfaction.” The New York Times, 1, 4 June 1910; Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.91.

50 “I just love that man” Lee, A Good Innings, 1.425. See also Whitelaw Reid to Philander Knox, 31 May 1910 (WR): “Arthur Balfour and Lord Cromer made no secret of their delight.… Edward Grey was equally pleased (although under more necessity to conceal it).” TR was even franker to a group of Irish nationalist M.P.s, who met with him the following day and were disappointed to hear that he by no means favored Home Rule. “I think they were too lenient with you,” he genially informed Arthur Alfred Lynch, who had deserted the British army in South Africa but been forgiven by the British government. “If I had been in their place I would certainly have had you hanged.” Lee, A Good Innings, 1.426.

51 “Well, the attitude” TR to ABR, 3 June 1910 (ABRP).

52 Liberal newspapers The New York Times, 1, 3, 4 June 1910; Manchester Guardian, 1 June 1910. See also Literary Digest, 11 June 1910.

53 Conservative reactions TR, African and European Addresses, vii; The Times, 1 June 1910; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 160. For John St. Loe Strachey’s White House visit in 1902, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 181, 188.

54 George Bernard Shaw Shaw quoted in Chicago Tribune, 3 June 1910; Stead in Manchester Guardian, 2 June 1910. TR reciprocally considered Shaw to be “a blue-rumped ape.” Wagenknecht, Seven Worlds, 137.

55 “I was an auditor” TR, Letters, 7.403.

56 “I should have thought” Ibid., 7.404.

57 lunching with a grateful King For an account of this haut-bourgeois luncheon, see ibid., 7.414–15. TR also dined with Robert Scott on the eve of the latter’s last voyage to the Antarctic.

58 “He has enjoyed himself” Gwynn, Cecil Spring Rice, 2.151.

59 STATEMENT INCORRECT TR, Letters, 7.87.

60 One last public appearance The following account of TR’s honorary degree ceremony at Oxford is based on reports in The New York Times, 8 June, and The Times, 9 June 1910. See also TR, Letters, 7.406–7 and Sullivan, Our Times, 4.431. Quotations from the proceedings are taken from TR, African and European Addresses, 175–249.

61 For once, Roosevelt was Among the scholars whom TR consulted in preparing his lecture were Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, and James Bryce, the former regius professor of modern law at Oxford, and current British ambassador to the United States. After a blue-pencil review of the draft manuscript, which contained specific comparisons of two moribund European monarchies to the megatherium and glyptodon, Osborn wrote: “I have left out certain passages that are likely to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred to.” (Pringle, TR, 519.) For the long and eventually strained relationship of TR and Bryce, see Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.”

62 Behold, Vice-Chancellor This translation seems to have been written by Curzon himself.

63 More than ever TR, Works, 14.66. For the complete text of TR’s Romanes Lecture, see ibid., 65–106.

64 Roosevelt was using According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, the word ethnic acquired racial overtones only in American English, ca. 1945.

65 “It would appear” Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections (New York, 1939), 1.321. The “longitude” of TR’s text, running to almost 12,000 words, was apparent even to the speaker. According to one report, his voice began to fail, and he dropped whole chunks of text toward the end. Even so, TR spoke for an hour and a quarter. The New York Times, 8 June 1910.

66 attended by the heads Prime Minister Herbert Asquith; Chief Justice Lord Alverstone; Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury.

67 “at the time of the singing” Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.90.

68 the two men took a preliminary hike This account of TR’s expedition with Grey is based on his own narrative in TR, Works, 22.364–69, and a detailed map of the expedition route in The New Forest Commemorative Walk (Nature Conservancy of Britain, 1979). See also Paul Russell Cutright, “TR Listens to the Music of British Birds,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Spring 1987. In the summer of 2006, the author retraced TR’s steps with a British ornithologist, Mr. Richard Pennington, who identified twenty-eight of the species seen and heard in 1910.

69 Roosevelt listened and watched TR, Works, 22.365–67.

70 the unstoppable mockingbird See TR’s rapturous description in Works, 2.61–62. Grey wrote years later that he “had one of the most perfectly trained ears for bird songs that I have ever known.” Cutright, “TR Listens to the Music.”

71 “the woods and fields” TR, Works, 22.369. The Forest Park Hotel, where TR and Grey stayed, still operates in Brockenhurst, Hampshire.

72 “Take care of him” Kipling to Brander Matthews, 10 June 1910, quoted in Bishop, TR, 2.259.

73 Similar imagery The New York Times, 9 June 1910; The New Age, 16 May 1910; Literary Digest, 18 June 1910.

74 eight thousand letters Chicago Tribune, 10 June 1910. Most of these letters were mailed after TR’s Guildhall speech.

75 a spokesman for The New York Times, 5 June 1910.

76 “I have had” WHT to TR, 26 May 1910 (WHTP). TR replied evasively to WHT, in a letter unlikely to reach America before he did. “As to your more than kind invitation that I should visit the White House, I shall ask you about this to let me defer my answer until I reach Oyster Bay, and to find out what work is in store for me.” TR, Letters, 7.88–89.

77 passengers saw little of him The phrase, and all other details in this paragraph, come from The New York Times, 19 June 1910.

78 But she knew him well enough In Mar. 1898, TR had been ready to go to war in Cuba, even as EKR lay at the point of death with an abdominal abscess. “I shall chafe my heart out if I am kept [sic] here instead of being at the front,” he wrote. Sylvia Morris,Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 170–71.

79 “I love Father” ERD to Edith Gregori, 8 Aug. 1910 (ERDP).

80 He agreed to speak William Bayard Hale, “The Colonel and John Bull,” World’s Work, Aug. 1910.

81 Later in the day Ibid.

CHAPTER 4: A NATIVE OYSTER

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 359.

2 Joseph Youngwitz Youngwitz identified himself and described his purchase to a reporter during the course of the day. (The New York Times, 18 June 1910.) His name appears in the U.S. Census for 1910.

3 Straw boaters undulated Some of the boaters, sold by street vendors, were banded with the word “DEE-LIGHTED.” New York World, 19 June 1910; Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday: The Reminiscences of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 49.

4 At 7:30 A.M. The following description of TR’s return to New York is based on accounts in The New York Times, New York World, and New York Evening Post, 18, 19 June 1910; “TR’s Return to New York,” newsreel in Theodore Roosevelt on Film, Library of Congress; and photographs in Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 538–39. The World estimated the total crowd at one and a half million. By all accounts, it was the greatest individual welcome ever accorded by New York City, until the parade for Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

5 “He was smiling” EKR quoted in Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 143.

6 “Will you kindly” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 396.

7 “Think—for the first” Ibid., 399.

8 Roosevelt embraced his sisters Anna “Bamie” Roosevelt Cowles (1855–1931); Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (1861–1933).

9 Ted presented Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 339–40; Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 13–14.

10 Franklin Delano Roosevelt “Franklin ought to go into politics,” TR wrote, after FDR’s campaign as a Democrat for the New York State Senate was announced. “…  He is a fine fellow.” (To Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 10 Aug. 1910 [ARC].) For the intertwined history of the Oyster Bay (Republican) and Hyde Park (Democratic) branches of the Roosevelt family, see Stephen Hess, America’s Political Dynasties (New York, 1966, 1996), 167ff.

11 “my original discoverer!” The New York Times, 19 June 1910. See Morris, The Rise of TR, 131–33.

12 latest issue of The Outlook TR, “Our Colonial Policy,” The Outlook, June 1910.

13 He had to turn New York World, 19 June 1910.

14 “I am ready” The New York Times, 19 June 1910.

15 [We] figured it Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 396.

16 Just above Franklin The New York Times, 19 June 1910.

17 “about five years ago” Ibid.

18 That evening The wording of this paragraph closely follows that of TR’s own account in TR, Works, 22.369.

19 He and his first wife For TR’s marriage (1880–1884) to Alice Hathaway Lee, see Putnam, TR; Morris, The Rise of TR; and Michael Teague, “Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Hathaway Lee: A New Perspective,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 32.3 (Summer 1985).

20 Being a young widower For a short account of TR’s tenure as squire of Sagamore Hill, 1880–1919, see Natalie Naylor, “Understanding the Place: Theodore Roosevelt’s Hometown of Oyster Bay and His Sagamore Hill Home,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 30.1–2 (Winter–Spring 2009). The most extended study is Hermann Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill (New York, 1954).

21 “One thing” The New York Times, 19 June 1910.

22 a vow of political silence TR’s vow was transmitted to WHT twice on 18 June, verbally by Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson and in a note delivered by Archie Butt. (Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 404; Pringle, TR, 534.) For TR’s literary ambitions at this time, see Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew Them: Presidents and Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York, 1927), 327.

23 During the next TR, Works, 22.370–71.

24 Birds of Oyster Bay A copy of this extremely rare paper, printed in Mar. 1879, is in TRC.

25 Over the weekend New York World, 19 June 1910; New York Evening Post and Literary Digest, 18 June 1910. A veteran journalist rated TR’s current candle-power as higher than that of Jack Johnson. Charles Willis Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known and Two Near Presidents (Indianapolis, 1929), 27.

26 the right to doze For Taft’s somnolence, see Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 18, 504 (“I have never seen a man with such capacity for sleep”), and Irwin H. Hoover, Forty-two Years in the White House (Boston, 1934), 269.

27 were convinced Morris, Theodore Rex, 508.

28 The letters Archie Butt For the diplomatic role played by Archibald Butt in the writing of these letters, see Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 388–92. WHT made a show of reluctance over them (“I do not want to say anything at first which might mislead Roosevelt into thinking that I expect of desire advice”), but the querulous tone of the first letter speaks for itself. WHT declined to address TR as “Colonel” in his second communication, saying that plain “Mr.” was good enough.

29 “I do not know” WHT to TR, 26 May 1910 (TRP).

30 Taft took credit for Ibid.

31 “[They] have done” Ibid. Henry Cabot Lodge was of the same angry opinion. Lodge to TR, 30 Apr. 1910 (TRP).

32 He mentioned WHT to TR, 14 June 1910 (WHTP).

33 Now, my dear TR, Letters, 7.89.

34 Two days later Joseph H. Choate (eyewitness) to Carrie Choate, ca. 1910 (HKB); Robinson, My Brother TR, 262–63.

35 “I am like Peary” Charles G. Washburn, Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of His Career (Boston, 1916), 166. A copy of the exquisite dinner program is preserved in SUL.

36 “I am very much pleased” Thomas Dreier, Heroes of Insurgency (Boston, 1910), 30. Quoted in Pringle, TR, 535. Actually, La Follette was far from being pleased. Ambitious to run for the presidency on a progressive platform, he got the feeling, during this visit, that TR had similar designs. For the political pas de deux now embarked on by both men—full of courtly gestures, solo variations, and teetering levées (with La Follette constantly afraid that he would be dropped), see Herbert F. Margulies, “La Follette, Roosevelt and the Republican Presidential Nomination of 1912,” Mid-America, 58.1 (1976).

37 Most of the pilgrims In private, the progressives were not so circumspect. “Glorious to have him back and ready to lead the great fight against special interest and for the common weal,” Garfield wrote in his diary. TR was reportedly “in absolute agreement” with the aims of Garfield and Pinchot, and asked them to work out for him a declaration of principles that he could publicly espouse. This would appear to be the nucleus of TR’s “New Nationalism” speech. James Garfield diary, 23 June 1910 (JRGP).

38 “He says he will” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 416.

39 Colonel Roosevelt is now New York World, 20 June 1910.

40 “democracy of the heart” Mowry, TR, 52.

41 a fifth of the general populace The population of the United States in 1910 was 91,972,266, or 93,402,000 if Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico were included (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. [1911]).

42 Roosevelt had been wary Morris, Theodore Rex, 144–45 and passim; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.351.

43 “hideous human swine” TR, Letters, 5.264. TR complained to Owen Wister, who as a young writer showed Zolaesque inclinations, “I think that conscientious descriptions of the unspeakable do not constitute an interpretation of life.… There’s nothing masculine in being revolting.” Wister, Roosevelt, 34.

44 From infancy, he had Leary, Talks with T.R., 208–9. “I have never known that wonderful experience of being ‘flat broke,’ ” TR told his old Rough Rider friend Jack Greenaway. Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 341.

45 His radicalism In June 1910, TR was offered the presidency of the National Trades and Workers Association at the enormous salary of $100,000. He turned the job down.

46 Booker T. Washington Ten years after their famous dinner, TR concluded that Washington was “the highest type of all-round man I have ever met.” Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers (Urbana, Ill., 1972–1989), 1.439.

47 If he was less motivated “Roosevelt,” WW sagely remarked, “never works the heart out of himself.” Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, N.J., 1966–1990), 56.

48 During Roosevelt’s absence Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909). TR had ordered a copy of the English edition to be held for him in London. (TR, Letters, 7.76.) Gary Murphy, “Mr. Roosevelt Is Guilty: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for Constitutionalism, 1910–1912,” Journal of American Studies, 36.3 (Dec. 2002) notes, “There is scarcely a theme or a recommendation of the New Nationalism which Roosevelt had not already enunciated before Croly’s work.”

49 “An individuality such” Croly, The Promise of American Life, 174. An odd feature of this book, published nine months after TR’s departure from the White House, was that it consistently spoke of him as if he were still in power. On 4 Oct. 1910, Ray Stannard Baker noticed the book lying on TR’s desk at Sagamore Hill, “with passages heavily scored and pages on the fly-leaf with references.” Notebook K, 153 (RSB).

50 Roosevelt’s Special Message Morris, Theodore Rex, 506–8. Mowry, TR, 34, dates the “rebirth” of progressive reform (after its earlier trial run as populism) to 1902, the annus mirabilis of TR’s first term. Except for Robert M. La Follette, then in his own first term as governor of Wisconsin, “Roosevelt stood virtually alone as a nationally known progressive Republican.”

51 The issues he raised then The complete text of TR’s Special Message of 31 Jan. 1908 is reprinted in TR, Letters, 6.1572–91.

52 The opponents TR, Letters, 6.1587.

53 converging at state and local levels The phrase is taken from John Allen Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, N.Y., 1978), 9.

Historical Note: The summer of 1910 also marked the convergence, within the Republican Party, of insurgency and progressivism, hitherto two separate movements. As Kenneth W. Hechler differentiates them, insurgency was agrarian in its values, and nonetheless narrow for being fought out primarily in Washington’s corridors of power. Progressivism’s typical battleground had been the state capitol or city hall, where “social reformers, champions of the rights of labor, and scions of the business world advocat[ed] a greater sense of responsibility to the public.” (Hechler, Insurgency, 24.) Although the two movements became one for campaign purposes through 1912 and beyond, their Jeffersonian-versus-Hamiltonian differences prevented them from achieving true unity.

54 “Is this not” Literary Digest, 25 June 1910, quoted in Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 9. This was a commentary on a widely publicized prediction, by the chairman of the Roosevelt Club of St. Paul, Minn., that TR, Gifford Pinchot, and James Garfield were destined to lead a new party with a progressive agenda.

55 The fact that Hechler, Insurgency, 217; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 300–301. For a full account of this purge, and WHT’s role in it, see Mowry, TR, chap. 4.

56 “I might be able” TR, Letters, 7.74.

57 On 29 June Sullivan, Our Times, 4.447. Sullivan was an eyewitness to this encounter.

58 Cannily, he emphasized Davis, Released for Publication, 192.

59 Many times See, e.g., Morris, The Rise of TR, 756.

60 He did not like The satirist Finley Peter Dunne stated flatly, “Nobody liked Hughes—nobody at all.” Philip Dunne, ed., Mr. Dooley Remembers: The Informal Memoirs of Finley Peter Dunne (Boston, 1963), 142.

61 Even Taft supported Pringle, Taft, 560.

62 “Our governor” The New York Times, 30 June 1910.

63 After coffee William N. Chadbourne interview, Apr.–May 1955 (TRB). A modern historian points out that TR had spent so many years in Washington that he had few close contacts in the state GOP. John Allen Gable, “The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, 1912–1916” (Ph.D. diss., Kenyon College, 1965), 16.

64 “What shall I do?” Chadbourne interview, Apr.–May 1955 (TRB).

65 “I believe” TR, Letters, 7.97. The wording of TR’s telegram allowed for the fact that he did not personally attach much value to the direct primary. He told Lawrence Lowell, the president of Harvard, that same day that the machine would soon manage to manipulate it. (Lowell to Owen Wister, 8 Aug. 1930 [OW].) Wister writes of TR’s commitment to help Hughes: “In all his life, I see no decision more crucial than this one.” Trifling in itself, it largely determined the future course of his life. Wister, Roosevelt, 280–82.

66 He was bursting Margaret Terry Chanler, Roman Spring (Boston, 1934), 199–201.

67 “I know this man” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 418.

68 “Jimmy, I may” Ibid., 261.

69 He came out of the house The following account of TR’s reunion with WHT is taken from the only primary record available, in Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 393–431.

70 Before leaving New York Evening Post, 1 July 1910; Lodge, Selections, 2.351; Paul T. Heffron, “William Moody: Profile of a Public Man,” Yearbook of the Supreme Court Historical Society, 1980. TR’s other Supreme Court appointments were Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Rufus Day.

71 He had looked to Moody As early as 26 Sept. 1907, Moody, just appointed to the Supreme Court, had written sarcastically to TR about “those who regard [the Constitution] as a benign gift from the Fathers, designed to protect those of sufficient wealth from the consequences of their misdoing.” He went on: “Above all I dread a reactionary in your place. It is not so much for what he would do within the four years, but for what he could perpetuate … by the power of appointment, which for the next six years is of vital importance to our future development” (TRP).

CHAPTER 5: THE NEW NATIONALISM

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 26.

2 Roosevelt returned home The New York Times headline on 1 July 1910 was DEFY ROOSEVELT IN BOTH HOUSES. TR was denounced in the assembly for interfering in the legislative process.

3 “And the ‘Hundred’ ” Literary Digest, 9 July 1910; New York Sun, 1 July 1910.

4 chairman of the convention In the confusing terminology of 1910, this office (both at the state and national level) was qualified by the adjective temporary before and through most of the convention. It changed to permanent only when the party elected its chairman for the next two or four years. The distinction may now be conveniently ignored.

5 “Archie, I am” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 434.

6 “I could cry” Lucius Burrie Swift to Mrs. Swift, 8 July 1910 (LBS).

7 “Are you aware” Victor Murdock interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, 10 Nov. 1940 (TRB).

8 Roosevelt was struggling The fairest analysis of TR’s complex political situation in the summer of 1910 remains that of Sullivan, Our Times, 4.443–45.

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 professor’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).

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 on 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 York, 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.

5 “a young girl entitled” TR, Letters, 7.315.

6 The Roosevelt retinue Wallace, Sagamore Hill, 1.22–27; TR, Letters, 7.316. Scholars of race nomenclature might note that in the latter, TR refers to his male servants alternately as “black,” “colored,” and “native Americans.”

7 “I am really thinking” TR, Letters, 7.295; Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 23 Aug. 1911. See also TR, Letters, 7.219–22, 303–4. “I wish I could devote myself exclusively to work as a naturalist,” he wrote Henry Fairfield Osborn on 5 July 1911 (AMNH). TR’s monograph was an expansion of his critical appendix on protective coloration theory in African Game Trails (reprinted in TR, Works, 6.375–405). The main proponent of the theory, the artist Abbott H. Thayer, replied to TR’s criticisms in the July issue of Popular Science Monthly and in the America Museum Bulletin on 14 Sept. 1912. TR’s final word on the subject was published in American Museum Journal, Mar. 1918. For a beautifully illustrated discussion of the whole confrontation, see Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Attraction of Camouflage,” American Art, Summer 1997.

8 Roosevelt followed it See TR, Works, 14.439–47, 195–203, 52–57; TR, Letters, 7.302. TR’s reviews of the Chamberlain and Weigall books are in TR, Works, 14.52–57, 195–203.

9 Somehow, he could not TR, Letters, 7.311.

10 “As you know” Ibid., 7.310; TR, Last Will and Testament, 13 Dec. 1912, copy in AC. TR was disappointed to hear from Charles Scribner on 21 Aug. that African Game Trails had not proved to be the bestseller he had expected, after its promising launch in the fall of 1910. “While it did not do all we had hoped for, the sale falling off rather suddenly at the last,” Scribner wrote, “we are by no means through with it and we are thoroughly contented.” He enclosed a check for $4,178, representing a half-year of royalties on all Roosevelt rights held by his house (SCR). TR’s income from his many books issued by various publishers is summarized below, 657.

11 “The kaleidoscope changes” TR, Letters, 7.311.

12 Not only he Ibid., 7.164–65; Mowry, TR, 166.

13 “I very earnestly” TR, Letters, 7.334.

14 “The word panic” Ibid. TR’s phrase, “fear, unreasoning fear” may have implanted itself in the memory of his young cousin Franklin Roosevelt, who had not yet left town on vacation.

Historical Note: TR was accused of approving (or, technically, promising not to prosecute), a deal transferring ownership of the world’s richest known tract of iron ore from the Tennessee Coal Company to U.S. Steel for only $30 million. By 1911, the tract was valued at $2 billion. In doing so, the Stanley Committee alleged, he had made himself a puppet of the steel magnates Henry Clay Frick and Judge Elbert H. Gary. TR read to Stanley one of his self-exonerating “posterity letters,” dictated immediately after meeting with the two men on 4 Nov. 1907, and delivered within the hour to his attorney general, Charles Joseph Bonaparte. It reported that Frick and Gary had informed him, with Secretary of State Elihu Root standing by as a witness, that “a certain business firm” (Moore & Schley) owning a majority of the shares of TCC would fail and cause a “general industrial smashup” unless it was bought at once by U.S. Steel. They had argued convincingly that they were performing a public service in acquiring an asset they really did not want. In return, they asked for a guarantee of antitrust protection. “I answered,” Roosevelt wrote, “that while of course I could not advise them to take the action proposed, I felt it no public duty of mine to interpose any objection.” Congressman Stanley, intimidated as much by TR’s extraordinary record-keeping as by the forcefulness of his reading, failed to follow up with an interrogation that could have shown how manipulated the President had in fact been, at the hands of two adroit businessmen congenial to Elihu Root. (The New York Times, 6 Aug. 1911; TR, Letters, 5.830–31.)

For a detailed account of the Wall Street panic of 1907, centering on the USS/TCC “deal” and upholding TR’s testimony, see Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York, 1999), chap. 28. But see also James C. German, Jr., “Roosevelt, Taft, and United States Steel,” The Historian, 34.4 (1972). This article lists at least half a dozen examples of deception practiced by Gary and Frick during their interview with TR on 4 Nov. 1907, including a false statement that Moore & Schley held a majority of TC&I stocks; no mention of the fact that TC&I was U.S. Steel’s principal competitor in iron ore holdings; and concealment of TC&I’s true profitability at the time of the purchase. TR was led to believe that the company’s stock was worthless.

15 Even The New York Times On 6 Aug. 1911. The New York Evening Post agreed, albeit with editorial tongue in cheek. “The Colonel enthusiastically approves everything the President did in 1907 … [as being] the source of unqualified satisfaction and pride to the man best able to judge the whole matter, namely, the principal actor in it” (7 Aug. 1911).

16 “very young looking” TR, Letters, 7.322.

17 News came from San Francisco EKR diary, 17 Aug. 1911 (TRC); TR to TR.Jr., 17 Aug. 1911, private collection. TR probably read Michelet’s famous diatribe against Jesuit misogyny at Harvard, in preparation for his senior thesis, “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights” (1880). As translated into English by Charles Cocks (London, 1845), the preface to the book reads, “Whether we be philosophers, physiologists, political economists, or statesmen, we all know that the excellency of the race, the strength of the people, come especially from the women. Does not the nine months’ support of the mother establish this?… We all are, and ever shall be, the debtors of women” (viii). TR quoted the last phrase, and held to the precept, continually through his life.

18 Grimly determined Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 44–45, 58; TR, quoting Ted, to Cecil Spring Rice, 10 Aug. 1912 (CSR).

19 “Do remember” TR, Letters, 7.344.

20 he was expressing See, e.g., TR’s articles on progressive justice in The Outlook, 24 June and 22 July, and on Alaska land policy in ibid., 22 July, 5, 12 Aug. 1911. See also TR, Letters, 7.323–24.

21 gambled his whole government See Pringle, Taft, 586, for a gaming slogan, coined by Laurier in Aug. 1911, that may have hastened the prime minister’s retirement.

22 About the only Hechler, Insurgency, 185; Mowry, TR, 173–74. La Follette announced for the presidency on 17 June 1911.

23 La Follette imagined The Outlook, 27 May 1911; Mowry, TR, 177–78. In Apr., La Follette, reacting to expressions of Rooseveltian goodwill relayed by an intermediary, Gilson Gardner, had convinced himself that TR wanted him to run against Taft as the official candidate of Republican progressives. Gardner later denied he had transmitted any such message. (La Follette, Autobiography, 512–16.) It is possible that La Follette, like many presidential aspirants before and since, mistook flattery for endorsement.

24 “My present intention” TR, Letters, 7.336. WW then was the strongest candidate, period. A midsummer presidential preference poll of 2,414 primary-state subscribers to World’s Work magazine returned 1,505 ballots, awarding 519 votes to WW, 402 to WHT, and 274 to TR, with all other candidates scoring only double figures. Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, 1966–1990), 23.234.

25 a second “Morocco crisis” Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York, 2004), 39–40; Gwynn, Cecil Spring Rice, 2.163; TR, Letters, 7.343.

26 Roosevelt raged Lodge, Selections, 2.409. TR added that the Kaiser’s strategists “are under solemn treaty to respect the territories of both countries, and they have not the slightest thought of paying the least attention to these treaties unless they are threatened with war as the result of their violation.” It is difficult to guess from whom TR may have gotten his “personal” information about German war plans, but he did spend many hours with Wilhelm II at Döberitz.

27 Taft and Governor Wilson chose The New York Times, 3 Sept. 1911.

28 Wilson’s statement Ibid. TR’s political enemy, Governor Simeon Baldwin of Connecticut, also contributed to this peace manifesto.

29 As an example TR, Letters, 7.448. See also Lodge, Selections, 2.404–5.

30 “The fact of” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 753. TR’s article was prominently quoted and summarized in The New York Times, 9 Sept. 1911, under the headline ROOSEVELT ASSAILS THE TAFT TREATIES. See also his even more emphatic year-end statement in TR, Letters, 7.447–50.

31 “This is the only” The following conversation is taken from Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 315–17. Stoddard was the editor of the New York Mail at the time.

32 On 15 September In preparation for the President’s arrival, the City Club in St. Louis installed new elevator cables. The New York Times, 14 Sept. 1911.

33 Canadians had voted The New York Times, 6 Sept. 1911; Pringle, Taft, 750. For a full discussion of the reciprocity issue, see Pringle, Taft, 582ff.

34 He had supported TR, Letters, 7.345. George Dangerfield links the cession of power from the Lords to the Commons on 10 Aug. 1911 to the subsequent decline of reform Liberalism in Britain. Unionist Toryism, too, was doomed to disappear with the rise of militant labor and the onset of World War I. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1935; Stanford, Calif., 1997), 63–69.

35 I found I was TR, Letters, 7.362. The full text of this letter, completed 1 Oct. 1911, is in ibid., 7.348–99. Five days later, TR wrote a sequel, describing his visit to Great Britain as special ambassador to Edward VII’s funeral, but with the extreme circumspection that always characterized his discussion of diplomatic matters, he addressed it to an American friend, David Gray, on the ground that it might be too frank for English eyes. See TR, Letters, 7.401–15. Later he changed his mind, and allowed Gray to send a copy to Sir George Otto Trevelyan.

Historiographical Note: In 2009 a third “posterity” letter written in this same period by TR to Trevelyan, and carbon-copied to Gray, came to light. Obviously intended to supplement TR’s tour reminiscences with an equally primary account of some of his earlier dealings with Wilhelm II and other statesmen, the letter, dated 9 Nov. 1911, has been published in facsimile, with an accompanying article and appendices. See Gregory A. Wynn, “ ‘Under Your Own Roof’: An Important TR Letter Discovered,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 30.3 (Summer 2009).

36 She was knocked The accident dislocated the top three vertebrae in EKR’s neck. EKR diary, 30 Sept. 1911 (TRC); TR to KR, 2, 5 Oct. and to Fanny Parsons, 6 Oct. 1911 (TRC); TR, Letters, 7.432; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 373–74. EKR’s diary remains blank through 10 Nov. 1911.

37 The family doctor TR, Letters, 7.429–36; New York Tribune, 21 Oct. 1911; TR, Works, 18.262. TR’s speech, entitled “The Conservation of Womanhood and Childhood,” was an early formulation of his views on welfare and the judiciary, which became central elements of the Progressive Party platform in 1912. It appears in TR, Works, 18.244–75.

38 Germany being “compensated” MacDonogh, The Last Kaiser, 325.

39 Meanwhile Taft Mowry, TR, 184; La Follette, Autobiography, 532. According to Mowry, the receptions accorded WHT in the Midwest were so chilly, he was jokingly said to have added some Southern states to his itinerary, “so that he might thaw out.” For an account of the Progressive convention’s rather ambivalent feelings regarding La Follette, see Margulies, “La Follette.”

40 Roosevelt was stunned TR, Letters, 7.430. The claim in Mowry, TR, 191, that “Roosevelt’s reaction was as instantaneous as it was violent” is not supported by TR’s behavior during the next two months, nor by the tone of his public references to the Taft administration. Mowry’s pioneer researches in the Roosevelt papers were sometimes hampered by his tendency to take TR’s political temperature and find it feverish. This misperception, shared by many historians, can be ascribed to TR’s own tendency (noticeable also in affectionate letters) to overexpress himself. For a corrective view, see Andrew C. Pavord, “The Gamble for Power: Theodore Roosevelt’s Decision to Run for the Presidency in 1912,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 26.3 (Summer 1996).

41 For two and a half Margulies, “La Follette”; Mowry, TR, 183, 293–94.

42 As James Bryce noted Bryce to Sir Edward Grey, 24 Oct. 1911, Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 15.48; Moody quoted in German, “Roosevelt, Taft, and United States Steel.” The latter concludes that TR was indeed misled. He was falsely told, among other things, that Moore & Schley held a majority of TC&I stocks; TC&I’s potential wealth and competitive threat to U.S. Steel were underplayed; he did not know that TC&I was paying dividends, and investing heavily in itself, at the time of purchase. In 1920, however, the Supreme Court found the steel company innocent of antitrust activity.

43 I know you” TR, Letters, 7.430–31.

44 He told two Ibid., 7.417, 422. According to La Follette, Autobiography, 535–37, TR had by this time been informed by two roving correspondents, Gilson Gardner and John C. O’Laughlin, as to the impressive extent of progressive opposition to WHT across the country. But the senator’s suggestion that this information caused TR at once to lust for the nomination is contradicted by the repeated testimony of TR’s letters for the rest of 1911. Harbaugh, TR, 384, comments: “Whatever his subconscious desires, his rational self opposed a bid for the nomination.”

45 At Carnegie Hall TR, Letters, 7.424, 421. This letter is a good example of TR’s need to imagine enemies. On 20 Oct. 1911, The New York Times, to cite just one newspaper generally critical of him, gave his Carnegie Hall speech long, respectful, and positive coverage, with copious quotations of the text. It reported that the hall was “crowded to the doors,” that he was greeted with a universal standing ovation, and that he expressed his “highest respect for the judiciary.” TR noticed only that the Times did not print his speech in full.

46 worked with extreme care TR, Letters, 7.435. “Nobody knows how much time I put into my articles for The Outlook,” TR told Charles Washburn one day, pulling a manuscript out of his pocket. Washburn, TR, 151.

47 The article, headlined TR, Letters, 7.454; Boston Globe, 17 Nov. 1911; Mowry, TR, 192. Although the issue of The Outlook containing TR’s editorial was date-lined 18 Nov., his words were effectively published two days earlier.

48 Roosevelt tersely reaffirmed The following quotations are taken from The Outlook, 18 Nov. 1911.

49 Admitting that he The Northern Securities Company was dissolved by order of the Supreme Court in Mar. 1904, Standard Oil and American Tobacco in the spring of 1911. Although TR authorized all three successful prosecutions, he was not satisfied with the last two, feeling that the essential dominance of either trust in its industry was unaffected by the Court’s vague application of a “rule of reason” to antitrust law. This dissatisfaction fueled his demand for “continuous and comprehensive government regulation” of combinations. TR, Letters, 7.277–78; Harbaugh, TR, 379–81.

50 as long as they did not monopolize A contemporary historian waxes poetical in his sample listing of Progressive Era trusts: “Continental Cotton and U.S. Glue; National Biscuit and National Glass; American Bicycle and American Brass.” Michael McGerr,A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York, 2003), 151.

51 But those who thought Harbaugh, TR, 380, remarks on the irony that TR here echoed the very reservations about piecemeal prosecutions that had enraged him when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed them in dissenting from the U.S. v. Northern Securities decision of 1904.

52 it was regarded Boston Globe, 17 Nov., The New York Times, 18 Nov., The Washington Post, 17 Nov., New York World, 18 Nov. 1911. Andrew Carnegie, Grenville M. Dodge, and other industrial magnates also praised TR’s editorial. “To some extent,” George E. Mowry comments, “the Outlook article regained for Roosevelt the support of the business interests he had lost at Osawatomie.” Mowry, TR, 192.

53 “He presents” New York World, 18 Nov. 1911.

54 As so often TR, Letters, 7.455; Harbaugh, TR, 381–83, analyzes the “inconsistencies” in TR’s basically moralistic economic thinking.

55 Or so he TR, Letters, 7.441–42; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.461–62.

56 “since Mr. Roosevelt” Boston Globe, 28 Nov. 1911.

57 La Follette was Margulies, “La Follette”; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 388; Wall Street Journal, 9 Nov. 1910.

58 On 11 December Pavord, “The Gamble for Power”; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 388ff. For political gossip emanating from the RNC meeting, see Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 784ff.

59 A group of three Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 390–91; TR, Letters, 7.261–62.

60 Colonel, I never knew Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 391–92. See also TR, Letters, 7.469.

Historiographical Note: A letter from John C. O’Laughlin to a fellow journalist, James Keeley (16 Dec. 1911 [OL]), contains the following indiscretion about a conversation he had just held with TR: “Probably the sensational aspect of our talk related to a proposition which was made to him by Taft through a mutual friend. He told me this in dead confidence, but I can repeat it to you because I know he would not object. The President said he would withdraw and support Mr. Roosevelt provided the latter would agree to appoint him on the Supreme bench. I cannot conceive of a President of the United States making such a proposal. Mr. Roosevelt, of course, refused to listen to anything of the kind. He will enter into no deal for the presidency.” The story is unsupported by other evidence. An expert on the partisan politics of this period points out WHT was in too strong a position to risk the disgrace of such a ploy being made public. WHT in any case had turned down an offer of an associate seat on the Supreme Court during TR’s presidency, saying that he was interested only in becoming chief justice. That office was unlikely to become vacant for some years, since Edward Douglass White had assumed it only recently. Lewis L. Gould to author, 3 Aug. 2009 (AC).

61 There was no arguing Knox, however, was convinced that “if he [TR] is drafted for service by the people not the politicians he will not refuse.” La Follette got similar intimations from other attendants at the meeting. Pavord, “The Gamble for Power”; La Follette, Autobiography, 551–52.

62 “The Search for Truth” The Outlook, 2 Dec. 1911, reprinted in TR, Works, 14.418–38. All quotations below are from this source.

63 Arthur Balfour alone excepted Although Balfour was a bona fide published philosopher and a politician at least as skilled and successful as TR, it could be argued that the latter’s empirical understanding of the world—the basis, rather than the goal, of philosophy—was larger and more sympathetic. Balfour remained to the end of his life an intellectual elitist comfortable only in his own aristocratic class, and even within that class he held himself aloof. See John David Root, “The Philosophy and Religious Thought of Arthur J. Balfour (1848–1930),” Journal of British Studies, 19.2 (Spring 1980).

64 Reyles’s dying swan Originally La Muerte del Cisne. TR read this text in a French translation (Paris, 1911). Bibliographical details of all the books cited in his essay appear in TR, Works, 14.52–93.

65 “Subject to bursts” Henry Osborn Taylor, The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (1910), quoted in TR, Works, 14.420.

66 He took up In the year preceding TR’s essay, the issue of fides versus ratio had become fraught in Roman Catholicism. Sparked by Pope Pius X’s reactionary encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), attacking the validity of intuition, scientism, and mystical aspirations as bases for belief as opposed to scriptural orthodoxy, it had burst into doctrinal flame in 1910, when the pontiff ordered all Catholic clerics to swear an oath repudiating modernism. The resultant ideological schism tormented the Church for the rest of the century, and was moderated only by John Paul II in his great encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998).

67 The year ended TR, Letters, 7.450. “If I should run and be defeated,” TR told one of the “fool friends” urging him to commit himself, “I should be covered with obloquy.” He had had enough of that the winter before. Regis H. Post, “How Roosevelt Made the Government Efficient,” World’s Work, Apr. 1921.

68 Theodore Roosevelt had See, e.g., TR, Letters, 7.451–52.

69 His best interest Some biographers, e.g. Mowry, TR, 192ff., attempt to show that TR had become ambitious for the presidency in the fall of 1911, and that the steel suit was a jump-start to his campaign to defeat Taft. Their arguments, due to a common inability to conceive of TR as anything other than a politician, do not hold up in the light of his countless, and laboriously emphatic, denials of any such ambition. See the representative selection of apologia in TR, Letters, 7.446–69.

70 “Alice, when you” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 776. Butt had been promoted to major. According to ibid., 811–12, several other TR associates in the administration received similar storm warnings.

CHAPTER 8: HAT IN THE RING

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 21.

2 “They say that” TR speech in Manhattan, 7 Nov. 1910, transcript in TRB.

3 “You can put it” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 371. Meanwhile Helen Taft was telling her own husband with equal accuracy, “I think you will be renominated, but I don’t see any chance for the election.” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 68.

4 His response to TR, Letters, 7.466; Margulies, “La Follette”; Mowry, TR, 203.

5 “It now looks” Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 23.596.

6 the hajj that converged Mark Sullivan uses the simile of “strewn iron filings mobilizing to the pull of a revitalized magnet.” (Our Times, 4.469–71.) See also Mowry, TR, 199–202; TR, Letters, 7.470–493, 8.1474.

7 In cabs and carriages TR, Letters, 7.315.

8 Midwesterners loyal La Follette, Autobiography, 581–82; Pringle, TR, 554; Mowry, TR, 200–202.

9 “He is not” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 834–35. “What struck me as significant,” Butt wrote the next day, “was the fact that never once [in a visit lasting from three to four hours] did the Colonel mention the President.” Ibid., 833.

10 “I would much” Post, “How Roosevelt.”

11 “I am not” TR, Letters, 7.470–71. Norris was a La Follette supporter.

12 Nothing less Ibid., 7.474. Andrew C. Pavord, “The Gamble for Power,” argues that TR, in Jan. 1912, was not looking for personal glory. Profoundly idealistic, he felt that the radical reform program he had tried to launch in his second term had been thwarted by Congress, then under the control of Speaker Joseph Cannon and Senator Nelson Aldrich, and thereafter by the Taft administration. He now saw an opportunity to transform the desire of some progressives that he reenter politics into a “mass demand of the people” for completion of his presidential legacy. Through the rest of this month and into February, “Roosevelt was presented with a huge amount of evidence that such a demand truly existed.”

13 He was attractive Harbaugh, TR, 385–86.

14 his latest article TR, “Judges and Progress,” The Outlook, 6 Jan. 1912. James Bryce reported to his government that this article “has thrilled with horror minds of a conservative bent, and especially the higher ranks of the legal profession.” (Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 15.66.) Elihu Root, an eloquent representative of both groups, argued before the New York State Bar Association on 19 Jan. that the philosophy of popular recall “abandons absolutely the conception of a justice which is above majorities.… It denies the vital truth taught by religion and realized by the hard experience of mankind, and which has inspired … every declaration for human freedom since Magna Charta [sic]—the truth that human nature needs to distrust its own impulses and passions, and to establish for its own control the restraining and guiding influence of declared principles of action.” The New York Times, 20 Jan. 1912.

15 “Theodore Roosevelt is” Baltimore American, 24 Jan. 1912.

16 “It was the President” Adams, Letters, 6.490.

17 “What can you do?” La Follette, Autobiography, 547.

18 Taft had executive control Mowry, TR, 226–27. In anticipation of a run by TR, WHT had pressured state Republican committees to hold their conventions as early as possible, before his campaign took hold. Ibid., 209.

19 He now began TR, Letters, 7.451.

20 “In making any” Ibid., 7.481.

21 The only major papers Mowry, TR, 225.

22 Again citing Lincoln TR, Letters, 7.483–84.

23 On 16 January Mowry, TR, 205.

24 “Roosevelt obsession” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.472.

25 “I fear things” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 814.

26 “as hard as nails” Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB). Corinne Roosevelt Robinson told Archie Butt that her brother “could never forgive” Taft’s insult. The breach between him and the President was “irrevocable.” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 811–13.

27 “It is hard” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 804.

28 Major Butt noticed Ibid., 839.

29 La Follette, too Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 30–31; La Follette, Autobiography, 541–45, 586ff.; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.473; Margulies, “La Follette”; The New York Times, 4 Jan. 1912.

30 He had hoped to The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1912. La Follette was an obsessive, but not self-obsessed candidate for the presidency. His primary interest was to advance the cause of progressivism, and his initial reaction to the Roosevelt presidential boom at the end of 1911 had been to offer to withdraw in TR’s favor. But the latter’s indecision made him soldier on. See Harbaugh, TR, 392–94.

31 Within two days Mowry, TR, 210; TR, Letters, 7.485. Since TR had been so inscrutable on the question of his possible candidacy through Dec. 1911 and the first half of Jan. 1912, and since the governor’s letter was subject to several submissions, withdrawals, and revisions through 10 Feb. 1912, historians have long debated as to when, exactly, he decided to run against Taft and La Follette. The most exhaustive analysis of the available evidence is that of John Allen Gable, who concludes that TR “made up his mind sometime between the Norris letter of Jan. 2 and Jan. 16.” By 18 Jan., TR’s availability was a matter of record. Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 31–32, 66–69. See also La Follette, Robert M. La Follette, 1.385–86.

32 All this coordination Margulies, “La Follette”; TR, Letters, 7.487–93.

33 Pandemonium ensued The New York Times, 24 Jan. 1912. The convention also endorsed James Harris for the Republican National Committee.

34 “Do not for one” TR, Letters, 7.493. TR’s continuing reluctance to run in Feb. 1912 was proclaimed not only by himself in countless letters, but by friends and intimates who could sense both his doubts and his almost deterministic acceptance of fate. Albert Bushnell Hart remembers being invited to Sagamore Hill on 26 Jan. to listen, with others, to TR reading a proposed statement of candidacy. They felt it was too self-explanatory, and TR withdrew it, as if he was glad to postpone the moment of reckoning. Hart notes that by delaying almost another month before making a very different announcement, TR lost delegates in Colorado and elsewhere whose numbers might have clinched his nomination in June. (Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 254–56.) As late as mid-February, when TR was working on his Columbus speech in Manhattan, a young progressive named John A. Kingsbury took an evening stroll with him. “I remember that I was very genuinely impressed that night that the Colonel meant what he said when he told me that he would much prefer to retire to his home in Oyster Bay to lead the life of a private citizen … but that he could see the drift of events and he felt certain that he was going to be drafted.” (Kingsbury to Hermann Hagedorn, 31 Oct. 1921 [TRB].) See also Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 79–82.

35 By 2 February The petition was drafted by John C. O’Laughlin of the Chicago Tribune, operating, as he often did, on both sides of the media/governmental divide.

36 Woodrow Wilson preceded La Follette, Robert M. La Follette, 1.400; Ray Stannard Baker, “Notes and Memoranda,” 21 (RSB).

37 La Follette, in contrast La Follette, Autobiography, 605–7, 609; Wister, Roosevelt, 299–301; William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (New York, 1946), 449. All three authors were eyewitnesses. See also La Follette, Robert M. La Follette, 1.399–403, and Margulies, “La Follette.” The various accounts differ only slightly in details.

38 “That was” TR, Letters, 7.499; The New York Times, 4 Feb. 1912; La Follette, Robert M. La Follette, 1.399; White, Autobiography, 448; Benjamin P. De Witt, The Progressive Movement (New York, 1915), 39–40. “In my judgment,” Gifford Pinchot wired the Minnesota Progressive Republican League, “La Follette’s condition is so serious that further candidacy is impossible.” The New York Times, 12 Feb. 1912.

39 “Politics are hateful” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 376.

40 He brushed aside Margulies, “La Follette.”

41 Roosevelt supporters bolted The New York Times, 7 Feb. 1912. There was a similar bolt by progressives in Nebraska on 14 Feb. Ibid., 15 Feb. 1912.

42 On the ninth For the text of the governors’ petition, see TR, Letters, 7.511.

43 A principle is The New York Times, 11 Feb. 1912. With the implicit endorsement of Hiram Johnson of California, the total of governors appealing to TR was actually nine.

44 Taft, seriously disturbed The New York Times, 13 Feb. 1912.

45 Actually, he meant This was revealed by Mark Sullivan, writing with some discretion when Taft was still alive. Sullivan, Our Times, 4.480.

46 “If I were any” TR, Letters, 7.503.

47 He admitted Ibid., 7.498; Mowry, TR, 226.

48 “It seems to me” Root to TR, 12 Feb. 1912 (TRP).

49 “The time has come” TR, Letters, 7.504.

50 Little more than two Ibid., 7.495; TR, “Judges and Progress,” The Outlook, 6 Jan. 1912. In his letter of reply to Stimson, TR’s professed scruples about the recall of the judiciary, extending all the way up from the state to Supreme Court level, were so hedged with conditionals and veiled threats as to leave little doubt that he would move to implement it if reelected President. (TR, Letters, 7.494–95.) Eleven years later, Stimson was still puzzled as to what made TR change his mind about running for the nomination after his disclaimer of 7 Jan. 1912. Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB).

51 Roosevelt set The following quotations from TR’s speech, entitled “A Charter of Democracy,” are taken from The New York Times, 22 Feb. 1912. The version printed in TR, Works, 19.163–97 is almost identical with the newspaper transcript, except that “I” is usually rendered as “we” (i.e., the Progressive Party), and a few extra passages, apparently written much later, have been interpolated.

Historical Note: TR has been much criticized by biographers for the alleged impulsiveness and political indiscretion of his Ohio address. But it was one of his most deliberate and long-prepared orations. A sequential line of judicial criticism can be traced back to his article, “Judges and Progress” in The Outlook, 6 Jan. 1912, itself essentially a repetition of complaints he had made about the social insensitivity of the New York Court of Appeals at Carnegie Hall on 20 Oct. 1911. That speech in turn harked back through his attacks on Judge Baldwin to his address to the Colorado state legislature on 29 Aug. 1910—inspired, as he admitted, by his conversation with former justice William H. Moody the preceding spring. Whether or not George Mowry and John Allen Gable are correct in calling TR’s Ohio address an “egregious mistake” and “serious blunder,” it was hardly impulsive. He extensively discussed its draft contents with Herbert Croly, James Garfield, Frank Munsey, William L. Ward, Oscar Straus, and other advisers, including a disapproving Gifford Pinchot. Straus was surprised at his inflexible determination to include the recall proposal. (See above, 614; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 395–96; Straus, Under Four Administrations, 310–11; Mowry, TR, 212–13; Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 35; Wood,Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 258–61.) For modern revisionist views, see Pavord, “The Gamble for Power,” and Murphy, “Mr. Roosevelt Is Guilty.” In 1927, Henry L. Stoddard wrote: “No public man ever prepared his speeches so long in advance of delivery as Roosevelt; none ever gave them more careful revision. Those ‘impulsive’ phrases which his opponents by their denunciation made popular, were the most deliberately thought out phrases of all, and usually got the reaction he deserved.” As I Knew Them, 311–12.

52 “Shape your constitutional” The New York Times, 22 Feb. 1912.

53 “I know of no” Ibid.

54 The reaction to Ibid., 5 Mar. 1912; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.477; Current Literature, Apr. 1912. Such comments, however, were all initial, and often reflective of shock. A modern legal historian has shown, in an important corrective article, that as the summer and fall of 1912 wore on, many liberal judicial thinkers inclined to TR’s point of view—Felix Frankfurter, for one, remarking, “Thanks to T.R. there is live thought on the subject.” See Stephen Stagner, “The Recall of Judicial Decisions and the Due Process Debate,” American Journal of Legal History, 24.3 (July 1980).

55 It was to be Heaton, The Story of a Page, 299; Wall Street Journal, quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, 4.537, 490–91; The New York Times, 23 Feb. 1912.

56 Doubts about The New York Times, 28 Feb., 24 Mar. 1912; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.480–81; William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (Boston, 1919), 353–54; Adams, Letters, 6.518.

57 An appalled Henry The New York Times, 22 Feb. 1912. As early as 5 May 1910, TR had written Lodge from Christiania, Norway, to say there was a need for “very radical change” in the American judiciary. Lodge, Selections, 2.380.

58 “My hat” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.477. The earliest version of this famous quote, consisting of the first sentence only, appears in a no-headline special dispatch out of Cleveland to The New York Times on 22 Feb. 1912, printed in the following day’s paper. TR appears to have said it on board his train to a local county commissioner, William F. Eirick, who leaked their conversation as follows. Q: “Colonel, I have a question I want to ask.” A: “I know what it is. I’ll make a statement on Monday. My hat is in the ring.” A separate article in the same issue reports that TR seemed surprised when his remark was repeated to him by newsmen on his return journey, but did not deny making it. He used it again in a letter to Governor Hadley on 29 Feb. (TR, Letters, 7.513.) Where Mark Sullivan got the second sentence from is unclear.

59 “I will accept” TR, Letters, 7.511. “The Colonel made a mistake when he said he would ‘accept’ the nomination,” George Harvey remarked in Harper’s Weekly, 20 Apr. 1912. “What he meant to say was that he would ‘intercept’ it.”

60 Grant thought Robert Grant’s letter to James Ford Rhodes, 22 Mar. 1912, on which the rest of this chapter is based, is printed as an appendix in TR, Letters, 8.1456–61. See also White, Autobiography, 451–52.

61 William Roscoe Thayer See his account of this evening in Thayer, TR, 351–55.

62 Dante’s phrase “Vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui / Che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto” (I saw and recognized the shade of him / Who through cowardice made the great refusal), Dante, The Inferno, canto 3, line 60. In TR’s time, this was believed to refer to Pietro da Morrone, later Pope Celestine V.

63 feeling saddened Thayer, TR, 354.

CHAPTER 9: THE TALL TIMBER OF DARKENING EVENTS

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 62.

2 The contrary forces Alexander Lambert address to the Roosevelt Memorial Association, 20 Sept. 1923, transcript in HP; Boston Globe, 29 Feb. 1912. See also Dr. Lambert’s account in TR, Works, 3.xix. Either he or TR misidentified Hallowell as “General.”

3 “I am alone” Quoted in TR, Works, 3.xix. Notwithstanding his assertion to Robert Grant that he felt “as fine as silk,” TR was evidently under considerable stress during his Boston visit. Twice, he turned and snapped at reporters and photographers badgering him.(Boston Globe, 29 Feb. 1912.) This was in such contrast to his normal bonhomie as to suggest deep doubt about the course he had chosen.

4 In a cultural essay TR, “Productive Scholarship,” The Outlook, 13 Jan. 1912, reprinted in TR, Works, 14.340–48. TR was proud of this essay, and sent a copy to Edith Wharton. The novelist had visited Sagamore Hill in the fall of 1911 and been charmed. “The house was like one big library, and the whole tranquil place breathed of the love of books and of the country.… I felt immediately at home there.” TR to Edith Wharton, 5 Jan. 1912, EW; Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York, 1933, 1985), 316–17.

5 “We made” White, Autobiography, 458.

6 “Gentlemen, the first” Ibid., 453.

7 Bourne had been “I am keenly aware,” TR wrote Henry L. Stimson on 2 Feb. 1912, “that there are not a few among the men who claim to be leaders in the progressive movement who bear an unpleasant resemblance to the lamented Robespierre and his fellow progressives of 1791 and ‘92.” TR, Letters, 7.494.

8 “I move that” White, Autobiography, 453.

9 “This rebellion” Ibid., 452.

10 “He aims” James H. Morse diary, 29–30 Mar., 27 Apr. 1912 (JHMD); Elihu Root quoted in Adams, Letters, 6.515.

11 “I never thought” Lodge, Selections, 2.423–24; Putnam, TR, chap. 25. As senior senator from the Bay State, Henry Cabot Lodge had been embarrassed by TR’s aggressive defense of judicial recall, in a speech before the Massachusetts legislature on 26 February: “All I ask is that the people themselves … shall be given a chance to declare whether they will stand by the Supreme Court of the nation when it stands for human rights, or by the chief court of their own state when it stands against human rights. If that be revolution, make the most of it.” Boston Globe, 27 Feb. 1912.

12 I am opposed Ibid., 2.423.

13 “My dear fellow” TR, Letters, 7.515.

14 “He will either” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 846–47.

15 Butt listened Ibid., 844.

16 “If the old” Ibid., 848.

17 By early March, The New York Times, 27 Feb., 2 Mar. 1912.

18 a $50,000 startup budget See Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 399.

19 Roosevelt, in contrast The Washington Post, 1 Mar. 1912. It must be understood that opinion polls, in 1912, were local rather than national. They were conducted mainly by newspapers soliciting readers.

20 “You understand” TR, Letters, 7.506.

21 One day he allowed The following paragraphs derive from the account, dated 2 Mar. 1912, in Baker, notebook N, 16 (RSB).

22 men like Ward and Flinn Flinn, like many of Roosevelt Republican insiders in 1912, was less interested in “social and industrial justice” than in self-advancement.

23 charms of Ormsby McHarg Mowry, TR, 200, 238. TR was not initially aware that McHarg, an energetic turncoat who had worked for and against him in the past, had gone south in his aid. But he heard enough about McHarg’s methods to send him a “posterity letter” on 4 Mar. 1912, stating that he would appreciate “your personal assurance that you never endeavored by promises of patronage or by use of money … to try to influence any man to support me.” (TR, Letters, 7.516.) McHarg was glad to supply the assurance, and glad to continue supplying delegates.

24 seven Harvard men TR, Letters, 7.517.

25 It followed that The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912; Mowry, TR, 230–32.

26 a progressive enthusiast Mowry, TR, 232.

27 On 19 March, Morris, The Rise of TR, 200; The New York Times, 20 Mar. 1912; TR, Letters, 7.525; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 402. The truth, as so often in the grassroots squabbles of 1912, was almost comically petty, with overtones of the great battle of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. TR was in fact the preference of conservatives in the North Dakota GOP, if only because their leader, whose name was Hanna, was opposed to a progressive rival, whose name was Gronna. After Hanna and Gronna, egged on by La Follette, had flailed each other to exhaustion, the forces of reform prevailed. See Mowry, TR, 231.

28 “The prairies” Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 15.81.

29 “I tend to get” TR, Letters, 7.526–29, 532.

30 A childhood friend Frances Theodora Parsons, Perchance Some Day (privately printed, 1951), 238. For the teenage relationship of Fanny Parsons and TR, see Morris, The Rise of TR, 50–52.

31 Carnegie Hall was crammed The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912; TR, Letters, 7.529.

32 “It will be” The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912.

33 “The courts should” Ibid.; TR, Works, 19.206–8. William Draper Lewis of the University of Pennsylvania Law School suggested in a scholarly article that TR was clearly talking about judicial opinions on the constitutionality of acts, rather than decisions on practical points of law. (Stagner, “The Recall of Judicial Decisions.”) See also William Draper Lewis, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt (Philadelphia, 1919), 340–42.

34 sheet after sheet The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912.

35 The leader for TR, Works, 19.222–23. See also Abbott, Impressions of TR, 80–83, and for an affecting account of how this speech was written, Lewis, TR, 444–46. The latter source makes plain that Corinne Roosevelt Robinson erred in assuming that TR improvised his peroration. (My Brother TR, 267.) It was in fact carefully written out in pencil on “several soiled sheets of gray tissue manuscript,” which TR kept separate from the text he intended to give out to the press. Evidently he did not want to blunt the drama of viva voce delivery of one of his most eloquent utterances.

36 “Roosevelt, confound him” Abbott, Impressions of TR, 82–83. The political oratory of TR and WW in 1912 has been collected in two complementary anthologies: Lewis L. Gould, ed., Bull Moose on the Stump: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kan., 2008) and John W. Davidson, ed., A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson (New Haven, Conn., 1956).

Historiographical Note: Since few stenographic records of what TR actually said on the campaign trail in 1912 are available in TRC or TRP, Gould’s anthology relies much on contemporary newspaper reports. So does this biography. Journalistic transcripts, however, often vary considerably one from another. They may simply reproduce TR’s own typed speech scripts, handed out in the form of press releases (but he was inclined to reshuffle or even toss aside such scripts on the podium, talking off the cuff when the mood struck him). Throughout his public career, he could be cavalier, even with the scripts of his major addresses printed as urtext in TR, Works. The improvisational humor he used to temper his seriousness can only be imagined—along with the radiance of the personality that infused these frequently dull texts with life. For a rare example of TR interacting with his audience, see Gould, Bull Moose, 18–30.

37 Republicans amenable The New York Times, 27 Mar. 1912.

38 It turned out that Ibid., 27, 28 Mar. 1912.

39 The net results Ibid., 27, 31 Mar. 1912.

40 He received the news TR took a three-day swing to Portland, Maine, after his Carnegie Hall speech, then campaigned in the Midwest from 26 to 30 Mar.

41 “They are stealing” The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1912; Pringle, Taft, 771.

42 Roosevelt roared Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1912.

43 He was back On 2 Apr., Republicans in Wisconsin, a progressive primary state that TR had ceded to its favorite son, awarded 133,354 votes to La Follette and 47,514 to Taft. TR netted 628.

44 At the top Owen Wister, who had not seen TR for several years, briefly traveled with him during this campaign swing. “The energy, the action, the hammered words, the blaze of genial, jocund power, the prompt and marvelous application of some special sentence to some special place—I can call it nothing but gigantic.” Wister, Roosevelt, 307.

45 a major address In this uncompromising speech, TR castigated the august Joseph Choate and other Wall Street lawyers who had united in opposition to the referendum and recall, and compared their conservatism to that of New Yorkers defending the Dred Scott decision of 1857. See TR, “The Recall of Judicial Decisions” in TR, Works, 19.255ff., and, for a rare expression of contemporary legal support, Peter S. Grosscup, “Recall of Judicial Decisions Approved,” Ohio Law Bulletin, 22 Apr. 1912.

46 “No one can explain” Adams, Letters, 6.532. Under intense pressure from TR and Medill McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, Governor Charles Deneen had followed the example of Governor Hughes of New York in 1910, and called a special session of the Illinois legislature to authorize a direct, preferential presidential primary. It did so on 30 Mar., undeterred by William B. McKinley’s ban on “changes in the rules of the game while the game is in progress.” Other legislatures were encouraged to move just as fast, and do the same. Matthew James Glover, “Theodore Roosevelt Wins Illinois’ First Presidential Primary,” unpublished ms. (AC).

47 “The Titanic is wrecked” Adams, Letters, 6.534. For the next few days Adams obsessedly drew comparisons between the great shipwreck and the blow that TR, iceberg-like, had inflicted on the GOP. The former called into question the efficiency of modern mechanics; the latter, the smooth workings of the American political system. “We are drifting at sea in the ice, and can’t get ashore.… Our Theodore is not a bird of happy omen. He loves to destroy.” Adams, Letters, 6.534–38.

48 The President, nearly frantic The New York Times, 16 Apr. 1912.

49 “Major Butt was” Ibid., 20 Apr. 1912. According to local survivors, Butt had handled the catastrophe as if on army duty, controlling crowd hysteria and helping women and children aboard lifeboats. Marie Young, who had taught music to Archie and Quentin Roosevelt in the White House, was reportedly the last woman to catch a glimpse of him, waving to her from an upper deck as her boat pulled away. (Ibid.) Walter Lord, in A Night to Remember (1955), doubts the legend of Butt’s heroism on the ground that the accounts of it by Ms. Young and another Washington woman sound over-embellished. As quoted in the Times, they certainly sound so. But the two women nevertheless corroborated each other, and the behavior they describe is consistent with the punctilio and physical forcefulness self-evident in Butt’s three volumes of correspondence. A memorial fountain to him and his traveling companion, the Washington artist Frank Millett, survives on the Ellipse south of the White House.

50 “The odosus the Great” Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 123.

51 I am the will See Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 560–61 and 571.

52 They did what they could TR, Letters, 7.542–43; The New York Times, 21 May 1912.

53 “Since I have been” TR, Letters, 7.507–8.

54 “I think Taft” Ibid., 7.537.

55 “I am in” Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 220. The following account is based on reports in the Boston Globe and The New York Times, 26 Apr. 1912. All quotations are taken from the former source.

56 Moreover, Taft was Mowry, TR, 226–27.

57 Mr. Roosevelt ought not Boston Globe, 26 Apr. 1912.

58 After returning Pringle, Taft, 781–82. The New York Times, annoyed that Taft should stoop to the level of a personal attack, called his Boston appearance “one of the most deplorable occasions in the history of our politics.” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.482.

59 a momentary shiver The image of the shiver comes from the Boston Globe’s report of this meeting (27 Apr. 1912), as do the words of TR’s speech quoted here. See also Sullivan, Our Times, 4.482–85.

60 Roosevelt said that TR’s criticism was well founded. One of WHT’s self-quotations was to the effect that reciprocity would make Canada “only an adjunct of the United States.” These words caused an explosion of outrage both in Canada and Britain, where on 4 May the Pall Mall Gazette remarked that the President’s “blazing indiscretion” might cause embarrassed Americans “to turn to Roosevelt after all for political sobriety.”

61 Later he spoke The New York Times, 28 Apr. 1912.

62 “Now you have me” Ibid.

63 “He is essentially” Harbaugh, TR, 402.

64 “VOTE OF BAY STATE” The New York Times, 27, 30 Apr., 2 May 1912. In TR’s own wry summing-up of the vote, “Apparently there were about eighty thousand people who preferred Taft, about eighty thousand who preferred me, and from three to five thousand who, in an involved way, thought they would vote for both Taft and me.” TR, Letters, 7.539–40.

65 “In this fight” The New York Times, 2 May 1912; TR, Letters, 7.539–40.

66 By early May The New York Times, 4 May 1912.

67 Over the next week The Michigan state convention in April managed to elect two delegations simultaneously from the same platform, after reaching such a pitch of violence that Governor Osborn was compelled to deploy the state militia against Taft goons supplied by the sugar beet industry. Louise Overacker, The Presidential Primary (New York, 1926, 1974), 205.

68 “If I am defeated” Pringle, Taft, 757.

69 “I am a man” The New York Times, 5 May 1912. In another speech, WHT compared himself to “a man of straw.”

70 Their vocabulary The Washington Post, 15 May 1912.

71 “honeyfugler” A now extinct word, meaning one who seduces or cheats by sweet talk.

72 their Pullmans parked The New York Times, 15 May 1912.

73 “the hypocrisy, the insincerity” Pringle, Taft, 787.

74 a compromise candidate The first politician to suggest Hughes was William Barnes, Jr., citing the “grave” condition of the Republican Party. Barnes bitterly blamed progressivism for the plague of preferential primaries spreading across the nation. “This so-called reform has done more to confuse and corrupt legislators than anything in politics for fifty years.” The New York Times, 17 May 1912.

75 “I will name” The New York Times, 21 May 1912. The satirical magazine Life remarked, “The popular demand for Colonel Roosevelt is steadily increasing, but however great the demand may become, it can never be as great as the supply.” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.491.

76 “TRnadoes” Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 123. For a documentary account of how hard TR worked (and was worked) on the campaign trail, see William H. Richardson, Theodore Roosevelt: One Day of His Life (Jersey City, 1921). The day in question was 23 May 1912.

77 “Your judgment” Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 24.446.

78 more popular votes The precise size of this vote is difficult to calculate, because authorities are divided on how many, and which, states contributed to it. Mowry, e.g., cites “thirteen,” without naming them, and gives the candidate totals as TR, 1,157,397; WHT, 761,716; and La Follette, 351,043. Bishop lists 13 states, including Georgia but not New York. Lewis L. Gould lists 12 states, excluding both Georgia and New York. His resultant figures are TR, 1,164,765; WHT, 768,202; and La Follette 327,357. (Mowry, TR, 236; Bishop, TR, 2.322; Lewis M. Gould, ed., Four Hats in the Ring: The 1912 Election and the Birth of Modern American Politics [Lawrence, Kan., 2008], appendix B.) In a letter to the author (1 Aug. 2008), Gould disqualifies New York as a primary state in 1912 because of heavy-handed manipulation of the vote by Boss Barnes, and because delegates were elected locally rather than apportioned on the basis of a statewide vote, which mysteriously was never recorded. But these criteria might also disqualify, say, Boss Flinn’s Pennsylvania or Boss Walter F. Brown’s Ohio, or Washington State, whose mix of local primaries and district mini-conventions became a vexed issue at the national convention. New York’s election, which netted WHT 83 delegates to TR’s 7, was widely referred to as a “primary” at the time, despite the lack of a statewide total. See Overacker, The Presidential Primary, 13, 135. On 4 June 1912, The New York Times did at least compute the popular vote in New York County at 33,492 for WHT and 16,933 for TR, or a 2-for-1 majority for the President. If the total GOP state vote in 1912 was about the same as it was in 1916, i.e., 147,038, and if WHT and TR divided it much as they did the New York County vote, we may estimate their respective primary vote shares at 97,633 and 49,404. These figures, added to Gould’s for the other twelve primary states, project the grand totals given here. Whichever set is preferred, TR’s absolute popular majority among GOP voters is clear. See below, 638–39.

CHAPTER 10: ARMAGEDDON

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 66.

2 a baby parade The New York Times, 30 May 1912.

3 Next morning Heaton, The Story of a Page, 343.

4 A further similarity TR was about 20 percent behind WHT in delegates in the first week of June, and Wilson about 37 percent behind Clark.

5 his own claimants Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 67. The Atlanta Constitution, 18 June 1912, cited affidavits by three Taft members of the Georgia delegation stating that they had been offered cash bribes of up to $400 apiece to switch their votes to TR. McHarg does not appear to have been directly involved.

6 Still, he had Bishop, TR, 2.322–23; The New York Times, 9 June 1912.

7 chairman of the convention Technically in 1912, temporary chairman. See above, 612.

8 “Elihu,” Roosevelt TR quoted by Finley Peter Dunne in The American Magazine, 24 Sept. 1912.

9 On 3 June TR, Letters, 7.555.

10 EXCEPTION OF A VERY FEW Barnes was alluding to New York’s imbalance of 7 delegates for TR and 83 for Taft. The phrase temporary chairman in this telegram has been shortened to chairman, for reasons explained above (612).

11 “Root,” he complained Mowry, TR, 242; TR, Letters, 7.548–49, 555.

12 Unfortunately, most Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 66. Owen Wister describes delegates to the Republican convention in 1912 as coins pre-stamped with image and value. Notwithstanding their marks, the coins did not achieve currency until they had passed through a machine carefully calibrated by the National Committee. “A coin might be full weight, but if it were stamped with Roosevelt’s image, it might be rejected in favor of a short weight coin bearing Taft’s image.” Wister, Roosevelt, 310.

13 not a professional Rosewater (1871–1940), editor of the Omaha Bee, is generally portrayed as a conservative, but he had been comfortable with some of the reforms of TR’s second administration. In June 1912, Rosewater was acting chairman of the RNC, substituting for Harry S. New. He left a record of his convention experiences in a memoir, Back Stage in 1912: The Inside Story of the Split Republican Convention (Philadelphia, 1932).

14 The rest of the Committee Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 66–67. At the beginning of June, TR’s forces in Chicago launched an attempt to stack the committee by having at least five newly elected members take seats at the hearings at once, rather than waiting for the convention to authorize them. Among these were William Allen White of Kansas and R. D. Howell of Nebraska, who had displaced Rosewater as a delegate and now hoped to displace him as acting chairman. (The New York Times, 3 June 1912.) But since current members of the committee were entitled to keep serving until 18 June, the Roosevelt putsch never went anywhere.

15 “theft, cold-blooded” The New York Times, 8 June 1912.

16 For a while Davis, Released for Publication, 292; Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 86.

17 “If circumstances demand” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.497. The version of this quote given in Pringle, Taft, 796, comes with acquired dental effects.

18 proceeded to throw out For accounts of the hearings disputing TR’s accusations of delegate-stealing, see Rosewater, Back Stage in 1912, 80–120, and Pringle, Taft, 799ff.

19 Perhaps thirty Lewis Gould states that TR, on the basis of a modern impartial analysis, deserved “another twelve or fourteen” delegates from Texas, plus “probably … another twenty or so” from other states. With his 19 awardees, that would have given him an extra complement of 53, still far short of the number he needed to clinch the nomination. Earlier authorities, notably John Allen Gable in 1965, George E. Mowry in 1946, and Senator Borah, Governor Hadley, and Gilbert E. Roe (a La Follette supporter) back in 1912, differ in their assessments of TR’s chances of winning the nomination, but all agree that he was entitled to about 50 more delegates. See Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 67, and Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 39.

20 An impartial observer This sentence quotes De Witt, The Progressive Movement, 82. See also Mowry, TR, 239–40; Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 67. The former notes that TR, arranging the nomination of WHT in 1908, used many of the strong-arm tactics he accused the White House of using in 1912.

21 All the same, Roosevelt The clearest analysis of the bias of the Republican National Committee in 1912 remains that in Bishop, TR, 2.324–26.

Historiographical Note: The exact number of delegates won in primary elections by TR and WHT in 1912 has been the subject of much dispute among historians and biographers. (See above, 637, for the similar elusiveness of the total primary vote.) Mowry, e.g., allows WHT only 48 delegates, whereas Bishop gives him 68, and Sullivan and Pringle 71. There is even disagreement on how many primaries were held. In their general tendency to emphasize TR’s popularity among rank-and-file GOP voters, these historians mystifyingly exclude New York. Technically, it is true that the Barnes machine exerted an undue influence on the voting in that state, but the canvass held on 26 March was very definitely a primary, and treated as such by all participants.

The 83 delegates pledged to WHT from New York, plus the 7 pledged to TR, should be therefore included in the overall tally, making the President’s unpopularity less marked, while a recalculation of TR’s performance hardly affects the decisiveness of the outcome. The following table, compiled in calendar order, includes delegates-at-large who remained loyal to their candidate despite contrary instructions (as in Massachusetts) or who were added on by state conventions (as in Ohio). It does not, however, include 28 Taft delegates from the primary in Georgia, a state where the GOP was effectively disenfranchised.

STATE	TAFT	TR
North Dakota (La Follette)	0	0
New York	83	7
Wisconsin (La Follette)	0	0
Illinois	2	56
Pennsylvania	9	65
Nebraska	0	16
Oregon	0	10
Massachusetts	18	26
Maryland	0	16
California	0	26
Ohio	14	34
New Jersey	0	28
South Dakota	0	10
TOTALS	126	294

When these numbers are subtracted from the aggregates brought by each candidate to the convention, it will be seen that the real conflict in the spring of 1912 was not between WHT and TR, but between two delegate-producing systems: the modern primary one, confined to northern states tolerant of progressivism, and the old caucus-convention method, supreme in the South and other regions where authority mattered more than popularity. If the primary states had not so suddenly doubled in number, they would have posed less of a challenge to what Taft called “the principles of the party … the retention of conservative government and conservative institutions.” (Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 40.) They gave TR a more than two-to-one advantage, whereas a reverse imbalance in favor of the President applied in the other 35 states, contributing to his overall majority. Until one or other of the systems won out (TR himself was not persuaded that the primary should be adopted everywhere), it would always be foolhardy for a popular candidate to take on a party-sanctioned one.

22 “The Taft leaders” The New York Times, 9 June 1912.

23 There was nothing For TR’s post-campaign sabbatical at Oyster Bay, see Sullivan, Our Times, 4.496–504.

24 “confusion and comparative” The New York Times, 16 June 1912.

25 He found Roosevelt Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the Republican National Convention at Chicago, June 12, 1912, compiled from notes taken on the spot,” bound vol., 1 (TRC). See also Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 86ff.

26 “Well, Nick” Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 1.

27 The New York party Harper, a stenographer dispatched by The Outlook to assist TR on his tour of Europe in 1910, had stayed with him ever since. The following account of TR’s journey to Chicago is based on Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC.” Extra details from The New York Times and Syracuse Herald, 15, 16 June 1912, and Sullivan, Our Times, 4.505–6.

28 “the great effort” Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 1, 20.

29 In mid-afternoon John C. O’Laughlin, “Diary of the National Republican Convention,” 14–15 June 1912 (OL). It had been O’Laughlin who first conceived the idea of TR making a dramatic pilgrimage to the Chicago convention. (O’Laughlin to TR, 7 June 1912 [OL].) Mowry, TR, 244–45 cites the Taft campaign’s nervousness about the fickle loyalty of 66 Negro delegates, whom Roosevelt agents in Chicago were courting “by one means or another.”

30 a new, tan campaign hat Sullivan, Our Times, 4.505–6 and 510 (illustration).

31 People packed Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 7.

32 “Chicago is” Syracuse Herald and The New York Times, 16 June 1912.

33 “It is a fight” The New York Times, 16 June 1912. Meanwhile, Chicago bookies were betting 2 to 1 that TR would not be nominated. Decatur Sunday Review, 16 June 1912.

34 The crowd in Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 12, 16; The New York Times, 16, 17 June 1912.

35 The fervor of William Jennings Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions (New York, 1912), 10; White, Autobiography, 464; Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 20; The New York Times, 17–18 June 1912.

36 cries of “Shame” The New York Times, 18 June 1912. The following extracts from TR’s Auditorium address, entitled “The Case Against the Reactionaries,” are taken from TR, Works, 19.285–317.

37 William Jennings Bryan “The Arabs are said to have seven hundred words which mean camel,” Bryan wrote in his report of the speech. “Mr. Roosevelt has nearly as many synonyms for theft, and he used them all tonight.” Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions, 16.

38 “I am never surprised” O’Laughlin, “Diary of the National Republican Convention,” 17 June 1912 (OL).

39 the fanaticism of his followers “I can liken it only to a belief in God,” one Taft delegate recalled. “They thought Roosevelt was infallible—I have never known such intensity of feeling before or since.” (Ezra P. Prentice interviewed by Mary Hagedorn, 28 June 1955 [TRB].) William Allen White wrote that he was “thrilled to my heart” by the speech, yet at the same time, “I was disturbed, I suppose a little frightened, at the churning which he gave to the crowd.” Autobiography, 464–45.

40 At Three o’Clock Sullivan, Our Times, 4.511. Sullivan was unsure whether this flyer was circulated during the GOP or Progressive Party conventions of June and August, 1912, respectively. But two accounts by participants confirm the earlier date. Prentice interview, op. cit.; Henry J. Allen in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 273.

41 “I am for Teddy” Marshall Stimson, “Colonel Roosevelt and the Presidential campaign of 1912,” n.d., memorandum in TRB.

42 By the time Except where otherwise indicated, the following account is based on the reportage of The New York Times, Syracuse Herald, Emporia Gazette, and Atlanta Constitution, 18–23 June 1912, and Official Report of the Proceedings of the National Republican Convention (1912, Internet Archive [http://www.archive.org/]), hereafter Proceedings of the 15th RNC. Mark Sullivan’s account reproduces some brilliant sketches of the conventioneers in action. Sullivan, Our Times, 4.512–30.

43 “the mere monstrous embodiment” Morris, The Rise of TR, 481. For discussion of the relationship between James and TR, see Philip Horne, “Henry James and ‘the Forces of Violence’: On the Track of ‘Big Game’ in ‘The Jolly Corner,’ ” The Henry James Review, 27 (2006).

44 The bands that had White, Autobiography, 463. According to Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 70, the Roosevelt campaign spent $10,000 on bands during the course of the convention.

45 Victor Rosewater’s gavel Since the convention had not yet elected its chairman, Rosewater presided over its initial business in his capacity as acting chairman of the Republican National Committee. See Rosewater, Back Stage in 1912, 160–64.

46 But first Emporia Gazette, 18 June, The New York Times, 19 June 1912.

47 Contrary to rumors Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 24; Lewis, TR, 441.

48 Hadley, a calm Harlan Hahn, “The Republican National Convention of 1912 and the Role of Herbert S. Hadley in National Politics,” Missouri Historical Review, 59.4 (1965).

49 “Mr. Chairman,” he said Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 32. Except where otherwise indicated, all convention quotations are taken from this source.

50 William Barnes, Jr. The New York Times, 20 June 1912; Proceedings of the 15^th RNC, 32.

51 Hadley said For the negotiations that permitted Hadley to make his move, see Rosewater, Back Stage in 1912, 153–59.

52 The latest New York Times estimate 16 June 1912.

53 “Elihu Root is the ablest” Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 43. TR’s original tribute, abbreviated by Hedges, was even more fulsome: “He is the greatest man who has appeared in the public life of any country in any position, on either side of the ocean in my time.” Quoted by Walter Wellman in American Review of Reviews, Jan. 1904. For another cadenza of superlatives about Root, written when TR was on the Nile in 1910, see TR, Letters, 7.48.

54 “Cousin Theodore” Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 26.

55 for the first time Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 72.

56 rows of emptying benches Atlanta Constitution, 19 June 1912.

57 Hadley, elegant in White, Autobiography, 471; Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 108.

58 “Are you going to abide” The New York Times, 20 June 1912.

59 “I will support” Ibid.

60 Instantly every Roosevelt delegate Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 26, 40–41. For a verbal portrait of Root as chairman, see White, Autobiography, 470–71.

61 The demonstration was The New York Times, 20 June 1912. See also Sullivan, Our Times, 4.528–30, and Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions, 45–47, 55–56.

62 “That question is not” Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 144–46.

63 “No man can be” Ibid., 160. “In other words,” Owen Wister wrote, “the counterfeit Taft coins were allowed to decide that they were genuine, and the genuine Roosevelt coins were counterfeit.” Wister, Roosevelt, 312.

64 That night the woman Lowell (Mass.) Sun, 20 June 1912. Suspicions among Taft leaders that the demonstration was not entirely spontaneous were confirmed when it transpired that Mrs. Davis had tried out her portrait-waving stunt two nights earlier, jumping onto a table in the Congress Hotel and stimulating great enthusiasm among Roosevelt supporters. Later in the week she was seen visiting with Alice Roosevelt Longworth. The New York Times, 22 June 1912.

65 But throughout the day Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 31–33; W. Franklin Knox in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 267–79; Travers Carman in Abbott, Impressions of TR, 84–85; Davis, Released for Publication, 302–10; Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 72–73; TR, Letters, 7.570. According to Carman, an eyewitness, the representative of 38 Southern delegates offered him all their nominating votes if he would agree to an organization-controlled platform. These votes, added to the most recent assessment of TR’s core strength, would assure him of victory. Two aides urged him to accept. He put his hands on their shoulders and said, “I have grown to regard you both as brothers. Let no act or word of yours make that relationship impossible.” This is, however, but one of many conflicting stories in the above sources as to what transpired between TR and Hadley (who came to see him with a group of supporters seeking permission to make the governor a compromise candidate), and between TR and other negotiants whose names he chose not to reveal. After the convention, Hadley said that TR was promised “Washington and Texas” for cooperating with the Taft forces; Knox said TR wanted “at least four states” as his price; and TR himself stated that he was offered “Washington (not California or Texas),” but insisted on all or nothing. The truth is probably impossible to ascertain. But as Mowry remarks, “The facts clearly indicate that the Colonel would have tolerated no nomination but his own.” (Mowry, TR, 251–52.) See also Rosewater, Back Stage in 1912, 180–81.

66 “receiver of stolen goods” This phrase, commonly attributed to TR, was first hurled at Root by William Flinn, in the aftermath of the chairmanship vote. Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 88.

67 unconvicted felons The epithet was TR’s. He was still applying it to Root in 1916. Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 204, 209.

68 He knew what venality See TR’s subsequent essay, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” in TR, Works, 19.318ff. For an analysis of the rage that gripped TR in Chicago, by a friend who was worried by it, see White, Autobiography, 464. “Ambition, I am satisfied, was not the governing passion.”

69 “I never saw” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 305. Stoddard was active in the campaign and conferred frequently with TR and the Executive Committee.

70 “Theodore, remember” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 381.

71 The last of his visitors [Clinton W. Gilbert], The Mirrors of Washington: With Fourteen Cartoons by Cesare (New York, 1922), 250. See also Claudius O. Johnson, Borah of Idaho (New York, 1936), 137–40. Borah at this time was under pressure from William Barnes, Jr., to run for vice president with Charles Evans Hughes, should the latter emerge as a compromise candidate. Ibid., 139.

72 Their cheers and oratory Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 305. Possibly TR heard William Flinn bellowing from a tabletop: “I am going to follow Theodore Roosevelt, the greatest leader of men of this day, and we are going to carry Pennsylvania for him.” The New York Times, 20 June 1912.

73 “My fortune” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 306. See also Amos Pinchot, History of the Progressive Party, 1912–1916 (New York, 1958), 164–65. Some authorities, notably Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 43–44, believe that this incident took place the following evening, Thursday 20 June. The sequence of events, however, suggests Wednesday evening—or more precisely, the small hours of Thursday morning.

74 “You see” [Gilbert], The Mirrors of Washington, 250. According to another insider account, the final straw that broke TR’s back was the news that the GOP Credentials Committee had voted to severely reduce the time its protesting members needed to present their cases. George Henry Payne, The Birth of the New Party, or, Progressive Democracy (New York, 1912), 25–26.

75 When he arrived The committee bolt, reportedly ordered by TR, occurred at 11:45 p.m. The New York Times, 20 June 1912.

76 “As far as I” Pringle, Taft, 808–9.

77 After he left The New York Times, 20 June 1912; Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 34–35.

78 a period of uneasy calm Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions, 61.

79 After that he was The New York Times, 21 June 1912; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 200.

80 It is no pleasant Bryan, A Tale of Two Conventions, 64–65.

81 This could not have been achieved The “crisis” moment that Bryan had anticipated occurred when two Californian delegates for Taft were seated in defiance of that state’s primary rules by a vote of 542 to 529. “Had this vote gone the other way, there would unquestionably have been a general break for Roosevelt.” Lewis, TR, 359, 363–64.

82 “If you don’t look out” The New York Times, 22 June 1912.

83 During the umpteenth Ibid., 22 June 1912.

84 The atmosphere on Saturday Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 41–43. Instead of “Amen” at the end of the opening prayer, one delegate called out, “Toot toot.” During the course of the day, as Root tried to move things along, a delegate from Mississippi arose in mock complaint. “Mr. Chairman, I make the point of order that the steam roller is exceeding the speed limit.” Lowell (Mass.) Sun, 22 June 1912.

85 The Roosevelt family Lowell (Mass.) Sun, The New York Times, 22 June 1912; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 202.

86 She joined in Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 42; The New York Times, 22 June 1912. “They are all white hot,” ERD wrote that day to her friend Dorothy Straight. 22 June 1912 (ERDP).

87 racked with tuberculosis White, Autobiography, 470.

88 But the pertinent The full text of TR’s message is in TR, Letters, 7.562–63.

89 Sirs, I have heard Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 378–79.

90 a howl of rage Lewis, TR, 361. It was this act, more than any other by Root, that caused TR to break from him, saying that the Massachusetts delegation had been “publicly raped,” and contemptuously comparing the senator to Autolycus, Shakespeare’s “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” Nicholas Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, 13.

91 They headed The New York Times, 22 June 1912.

92 “Why weren’t you” White, Autobiography, 473. The original ts. of TR’s speech to the bolting delegates is preserved in TRC. For a photograph of him presiding at the Orchestra Hall meeting, see Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 569.

93 He felt as he had White, Autobiography, 452, 473.

94 The fight promised Ibid., 474.

95 “He was not downcast” Ibid., 474–75.

96 “I care more” Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols. (New York, 1938), 2.202. In 1919, still brooding, Root told Finley Peter Dunne that “it was on his [TR’s] advice that I declared myself for Taft before he himself determined to throw his hat into the ring.” Dunne, “Remembrances” (DUN).

CHAPTER 11: ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 324.

2 “My public career” TR quoted in E. A. Van Valkenburg, “Roosevelt the Man,” Philadelphia North American, 9 Jan. 1919. TR indicated on 10 July that he would have withdrawn from the race had WW been nominated before Taft. TR, Letters, 7.575.

3 For about a week “Pop is praying for the nomination of Champ Clark,” KR told Franklin Roosevelt before the Democratic convention. A TR lieutenant, Francis J. Heney, was dispatched to Baltimore to negotiate a progressive defection in the event of a win by the conservative Clark. TR’s mail during this period contained proposals that WW, or even William Jennings Bryan, be tapped to run with him on a third-party ticket. According to O. K. Davis, Bryan strongly hinted to TR and other GOP progressives in Chicago that he would lead a bolt of his own supporters from the Democratic Party if Clark was nominated in Baltimore. The two splinter movements would then unite under TR in a new, potentially irresistible Progressive Party. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton, N.J., 1947), 422; Davis, Released for Publication, 316–17.

4 the Socialist Eugene V. Debs Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, compensates for the neglect historians and biographers have shown to Debs’s candidacy in 1912. Although Debs, in his third presidential race, scored well over 900,000 votes (a record for the American Socialist Party), his 6 percent share of the national total hardly compared with those of the three major candidates.

5 anti-Negro prejudice See McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chap. 6.

6 Word had gotten out TR, Letters, 7.561; Morris, The Rise of TR, 254–55. WW had little discernible race hatred, but felt that Southern blacks, having no educational or social qualifications for suffrage, compounded the evil of Reconstruction. In the fifth volume of his History of the American People (1900–1903), he imputed the rise of the “great” Ku Klux Klan to “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes,” and described its nocturnal vigilantism with obvious relish (58–60). See also his article, “The Reconstruction of the Southern States,” The Atlantic Monthly, 87 (1901). As president of Princeton, WW opposed the admission of black students, and was not above joking about “coons.” (Morris, Theodore Rex, 207.) For a sober analysis of the racial aspects of WW’s campaign, see Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 501–5.

7 Four of the seven governors The New York Times, 8 July 1912; TR, Letters, 7.569. Osborn eventually changed his mind about WW, and—too late—campaigned for TR. See Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 24–25.

8 as the head Hadley to TR, 5 July 1912 (TRP). Hadley eventually supported WHT, not to Osborn’s surprise. “Hadley is a politician.” Osborn to TR, 5 July 1912 (TRP).

9 As for veterans Mowry, TR, 256–57; Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 468; E. Daniel Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party, 1912–1916: A Re-Interpretation,” Pacific Circle: Proceedings of the Second Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association (St. Lucia, Queensland, 1968), 186.

10 the nascent Progressive Party When the Party celebrated its first birthday in 1913, it chose to on 2 July, the anniversary of WW’s nomination. According to Henry Stoddard, TR had to fight to prevent it being called the Progressive Republican Party. “He insisted that [would be] a hopeless name down South; with a party having some other title, he would gain thousands of votes there.” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 406.

11 Had Wilson not TR, Letters, 7.598; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 20–21.

12 “She was quite radiant” E. A. Van Valkenburg, “Roosevelt the Man.” Albert J. Beveridge wrote many years later that TR in 1912 was possessed of “a kind of exaltation,” equally composed of fervor, unselfishness, and “an august dignity.” TR, Works, 8.xxi.

Biographical Note: In Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 252–53, the banker Otto Kahn gave this account of a conversation with TR in the winter of 1916:

Q. What did induce you to make the run on the Progressive ticket?

A. (head shoving forward) If a man does a thing which he discerns clearly to be against his interest, if he accepts the burden, strain and bitterness of a fight, at the end of which he sees discomfiture, defeat and lasting disability, if he leads a forlorn hope … how would you diagnose his motives?

Q. It seems to me the answer is—

A. (interrupting) The answer is that his motives disregard his personal interests, that he is actuated by a compelling sense of what his duty, his conscience and his station require him to do.

Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party,” dissents from the received view that TR left the GOP in order to revenge himself on corporate conservatives and WHT in particular. He argues that TR’s moral conscience always dictated his decisions in moments of crisis. When the Party was threatened with a similar split in 1884, for example, the young TR cited three moral reasons to stay with it: the cause (resentment against the nomination of James G. Blaine) was not overwhelming, the time was not right, and the effect of his leaving would not be demonstrably “proper.” See Putnam, TR, chap. 25; Lewis, TR, 368–70; and TR, “How I Became a Progressive,” TR, Works, 19.435–40.

13 “weaving the inevitable” White, Autobiography, 468. On the eve of the convention, EKR told John C. O’Laughlin that “she did not want her husband nominated, [and] looked forward with dread to returning to the White House.” O’Laughlin, “Diary of the National Republican Convention,” 16 June 1912 (OL).

14 other visitors as well e.g., Elizabeth Cameron in Adams, Letters, 6.550.

15 The Roosevelt children According to the manager of the Progressive Party, TR held a family conference after WW’s nomination and warned that the consequences of his proceeding with a third-party campaign would be dire. “Some of the finest minds in the country, some of the men I most admire and love are going to stop coming here.” David Hinshaw, interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, n.d. (TRB).

16 To the puzzlement Morris, Theodore Rex, 400; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 228–29; Cordery, Alice, 221–22. Longworth’s talent was recognized by no less an authority than the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who said that music was his “natural element.” His fellow quartet players were all professionals. He was also an excellent pianist and dabbled in composition. Later in life he became president of the Washington Chamber Music Society.

17 “first, last and always” This slogan was repeatedly chanted at the Chicago convention by supporters of TR.

18 Representative Longworth’s position Longworth, Crowded Hours, 192–94; Cordery, Alice, 223–28. In old age Alice told Michael Teague that she had briefly considered divorcing Nicholas Longworth in 1912, but was dissuaded by TR and EKR. Teague,Mrs. L, 158.

19 Ted was an ardent Longworth, Crowded Hours, 197; Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 58–59.

20 the Land of Beyond Robert W. Service’s imagery had a powerful effect on thousands of young romantically inclined Americans in the early 20th century. Kermit Roosevelt, The Happy Hunting Grounds (New York, 1920) makes plain its author’s lifelong wanderlust.

21 He was due to sail KR left for Brazil on 27 July 1912.

22 a thirtyish surgeon She had met him in Berlin in May 1909. KR to ERD, 19 May 1913 (ERDP).

23 “How is my sweet” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 829. In a conversation with her piano teacher, ERD said of her shyness, “I wonder if it could be Papa I get it from? Can it be that he seems so terribly the opposite of shy because at heart he really is so?” Emma Knorr in Washington Herald, 27 July 1931.

24 “Oh Dorothy” ERD to Dorothy Straight, ca. 22 June 1912 (ERDP).

25 Archie had little patience ABR to QR, 12–27 Sept. 1917 (ABRP); TR to Cecil Spring Rice, 10 Aug. 1912 (CSR). Archie Roosevelt’s personal characteristics of truculent terseness, intense focus (from a slightly obtuse angle) on one matter at a time, and unconcern about offending people, are consistent with a modern diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.

26 “tranquil, efficient” TR to ERD, 21 Aug. 1912 (ERDP).

27 “I’m feeling like” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.506. There is some uncertainty as to when TR said this, but it was definitely part of the American political vernacular by the weekend of 22–23 June, when WHT received a telegram congratulating him on “having lassoed the bull moose.” (The New York Times, 24 June 1912.) Before the end of the month the moose had traveled as far as Germany, where it was the subject of a mocking editorial in the Berliner Tagblatt (29 June 1912). TR described himself as feeling “as rugged as a bull moose” as early as 30 Sept. 1894, in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge. TR, Letters, 1.399.

28 Governor Osborn wrote Chase Osborn to TR, 1 July 1912 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.569.

29 “I suppose that” TR, Letters, 7.567–68.

30 On 7 July The New York Times, 8 July 1912. For a detailed account of the pre-convention work of organizing the Progressive Party, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chap. 2.

31 the Party’s biggest bankroller Mowry, TR, 222. By the end of the 1912 campaign, however, Frank Munsey’s contributions slightly exceeded Perkins’s.

32 “Roosevelt has the right” Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 124.

33 his palatial estate overlooking the Hudson Now Wave Hill, a public park in New York City. Coincidentally, but no doubt pleasingly to both men, TR had summered there as a boy.

34 He had come John A. Garraty, Right-Hand Man: The Life of George W. Perkins (New York, 1960), passim. See also William J. Boies, “George W. Perkins,” World’s Work, Dec. 1901; White, Autobiography, 459–561, 519. In 1912, Perkins told Henry L. Stoddard that he had “all the money a man should possess” and intended to devote the rest of his life to “public affairs.” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 423.

35 Exquisitely undertailored The phrase is William Allen White’s. See White, Autobiography, 459–561, 519. Since at least the turn of the century, when they had worked together to create the Palisades Intersate Park, Roosevelt had held Perkins to be “one of the most delightful men I have ever met.” TR, Letters, 3.53.

36 White always a surname At least until 1917, when he became “W.A.”

37 To White, that sounded White, Autobiography, 459.

38 One of the reasons Mowry, TR, 225; Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 310; TR, Letters, 7.567. “I’d much rather discuss ornithology than politics,” TR told a Columbia University professor in between platform discussions. (Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 263.) For a detailed account of these discussions, see Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 133–40.

39 Excepted only were Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 129; TR, Letters, 7.564.

40 “I regard” TR, Letters, 7.577.

41 all hailed from Southern states Specifically, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.

42 his racial views See Morris, Theodore Rex, chaps. 2 and 27.

43 Taft’s deliberate score Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 511.

44 “inhuman cruelty and barbarity” See Morris, Theodore Rex, 49–50, 110–11, 246, 258–62.

45 Yet stray observations TR, Letters, 5.226; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, James Ford Rhodes: American Historian (New York, 1929), 119–20; Bull, Safari, 179. Rhodes’s account of a conversation on race with TR (16 Nov. 1905) should be considered in the light of his own opinion that the Negroes of the Yazoo delta were a million years behind their fellow whites. According to Grogan, TR remarked that, fantasies of button-pushing aside, “integration [was] the only answer” to the color problem in the United States.

46 “We have made” TR, Letters, 7.585–86.

47 He noted that Ibid., 7.587–89. According to TR, 7 out of every 8 black delegates at the Republican convention voted for WHT. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 63.

48 The machinery does not TR, Letters, 7.590.

Biographical Note: Even allowing for “the pastness of the past,” and the fact that TR never shared the virulent racism of, e.g., Owen Wister, Henry Adams, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, it is difficult not to see him now as anything other than paternalistic in his attitude to blacks. His genuine admiration, approaching reverence, for Dr. Washington was shared by many liberal white Republicans in the early years of the 20th century. However, the very uniqueness they ascribed to the author of Up from Slavery emphasized their consensus that Negroes generally languished at the opposite end of the scale of achievement. The best that can be said for TR’s paternalism is that it was good-natured and devoid of fear. His descriptions of his black safari employees in African Game Trails are affectionate, but almost always dismissive, e.g.: “Most of them were like children, with a grasshopper inability for continuity of thought and realization for the future.” (TR, Works, 4.120.) For a detailed analysis of the reasoning behind his letter to Joel Harris, see Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 167ff. For the agonized subsequent discussions of race policy in the provisional National Progressive Committee, ending in the decision to endorse TR’s attitude, see “Proceedings of the Provisional National Progressive Committee, 3–5 August 1912,” bound ts. (TRC).

TR had no patience with blanket or “scientific” theories of race, describing Houston Stewart Chamberlain, xenophobic author of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), as “an able man whose mind is not quite sound,” and remarking of Joseph de Gobineau’s famous Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1855) that “to approach it for serious information would be much as if an albatross should apply to a dodo for a lesson in flight.” (TR, Works, 14.201, 464–65.) Racial extremism on the liberal side also irritated him, especially in regard to foreign policy: “I have some worthy friends in Boston appeal to me to give self-government to a number of individuals who regard themselves as overdressed when they wear breech-clouts.” (TR, Works, 15.548.)

The only extended study of TR’s racial attitudes is Thomas G. Dyer’s Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, La., 1980). It is flawed by presentism, and a failure to examine TR’s long and close relationship with Booker T. Washington—a subject worthy of a book in itself. For a more balanced analysis relevant to the politico-racial situation in 1912, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chap. 3, “Lily White Progressivism.” See also McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chap. 6., and David W. Southern, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917 (Wheeling, W.V., 2005). Two contemporary essays on race by TR are self-revelatory: “The Negro in America,” and “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” in TR, Works, 14.185–202 and 412–18.

49 Many of the Progressive Except where otherwise indicated, the following account is based on “First National Convention of the Progressive Party,” typed minutes (TRC), and daily reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Atlanta Constitution, 5–8 Aug. 1912.

50 Barbed wire no longer White, Autobiography, 483.

51 The semi-religious glow The New York Times, 23 June 1912; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 410. For TR’s appointment of Straus to his cabinet (“I want to show Russia and some other countries what we think of Jews in this country”), see Straus, Under Four Administrations, chap. 9.

52 The record size Many states sent double or triple the number of their allotted delegates, dividing votes between them.

53 They were scrubbed Nicholas Roosevelt, “Account of the RNC,” 40–41; White, Autobiography, 483–84.

54 White was struck White, Autobiography, 483. A photograph reproduced in The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912, dramatically shows how many women attended the convention. Woman suffrage was still considered a states’ rights issue in the early months of 1912. Only six states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, California, and Washington) allowed women to vote. For TR’s belated, but unqualified conversion to the cause, see TR, Letters, 7.595–96.

55 too fond of battleships TR, Letters, 7.594. TR, in turn, regretfully wrote of Miss Addams, “She is a disciple of Tolstoy.” Ibid., 7.833.

56 She had agreed The Washington Post, 6 Aug. 1912; Chicago Tribune, 6 Aug. 1912. Jane Addams (1860–1935) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She first became famous in the 1890s as the founder of Hull House, a pioneer social settlement in Chicago, and later as a writer and lecturer on social problems. For TR’s courtship of Miss Addams, and her subsequent role in the formation of the Progressive Party, see Katherine Joslin, Jane Addams (Urbana, Ill., 2004), 133ff.

57 an opening prayer The devout quality of the convention was established by this prayer, which occupies seven full pages of the typed “Proceedings.”

58 The former senator Atlanta Constitution and Boston Globe, 6 Aug. 1912; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 408–9. O. K. Davis amusingly reports that TR had to be dissuaded from delivering his acceptance speech from the balcony of the Congress Hotel. Davis,Released for Publication, 320–26.

59 in the days of McKinley This phrase forms the title of one of the great presidential biographies, by Margaret Leech (New York, 1959).

60 His ego In his unpublished “Autobiography of an American Boy,” Beveridge wrote, “This miracle of the invisible powers in my behalf has strengthened the sureness of achievement which is so vital a part of me” (BEV). For a contemporary sketch (1910), see Dreier, Heroes of Insurgency, 103–22.

61 “We stand for” “Pass Prosperity Around”: Speech of Albert J. Beveridge (Progressive Party pamphlet [AC]). Nervous at first, Beveridge seemed to be in competition with Warren Harding for alliterative mastery: “Parties exist for the people, not the people for the parties. Yet for years the politicians have made the people do the work of the parties instead of the parties doing the work for the people.” Speech scholars contemplating a monograph on the extraordinary fondness of politicians for the letter p should note TR’s own attraction to it. See Morris, The Rise of TR, 224–25.

62 “It was not a convention” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 1912.

63 Enthusiasm became ecstasy Except where otherwise indicated, this account of the second day of the Progressive convention is based on The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug., and The Washington Post, 8 Aug. 1912. The survey of attendees derives mainly from Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 34–59. Black delegates attended on the second day of the convention not only from the Northern states TR had mentioned in his letter to Joel Harris, but also from Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. By the peculiar political standards of the time, these Southern states were considered to be “border” territory, with their electoral votes not yet wholly lost either to the Republican or Progressive parties. Lewis L. Gould to author, 2 Dec. 2008, AC.

64 Two black Northern These same delegates had conspicuously boycotted the previous day’s proceedings, in a show of sympathy for their excluded Southern brothers. Atlanta Constitution, 6 Aug. 1912.

65 Roosevelt led the singing Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug. 1912.

66 “I have been” The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912.

67 Senator Root’s mocking prophecy Quoted in Adams, Letters, 6.515.

68 His smile betrayed A reporter sitting just below TR in the press box noted, “It was evident that the fanaticism had got past him, and that he himself had no realization of the intense Christian feeling in that crowd all over the hall.” (The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912.) Richard Harding Davis wrote of the demonstration, “There was in it something inspired, spiritual, almost uncanny. It caught one by the throat.” Davis, “The Men at Armageddon,” Collier’s, 24 Aug. 1912.

69 It said something Morris, The Rise of TR, 54–56; Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston, 1921), 473; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.509. For TR’s relationships with all these men, see Morris, The Rise of TR, passim.

70 not even Alice Cordery, Alice, 229.

71 The explosion somehow Atlanta Constitution, 7 Aug. 1912.

72 Roosevelt’s address TR to KR, 12 Aug. 1912 (TRC); TR, Works, 19.376, 386. TR’s entire speech is reprinted in Works, 19.358–411.

73 He dismissed TR, Works, 19.358. TR’s complaint about press bias was to become a leitmotif of his campaign from now on. In mid-August a researcher armed with a foot rule measured the coverage he and the Progressive agenda had in fact received, since the start of the month, in The New York Times and Sun. The total just for ten days was 2,148½ column inches, or something over 200,000 words, most of it front-page reportage under banner headlines. WHT or even WW would have been glad of half as much.The New York Times editorial, 18 Aug. 1912.

74 The dead weight TR, Works, 19.372.

75 new or revived federal agencies The genesis of the future Federal Trade and Securities Exchange Commissions, as well as the Social Security and Occupational Safety and Health administrations, may be traced back to these 1912 proposals by TR. He did not, however, suggest that the federal government should itself provide medical insurance. That was the responsibility of employers, and, on occasion, state governments.

76 “I say in closing” TR, Works, 19.411.

77 voices singing his name The Washington Post, 8 Aug. 1912.

78 “Colonel,” Robins said Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).

79 In another room Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–99.

80 “Each one of those” Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB). One of these planks, written by Amos Pinchot, tied the high cost of living to business, a view that TR rejected as “utter folly.” (Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” [diss.], 245.) The others were for prohibition, a single tax, and constitutional amendment by referendum.

81 “Each one of those” Raymond Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).

82 a compromise platform A sheaf of Perkins’s draft paragraphs, preserved in the Pforzheimer Collection subsection of TRC, shows that he and TR initially conceived of their platform as a Republican document, in the hope of victory at the GOP convention in June. Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–106, is an exhaustive account of the platform deliberations. See also Davis, Released for Publication, 328–36.

83 “much the most important” TR, Letters, 8.1068. For the last-minute, behind-the-scenes story of how this document was assembled, only to have a confused Dean Lewis misrepresent it to the convention (nearly costing TR the support of George Perkins), see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 98–106 and Davis, Released for Publication, 328–36.

Historical Note: The Progressive Party platform for 1912 amounted to a redrafting, for practical campaign purposes, of TR’s 1910 New Nationalism program. Not until the Democratic platform of 1964 did any major party demand so many and such specific reforms. These were, in partial summary: direct primaries to nominate state, national, and presidential candidates, plus direct elections to the U.S. Senate; federal jurisdiction over national problems formerly treated as state problems; a universal minimum wage, and broader laws to protect, insure, and compensate abused or injured industrial workers; an eight-hour day work limit for women and juvenile employees, plus welfare benefits; facilitated organization of labor unions, and limitation of injunctions in labor disputes; farm relief; a more elastic currency; a downwardly revised, but still protective tariff; at least four nonpartisan regulatory commissions, with power over corporate pricing and all interstate business; further application of the initiative, referendum, and recall (but severely limited in application to judicial decisions); accelerated conservation and protection of natural resources, including a vast flood control program for the Mississippi River and its tributaries; development of Alaskan coal fields; woman suffrage; a national health service; federal income and graduated inheritance taxes; a two-battleships-per-year rearmament schedule; national highways; and a parcel post system.

84 “There is no” The New York Times, 8 Aug. 1912.

85 When Judge Lindsey Ogden (Utah) Examiner, 8 Aug. 1912.

86 singing the Doxology Mansfield (Ohio) News, 8 Aug. 1912.

CHAPTER 12: THERE WAS NO OTHER PLACE ON HIS BODY

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 31

2 “In form, two thousand” Proceedings of the 15th RNC, 436.

3 The more measured The New York Times, 7 Aug. 1912.

4 Ray Stannard Baker Baker, notebook M, 17–20 (RSB).

5 And at the lowest Robert Donovan, The Assassins (New York, 1955), 135, 137.

6 “Of course I do not” TR to KR, 13 July 1912 (TRC). See also Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 155.

7 Wilson was the 2-to-1 The Washington Post, 7 Aug. 1912.

8 he hopped across the court The last words of this sentence are taken from Nicholas Roosevelt’s diary of 10 Aug. 1912. See Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 98–99.

9 “He is a real” Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25.26. For TR’s embrace of (and self-identification with) Bergson’s currently popular theory of élan vital, see TR, Works, 14.435 and passim.

10 He had not been impressed William Starr Myers, ed., Woodrow Wilson: Some Princeton Memories (Princeton, N.J., 1946), 42–43.

11 Wilson is a good man TR, Letters, 7.592.

12 “I know it” The New York Times, 13 Aug. 1912.

13 After his desperate Pringle, Taft, 818; The New York Times, 13 Aug. 1912. For WHT’s decision not to campaign actively, see Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 126ff.

14 Taft knew that Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 694 and passim; Pringle, Taft, 82. “Ike” Hoover, the veteran White House usher, considered WHT to be, after Calvin Coolidge, the most self-centered of the nine presidents he had known. TR rated third. Hoover,Forty-Two Years, 232.

15 “I have no” WHT quoted in Pringle, Taft, 823.

16 What with Ted Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 60–61.

17 By the time everybody Ibid., 62.

18 After a few weeks Ibid., 61.

19 One night after dinner Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 99.

20 “Yes, yes!” Ibid.

21 A more agitated EKR to ERD, n.d., ca. Aug. 1912 (ERDP); Cordery, Alice, 231–32.

22 “I wish to goodness” EKR to ERD, n.d., ca. Aug. 1912 (ERDP).

23 By the end of the month For Debs’s double challenge to TR and WW in the summer of 1912, see Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, chap. 5. TR made two brief campaign trips into New England during the second half of Aug., attracting large, enthusiastic crowds. In Providence, R.I., on the 16th he spoke on tariff and currency reform, and made what appears to have been the first use of a phrase that reentered the American political vocabulary 70 years later: “The Republican proposal is only to give prosperity to [wealthy industrialists] and then to let it trickle down.” The New York Times, 17 Aug. 1912.

24 Wilson chose Dunkirk (N.Y.) Evening Observer and The New York Times, 16 Aug. 1912.

25 340 pounds WHT admitted to this weight at the end of his presidential term. New York Times, 12 Dec. 1913.

26 “As the campaign” WHT on 26 Aug. 1912, quoted in Pringle, Taft, 815.

27 All of them stood The New York Times, 27 Aug. 1912.

28 Woman suffrage was an issue The cover illustration of the pro-Wilson Harper’s Weekly, 17 Aug. 1912, showed TR shouting “Woman Suffrage Forever” through a megaphone, with a billboard proclaiming, “Great Vaudeville Act—The Call of the Wild.”

29 small silver bull mooses Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 184. TR had previously (28–31 Aug.) undertaken a short campaign swing through New England. See Gould, Bull Moose, 41–51, for an important address in Vermont on the social-industrial aspects of Progressive policy.

30 He intended to barnstorm TR’s itinerary is detailed day by day in the trip journal of George E. Roosevelt (TRC). The Colonel traveled with George and four other aides in a private car hitched to various public trains. Another private car, chartered by the press, was in turn hitched to his.

31 “He looked, as usual” Baker, notebook M, 34–35 (RSB). TR’s speech is in Gould, Bull Moose, 51–56.

32 A citizen of TR, Letters, 7.570–71; The New York Times, 13 July, 1 Aug. 1912; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 273ff.; Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 190.

33 a convenient code Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 141.

34 “Friends,” he yelled Ibid., 175.

35 “My fellow citizens” The New York Times, 10 Sept. 1912.

36 gloved hands clapping Ibid.

37 Two nights later Donovan, The Assassins, 136. According to the self-styled “written proclamation” of John Schrank, quoted in the New York Press, 15 Sept. 1912, the time of this vision was 1:30 A.M. on the 12th. For his earlier vision of McKinley and TR at the same hour on 15 Sept. 1901, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 17.

38 his oratory became impersonal Exhorted by a Progressive official to “come out stronger” against WW, TR said, “No, that would be entirely wrong. Give Wilson a chance to make good. Don’t handicap him before he has had an opportunity to do anything.” David S. Hinshaw interviewed by J. F. French, 1922 (TRB).

39 Only California When TR arrived in Los Angeles on the 16th, 200,000 people lined the streets and shouted his name. Mowry, TR, 276.

40 “a quiet, steady” The New York Times, 23 Sept. 1912.

41 “There was no applause” David S. Hinshaw interviewed by J. F. French, 1922 (TRB). White wrote a charming account of TR’s visit to Emporia in his Autobiography, 493–96.

42 five 78 rpm shellac discs Victor C-12406 through 12410, all recorded on 22 Sept. 1912. These recordings and four cylinders recorded the previous month for the Edison Company can be heard on numerous Internet sites. The most representative is “The Right of the People to Rule,” downloadable from the Library of Congress’s American Memory archive (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem). It contains TR’s famous exhortation to “Spend and be spent.” Another, “The Progressive Covenant with the People,” ends with him declaiming his Armageddon line with enormous relish. The pleasant voices of Wilson and Taft can be heard on the Vincent Voice Library website at http://vvl.lib.msu.edu/.

43 “I am hoarse” TR to KR, 27 Sept. 1912 (TRC).

44 Arkansas. Tennessee. At Memphis, on 26 Sept., TR gave a far-seeing, nonpartisan address to the Levee Convention. In language clearly written for the most part by Gifford Pinchot, he called for wholesale federal development and protection of the Mississippi drainage basin, using the plant and technology that would soon become available to the United States upon completion of the Panama Canal. See Gould, Bull Moose, 126–36.

45 “Theodore Roosevelt has” African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, 29.2 (Oct. 1912).

46 “It is impossible” The New York Times, 29 Sept. 1912. See Gould, Bull Moose, 136–42, for an account of TR’s successful appeal for support in New Orleans, and Arthur S. Link, “Theodore Roosevelt and the South in 1912,” in North Carolina Historical Review, 23 (July 1946) for TR’s popularity elsewhere in Dixie: “Roosevelt found … that it was his misfortune that people often shout one way and vote another.”

47 He practically called The New York Times, 29 Sept. 1912.

48 He blustered on George Roosevelt trip journal, 29 Sept. 1912; Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 187; The New York Times, 30 Sept. 1912; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 276. The Atlanta Constitution report quoted in Gould, Bull Moose, 143–48, downplays the hostility TR provoked.

49 He got the impression Willard Straight to Henry P. Fletcher, 3 Oct. 1912 (STR).

Chronological Note: The investigation had been triggered by an article in the August issue of Hearst’s Magazine, showing that the payment had originally been made by John D. Archbold of Standard Oil to Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania. The latter, an archenemy of Progressivism, claimed in 1912 that he had accepted it in behalf of TR’s reelection campaign. The President, he said, not only knew about the $25,000, but had demanded a larger contribution if Standard Oil was not to be prosecuted under the Sherman Act. Although Penrose could not offer any proof of his allegation, he and the ever-vengeful Robert La Follette jointly called for a Senate examination of all contributions to the 1904, 1908, and 1912 campaigns. A subcommittee for the purpose, chaired by Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, grilled TR on 4 Oct. 1912. He preempted his appearance by publishing a long letter to Clapp. In it, he denied Penrose’s allegation, and attached documents from his presidential papers to prove that in 1904 he had directed that no contributions from John D. Rockefeller’s highly unpopular trust should be accepted by the Republican National Committee. See TR, Letters, 7.602–5, and Campaign Contributions: Testimony Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Privileges and Elections, U.S. Senate, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1913).

50 a conference of The New York Times, 7 Oct. 1912.

51 Wilson had come up Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House, 476–77; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 260–61; Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 164–65. For an analysis of the contrasting yet often complementary platforms of TR and WW in the campaign of 1912, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York, 2009), 173–80.

52 Johnson had a twenty-two-state Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 111.

53 In Indiana, Albert Beveridge Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 273–84; TR, Letters, 7.595; TR to KR, 1 Nov. 1912, ts. (TRC). For a detailed account of the organization of the Progressive Party, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 22–57.

54 “Children, don’t crowd” Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 144.

55 The Colonel was back Davis, Released for Publication, 355–56.

56 Roosevelt seemed a new The Outlook, 12 Oct. 1912; Philip J. Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912: An Intimate Progressive View,” ts. (TRC), 28, 40; Gould, Bull Moose, 151–54.

57 “I’m fur Teddy” Mrs. Rudolph Schori to TR, 21 Jan. 1913, pasted into the manuscript of TR’s autobiography (MLM). Later, in Duluth and Chicago, TR used his briefing book to further effect, quoting some highly xenophobic remarks made by WW about European immigrants “of the lowest classes” in a magazine article in 1899. Gould, Bull Moose, 158–59.

58 Munsey, a strict dieter Munsey’s advice fell on deaf ears. Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 407–8.

59 Rumors persisted Davis, Released for Publication, 362.

60 His speech Gould, Bull Moose, 161–62.

61 After dinner Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 49. TR’s voice loss in the Coliseum was unfortunate, because his speech was an effective attack on WW as governor of the most corporate-friendly state in the Union. “He did precisely and exactly nothing [in New Jersey]. It is as simple to describe what [he] accomplished against the trusts as it is to write a volume on the natural history of the snakes in Ireland. There are no snakes in Ireland.” Gould, Bull Moose, 166.

62 He returned to Chicago Davis, Released for Publication, 369.

63 Roosevelt lies and curses Ishpeming (Mich.) Iron Ore, 12 Oct. 1912, copy in TRC.

64 “Let’s go at him.” Davis, Released for Publication, 369.

65 Later that afternoon The following account of the events of 14 Oct. 1912 is based on the eyewitness reportage of Philip Roosevelt in “Politics of the Year 1912”; O. K. Davis to George Perkins, 15 Oct. 1912, ts. copy (AC); Davis, Released for Publication, 370–90; Oliver Remey, Henry F. Cochems, and Joseph C. Bloodgood, The Attempted Assassination of Ex-President Theodore Roosevelt (Milwaukee, Wis., 1912); Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 147–50; and “Incidents in the Political Life of Theodore Roosevelt as Related by Owen Crozier,” ts. copy (TRB).

66 “I want to be” Davis, Released for Publication, 372.

67 “He’ll never get up” Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 54.

68 Looking down, he Ibid.

69 “Don’t hurt him” TR, Letters, 7.705; Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 54.

70 What he saw Full-length photograph of Schrank, 14 Oct. 1912, Library of Congress.

71 “What did you” Davis, Released for Publication, 149.

72 “He pinked me” Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 16.

73 Terrell had heard Davis, Released for Publication, 378; Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 55. TR later remembered saying, “I am ahead of the game and can afford to take the chances.” TR, Works, 6.xiii.

74 “No, Colonel” Davis, Released for Publication, 378; Leary, Talks with T.R., 30; Emlen Roosevelt, ed., Roosevelt v. Newett: A Transcript of the Testimony Taken and Depositions Read at Marquette, Michigan (privately printed, 1913), 71, cited hereafter asRoosevelt v. Newett.

75 “It’s all right” Davis, Released for Publication, 380. Afterward TR wrote KR, “As I did not cough blood, I was pretty sure that the wound was not a fatal one.” (19 Oct. 1912 [TRC].) The auditorium where TR spoke is now the Milwaukee Theater.

76 Cochems preceded him New York Press, 15 Oct. 1912; Stan Gores, “The Attempted Assassination of Teddy Roosevelt,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 53 (Summer 1970).

77 Roosevelt stepped forward O. K. Davis to George Perkins, 15 Oct. 1912 (AC); E. W. Leach (eyewitness) in Racine Journal, 13 Aug. 1921. A surviving photograph of the shirt still evokes an emotional reaction. See Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 573.

78 “I’m going to ask you” Chicago Tribune, 15 Oct. 1912.

79 Waiting for the noise Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 57; Davis, Released for Publication, 381.

80 His heart was racing TR, Letters, 7.705. A stenographic text of TR’s speech, varying considerably from the original script, is reproduced in Gable, The Man in the Arena, 102ff. It appears to have been much abridged before its first publication in Elmer H. Youngman’s Progressive Principles (New York, 1913), 102–14.

81 Roosevelt swung his head The image of the steel-gray stare is Philip Roosevelt’s. (“Politics of the Year 1912,” 58.) O. K. Davis was similarly rebuffed when he, too, tried to stop TR from going on. “He paused in his speech, and swung around on me with an expression on his face that can be described accurately only by the word ‘ferocity.’ ” Davis, Released for Publication, 383.

82 After about forty-five minutes Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 58; Leach in Racine Journal, 13 Aug. 1921; Crozier, “Incidents in the Political Life of Theodore Roosevelt”; Davis, Released for Publication, 385.

83 Incredibly, members Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 58; New York Press, 15 Oct. 1912; Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 149–50.

84 Before being stripped TR, Letters, 8.1449; TR to KR, 19 Oct. 1912, ts. (TRC). This was an inside joke. Many years before, Bullock had been convulsed by one of TR’s favorite stories, about the Rough Rider who shot someone and who, in response to his question, “How did it happen?” answered, “With a .38 on a .45 frame, Colonel.” TR, An Autobiography, 380.

85 Meanwhile, at New York Press, 15 Oct. 1912.

86 Never let Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 60 (facsimile).

87 News of the drama New York Press and The New York Times, 15 Oct. 1912. See also Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 67, and Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 385–86. A medical soap opera commenced while TR was being examined in Milwaukee. The eminent surgeon Dr. Joseph C. Bloodgood of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore happened to be in the Auditorium to witness TR’s speech, and followed him to the Emergency Hospital to offer assistance if needed. He was unimpressed with the quality of the local care, and said urgently to O. K. Davis, “Get him out of here just as quickly as you can. This is no place for him.” Both Bloodgood and Terrell recommended Mercy Hospital’s John B. Murphy as the best specialist for his case. TR assented and was checked out of the Emergency Hospital at 11:25 P.M. (Davis, Released for Publication, 389; TR to J. Keeley, 30 Dec. 1912 copy (AC); Loyal Davis, J. B. Murphy: Stormy Petrel of Surgery [New York, 1938], 262–63; New York Press, 15 Oct. 1912.) For subsequent episodes of the soap opera, involving the rivalry of four Chicago surgeons, see Davis, Murphy, 263–72.

88 It lay embedded Davis, Murphy, 267; EKR to Emily Carow, 17 Oct. 1912 (TRC); Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 57. TR’s personal doctor, Alexander Lambert, pointed out that the spectacle case deflected the bullet upward. “[Had] the bullet gone through the arch of the aorta or auricles of the heart, Colonel Roosevelt would not have lived 60 seconds.” Bishop, TR, 2.339.

89 “There was no other place” Crozier, “Incidents in the Political Life of Theodore Roosevelt.”

90 His breathing hurt TR, Letters, 7.705; Philip Roosevelt, “Politics of the Year 1912,” 58–59.

91 He was asleep Davis, Released for Publication, 390, 393; Davis to George Perkins, 15 Oct. 1912 (AC); Gores, “The Attempted Assassination.”

92 Even at that Chicago Tribune, 16 Oct. 1912; Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 71; photograph in Milwaukee County Historical Society collection.

93 At 10:30 Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 66–67.

94 X-ray reproductions One of these can be seen in ibid., 32.

95 The surgeon was closemouthed Davis, Murphy, 267. Murphy privately told TR that a few splinters of rib bone had penetrated his pleura, and that his speech after the attack had aggravated the laceration. The surgeons were afraid that if they extracted the bullet immediately, “there might be either a collapse of the pleura or an infection of the pleural cavity.” Bishop, TR, 2.345.

96 The records show Davis, Murphy, 268. One of the examining doctors remarked that TR’s musculature had much to do with the stopping of Schrank’s bullet. “Colonel Roosevelt has a phenomenal development of the chest.… He is one of the most powerful men I have ever seen laid on an operating table.” (Bishop, TR, 2.338–39.) A score for the 12-year-old Teedie Roosevelt in 1870–1871, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion.” Robinson, My Brother TR, 50.

97 Perhaps the best Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 387ff.

98 Dr. Murphy’s pointed reference Davis, Murphy, 273, notes that the reference was “out of place” in a medical bulletin. “But in the light of the Colonel’s [libel] suit it grows evident that the patient had asked that some such allusion to liquor should be made.”

99 It was from Davis, Released for Publication, 395.

100 Among the other The New York Times, 15, 16 Oct. 1912; Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 25.421–22, 425. WW privately joked about the effect his courteous gesture would have on TR. “Teddy will have apoplexy when he hears of this.” Cooper,Woodrow Wilson, 170.

101 Similar messages Davis, Released for Publication, 396; The New York Times, 16–18 Oct. 1912; Chicago Tribune, 21 Oct. 1912. The crowned heads included George V of England, Wilhelm II of Germany, Franz Joseph of Austria, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and the Emperor of Japan. For editorial reactions, domestic and international, to the attack on TR, see The Outlook and Literary Digest, 26 Oct. 1912.

102 He informed the judge Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 94–96; Gores, “The Attempted Assassination.”

103 After a week TR, Letters, 7.632; The New York Times, 27, 28 Oct. 1912.

104 “I am in fine” TR, Letters, 7.631–32.

105 Hiram Johnson was The following description of TR’s appearance in the Garden is based on illustrated articles in The New York Times and Syracuse Herald, 31 Oct. 1912.

106 “Quiet, down there!” Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 325.

107 “—Perhaps not so” The complete text of TR’s speech, entitled “The Purpose of the Progressive Party,” is in Gould, Bull Moose, 187–92.

108 This was Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 270; Gould, Bull Moose, 188. TR’s appearance, at the Garden—stigmatized, suffering, elevated high above the faithful—marked the climax of the quasi-Christian symbolism of his campaign. See, e.g., Robinson, My Brother TR, 275.

Chronological Note: WW addressed a Democratic rally the following night, 31 Oct., and Tammany Hall timekeepers made sure that the ovation for him lasted half an hour longer than the one for TR. Ignoring medical advice, TR returned to the Garden on 2 Nov., still manifestly in pain, to speak on behalf of Oscar Straus’s gubernatorial candidacy. He then made a couple of election-eve appearances on Long Island. The last speech he made, at the Oyster Bay Opera House, was a furious reply to some minor criticisms leveled against him by Elihu Root. Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 262; The New York Times, 2, 5 Nov. 1912.

109 At seven the Colonel EKR to KR, 6 Nov. 1912 (KRP); Cordery, Alice, 234.

110 The phone call TR actually knew as early as 7:30 P.M. that a landslide for WW impended, but the Democratic National Committee did not claim victory until 10:30. WW acknowledged his triumph at 10:45. Atlanta Constitution and The New York Times, 6 Nov. 1912.

111 THE AMERICAN PEOPLE The New York Times, 6 Nov. 1912.

112 “Like all other” New York Evening Post, 6 Nov. 1912.

CHAPTER 13: A POSSIBLE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 16.

2 “Well, we have” TR to KR, 5 Nov. 1912, ts. (TRC).

3 In his still-fragile Ibid. After the last line, TR characteristically added, “I am absolutely happy and contented.” See also his posterity letter sent on the same date to Arthur Lee, in TR, Letters, 7.634–35.

4 “You know him” EKR to KR, 6 Nov. 1912 (KRP).

5 Gradually, Roosevelt realized In further analysis, TR ran second in 23 states, seven of them in the South, where his “lily-white” Party policy proved effective in weakening WHT’s machine support. He swept Pennsylvania with a 50,000-vote margin over WW, plus California with 11 out of 13 electoral votes, and Michigan, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Washington besides. He was only 1,000 votes behind WHT in Vermont, and 3,000 behind WW in Maine. The governor’s winning margins in North Dakota and Montana were not much greater, at 4,000 and 6,000. New York City rejected its native son by a plurality of 122,777 votes, but TR racked up convincing wins in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He performed strongly in the Midwest and West, and secured a majority of the nation’s normal GOP vote by a margin of more than half a million. (Gould, Bull Moose, 176–77; Literary Digest, 16 Nov. 1912; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 131–32.) Gould points out that TR did not technically defeat WHT in either California or South Dakota, since the President was not on the ballot in those states.

6 stomped and burned The New York Times, 10 Nov. 1912.

7 Even if he A progressive Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota received almost four times as many votes as the Progressive Party candidate. TR himself did best in states where the GOP vote was traditionally high. Potts, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party”; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 132.

8 He would now John Milton Cooper, in Naylor et al., TR, 505, expresses a contrary view, suggesting that WW would have been nominated as the only possible foil to TR, and during the campaign would have attracted away from him much of WHT’s conservative/corporate support.

9 There remained James E. Amos, Theodore Roosevelt: Hero to His Valet (New York, 1927), 147–48. “To me and to some of the others who were near him it always seemed that after the shooting things began to break against him. Up to that moment his life had been a rising scale of successes. People talked about his star and his destiny. Things broke for him. After that they broke the other way.”

10 poor Nick Representative Longworth was defeated by only 97 votes—which ARL guiltily blamed on herself, for attending a Progressive rally in Columbus earlier in the year. He took solace in alcohol, breaking down completely on 13 Nov., to her “infinite sorrow and pity.” Cordery, Alice, 235–36.

11 Roosevelt admitted TR to KR, 24 May 1913, ts. (TRC); Willard Straight to Henry P. Fletcher, 3 Oct. 1912 (STR). Apparently TR did not know that The Outlook had taken out a $25,000 accident insurance policy on him, and made a claim after he was incapacitated in Milwaukee. The insurance company argued that only TR could have claimed, and tried to have the policy voided. TR then mystifyingly announced that TR would not file any claim himself. The New York Times, 8, 9 Nov. 1912.

12 And he suspected Encouraged by timid signals from Ethel, Dr. Derby had begun to press his suit again in October. Their ultimately fruitful, two-and-a-half-year romance is touchingly documented in WFP.

13 Roosevelt was willing TR to KR, 11 Nov. 1912, ts. (TRC).

14 “I get from” Ibid. TR’s Outlook salary was $12,000.

15 There remained African Game Trails sold 36,127 copies in 1910, about 4,700 copies in 1911, and about 1,019 copies in the first half of 1912. (Charles Scribner to TR, 7 Feb. 1911, 21 Feb. and 22 Aug. 1912 [SCR].) Author’s estimates based on payments to TR, where no sales figures are available.

16 Looking back Charles Scribner to TR, 1 Feb. and 22 Aug. 1912 (TRP). TR had, all the same, an impressive total of 15 titles in print at the end of 1912, many of them in multiple editions, and all still earning royalties. This total did not include the “Elkhorn Edition” of his complete works to date (26 vols.), nor any of his foreign editions and translations.

Biographical Note: The information in these paragraphs is based on scattered royalty statements and “stock accounts” sent to TR by his various publishers in 1912, and preserved in TRC. From 1913 through 1919 he appears to have earned a further $58,125 in advance payments and royalties. (TR file, SCR.) Posthumously, he once again became a bestselling author, thanks to the publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. (See Epilogue.) It is impossible to calculate how many copies of TR’s books were bought during his lifetime and in the decade or so after his death. A memo prepared by his main publisher, Scribners, in 1933, lists 876,375 copies sold by that house to date. Scribners to William H. Bell, 25 Nov 1933 (SCR).

17 The Century Company Hero Tales from American History (New York, 1895), addressed to young readers, was co-authored by Henry Cabot Lodge. Stories of the Great West (New York, 1909), was a selection of chapters and articles previously published by TR.

18 He was not sure TR to KR, 21 Jan. 1913, ts. (TRC); Charles Scribner to William B. Howland, 2 Dec. 1912 (SCR).

19 not that they John Adams’s autobiography was abandoned in mid-sentence, and John Quincy Adams’s was a scissors-and-paste job compiled by his son Charles Francis.

20 “This is the first” Charles Scribner to TR, 2 Dec. 1912 (SCR).

21 “another proposition” Howland to Scribner, 3 Dec. 1912 (SCR).

22 The proposition had come Macmillan statement, 30 Apr. 1914 (TRP). TR’s advance was not payable until publication day, 19 Nov. 1913. There is no of record what, if anything, he was paid by The Outlook for first serial rights.

23 reputation for promptness See Abbott, Impressions of TR, 173–74.

24 His third book project Charles Scribner to TR, 17 June and 16 Sept. 1913 (SCR).

25 John F. Schrank, meanwhile Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 98, 101–2.

26 he insisted that TR was inclined to agree with Schrank. “I very gravely question if he has a more unsound mind than Eugene Debs.” Bishop, TR, 2.344.

27 He bequeathed Gores, “The Attempted Assassination”; Chicago Tribune, 15 Oct. 1912; The New York Times, 19 Nov. 1912; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 15 Oct. 1912.

28 incarceration for life The lunacy commission’s euphemism, “until cured” was understood in 1912 to mean a life sentence. The New York Times, 23 Nov. 1912.

29 “Only Bull Moose” Chicago Tribune, 23 Nov. 1912. TR told St. Loe Strachey on 16 Dec. that he did not consider Schrank to be any more insane than Senator La Follette or Eugene Debs. He blamed his own journalistic enemies for having excited the little man to action. “I have not the slightest feeling against him.” (TR, Letters, 7.676–77.) Schrank was shortly transferred to Wisconsin’s Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and remained there until his death on 15 Sept. 1943—the anniversary of his first vision of the ghost of McKinley. He was a model prisoner and exhibited no further evidence of aberrant behavior until Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a third term as President in 1940. Schrank then became agitated, and was heard to say that “if he was free he would take a hand in the matter.” During his 31-year incarceration, he was visited by no one and received no letters. (Gores, “The Attempted Assassination.”) See also Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 117ff. for Schrank’s complete testimony in 1912.

30 Much as Roosevelt Gable, The Bull Moose Years 149–55. For TR’s years as a self-described “literary feller,” see Morris, The Rise of TR, chap. 15.

31 George Perkins, seeking Garland, Companions on the Trail, 505–6.

32 an excellent life Ulysses S. Grant: His Life and Character (1898). Garland (1860–1940) was to achieve fame in 1917 with his autobiographical Son of the Middle Border. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a sequel, Daughter of the Middle Border, in 1921. His three volumes of literary reminiscences, Roadside Meetings (1930), Companions on the Trail (1931), and My Friendly Contemporaries (1932), are richly anecdotal.

33 “I’ll begin it immediately” Garland, Companions on the Trail, 507.

34 Abbott’s idea Abbott, Impressions of TR, 176–78.

35 On October 27, 1858 TR, An Autobiography, 256.

36 Ever since the election “Minutes of the National Committee of the Progressive Party, 1912–1916,” bound ts., 5–20 (TRC); Mowry, TR, 289. In an editorial dated 8 Jan. 1913, Munsey proposed a merger between the Progressive and Republican parties. For a detailed account of the intraparty battle against Perkins, see Mowry, TR, chap. 11.

37 Showing as much Chicago Tribune, 9 Dec. 1912; Mowry, TR, 285.

38 convinced by his support TR, Letters, 7.665.

39 “The doctrine of” Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 154. A case in point soon materialized in Idaho, where the state supreme court, on 2 Jan. 1913, jailed and fined the editor and publisher of the Boise Capital News on contempt charges for criticizing its decision to deny local candidates the right to run as Progressives on the national ballot. The result was outrage in all sections of the American press, and wide circulation of TR’s triumphant reaction: “There could be no better proof that we need in many states at least the power to recall judges from the bench when they act badly.” TR, Letters, 7.687.

40 “I have had” TR to KR, 27 Dec. 1912 and 21 Jan. 1913. The manuscript of TR’s autobiography, bound in two vols., is in MLM. Except for chap. 1, which seems to be a copy of Lawrence Abbott’s redaction of his first “interview” session with TR, and a few late pages on conservation written by Gifford Pinchot at the author’s request, all the other chapters are original typescripts dictated and heavily edited by TR. Some pages are so dense with handwritten “inserts” that the four margins are filled to capacity. It is clear that he regarded the book as an important document.

41 a lock of honey-colored hair This memento of Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt is preserved at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

42 The company of TR, Letters, 7.688.

43 He was intrigued TR to KR, 11 Nov. 1912, ts. (TRC); TR, Letters, 8.829; Endicott Peabody in Boston Transcript, 22 July 1918. TR was particularly impressed with QR’s story, “From a Train Window,” Grotonian, Oct. 1914.

44 Kermit claimed KR to ERD, 12, 26 Nov. 1913 (ERDP); EKR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 15 Oct. 1913 (ARC); KR to ERD, 12 May 1913 (ERDP).

45 “As president of” TR, Letters, 7.660.

46 More excitingly Ibid.

47 At Symphony Hall Lowell (Mass.) Sun, The New York Times, 28 Dec. 1912.

48 And the great Parkman Morris, The Rise of TR, 120, 393, 412.

49 None of the members Pringle, TR, 572.

50 He proceeded to say TR’s lecture, “History as Literature,” has been widely reprinted. The version cited here, taken from the American Historical Review, Apr. 1913, appears in TR, Works, 14.3–28. It is the source of the following quotations.

51 Literature may TR, Works, 14.7.

52 “the preacher militant” Wister, Roosevelt, 232.

53 He must ever remember TR, Works, 14.23.

54 “He is so” Turner, Dear Lady, 139.

55 “T.R. came and went” Akiko Murakata, “Theodore Roosevelt and William Sturgis Bigelow: The Story of a Friendship,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 23.1 (1975).

56 With some awkwardness Lodge, Selections, 2.426–34. Lodge’s Early Memories, published in the fall of 1913, stopped short of his political career and said nothing about his relationship with TR.

57 A much frostier The New York Times, 5 Jan. 1913.

58 “No, dear, no” Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 65.

59 His wisecrack The New York Times, 5 Jan. 1913.

60 In a bizarre speech Logansport (Ind.) Journal-Tribune, 5 Jan. 1913.

61 For the rest The first chapter of TR’s autobiography, “Boyhood and Youth,” appeared in The Outlook on 22 Feb. 1913. Eleven further chapters followed fortnightly. The McClure Newspaper Syndicate began reprinting them on 13 April.

62 “It is very difficult” TR, Letters, 7.689.

63 He was shy TR, An Autobiography, 258, 263–64. TR did permit himself one reference to “my son Kermit” in describing a lion hunt in Africa, presumably because KR had been mentioned often in African Game Trails. Elsewhere in his manuscript, he deleted some accidental references to Ted before sending it to the printer. See chap. 9, 24 (MLM).

64 Adult traumas Morris, The Rise of TR, passim.

65 “an optimist” Wister, Roosevelt, 331–32.

66 That land of the West TR, An Autobiography, 346. His quotation “gone with lost Atlantis” is from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Philadelphia” in Rewards and Fairies (1910).

67 On Tuesday The New York Times, 5 Mar. 1913.

68 the Colonel went that morning Ibid. To New Yorkers in 1913, the term Futurism was not necessarily associated with the movement of that name in Italy.

69 a bedlam of aesthetic debate See Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York, 1988), chap. 9.

70 some Valhallan landscapes Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867–1909) is often misnamed in TR studies as “Marcus Symonds” or “Bruseius Simons.” A skilled, New York–born genre painter in the 1880s, he later developed a vaguer, more mystical style, apparently influenced by Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen and Parsifal. He died in Bayreuth. For TR’s emotional reaction to three Simons works (which still hang in Sagamore Hill), see TR, Letters, 4.757–78. “I wish ‘the light that never was on land or sea’ in the pictures I am to live with—and this light your paintings have.” See also TR, An Autobiography, 586.

71 As for sculpture Longworth, Crowded Hours, 65.

72 “Art,” Roosevelt admitted TR quoted in Butt, Letters, 355–56.

73 His executive dining room Morris, Theodore Rex, passim; Albert Bigelow Paine, Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures (New York, 1904), 556ff.; Garland in Roosevelt House Bulletin, 2.2 (Fall 1923).

Historiographical Note: A comprehensive study of TR’s patronage of artists and the arts as President remains to be written. His activism included the classical restoration and renaming of the White House; dynamic backing for the McMillan Commission’s 1902 plan to de-clutter and beautify Washington, along the lines of Pierre L’Enfant’s original design; relocating the proposed Lincoln Memorial on Capitol Hill to its present site; ordering the removal of the former Pennsylvania Railroad Station on the Mall at Sixth Street, N.W.; campaigning for a National Art Gallery; and pressuring his fellow regents on the Smithsonian Institution board to acquire major collections of Oriental, British, and contemporary American art. Shortly before leaving the White House he appointed and empowered a Fine Arts Council, under the advisement of the American Institute of Architects. But the gesture was quixotic, since neither Congress nor President Taft showed any interest in continuing the cultural policies of the Roosevelt administration. See TR, Letters, 4.817; Glenn Brown, “Roosevelt and the Fine Arts,” American Architect, 116 (1919); “Roosevelt and Our Coin Designs: The Letters Between Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint Gaudens,” The Century Magazine, Apr. 1920; reminiscences of Christopher LaFarge and Glenn Brown in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 169–72; Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., “Theodore Roosevelt, Champion of Governmental Aesthetics,” Georgia Review, 67.21 (Summer 1967); Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion (Baton Rouge, La., 1985); Steven L. Levine, “Race, Culture, and Art: Theodore Roosevelt and the Nationalist Aesthetic” (Ph.D. thesis, Kent State University, 2001). Aviva F. Taubenfeld’s Rough Writing: Ethnic Authorship in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York, 2008) is an important study of TR’s literary patronage related to the immigrant experience.

74 Unlike most The British novelist Arnold Bennett visited New York 15 months before the Armory Show and was dismayed at the low esteem in which Europhile Americans held their own culture. “They associate art with Florentine frames, matinée hats, distant museums, and clever talk full of allusions to the dead.” Bennett, Your United States (New York, 1912), 163–64.

75 He felt that TR, “A Layman’s View of an Art Exhibition,” TR, Works, 14.405ff. Originally published in The Outlook, 29 Mar. 1913.

76 Roosevelt was in Journalistic glimpses of TR at the Armory Show describe his pace as leisurely and his mood one of calm enjoyment. He was escorted by Arthur B. Davies, president of the exhibition, Walt Kuhn, and Robert W. Chanler. The following account of what he saw is based on TR’s above-cited article, and on a virtual, though partial, tour of the exhibition compiled by Shelley Staples for the University of Virginia at http://xroads.virginia.edu/. Extra visual details, and identification of the artworks that caught TR’s eye, come from the scrapbooks, photographs, and clippings collected by Walt Kuhn in WCF. The Kuhn archive also includes a complete typed list of all the exhibits.

77 He was predisposed TR, Works, 14.410. Chanler (1872–1930) was a French-trained muralist whose intricately woven style was inspired by the polyphony of J. S. Bach. (Chanler, Roman Spring, 188–89.) For TR’s “American ideal” in the creative arts, see Taubenfeld, Rough Writers, 2–12, and Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR, 65–79.

78 It was clear that Davies (1862–1928) was, despite his romantic style, a member of “The Eight.” Considered by many in his day to be the greatest living American artist, he was an enthusiastic promoter of the European avant-garde. It was largely due to him that the Armory Show, originally intended as a survey of American art, became international. Davies selected most of the foreign works on display, leaving the American galleries to his colleague William Glackens.

79 Roosevelt was taken TR, Works, 14.410. Ms. Myers’s satiric sculpture is illustrated in The Century Magazine, 85.4 (Aug. 1913).

Biographical Note: TR’s casual evocation of the fifteenth idyll of Theocritus in reference to a piece of contemporary American sculpture might have struck some readers of his review as “showing off.” But nobody viewing the carved figures and reading the poem—both invoking nervous, chatterboxy, overdressed women, recoiling from yet half-excited by the press of flesh in a crowded street—could dispute the brilliance of the analogy. Such aperçus were so much a feature of his private conversation and correspondence that he could have published more of them if he chose.

TR’s memory was as comprehensive as it was photographic. It went far beyond the normal politician’s knack of remembering names and faces, although his ability in that regard was phenomenal. What he saw or heard, and in particular what he read, registered with an almost mechanistic clarity. A few days after the Armory Show, he received a letter from KR, asking if he could remember the words of a poem by Edith Thomas (1854–1925) about exile south of the border.

“[It] runs as follows, I think,” TR replied, and wrote in his clear hand: Beside the lake whose wave is hushed to hear, / The surf beat of a sea on either hand, / Far from Castile, / Afar in Toltec land, / Fearless I died who living knew not fear. / Dark faces frowned between me and the sky; / The Gordian knife drove deep; life grew a dream / Far from Castile! / Who heard my cry extreme / That held the sum of partings? / World, goodbye! (TR to KR, 26 Mar. 1913, ts. [TRC].)

He was not copying. His punctuation differed in several particulars from Thomas’s, although he correctly reproduced the exclamation mark that inflected her repetition of “Castile.” He erred on one image, writing “Gordian knife” instead of “Indian blade,” and divided four lines that should have been couplets. Otherwise, he got the poem as right as if he had memorized it hours before. In fact, he was remembering its first printing in 1894, in an issue of The Atlantic Monthly that had coincidentally carried an article by himself. The poem must have registered there and then, because he had quoted a phrase from it, probably without thinking, two years later in the fourth volume of his book The Winning of the West: “Dark faces frowned through the haze, the war-axes gleamed, and on the frozen ground the soldiers fell.” Edith M. Thomas, “A Good-By” and TR, “The College Graduate and Public Life,” The Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1894; TR, The Winning of the West (New York, 1896), 4.60.

80 What pleased Roosevelt Other American works TR singled out for especial praise were Kate T. Cory’s “Arizona Desert,” Mahonri Young’s studies for the Sea Gull Monument in Salt Lake City, Leon Dabo’s “Canadian Night,” Amos Chew’s plaster, “Pelf,” and Émile Bourdelle’s “Heracles.” TR, Works, 14.410.

81 European moderns The Armory Show grouped artists geographically according to their current domicile. Hence Whistler was hung in the British galleries, and Kandinsky in the German.

82 Then came the slap See Brown, Story of the Armory Show, 168ff.

83 obviously mammalian The phraseology here is TR’s, in Works, 14.408.

84 A phrase he TR, Letters, 7.710.

85 Nakedness seemed Henri’s “Figure in Motion,” clearly influenced by the photography of Eadweard Muybridge, was described by William Zorach as “the “nudest nude I ever saw.” It and Pascin’s “Three Girls” may be seen on the above-cited website of Shelley Staples.

86 As James Bryce Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR, 22.

87 his subsequent review TR, Works, 14.405. The tone of TR’s review may be contrasted with that of, e.g., Kenyon Cox in Harper’s Weekly, 15 Mar. 1913: “This thing [modernism/Cubism] is not amusing: it is heartrending and sickening … nothing less than the total destruction of the art of painting … revolting and defiling … pathological.… As to Matisse … it is not madness that stares at you from his canvasses, but leering effrontery.”

88 What disturbed him “Something is wrong with the world,” the financier James D. Stillman wrote after touring the Armory Exhibition. “These men know.” McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 241.

89 In this recent TR, Works, 14.407.

Biographical Note: Joseph Masheck, “Teddy’s Taste: Theodore Roosevelt and the Armory Show,” Art Forum, 9.2. (1970), challenges the received opinion of TR’s review as unsubtle and uninformed. He points out that TR’s personal collection of art and objets d’art, much of which can still be seen at Sagamore Hill, contains some “very fine items,” including Oriental bronzes and screens, a signed drawing by the Roman Baroque master Pietro Testa, a few “sublime landscapes,” including those of Marcius-Simons, plus French porcelains, a large corpus of statues by Frederic Remington, and “a number of truly superb Indian rugs and blankets.” As for TR’s seeing eye, Masheck notes that he already had demonstrated, in his criticism of the Thayer theory of protective coloration (see above, 141, 623), “a grasp of the total visual field … quite out of Thayer’s reach,” plus an “extremely Post-Impressionistic” ability to identify with both observer and observed. Masheck agrees with several Rooseveltian assessments of individual items on display in the Armory, especially the “very remarkable works” of Chanler. He traces and authenticates all TR’s quotes of pretentious art-writing, and remarks that even a humorous reference to “colored puzzle-pictures” in the Sunday papers was well-chosen, since John Sloan had long earned money doing just that. As for the Navajo rug, “Roosevelt needs no utilitarian apology for formal beauty: in fact, what he seems to be after is pure decorative value.” As a postscript, it might be noted that when Walter Pach visited wartime France in 1914 to buy modern art for New York galleries, he went armed with a “To Whom It May Concern” letter from TR. “As a result,” Bennard B. Perlman writes, “Pach was successful in acquiring and transporting back to the United States art by Picasso, Derain, Redon, Rouault, Dufy, and Matisse.” American Artists, Authors, and Collectors: The Walter Pach Letters, 1906–1958, Bernard B. Perlman, ed. (New York, 2003), 7.

90 A cartoon by Kemble Baltimore Evening Sun, 5 Mar. 1913. The image, preserved by Walt Kuhn in WCF, shows a gift note attached to the portrait of TR, reading: “Dear Woodrow, I leave this to your tender care. I have no use for it. Yours, William.”

91 the “Square Deal” New York World editorial, ca. Mar. 1913 (WCF).

92 drew a caricature Preserved in WCF.

93 It turned out Baltimore Evening Sun, 3, 5 Mar. 1913; Atlanta Constitution, 6 Mar. 1913. WHT’s chair, if left behind at all, was presumably too large for WW.

94 “Don’t you suppose” Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 274.

95 The great government The New York Times, 5 Mar. 1913.

96 an armed attack The Washington Post, 5 Mar. 1913. Wilson had been more or less forced to appoint Bryan, who had swung the Baltimore convention for him the year before, and who still commanded the loyalty of the Democratic Party’s populist majority. Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 269.

97 found themselves barred The New York Times, 6 Mar. 1913.

98 On Friday, 4 April The following account of ERD’s wedding is based on newspaper reports, chiefly The New York Times, 6 Apr. 1913, and Wister, Roosevelt, 319–20.

99 “I feel very strongly” TR, Letters, 7.718.

100 This had been EKR to Emily Carow, 10 Feb. 1913 (TRC). A conspicuous Harvard no-show at the wedding, to ARL’s considerable anger, was Nick Longworth. He remained depressed over the loss of his Congressional seat through most of 1913. Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 394–95.

101 He seemed near Syracuse Herald, 6 Apr. 1913.

102 such a concourse Wister, Roosevelt, 319. For an extended survey of TR’s “familiars,” see ibid., 45ff.

103 “I am working” TR to ERD, 1 Apr. 1913 (ERDP).

104 heroism at San Juan An Autobiography, 512–24.

105 write more “picturesquely” Abbott’s adverb is barely legible in a note penciled on a page of chap. 3 of TR’s manuscript in MLM. It may be “pictorially,” but phrases in the note that can be read (“I wish Mr. T. R. could and would [illegible]”) convey his editorial unhappiness. EKR, too, expressed misgivings about the quality of the ms., which she blamed on the pressure of having to publish serially. “I hope he will get the opportunity to polish it up.” EKR to ERD, ca. June 1913 (ERDP).

106 Roosevelt revised some TR manuscript of An Autobiography (MLM).

107 asking Gifford Pinchot See TR, Letters, 7.716–17. TR actually pasted Pinchot’s draft into his text, with minimal alterations. An Autobiography ms., chap. 11 (MLM).

CHAPTER 14: A VANISHED ELDER WORLD

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 99. TR chose a stanza from this poem (“The Wilderness”) as an epigraph to his book of travel essays, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (New York, 1916).

2 The county courthouse See Roosevelt v. Newett for the full cast of characters participating in TR’s libel suit. The following account of the proceedings is based on this source, and newspaper reports, mainly those of The New York Times, 28 May–1 June 1913.Roosevelt v. Newett, privately published by TR’s cousin Emlen Roosevelt, is marred by the exclusion of depositions for the defense. For a summary of these, see Charles A. Palmer, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Libel Trial,” Litigation, 19.3 (Spring 1993).

3 A jury of Sheboygan Press, 27 May 1913.

4 Newett was due Ibid.; Atlanta Constitution, 1 June 1913.

5 “All that Roosevelt” Roosevelt v. Newett, 12.

6 Newett was a stalwart Melvin Holli and C. David Tompkins, “Roosevelt v. Newett: The Politics of Libel,” Michigan History, 47.4 (Dec. 1963); Roosevelt v. Newett, 12. TR’s other attorneys were W. S. Hill of Marquette and William Van Benschoten of New York. Newett was represented by William Belden, a prominent local corporate lawyer, and Horace Andrews, head counsel for the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company of Ohio.

7 I have never Roosevelt v. Newett, 13–14.

8 “about seven tablespoons” “Brandy” sic. See above, 588.

9 “Because of my” TR quoted by Jay G. Hayden, correspondent for the Detroit News, in an interview with Hermann Hagedorn, 10 Dec. 1948 (TRB).

10 Doctors Lambert Roosevelt v. Newett, 45–70.

11 “He is about” Ibid., 58–61.

12 He sat tilted Cedar Rapids Republican, 29 May 1913.

13 By mid-morning Roosevelt v. Newett, 109. In pretrial depositions, the defense had relied on the testimony of distant witnesses who had found TR’s behavior strange on four occasions: during campaign appearances in Ohio and Michigan on 17 May and 8–9 Oct. 1912; at an air show in St. Louis on 11 Oct. 1910; and at a dinner for Speaker Joseph Cannon in Washington on 7 May 1906. The first three of these allegations were easily rebuffed with primary evidence, and just before the trial began, a former reporter prepared to swear to the fourth skipped across the Canadian border to escape an unrelated charge of grand larceny. Palmer, “Teddy Roosevelt’s Libel Trial.”

14 James Pound said Roosevelt v. Newett, 111–12.

15 Pound returned triumphant Ibid., 325, 92, 178. There were no trial proceedings on Friday, Decoration Day.

16 By Saturday morning Roosevelt v. Newett, 355–56.

17 “a tool of the steel trust” During TR’s speech on 9 Oct. 1912, a man in the audience had objected to this characterization of Young, calling TR a “liar.” The exchange prompted Newett’s editorial. TR subsequently carried Marquette County. Holli, “Roosevelt v. Newett.”

18 The trial was won Roosevelt v. Newett, 358.

19 Throughout, Roosevelt had Atlanta Constitution, 1 June 1913; Roosevelt v. Newett, 358.

20 After it was all over The jury foreman significantly forgot to use the word plaintiff in announcing, “We find for Theodore Roosevelt.” The New York Times, 1 June 1913.

21 “Are you and Newett” The wording of this anecdote closely follows that of Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 125. See also ibid., 194–95.

22 Roosevelt v. Newett was The New York Times, 2 and 3 June, Fort Wayne News, 28 May 1913.

23 “I am very glad” TR to KR, 2 June 1913, ts. (TRC). According to Abbott, Impressions of TR, 284–85, Bowers & Sands, TR’s New York law firm, waived its fee on the ground that he had been unjustly libeled.

24 It occurred to him EKR to ERD and Richard Derby, 11, 28 May 1913 (ERDP); TR to KR, 1 May and 2 June 1913, ts. (TRC). KR’s new employer was the Anglo-Brazilian Forging, Steel Structural & Importing Company, a start-up venture promising high future rewards. KR to ERD, 30 Apr. 1913 (ERDP).

25 “Sometime I must” Kermit Roosevelt, The Long Trail, 65.

26 Roosevelt had in fact TR to ERD, 1 June 1913 (ERDP); TR, Letters, 7.731; Chicago Tribune, 8 Dec. 1912.

27 “Great risks and hazards” The Outlook, 1 Mar. 1913.

28 For a variety of reasons EKR ascribed TR’s need for physical adventure in the spring of 1913 to political frustration. “Father needs more scope,” she wrote ERD, “and since he can’t be President must go away from home to have it.” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 397.

29 In Paris, on the See Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, chap. 1, for the famous premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 29 May 1913, and the portents it held for a world about to slip into war.

30 He found his TR to KR, 24 May 1913. ts. (TRC). TR’s current reading included Vladimir Simkhovitch’s Marxism versus Socialism. (TR, Letters, 7.742.) Although the book confirmed his prejudices about the equalization of wealth, he was hardly less approving of free-market capitalism.

31 “It is rather” TR, Letters, 7.741.

32 “I shall be glad” TR, Works, 6.4; TR, Letters, 7.741.

33 The pious doctrines The New York Times, 23 Apr. 1913. The Hobson-Sheppard Resolution of 1913, calling for a prohibition amendment to the Constitution, was the seed of the Eighteenth Amendment of 1919. It passed the House in 1914, but failed to achieve a two-thirds vote in the Senate. For Bryan’s role as a prohibitionist, see Mark Edward Lerner, Dictionary of American Temperance Biography (Westport, Conn. 1984), 69–70, 442.

34 “Thou Shalt Not” TR, Letters, 7.739.

35 He was sufficiently alarmed EKR to ERD, 11 May 1913 (ERDP); TR, Letters, 7.729. “For the first time,” Edith wrote TR’s sister Bamie, “He begins to wish his hand was on the helm.” (12 May 1913 [TRC].) TR’s attitude to the California-Japan crisis of 1913 is spelled out in TR, Letters, 7.720–22 and 727–31. The Wilson administration was itself sufficiently concerned about the Pacific threat to devote a cabinet debate to it on 16 May. Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 301.

36 Like David Livingstone The Victorian era’s saintly missionary converted only one African, who subsequently reverted to paganism. Tim Jeal, Livingstone (New York, 1973), 80–81.

37 “go up the Paraguay” TR, Works, 6.3; TR, Letters, 7.741.

38 his essay on faith See above, 154–57.

39 There was a certain TR, Letters, 7.741; See also John Augustine Zahm, Through South America’s Southland: With an Account of the Roosevelt Scientific Expedition to South America (New York, 1916), 4–9; TR, Works, 6.4.

40 Chapman suggested Frank Chapman to Henry Fairfield Osborn, 24 June 1913 (AMNH); National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 37.387–98, 40.320.

41 Roosevelt reviewed TR to Frank Chapman, 30 July 1913 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.ix–x, 5–6. Cherrie had given help to opponents of the Venezuelan dictator Cipriano Castro, immortalized by TR as “that unspeakably villainous little monkey.”

42 he was recruited TR, Works, 6.5. Miller was twenty-six. TR offered to pay the traveling expenses of both naturalists, on condition that they would publish nothing competitive with his own memoir of the expedition. The museum agreed to provide scientific equipment and take care of the transportation of specimens. TR to Henry Fairfield Osborn, 20 July 1913 (AMNH).

43 Anthony Fiala, a Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 11; Candice Millard, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey (New York, 2005), 33–34; TR to Lauro Müller, 14 Oct. 1913 (TRP); Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 296–97; TR to KR, 30 June 1913, ts. (TRC).

44 graduated at last TR had attended ABR’s commencement in Andover on 13 June 1913.

45 Two days later The chronology of TR’s movements from 12 July–22 Aug. 1913 in TR, Letters, 8.1481 is inaccurate. The correct sequence of night stops is July 12–14: El Tovar; 15: Phantom Ranch; 16–31: Kaibab Plateau; Aug. 1: House Rock Valley; 2–3: Lees Ferry; 4: Painted Desert; 5–6: Tuba; 7: camp; 8: Marsh Pass; 9: Kayenta; 10: Bubbling Spring Valley; 11: Navajo Mountain; 12: Rainbow Bridge, Utah; 13–14: camp; 15–16: Kayenta; 17–18: camp; 19–20: Walpi; 21: Ganado; 22: Gallup, N.M.

46 Moonlit and mysterious The following account of TR’s vacation in Arizona is based on his articles “A Cougar Hunt on the Rim of the Grand Canyon,” “Across the Navajo Desert,” and “The Hopi Snake Dance,” The Outlook, 4, 11, and 18 Oct. 1913. They are cited as reprinted in TR, Works, 4. Supplementary details and chronology from Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 110ff.

47 Leave it as See Morris, Theodore Rex, 225–26.

48 “He still has” Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 117.

49 Roosevelt indulged in TR, Works, 4.22. A lookout southeast of Vista Encantada was dedicated by the National Park Service in 1990 as “Roosevelt Point.”

50 The soil was so arid It is a conjecture that the future author of “The Waste Land” may have read TR’s article “Across the Navajo Desert” in The Outlook that fall, before moving to England in the spring of 1914.

51 Roosevelt was reminded TR, Works, 4.26, quoting Joaquin Miller, Song of the Sierras (Boston, 1871), xii.

52 Kayenta was TR, Works, 4.31, 36. See Elizabeth Compton Hegemann, Navaho Trading Days (Albuquerque, 1963), 224ff., for a photographic memoir of the Wetherills and the entire region TR traversed in 1913.

53 On 10 August Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 120; TR, Works, 4.37.

54 He noted the next TR, Works, 4.38.

55 proposals to cut up and sell Dana and Mary R. Coolidge, The Navajo Indians (Boston, 1930), 268.

56 Although he held no brief TR, Works, 4.28.

57 Roosevelt’s attitude Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, 355; Morris, The Rise of TR, 304–5, 466–67. The most comprehensive survey of TR’s prepresidential Indian policies is that of Dyer, TR and the Idea of Race, 70–83.

58 As President See Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kan., 1991), 207–9. But see also McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 205–9.

59 He had protected Natalie Curtis, The Indians’ Book (New York, 1907), 476. Natalie Curtis, later Burlin (1875–1921), was related to the great Western photographer Edward S. Curtis, a family friend of the Roosevelts. This connection helped smooth her introduction to TR in 1903. See Natalie Curtis, “Mr. Roosevelt and Indian Music: A Personal Reminiscence,” The Outlook, 5 Mar. 1919, and TR, Letters, 3.523. Her pioneering musicology, using cylinder recordings, was taken seriously in Europe, where composers such as Béla Bartók were conducting similar researches. Ferruccio Busoni’s Red Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra (1915) was based on themes from The Indians’ Book. A biographical website devoted to Miss Curtis is available athttp://www.nataliecurtis.org/.

60 “These songs cast” Reproduced in facsimile in Curtis, The Indians’ Book.

61 He talked to her TR, Works, 4.41.

62 Dawn, beautiful dawn Ibid., 4.44.

63 Roosevelt decided Ibid., 4.42. TR also wrote that Kayenta “would be an excellent place for a summer school of archeology and ethnology.” Ibid., 38–39.

64 At mid-morning TR, Works, 4.47; Natalie Curtis, “Theodore Roosevelt in Hopi-Land,” The Outlook, 17 Sept. 1919. The following anecdote, with quotations, is taken entirely from this source.

65 It was Natalie Curtis Miss Curtis’s embarrassment was compounded when she found that the good-looking young “cowboy” who had helped her milk the gasoline from a parked car was none other than Archie. Curtis, “Theodore Roosevelt in Hopi-Land.”

66 Roosevelt then gave himself Except where otherwise indicated, the following account of TR’s stay in Walpi is based on his essay “The Hopi Snake-Dance,” in TR, Works, 4.48–72.

67 On Wednesday morning Curtis, “Theodore Roosevelt in Hopi-Land.”

68 Roosevelt listened and memorized In her memoir of TR’s visit, Miss Curtis remarked on the “impersonality” with which he absorbed what she had to tell him. This, plus the “electric snap” of his comprehension and the accuracy of his memory, gave him “an astonishing command of data in subjects that no one would imagine he could know … without years of study.”

69 At dawn the following day Curtis, “Theodore Roosevelt in Hopi-Land”; TR, Works, 4.63–64.

70 privately wishing TR, Works, 4.64.

71 When each priest Ibid., 4.65–68.

72 At five o’clock “Hopi Indians Dance for TR [at Walpi, Ariz.] 1913,” a film available online from the Library of Congress at http://memory.loc.gov/, shows TR watching this event with a woman who may be Natalie Curtis.

73 “If I don’t write” Curtis, “Theodore Roosevelt in Hopi-Land.”

74 “I can never afford” Ibid. Miss Curtis, writing in 1919, misremembered her own and TR’s schedule, but she was specific in describing the editorial session she had with him before he left Walpi. Even for a writer of his promptitude, completing such a lengthy manuscript so soon was a remarkable feat. He may have already written the parts of it that covered the events of 19 and 20 Aug.

75 The Colonel returned TR arrived back in New York on 26 Aug. 1913. His three Arizona articles were published in The Outlook on 4, 11, and 18 Oct. 1913.

76 He was overjoyed EKR was slightly piqued not to have been consulted about TR’s proposed expedition until it was a fait accompli. She wrote KR from Europe to complain, “In his letters to me he preserves a sphinx like silence and except for the fact that he sails on October 4th I know nothing of his plans.” 15 July 1913 (KRP).

77 One of her favorite quotations Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 397. EKR was probably thinking of the passage in Boccaccio’s version of the story, “Therefore let us flee hence in secret and go there together, thou and I; and what span of life we have left in the world, heart of my body, let us spend it together in delight.” R. K. Gordon, ed., The Story of Troilus (London, 1934), 88.

78 “I am having” TR to QR, 29 Sept. 1913 (TRC).

79 On 27 September The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1913. TR also forced the nomination of Samuel Seabury, a Democrat, as associate justice running on the Progressive ticket.

80 Finally he allowed The New York Times, 4 Oct. 1913. The official text of TR’s speech, entitled “The United States and the South American Republics,” is in TR, Works, 18.391–405. TR was embarrassed when some paragraphs he decided not to read, being overly critical of Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy, were accidentally released to newspapers.

81 he sold The Outlook EKR to ERD, 4 July 1913 (ERDP). TR’s income from writing and speaking in 1913, based on his wife’s figures and royalty statements in SCR, was approximately $46,000, or $764,000 in contemporary (2010) dollars. This total does not include whatever he may have earned from his inheritance and investments. His and EKR’s frequent protestations of poverty in later life were those of old-money aristocrats, as reflexive as middle-class complaints about the weather. Before returning home from South America, EKR informed ERD that in order to get through the winter alone at Sagamore Hill, she would require the in-house services of a cook, a kitchen maid, a waitress, a chambermaid, and a parlormaid (20 Oct. 1913 [ERDP]).

82 Quentin and Archie Having qualified for Harvard, ABR congratulated himself on at last being able to associate with men “of my own class.” Apparently Andover had not come up to his social standards. ABR note, n.d., enclosed in EKR to KR, 9 Mar. 1913 (KRP).

83 Alice was more EKR to KR, 24, 27 May 1913 (KRP); EKR to ERD, 15 July 1913 (ERDP). According to ARL in later life, TR and EKR showed more concern for the social consequences of a loud public divorce than for her or Nick’s personal distress. “Although they didn’t quite lock me up, they exercised considerable pressure … told me to think it over very carefully indeed.… Not done, they said. Emphatically.” Teague, Mrs. L, 158. See also Cordery, Alice, 238.

84 “Naturally,” he wrote TR, An Autobiography, 243 (foreword, dated 1 Oct. 1913).

INTERLUDE: GERMANY, OCTOBER—DECEMBER, 1913

1 Inevitably, they dwarfed Illustration in The Outlook, 18 Oct. 1913. There is a full account of the dedication in The Times, 20 Oct. 1913.

2 The Battle of Leipzig Also known in various languages as the Battle of Nations, because of the multiplicity of armies that took part. Germans usually refer to the monument as der Volkerschlachtdenkmal.

3 in tomorrow’s European papers See, e.g., page 8 of The Times, 20 Oct. 1913.

4 His particular phobia Bismarck’s constant, typically Prussian refrain had been, “The Reich is in danger.” (Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 66.) For a discussion of the anthropological significance of the Battle of Nations monument, see Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, Calif., 2000) 43–47.

5 “Ich gehe mi Euch” Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (Boston, 2000), 133. In an alternate translation of this remark, the Kaiser sounds more peremptory: “you would be at Belgrade” becomes “you must be in Belgrade.” (H. W. Koch, ed.,The Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalry and German War Aims [London, 1972], 136.) Conrad himself was the source of the quotation.

6 Franz Ferdinand jealously Sondhaus, Conrad, 133.

7 French comments had The New York Times, 19 Nov. 1913; Koshar, From Monuments to Traces, 47.

8 An eruptive bigness Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 69; Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 344; Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 345. Tuchman misdates the premiere of Strauss’s Festliches Präludium, Op. 61, which marked the opening of the Vienna Konzerthaus on 19 Oct. 1913.

9 “It is only by” Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 344.

10 In last year’s Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 73.

11 Chancellor ever more Franz von Papen, Memoirs, trans. Brian Connell (London, 1952), 13.

12 “fureur d’hégémonie” Georges Clemenceau, Discours de guerre (1934, 1968), 12.

13 Early in November Except where otherwise indicated, the following account of the Zabern affair is based on David Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913: Consensus Politics in Imperial Germany (London, 1982), and on Sebastian Compagnon, “Novembre 1913: Saverne la tranquille se rebelle,” online study published by the University of Strasbourg at http://mcsinfo.u-strasbg.fr/.

14 “Should you kill” Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913, 98. The author has retranslated the words in Schoenbaum’s source, Arnold Heydt, Der Fall Zabern (Strasbourg, 1934), 7–8.

15 “And me, I’ll” Zaberner Anzeiger, 6 Nov. 1913, quoted in Compagnon, “Novembre 1913.” The local report inflated the shooting-range scuffle into an actual sword attack on an Alsatian.

16 “For every one” Ibid.

17 “Tête de macchabée!” Ibid.

18 “As far as I” Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913, 103.

19 shouts of “Bettscheisser” Ibid., 111–12.

20 The Chancellor, sounding Transcript of Bethmann-Hollweg’s remarks at World War I Document archive (http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/); James W. Gerard (eyewitness), My Four Years in Germany (New York, 1917), 67. Gerard, the American ambassador to Germany, gives a personal account of the Zabern affair and its effect on the German people in ibid., 59ff.

21 During the debate Schoenbaum, Zabern 1913, 125.

22 rage and shame The British peer Lord Milner was in Germany at the time of the Zabern crisis and reported that “the people were so incensed that a revolt against the brutality of the system was with difficulty controlled.” (Robert T. Loreburn, How the War Came [New York, 1920], 283.) Meanwhile, Alsatians began to refer to themselves bitterly as Muss-Pruessen, compulsory Prussians. Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 344.

23 One day, at Clemenceau, Discours de guerre, 18 (trans. author).

Historical Note: On 5 Jan. 1914, Reuter and Forstner appeared before a military tribunal in Strasbourg on charges of overriding the civil authority in Zabern. They were acquitted after defense lawyers argued that they had been doing their duty in a situation threatening riot. The Crown Prince personally congratulated Reuter and decorated him. Nevertheless, the German and Reichsland parliaments pressed the issue of abuse of military power so forcefully that on 19 Mar., Wilhelm II issued a new regulation that compelled the army to seek civil clearance for acts of social discipline.

In 1916, the “hurricane” that Clemenceau had so long predicted mowed down Günter von Forstner. The lieutenant’s offenses remained largely forgotten until 1931, when Sergeant Willy Höflich published a memoir, Affaire Zabern. In retrospect, the incident can be seen as having been doubly divisive, driving a wedge not only between German democratic opinion and royal authority, but between the citizens of Alsace-Lorraine and their temporary overlords (“perhaps the final factor which decided the advocates of the old military system of Germany in favor of a European war”). Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 91.

CHAPTER 15: EXFEDIÇÀO CIENTÍFICA ROOSEVELT-RONDON

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 67.

2 On the first day TR, Works, 6.110.

Chronological Note: Upon arrival at Barbados on 10 Oct. 1913, TR and his expedition colleagues were joined by Leo Miller. They steamed on south without visiting Panama, where President Wilson had just triggered, via electric signal, the fall of the last canal dike separating the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. If TR was wistful at not seeing this consummation of what he considered the greatest initiative of his presidency, he gave no sign. Earlier in the year, he had joked about keeping clear of Colombia, to avoid being jailed there for enabling the Panama Revolution of 1903. (James T. Addison to Hermann Hagedorn, 26 Apr. 1921 [AC].) He was happy now simply to be away from all things political. “I think he feels like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress when the bundle fell from his back,” EKR wrote on 15 Oct. 1913 to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, “—in this case it was not made of sins but of the Progressive Party.” She watched her husband laughing at deck sports, “as I have not heard him laugh for years” (TRC). KR was at dockside when the Roosevelts arrived in Bahia, Brazil, on 18 Oct. Three days later in Rio de Janeiro, TR began his official tour of the “ABC nations,” Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. In all three countries, and also in transit through Uruguay, he received elaborate welcomes and hospitality from the governing, intellectual, and social elite. There were numerous formal sightseeing excursions, and he sent regular travel articles home to The Outlook. Three compilations of these are printed in TR, Works, 4.73–110.

His formal lectures at the universities of Rio and São Paulo (24, 27 Oct.), the Museo Sociale Argentino in Buenos Aires (7, 10, 12 Nov.), and the university in Santiago (22 Nov.) amounted to repetitions of the political and moral points he had been making for the past several years. They were reprinted in The Outlook.

After TR’s momentous change of plan in Rio for his Amazon expedition, described in this chapter, and his visit to that city’s Theatro Municipal on 22 Oct. to see the Ballets Russes in Swan Lake, his travels were without important incident. He left Cherrie and the rest of his scientific team behind to prepare for the expedition, and continued south with EKR and KR to São Paulo on 26 Oct. The family party proceeded via Montevideo (4 Nov.) to Buenos Aires (5–14 Nov.), before crossing the Andes by rail, via Tucumán and Mendoza to Santiago (21–25 Nov.). EKR sailed home from Valparaiso on 26 Nov. TR and KR recrossed the Andes from Puerto Varas via Lakes Esmeralda and Fria into the plains of northern Patagonia on 29–30 Nov., riding some of the way on horseback and also traveling by steamboat, ox railway, and automobile. On the shore of Nahuel Huapi, one of the world’s remotest bodies of water, TR was accosted by an English peer who said, “You won’t remember me; when I last saw you, you were romping with little Prince [Olaf of Norway] in Buckingham Palace.” (TR, Works, 4.100.)

He returned to Buenos Aires on 4 Dec., and left next day for Asunción, Paraguay, whence, on 9 Dec., he sailed up the River Paraguay, heading back into Brazil. For TR’s serialized account of these travels, see The Outlook, 24 Jan.–6 June 1914.

3 For a week Unless otherwise indicated, the narrative, scenic, and atmospheric details in this and the following chapter come from TR’s and Father Zahm’s respective travel books, Through the Brazilian Wilderness (TR, Works, 6) and Through South America’s Southland. The chronology is based on two expedition diaries: those of George K. Cherrie, 1913–1914 (AMNH), and Kermit Roosevelt, 1914 (KRP). Other firsthand accounts (cited when used) are those of Cândido M. Rondon, Lectures Delivered by Colonel Cândido Mariana da Silva Rondon … On the 5th, 7th and 9th of October 1915 at the Phenix Theatre of Rio de Janeiro, on the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, trans. R. G. Reidy and Ed. Murray (Rio de Janeiro, 1916; New York, 1969); Esther de Vivieros, Rondon conta sua vida (Rio de Janeiro, 1958), an “as told to” biography largely dictated by Rondon; Leo E. Miller, In the Wilds of South America (New York, 1918), chaps. 13–16; George K. Cherrie, Dark Trails: Adventures of a Naturalist (New York, 1930), Part Six; and Kermit Roosevelt, Happy Hunting Grounds, chap. 1. The fullest account of the expedition, apart from TR’s, is Millard, The River of Doubt.

4 Roosevelt stoked himself TR, Works, 6.110; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 416; TR to ERD, 8 Oct. 1913 (ERDP). Nicholas Roosevelt had noticed in Arizona that “his waist was larger than his chest.” TR, 13.

5 He had come north TR’s social and hunting activities between 12 and 31 Dec. 1913 are fully described in TR, Works, 6.47–110. See also Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 419–41; Miller, In the Wilds, 214–29; and Rondon, Lectures, 16–30.

6 He had already Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 438. For a detailed account of this hunt, see TR, Works, 6.63–92.

7 He had not found TR, Works, 6.77. Cruising up the Paraguay, TR became agitated when he heard some sailors shooting at birds from the bow of the Riquelme. “By George, this thing must stop.” And so it did, on his order. Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 424.

8 a tiny man Rondon was five foot three. Millard, The River of Doubt, 73.

9 Roosevelt had met up Rondon, Lectures, 15ff.; TR, Works, 6.50. In 1927, José Alves de Lima, a minor diplomat and memorialist, claimed to have “selected” Rondon as TR’s guide long before Müller did. (Alves de Lima, “Reminiscences of Roosevelt in Brazil.”) The boast is implausible. However, TR was certainly aware of Rondon’s existence, and value as a consultant, before arriving in Rio. TR to Lauro Müller, 14 Oct. 1914 (TRC).

10 It had been he TR, Works, 6.xiii–xvi, 10; Rondon, Lectures, 10–12. Several alternative expeditions, all plotted by Rondon, were offered to TR, in case he declined to explore the Dúvida.

11 Cândido Rondon was TR, Works, 6.xiv, 73.

12 a mysterious river Ibid., 6.xiv. Rondon discovered the Dúvida in 1909.

13 Roosevelt would advertise Ibid., 6.10.

14 Müller could not have Even before meeting Müller, TR praised him, on the basis of information supplied by Elihu Root, as “one of the men to whom this entire western hemisphere must look up.” Alves de Lima, “Reminiscences of Roosevelt in Brazil.”

15 Müller dreamed of building Armelle Enders, “Theodore Roosevelt explorateur: Positivisme et mythe de la frontière dans l’expediçào cíentífica Roosevelt-Rondon au Mato Grosso et en Amazonie,” Nuevo Mundo Mundo Nuevos (http://nuevomundo.revues.org/), 2 Feb. 2005, 3–5. Müller’s dream of an inland capital was realized in 1960 with the building of Brasília. For TR’s two major South American addresses on the Monroe Doctrine, see The Outlook, 14, 21 Mar. 1914.

16 “I want to be the first” Rondon interviewed by Douglas O. Naylor in The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929.

17 “I have already” Osborn, “Theodore Roosevelt, Naturalist,” Natural History, 19.1 (Jan. 1919). See also Osborn to TR, 26 Dec. 1913 (“I shall hear with the greatest relief of your arrival in Manaos”), AMNH.

18 his six colleagues TR may be seen posing with his colleagues en route to Rio in a contemporary documentary, Theodore Roosevelt—The River of Doubt, available online at http://www.loc.gov/. The movie, titled with extracts from Through the Brazilian Wilderness, includes footage of many of the episodes described in this and the following chapter.

19 Cherrie and Miller, in TR, Letters, 7.754. Their official employer, Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum, was considerably less enthusiastic. Millard, The River of Doubt, 60.

20 Roosevelt had told TR, Works, 6.xiv–xv.

21 Kermit, of course TR, Letters, 7.756; KR to Belle Willard, n.d. (KRP); Millard, The River of Doubt, 276–77. EKR, worried about her husband’s safety in the jungle, had been instrumental in persuading TR to take KR with him. KR to ERD, Nov. 1913 (ERDP).

22 At daybreak The following account of TR’s New Year hunt is based on TR, Works, 6.110–14.

23 Rondon was used For an excellent short biography of Rondon in English, see Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, N.C., 2004).

24 He was about TR, Works, 6.50–51.

25 not entirely believable Miller, In the Wilds, 196–97.

26 Roosevelt tried to Cherrie, Dark Trails, 282; TR, Works, 6.112.

27 He relaxed Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 450.

28 The great river Rondon, Lectures, 33–34; TR, Works, 6.70.

29 Now that he saw TR, Works, 6 passim.

30 One evening this Rondon, Lectures, 33–44; Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 449–50. Rondon and Zahm both mention TR’s rapturous reaction to this sunset, and agree that he observed it from the deck of the Nioac, a day or two after his São Lourenço hunt. Yet he, puzzlingly, dates it back to 14 Dec. 1913, when he was still aboard the Riquelme. (TR, Works, 6.58–59.) Possibly there were two such “evenings of extraordinary splendor and beauty.”

31 As far as Kermit KR to EKR, 12 Jan., 8 Feb. 1914; Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, passim; John Cavanaugh, “Father Zahm,” Catholic World, Feb. 1922. Zahm’s gushy prose style is unreadable now, but his breadth of scholarship continues to impress. He is venerated at his alma mater for enriching its theological curriculum with scientific studies (symbolically, he made Notre Dame the nation’s first electrically lit college campus), and for endowing it with his personal Dante collection, one of the top such archives in the United States.

32 Kermit did not know Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 428; TR estate tabulation file, 7 Mar. 1920 (SCR).

33 Father Zahm was sorry KR diary, 6–7 Jan. 1914 (KRP); Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 460; TR, Works, 6.xv; Millard, The River of Doubt, 34.

34 Roosevelt spent his last This paragraph paraphrases TR’s own account in Works, 6.123–24.

35 A gasoline launch George Cherrie diary, 6–7 Jan. 1914.

36 The two commanders TR, Works, 6.128; Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 43. The military-propaganda aspects of the expedition are noted by Armelle Enders in “Theodore Roosevelt explorateur,” 1.

37 Rondon’s “commission” See Dominichi M. de Sá, Magali Romero Sá, and Nísia Trindade Lima, “Telegraphs and an Inventory of the Territory of Brazil: The Scientific Work of the Rondon Commission (1907–1915),” História, Ciêncas, Saúde-Manguinhos, 15.3 (July–Sept. 2008), http://www.scielo.br/. Commission members not named were Dr. Euzébio de Oliveira (geologist), Henrique Reinisch (zoologist), Dr. Fernando Soledade (entomologist), Arnaldo Blake de Sant’anna (taxidermist), Frederico Hoehne (a botanist of international repute), Lieutenants Alcides Lauriodó and Joaquin Mello Finho (general duty), and Thomaz Reis (cinematographer).

38 Roosevelt’s team For Fiala’s disastrous record as an Arctic explorer, see Millard, The River of Doubt, 31–32. KR, a natural linguist, had found himself thinking in Portuguese for at least six months. KR to ERD, 2 June 1913 (ERDP).

39 his Swiss servant For more on the mysterious Sigg, see Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 463, 498–500, and Millard, The River of Doubt, 46–47.

40 an opportunity to hunt KR diary, 8–10 Jan. 1914 (KRP); TR, Works, 6.129, 132–45; Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 462.

41 After dinner TR, Works, 6.136.

42 At first sight Ibid., 6.155ff.; Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 474; Miller, In the Wilds, 225.

43 It did not look TR, Works, 6.156; Cherrie diary, 18 Jan. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.151.

44 Roosevelt had begun TR, Letters, 8.905; TR, Works, 6.160. TR’s tent came complete with a floor rug.

45 Rondon and Lyra Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 36; Millard, The River of Doubt, 34.

46 This was too much Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 43; Cherrie, Dark Trails, 247; TR, Works, 6.224. The resignations of Hoehne, Soledade, Blake de Sant’anna, and Reis became formal on 23 Jan. 1914. Reinisch stayed with the expedition. De Sá et al., “Telegraphs.”

47 On 19 January TR, Works, 6.160. TR mentions only one Canadian canoe here. There were in fact two, as he confirms on page 300.

48 Sixty-four other TR, Works, 6.160, 163; Vivieros, Rondon, 388; Rondon, Lectures, 37.

49 If the Dúvida Miller, In the Wilds, 240.

50 We were now TR, Works, 6.161.

51 He left Robert Bridges to cut Bridges did not do so.

52 Next morning TR, Works, 6.168.

53 The command detachment Rondon, Lectures, 38; Miller, In the Wilds, 226; KR diary, 29 Jan. 1914 (KRP).

54 A daily camp rhythm Miller, In the Wilds, 230; Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 378; TR, Works, 6.169–70; Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929.

55 “one felt” Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 479.

56 By now Kermit KR to EKR, 12 Jan., 8 Feb. 1914 (KRP); Miller, In the Wilds, 225. It is possible that Lizzie was the “giant land turtle” mentioned in TR, Works, 6.

57 Zahm was alarmed Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 479–80; Vivieros, Rondon, 389.

58 Relief for him Miller, In the Wilds, 227; TR, Works, 6.173–74. Despite Zahm’s eagerness to travel ahead in a caminhão, he objected bitterly to having to sit next to its black driver. Vivieros, Rondon, 389.

59 Kermit was not KR diary, 26 Jan. 1914 (KRP); TR, Works, 6.49; Vivieros, Rondon, 389–90. Zahm’s attitude toward South American Indians may be intimated from his description of the Guarani as “noble redmen” who had been “gathered by the Jesuits into the most interesting theocratic community of which there is any record.” He praised “the childlike docility with which they submitted to the guidance of their father-priests.” Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 393, 397.

60 he had himself founded Enders, “Theodore Roosevelt explorateur,” 6–8, analyzes Rondon’s complex philosophy as the patron and protector of Brazilian Indians. For an exhaustive discussion of his education in the teachings of Comte, see Fernando Correia da Silva, “Cândido Rondon: Explorer, Geographer, Peacemaker, 1865–1958,” http://www.vidaslusofonas.pt/. Positivism is still a strong religious force in Brazil.

61 When Roosevelt first TR, Works, 6.183–84.

62 The great cascade Zahm, Through South America’s Southland, 496; TR, Works, 6.181–88; Vivieros, Rondon, 393.

63 compared to Niagara Morris, The Rise of TR, xxiv.

64 Father Zahm had Vivieros, Rondon, 394.

65 The Serviço de Proteção’s Ibid.

66 When the two colonels Ibid., 394–95 (trans. author). See also Rondon, Lectures, 46–49.

67 Every American member Memo, 1 Feb. 1914, preserved in KRP. “Dr. Zahm had gotten much on TR’s ‘nerves.’ ” (Cherrie diary, 3 Feb. 1914 [AMNH].) KR rejoiced in Zahm’s dismissal, on the grounds that he was “thoroly [sic] incompetent and selfish.” (KR diary, 30 Jan. 1914 [KRP].)

68 “Cat very sad” KR diary, 1, 2 Feb. 1914 (KRP); KR to Belle Willard, 31 Jan. 1914 (KRP). KR’s proposal and Belle’s acceptance letters are quoted in Millard, The River of Doubt, 51–52 and 67–68.

69 He took what consolation In his diary, KR uses the Portuguese word moribundia (dying) to describe his spells of depression.

70 The rain thinned TR, Works, 6.192, 94; Rondon, Lectures, 77; Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929.

71 Meanwhile the Papagaio The language of this sentence is mostly TR’s in Works, 6.188–89.

72 Father Zahm salvaged Rondon, Lectures, 49–50; TR, Works, 6.195.

73 There followed KR diary, 3–6 Feb. 1914 (KRP); TR, Works, 6.198; Frank Chapman in TR, Works, 6.xviii.

74 Kermit, Cherrie, and Miller Cherrie diary, 6 Feb. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.195; Miller, In the Wilds, 231–32. The Canadian canoes were left behind because they became heavy in the rain. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 41.

75 The carts were TR, Works, 200–201; KR to EKR, 8 Feb. 1914 (KRP).

76 Groups of Nhambiquaras Cherrie diary, 23 Feb. 1914 (AMNH); Miller, In the Wilds, 232; TR, Works, 6.209.

77 Hard rain This paragraph summarizes KR diary, 3–23 Feb. 1914 (KRP); Miller, In the Wilds, 234–37; TR, Works, 6.196–228; Vivieros, Rondon, 393–99.

78 Fiala nearly drowned Cherrie diary, 8 Feb. 1914 (AMNH). See also Millard, The River of Doubt, 114–15.

79 Books were classified TR, Works, 6.231; Vivieros, Rondon, 400.

80 The three Brazilian Miller, In the Wilds, 231; TR, Works, 6.231.

81 sketched out a title page Bishop, TR, 2.363.

82 their Gi-Paraná colleagues Amílcar, Miller, Oliveira, and Mello.

83 Seven shovel-nosed TR, Works, 6.231–33; KR diary, 25 Feb. 1914 (KRP).

84 The inscrutable river Cherrie diary, 26 Feb. 1914 (AMNH); Miller, In the Wilds, 23. See Millard, The River of Doubt, 172 on the coloration of Amazonian tributaries—the milky, the black, and the clear.

85 Goodbyes were exchanged Cherrie diary, 27 Feb. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.233–34. Aside from the 6 principals, the expedition force consisted of 2 solders, 8 “regional volunteers,” and 6 laborers. All were highly paid for their dangerous work.

86 Then with a parting Miller, In the Wilds, 241–42.

CHAPTER 16: ALPH, THE SACRED RIVER

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 16.

2 “We were quite” TR, Works, 6.233.

3 He noted the date Ibid.

4 There were so Miller, In the Wilds, 206.

5 Roosevelt found himself Vivieros, Rondon, 407 (“corrente escura, volumosa, porque era plena estação das águas”).

6 “Kermit landed” TR, Works, 6.234–35.

7 The jungle was lovely Descriptive passages in this chapter adhere closely to those of TR in Through the Brazilian Wilderness. (TR, Works, 6.233ff.) Details supplied by Rondon, Cherrie, and Kermit Roosevelt are attributed when important.

8 Roosevelt had the TR, Works, 6.236; KR diary, 27 Feb. 1914 (KRP); Vivieros, Rondon, 408.

9 He studied TR, Works, 6.237.

10 a big affluent KR diary, 28 Feb. 1914 (KRP); TR, Works, 6.237.

11 “very good eating” TR, Works, 6.239.

12 After twenty kilometers Rondon, Lectures, 72–73.

13 Curls, falls, ponds TR, Works, 6.241. Rondon named these rapids Navaitê, after a tribe of Indians thought to be living in the area.

14 There was nothing Rondon, Lectures, 74; TR, Works, 6.242–43; KR diary, 3 Mar. 1914 (KRP).

15 The next one TR, Works, 6.243–44. The camaradas were classified as “regional volunteers” by the Brazilian Telegraphic Commission, and highly paid for their trouble.

16 On the morning Cherrie diary, 11 Mar. 1914 (AMNH); Rondon, Lectures, 79.

17 There were spells Rondon, Lectures, 77; TR, Works, 6 passim.

18 When he floated Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929. Rondon added: “He was what we Brazilians call a pandego (man of constant good humor).”

19 “I never saw” Ibid.

20 descent into the TR, Works, 6.245; Rondon, Lectures, 79. Rondon listed 114 survey stations along the Dúvida.

21 By midday The following account synthesizes the sometimes conflicting testimonies of TR in his Works, 6.257–59, and Rondon in his Lectures, 80–83, supplemented by Vivieros, Rondon, 409–10.

22 Rondon ordered Rondon, Lectures, 80.

23 Kermit and Simplício clambered TR’s account, based on what KR told him, makes no mention of Simplício’s presence on the upturned boat.

24 All of this Cherrie, Dark Trails, 289.

25 “Well, you have” Rondon, Lectures, 81.

26 He no longer made Ibid.

27 It was clear Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 43, notes that Rondon suppressed his rage against KR in later published accounts of the expedition, no doubt to avoid distressing TR.

28 AQUI PERECEU Rondon, Lectures, 83; Vivieros, Rondon, 410.

29 To him, it said Rondon, Lectures, 83; Vivieros, Rondon, 410; TR, Works, 6.259.

30 The portage began Rondon, Lectures, 86; TR, Works, 6.260–61.

31 Rondon examined Candice Millard has revealed that the Indians living alongside the Dúvida in 1914 were the cannibalistic Cinta Larga. Millard, The River of Doubt, 223–31.

32 Later that TR, Works, 6.260.

33 Every dispensable possession Ibid., 6.262–63.

34 “Our position” Ibid., 6.264; Rondon, Lectures, 87–88; Cherrie diary, 16 Mar. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.264.

35 Rondon decided Millard, The River of Doubt, 154–62 and passim; Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929.

36 On behalf Cherrie diary, 18 Mar. 1914 (AMNH); Rondon, Lectures, 87–89; TR, Works, 6.267. According to Armelle Enders, it was actually Lauro Müller’s idea to honor TR in this way. Enders, “Theodore Roosevelt explorateur,” 9.

37 Roosevelt was taken TR, Works, 6.268.

38 There was little Cherrie diary, 19 Mar. 1914 (AMNH); Cherrie, Dark Trails, 297.

39 One morning Rondon, Lectures, 92. Millard, The River of Doubt, 245 misdates this conversation.

40 “First of all” The following dialogue is quoted in Vivieros, Rondon, 411 (trans. author). See also Rondon, Lectures, 91–92, and Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 44–45.

41 Clearing skies Cherrie, Dark Trails, 298; TR, Works, 6.278 and passim.

42 On 27 March Cherrie diary, 27 Mar. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.xx, 281–82, 296.

43 Twelve years before Morris, Theodore Rex, 141–49. In September 1908, TR told KR that his shin had never really healed. Kermit Roosevelt, The Long Trail, 37–38.

44 in the summer of 1910 See 610.

45 three black vultures Cherrie diary, 27 Mar. 1914 (AMNH); Cherrie, Dark Trails, 308.

46 There was a KR diary, 28 Mar. 1914 (KRP); Cherrie, Dark Trails, 308; TR, Works, 6.282–83.

47 The Americans overruled Rondon, Lectures, 99–100; KR diary, 28 Mar. 1914 (KRP).

48 Roosevelt kept TR, Works, 6.283. TR gave his spare pair of shoes to KR, whose own fell apart because of constant immersion in the river.

49 Cherrie accompanied Cherrie, Dark Trails, 305–6. According to Cherrie, TR “had been ill intermittently” since about the middle of Mar., when he began to suffer from fever and dysentery. KR’s diary makes no mention of these earlier ailments, but he too began to worry about the condition of TR’s heart. It was characteristic of TR himself to say nothing of his 27 Mar. bruise except that “the resulting inflammation was somewhat bothersome.” (TR, Works, 6.296.) He was equally reticent about his later sufferings.

50 Together at TR, Works, 6.284; Cherrie diary, 29 Mar. 1914 (AMNH). The phrase “arrow of light” is Cherrie’s.

51 When they descended Cherrie diary, 2 Apr. 1914 (AMNH); Cherrie, Dark Trails, 301.

52 As if in TR, Works, 6.283–86; KR diary, 30–31 Mar. 1914 (KRP).

53 By the time Rondon, Lectures, 101; TR, Works, 6.263.

54 The following day’s Rondon, Lectures, 104; TR, Works, 6.287–88.

55 “Worried a lot” KR diary, 2 Apr. 1914 (KRP).

Biographical Note: Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., in conversation with the author in 1988, speculated that TR “probably had—was born with—a bicuspid aortic valve like Cousin Kim’s [Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.], instead of the normal tricuspid. People with that problem often overcompensate for it in early life, but they get a telltale heart murmur—which is probably what TR’s doctor at Harvard heard when he warned him to lead a sedentary life. They also are susceptible to oral bacteria, which can lead to very high fevers and even endocarditis if the bloodstream is infected.” Both ABR, Jr., and KR, Jr., began to suffer from calcium buildup close to the aortic valve at approximately the same age as TR developed heart trouble on the Dúvida. ABR, Jr., interview, Apr. 1988 (AC).

56 The next morning Rondon, Lectures, 104; TR, Works, 6.290.

57 Rondon took some men The following incident is reported by TR in Works, 6.290–93, and Rondon in Lectures, 105–6, as well as Vivieros, Rondon, 416–17. Supplemental details come from Cherrie diary, 3 Apr. 1914 (AMNH).

58 He was a known For an earlier knife-wielding incident involving Julio, see Millard, The River of Doubt, 91–92.

59 “We must go after” Vivieros, Rondon, 416 (trans. author).

60 “Paixão is following” TR, Works, 6.293. TR spelled Paixão phonetically as “Paishon.”

61 The murdered man TR, Works, 6.295–96.

62 Late the following Cherrie’s memoir of the expedition has caused some confusion among later writers as to when this attack took place. He dates it just after Rondon’s 28 Mar. announcement that the canoes were going to have to be abandoned. However, Cherrie’s diary makes no reference to TR becoming ill before the heart problems that afflicted him on 2 Apr. Millard cites an official report by Dr. Cajazeira stating that TR’s fever struck him around 2:30 P.M. on 4 Apr. (The River of Doubt, 295–96). Rondon and KR confirm that the fever mounted that evening, and that TR lapsed overnight into delirium. (Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929; Rondon, Lectures, 108; KR diary, 4 Apr. 1914 [KRP].) See also TR, Works, 6.296.

63 He had to endure Cherrie diary, 3, 4 Apr. 1914 (AMNH); Rondon, Lectures, 108; TR, Works, 6.296. Cherrie gives TR’s temperature this night as “39.8° (Centigrade).”

64 He became delirious KR diary, 4 Apr. 1914 (KRP); Kermit Roosevelt, Happy Hunting Grounds, 47; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream” (1797).

65 The doctor laced him Millard, The River of Doubt, 295–96.

66 In terror Kermit Roosevelt, Happy Hunting Grounds, 47. The pathetic fallacy implicit in KR’s reference to the “rushing river” and overnight deluge may owe something to his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s fable “Silence.”

67 “The expedition cannot” Vivieros, Rondon, 418 (trans. author). See also Cherrie, Dark Trails, 253–54 and Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929. TR told Charles Washburn in Jan. 1915 that he would have shot himself if he felt completely unable to go on. Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 261.

68 the sunless gorge The adjective, borrowed from “Kubla Khan,” is TR’s.

69 “Bôa Esperança” Rondon, Lectures, 109.

70 Dr. Cajazeira noted Millard, The River of Doubt, 323; KR diary, 5 Apr. 1914 (KRP).

71 “Am in a” KR diary, 4 Apr. 1914 (KRP).

72 “Tenente!” Rondon, Lectures, 114. Reminiscing in old age to Esther Vivieros, Rondon gave Julio’s cry as “Senhor Coronel!” (“Mr. Colonel!”). His early recall is more likely to be accurate.

73 The sound of Rondon, Lectures, 114; Vivieros, Rondon, 417; see also TR, Works, 6.294–95.

74 After a record Rondon, Lectures, 110–11.

75 “The expedition is” Vivieros, Rondon, 417–18 (trans. author). See also Rondon, Lectures, 114–15. The earlier account is much more discreet.

76 “Shut up!” Vivieros, Rondon, 417. TR’s explosion is quoted in English.

77 “the duty of” Rondon, Lectures, 114. An ailing Kermit, in his diary entry for this day, states that Rondon and Lyra had been “in a blind rage to kill” Julio three days before. If so, Rondon may have imputed some of his own excitement to TR when relating the incident to Vivieros. But all sources agree that after discovering Julio’s dropped rifle, Rondon declined to pursue him.

78 “Let the law” Vivieros, Rondon, 418. See also TR, Works, 6.294–95.

79 Julio did not show Rondon, Lectures, 115.

80 It was pleasant TR, Works, 6.298–99; Vivieros, Rondon, 418. The phrase “gleam like tossing silver” is TR’s.

81 Roosevelt ate little Cherrie diary, 8 Apr. 1914 (AMNH); Cherrie, Dark Trails, 305–6.

82 Rondon doubted Rondon, Lectures, 110, 113; Millard, The River of Doubt, 322; Cherrie diary, 8, 10 Apr. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.307. “There were a good many days,” Cherrie remarked afterward, “…  when I looked at Colonel Roosevelt and said to myself, he won’t be with us tonight: and I would say the same thing in the evening, he can’t possibly live until morning.” Cherrie in TR, Works, 6.xix.

83 Maple buds TR, Works, 6.301–2, 307.

84 “How I longed” Ibid., 6.300.

85 On 14 April Rondon, Lectures, 118; TR, Works, 6.303.

86 he had a violent Rondon, Lectures, 117; Millard, The River of Doubt, 332–33; KR diary, 14, 15 Apr. 1914 (KRP).

87 an old black fisherman Rondon, Lectures, 119; Cherrie diary, 15 Apr. 1914 (AMNH).

88 “But is he truly” Rondon, Lectures, 119. (Retranslated from the Portugese original, 100.)

89 When Roosevelt Rondon, Lectures, 119.

90 Dr. Cajazeira was Millard, The River of Doubt, 322–23; KR diary, 16 Apr. 1914 (KRP); Kermit Roosevelt, Happy Hunting Grounds, 48; TR, Works, 6.306; Cherrie diary, 21 Apr. 1914 (AMNH).

91 It took another Cherrie diary, 26 Apr. 1914 (AMNH).

92 Early in the Rondon, Lectures, 67–68.

93 The lieutenant had Rondon, Lectures, 167; Cherrie diary, 26 Apr. 1914 (AMNH); TR, Works, 6.318–19. Pirineus was the officer who lost part of his tongue to a piranha, in the anecdote told by TR on 309.

94 It was agreed Despite Rondon’s efforts, the Rio Roosevelt quickly became known as the “Rio Téodoro,” which was easier for Brazilians to pronounce. TR himself preferred the more informal name, and allowed it to be engraved in the map of South America prepared for his book Through the Brazilian Wilderness. See the frontispiece to TR, Works, 6. The river’s official name remains Rio Roosevelt.

95 The dedicatee seemed less moved KR diary, 26 Apr. 1914 (KRP).

96 When the American Vivieros, Rondon, 421; Cherrie diary, 28 Apr. 1914 (AMNH). He added, “Col. Roosevelt does not improve nor gain strength as rapidly as we had hoped.”

97 Roosevelt’s estimate TR, Works, 6.320; TR to Anthony Fiala, 8 July 1915 (AMNH).

98 “some small achievement of worth” See 346.

99 At 2:30 P.M. Cherrie diary, 29, 21 Apr. 1914 (AMNH); KR diary, 28 Apr. 1914 (KRP). According to Rondon, TR was in such pain during this voyage that he spent most of it lying facedown—“not a position in which he could write his notes.” Vivieros,Rondon, 421.

100 Each man to his TR, Works, 6.308.

101 Roosevelt did not Vivieros, Rondon, 421–22; KR diary, 29 (actually, 30) Apr. 1914 (KRP).

102 “Father about” KR diary, 30 Apr. 1914 (KRP).

103 Arrangements were made Ibid., 1, 5 May 1914 (KRP); The New York Times, 6 May 1914.

104 Before leaving Cherrie diary, 1 May 1914 (AMNH); The New York Times, 19 May 1914.

105 Dear Arthur TR, Letters, 7.761.

106 two abscesses TR tended to belittle his ailments. KR speaks of “a veritable plague of deep abscesses,” and Rondon describes them as “numerous.” He was also suffering from malnutrition, and the lingering aftereffects of malaria.

107 We have put on the map TR, Letters, 7.761. See ibid., 7.759–60, for TR’s telegram from Manáos to Lauro Müller, tersely summarizing the trials and triumphs of the Expediçào Scíentifica Roosevelt-Rondon. KR did not accompany his father back to New York, but remained in Belém preparatory to departure for Madrid.

108 He was profoundly Rondon appears to have chartered, or commandeered, the Cidade de Manáos to get him to Belém ahead of TR. Cherrie diary, 2–3 May 1914 (AMNH).

109 “I hope and pray” Vivieros, Rondon, 422 (trans. author).

CHAPTER 17: A WRONG TURN OFF APPEL QUAY

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 231.

2 The first published Middletown (N.Y.) Times-Press, 20 May 1914; The New York Times, 20–21 May 1914. The Times printed side-by-side photographs to show how dramatically TR had aged since leaving the United States six months before.

3 He claimed that The New York Times and The Washington Post, 20 May 1914. George Cherrie reported TR’s fever attack.

4 The President had WW to TR, 23 May 1914 (WWP); TR to WW, 23 May 1914 (TRC).

5 At three o’clock The Washington Post, 27 May 1914.

6 Wilson had been Morris, Theodore Rex, 18.

7 Roosevelt had always “Woodrow Wilson is a perfect trump.” TR, Letters, 3.275.

8 “What is” D. H. Elletson, Roosevelt and Wilson: A Comparative Study (London, 1965), 61; Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 12.262.

9 When Wilson became Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 12.454; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 76–77; “Dr. Woodrow Wilson Defines Material Issues,” The New York Times, 24 Nov. 1907.

10 Roosevelt’s reciprocal TR, Letters, 8.836; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.137. “No American ever knew where he was during the many months I have been on this coast,” Sir Christopher Cradock, the local British naval commander, wrote Cecil Spring Rice from Vera Cruz on 30 May 1914. “They stand fools to the world” (CSR).

11 “morality and not expediency” WW at Mobile, Ala., on 27 Oct. 1913, quoted in The New York Times, 28 Oct. 1913. See also Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 140–41.

12 So he had lifted Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 242.

13 Wilson had gone before The New York Times, 21 Apr. 1914.

14 Chronic wrongdoing Fourth Annual Message (Dec. 1904), TR, Works, 17.295, 299.

15 In a development Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 8th ed. (New York, 1969), 558–59.

16 Roosevelt had thrilled According to Rondon, the ailing TR had been avid to get home in case of war, exclaiming, “Oh, Mexico! Oh, Mexico!” Rondon-Naylor interview, The New York Times, 6 Jan. 1929.

17 For a while Henry J. Forman oral history, “So Brief a Time” (1959–1960), conducted by Doyce B. Nunis, Young Research Library, UCLA, 228. In 1914, Forman was a reporter for the New York Sun, covering the White House. See also Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 243–45.

18 “I never went” Speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, 11 May 1914, The New York Times, 12 May 1914.

19 Booth Tarkington’s Penrod Tarkington had once been a student of WW’s at Princeton. Penrod was a bestseller in 1914, and gave rise to many sequels and cinema adaptations. TR was seen absorbed in it, one foot tucked under him, on his train journey south, while hovering Progressives competed for his attention. (The New York Times, 27 May 1914.) There is also an amusing photograph in TRC of him reading the book with an intensity that threatens to scorch the pages.

20 the Colonel’s latest Life-Histories of African Game Animals (New York, 1914), is not included in any of the editions of TR’s collected works. Advertised as the first categorical survey of the large fauna of any continent outside the United States, it was praised for its readability in The New York Times Book Review, 24 May 1914. “Latin binomials do not clutter the book with italics.… The treatment [of zoological data] is especially direct and lucid, and the vast amount of information which he [TR] has gathered at first hand [is] of inestimable service to our all too small fund of knowledge of animal psychology.” The book received scientific sanction in a major review by C. Hart Merriam in American Museum Journal, 16.3 (Mar. 1916). It proved to be a disappointment to Scribners, slowly selling only 2,000 copies. Publisher’s memo to William H. Bell, 1933 (SCR).

21 When Roosevelt rose The Washington Post and The New York Times, 27 May

22 “He is a great” Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him (New York, 1921), 287–88.

Historiographical Note: This first meeting of TR and WW in the White House has escaped the attention of historians. Consequently, the President’s famous remark, quoted by Tumulty, has always been ascribed to TR’s second call upon him, in the spring of 1917. Tumulty was present at both meetings, but when writing his memoir in 1921, remembered only the later, which he called the “one and only.” He said, further, that it took place entirely in the Red Room. The author believes that Tumulty simply forgot about the first, and conflated his memories. The secretary was wrong, e.g., in stating that in 1917, TR and WW “had not met since they were political opponents in 1912.” That could only be true of their encounter in the spring of 1914. Tumulty was far more likely to have asked the President then what he thought of his visitor, and WW more inclined to have found TR irresistible then than three years later, when their relations were strained. It is a matter of record that TR, on the earlier occasion, was in a boyish mood (videthe hat-bopping incident, and the copy of Penrod in his pocket). Tumulty was, however, correct in recalling that the substance of the 1917 visit was TR’s desire to command a division of volunteer troops in World War I. See 486–87.

23 It was still hot The Washington Post and Middletown (N.Y.) Times-Press, 27 May 1914; The New York Times, 7 May 1914. See also Millard, The River of Doubt, 337–39.

24 Veteran observers Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, 27 May 1914.

25 “I’m almost regretful” A stenographic transcript of TR’s address was printed in The Washington Post and other major newspapers on 27 May 1914.

26 Again and again The Washington Post, 27 May 1914.

27 a pium-like swarm Gus Karger of the Cincinnati Times-Star attended TR’s meeting with the Progressives and got the feeling that “in cold blood … he was contemplating the best method of ‘dumping them’ if their canine loyalty should become uncomfortable to himself.” Quoted in O’Toole, When Trumpets Call, 258.

28 Edith Roosevelt, who Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 403: “The reason for her not going is obscure. Analysis of the evidence available, from thyroid pills and frequent depressions, indicates that [EKR] was undergoing menopause.” Another factor may have been the fact that Belle was the daughter of a prominent Democrat, EKR being politically much more partisan than her husband. Belle, in addition, like countless brides before and since, had to compete with a mother’s passion for a favorite son.

29 Their initial meetings For an awkward hour the previous day, TR and Alfonso had breakfasted back-to-back on the same train from Paris to Madrid. There had been no qualified intermediary to reintroduce them, so they pretended to be unaware of each other.The New York Times, 9 June 1914.

30 Roosevelt treated TR to EKR, 11 June 1914 (KRP).

31 Plainclothes detectives The New York Times, 9, 10 June 1914.

32 To Roosevelt’s mild irritation TR to EKR, 11 June 1914 (KRP); The New York Times, 9 June 1914.

33 A guest list drawn KR to ERD, 1 June 1914 (ERDP); The New York Times, 16 July 1914; KR to ERD, 4, 30 Apr. 1913 (ERDP). EKR did not record the wedding in her otherwise conscientiously kept diary.

34 “I believe” TR to EKR, 11 June 1914 (KRP).

35 He stopped in Paris The New York Times, 7 June 1914; Straus, Under Four Administrations, 360. Herrick, who had known TR since the early days of the McKinley administration, was impressed with the balance of his political views and the ease with which he held his own in conversation with members of the French Academy. Herrick wrote afterward to his son, “I believe it to be an undeniable fact—that Roosevelt is one of the greatest, if not the greatest man of the time.” T. Bentley Mott, Myron T. Herrick: Friend of France (New York, 1929), 103–4.

36 Paris that June Owen Wister visited Paris at the same time, and was struck by its air of dilapidation and self-doubt (“The French face … too often a face of worried sadness, or revolt”) in contrast with Germany’s clicking efficiency and “contentment.” (Wister,The Pentecost of Calamity, 54.) See also Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 46.

37 Georges Clemenceau’s passionate Clemenceau, Discours de guerre, 17; Strachan, The First World War, 46; François Lesure and Roger Nichols, eds., Debussy Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 292. Debussy, writing to Robert Godet, was looking back to the Franco-Prussian War, which he regarded as a catastrophe for French culture.

38 “suffrage bomb” The Washington Post, 15 June 1914.

39 The old church See above, 604. The British prime minister H. H. Asquith had also been married there.

40 Obscurely basking Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 307–8.

41 Afterward the Lees Lee, A Good Innings, 1.523ff. Chequers was deeded to the nation in 1921.

42 country palace near Prague Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 305.

43 Wilhelm neither Ibid.

44 While Roosevelt Nevins, Henry White, 326; The Washington Post, 18 June 1914; The New York Times, 17 June 1914.

45 Roosevelt more or less TR’s address, “A Journey in Central Brazil,” is printed in Geographical Journal, 45.2 (Feb. 1915), with a magnificent foldout map based on the observations of Lyra and Rondon.

46 The nearest he got Geographical Journal, 45.2 (Feb. 1915); Daily Express, 17 June 1914.

47 “This is my” The New York Times, 18 June 1914. See also TR, Letters, 7.779–80.

48 He used virtually The New York Times, 18 June 1914; Lee, A Good Innings, 1.524. TR was well acquainted with Balfour’s views on this subject, having already devoured abstracts of the former Tory leader’s Gifford Lectures, given at the University of Glasgow the previous winter. (Balfour to TR, 29 Sept. 1915 [AJB].) The lectures were published in 1915 under the title Theism and Humanism.

49 He called on The New York Times, 16 June 1914.

50 other members of the government Robert Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York, 2003), 166–72. The following supplementary list of other persons seen by TR during his short visit to England is given simply to indicate the breadth of his British acquaintance on the eve of World War I: Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer, and Lord Lewis Harcourt, colonial secretary; Sir Edward Carson, Austen Chamberlain, Henry Chaplin, George Cave, and Viscount Walter Hume Long, leaders of the Tory Opposition; Lord Northcliffe, the press baron; Geoffrey Robinson Dawson and J. L. Garvin, editors respectively of The Times and The Observer; Sir Bertrand Dawson, physician to the King; Fred S. Oliver, the department store magnate; Edward Lyttelton, headmaster of Eton; George Otto Trevelyan, the historian; Sir Leander Starr Jameson, the Boer War raider; and Lord Roberts, the apostle of war preparedness.

51 “Excuse me sir” Lee, A Good Innings, 1.526. Alice Longworth, who had crossed over with her father at the end of May, did not accompany him on his return voyage.

52 Five minutes after TR, Letters, 7.769; TR interviewed by The New York Times, 19, 25 June 1914.

53 “When Roosevelt” Walter Hines Page to WW, 12 July 1914 (WWP).

54 Roosevelt had rejected See Morris, Theodore Rex, chaps. 18 and 19.

55 Roosevelt angrily insisted Abbott, Impressions of TR, 140. Abbott was a fellow passenger on the Imperator, and witnessed TR’s “thoroughly lively” interview with the Colombian diplomat.

56 “If anybody” The New York Times, 26 June 1914. Du Bois had been minister to Colombia during the Taft administration. For a more extended statement of his views, politely but damagingly critical of TR, see ibid., 2 July 1914.

57 The handling of Ibid.

58 He went on The New York Times, 25 June 1914.

59 In doing so The casualties in the Panamanian Revolution, both victims of Colombian artillery fire, were one donkey and a Chinese immigrant. Morris, Theodore Rex, 290.

60 “We have gone” The New York Times, 12 May 1914.

61 a run for the U.S. Senate Pinchot failed to unseat Boies Penrose.

62 “You may expect” The New York Times, 28 June 1914; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 396. For the similar warning of a Harvard doctor who examined TR on the eve of his graduation, see Morris, The Rise of TR, 108–9.

63 “Oh! I guess” The New York Times, 29 June 1914.

64 “Es ist nichts” Stürmer, The German Empire, 100.

65 His assassination Strachan, The First World War, 10.

66 Apparently, Franz Ferdinand The archduke was warned to stay away by Bosnian authorities, but he did not take their alarmism seriously.

67 After a journey EKR diary, 30 June 1914 (TRC); Titusville (Pa.) Herald and The New York Times, 1 July 1914; Greenville (Pa.) Evening Record, 1 July 1914.

68 “It is such” The New York Times, 1 July 1914.

69 “thoroughly exhausted” Lewis, TR, 415–16. The Titusville (Pa.) Herald, 1 July 1914, also noted TR’s husky voice and lack of gestural force.

70 “What on earth” Lewis, TR, 453.

71 Roosevelt was back The New York Times, 2 July 1914.

72 “It was not” EKR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 15 Oct. 1913 (ARC); TR, Letters, 7.772.

73 He would still Lawrence Abbott to his father, 13 May 1914 (ABB). John McGrath, 23, had replaced Frank Harper as TR’s secretary.

74 “If I had been” TR, Letters, 7.768.

75 In Berlin, Wilhelm Count Szögyéni to Count Berchtold, 5 July 1914, in GHDI: German History in Documents and Images (http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/).

76 “a serious complication” Ibid.

77 “The future lies” Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 313.

78 While Washington waited Oakland Tribune, Ludington (Mich.) Daily News, Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, Nevada State Journal, Titusville (Pa.) Herald, Orange County (N.Y.) Times, and Brownwood (Tex.) Daily Bulletin, 29–30 June 1914.

CHAPTER 18: THE GREAT ACCIDENT

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 12.

2 When the Imperator The New York Times, 16, 17 July 1914.

3 little Richard This ill-fated boy was the eighth Richard to be born in eight generations of the Derby family in the United States. TR, Letters, 8.1015.

4 So would Ted EKR diary, 16–31 July 1914 (TRC).

5 That young lady Belle Willard Roosevelt had just turned 22.

6 the slender graduate John C. O’Laughlin to wife, 15 Sept. 1914 (OL).

7 A delegation The New York Times, 19 July 1914.

8 In New York State Ibid., 23 July 1914.

9 On the same Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 318.

10 The terms of this ultimatum On 8 July, the German ambassador in Vienna delivered a virtual command from the Kaiser, stating “most emphatically that Berlin expected the [Dual] Monarchy to act against Serbia, and that Germany would not understand it if … the present opportunity were allowed to go by … without a blow struck.” Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 62.

11 In mid-Atlantic The New York Times, 1 Aug. 1914. The Kaiser himself had suggested, as early as 20 July, that German liners in foreign waters be put on war alert. Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 69.

12 he allowed Theodore Roosevelt See Morris, Theodore Rex, 388–91.

13 “Then I must” Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 87.

14 At 11:10 A.M. Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 320; Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 143; Strachan, The First World War, 10; Mark Mitchell and Allan Evans, citing the Austrian imperial archives in Moriz Rosenthal in Word and Music(Bloomington, Ind., 2006), 173.

15 Wilhelm II, however Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 322; Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 58.

16 To Edith Wharton Wharton, A Backward Glance, 338, specifically describing the atmosphere in Paris on 31 July 1914.

17 On 29 July Strachan, The First World War, 11.

18 The idea of a world war The first potential belligerent to invoke it seriously appears to have been the Hungarian prime minister István Tisza, who warned on 8 July that an Austrian attack on Serbia would lead to “intervention by Russia and consequently world war.” Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 61.

19 RUSSIA READY The Washington Post, 30 July 1914.

20 “It’s the Slav” Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 326.

21 “An ignoble war” These exchanges between “Willy” and “Nicky” are taken from Michael S. Neiberg, ed., The World War I Reader: Primary and Secondary Sources (New York, 2007), 46–47.

22 more than one ally Strictly speaking, Britain was not allied to France under the Triple Entente, as France was to Russia. Strategically, however, neither Britain nor France could stand for German mobilization in the summer of 1914.

23 When Goschen G. P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914 (London, 1926), vol. 11, doc. 293.

24 The combined vagueness Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 82. The double assurance of Wilhelm II and Bethmann-Hollweg on 5 July that Germany would stand by Austria in its Serbian quarrel is known to historians as “the blank check” that precipitated World War I.

25 The last forty-eight Ibid., 118.

26 “those peace people” Nevins, Henry White, 502.

27 “Germany does not” Moltke to Bethmann-Hollweg, 30 July 1914, in GHDI.

28 Forces for good TR, Works, 14.274–75.

29 the new autocrats The phrase is that of Martin Gilbert in A History of the Twentieth Century, 329.

30 “the French Socialist Republic” Superscript by the Kaiser on St. Petersburg dispatch, 25 July 1914, GHDI, no. 160.

31 “That is the match” Wister, The Pentecost of Calamity, 10–11. See also Wister, Roosevelt, 321.

32 for the first time in history Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 70.

33 That insult Since the Reichstag elections of 1912, and especially since the Zabern affair of 1913, when the German crown prince had actually proposed a military coup d’état to Bethmann-Hollweg, Prussian conservatives “had come to regard war as a ‘tempering of the nation.’ ” Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 55–56.

34 Ordinary Berliners The following description of Berlin on the eve of World War I owes much to the vivid account of Modris Ecksteins in Rites of Spring, chap. 2. See also Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 121.

35 Holy flame Author’s translation.

36 “a dance of death” Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 326. There were similar demonstrations of war fever in other German cities, including Munich. Sullivan, Our Times, 5.5.

CHAPTER 19: A HURRICANE OF STEEL

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 74.

2 “The situation” TR to QR, 2 Aug. 1914 (ERDP).

3 A packhorse QR to KR, 2 Feb. 1916 (KRP).

4 As a little girl Longworth, Crowded Hours, 235.

5 Balfour’s dream See 71.

6 he also had his Saxon side The Kaiser, flattering TR during his presidency, had come up with a triple adjective: “Let us rejoice that, thank Heaven, the Anglo-Saxon-Germanic Race is still able to produce such a specimen.” (Wilhelm II to TR, 14 Jan. 1904 [TRP].) For TR’s German days, see Putnam, TR, 102–13, or Morris, The Rise of TR, 43–47.

7 “From that time” TR, An Autobiography, 274.

8 “I wish I had” TR to Finley Peter Dunne, quoted in Ellis, Mr. Dooley’s America, 154.

9 “the battle forced” Quote in Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 93.

10 “If they refuse” Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York, 1962, 1979), 141.

11 “The lamps are going out” Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.20. There was a personal poignancy to Grey’s metaphor. He was afflicted with dimming vision, and had been told by oculists that he would become functionally blind in a few years. Ibid., 61–62.

12 “You’ve got to” Felix Frankfurter, eyewitness.

13 Booth would only say Charles Booth (1840–1916) was a stellar example of the high Victorian ideal of a businessman devoting himself to the making of money and enlightened philanthropy. He was author of a 17-volume social study, Life and Labor of the People in London (1891–1903). The steamer Aidan, which had altered its itinerary to bring the ailing TR home from Brazil in May 1914, belonged to Booth’s fleet. His brother, Alfred Booth, was chairman of the Cunard Line, which on this same day delayed the departure from New York of its flagship Lusitania.

14 “would result in” TR, Letters, 8.826.

15 “The European world” The New York Times, 4 Aug. 1914. WW reckoned without the strong inherited patriotism of German-Americans. When the Reich declared war on Russia, the New York Herald ran a banner headline, ALLE DEUTSCHEN HERZENSCHLAGENHEUTE HOHER (“All German hearts beat faster today”). Sullivan, Our Times, 5.8.

16 When other powers Japan declared war against Germany on 23 Aug. and Turkey against the Allies on 11 Nov. 1914. Italy hesitated until 24 May 1915 before turning against its former Triple Entente partner, Austria-Hungary.

17 Theodore Roosevelt’s gift The Washington Post reported on this date, 5 Aug. 1914, that strategists in the nation’s capital regarded the Canal as “the biggest war menace that hangs over America and the western hemisphere.”

18 “God has stricken me” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 334.

19 “Let us be” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 1914.

20 “I simply do not” TR to George S. Viereck, 8 Aug. 1914 (TRC).

21 Having lost See Morris, The Rise of TR, 229–31. TR sent WW a supportive telegram even before Ellen Wilson died. “Very deep sympathy. Earnestly hope reports of Mrs. Wilson’s condition are exaggerated.” TR to WW, 5 Aug. 1914 (TRP).

22 “It is not” TR, Letters, 7.790.

23 “The melancholy thing” TR, Letters, 7.794. Münsterberg (1863–1916) was one of the most eloquent of TR’s German-American friends attempting to recruit him as a spokesman for their cause. A pioneer industrial psychologist, antifeminist, and protégé of William James, he died suddenly in 1916 after publishing The Photoplay, the first major work of film theory.

24 The message he Papen, Memoirs, 14; TR, Letters, 8.1165.

25 Roosevelt bowed back TR, describing this visit later, dated it as occurring “within a week of the outbreak of the war,” and identified his caller only as “a young member of the German Embassy staff in Washington,” and “I think a Count.” (TR, Letters, 8.1165; Leary, Talks with T.R., 41.) But the evidence that it was Papen is, on top of these qualifications, compelling. In his memoirs, Papen mentions being entrusted with Wilhelm II’s goodwill message before being posted to the United States in the new year of 1914. He also states that he came to New York at this time, straight from an espionage visit to Mexico, in order to set up a base for further spying and propaganda work at the Manhattan headquarters of “a German firm in Hanover Street.” (Papen, Memoirs, 21, 31.) Papen left Galveston, Tex., at midnight on 4 Aug. 1914, and probably saw TR in New York on 7 Aug. TR was back in Oyster Bay the following day.

26 “In common with” TR, “The Foreign Policy of the United States,” The Outlook, 22 Aug. 1914.

27 daily in black headlines “The dispatches were as if black flocks of birds, frightened from their familiar rookeries, came darting across the ocean, their excited cries a tiding of stirring events.” (Sullivan, Our Times, 5.2.) See ibid., 1–46, and American Review of Reviews, Oct. 1914, for the impact of the war on American newspapers.

28 swamping even, on 15 August The Washington Post, e.g., put the canal opening on page 10. The Syracuse Herald gave it a slender column on page 2, beneath a banner headline: STUPENDOUS BATTLE BETWEEN GERMANS AND THE ALLIED FORCES IS NEAR AT HAND.

29 Diaghilev’s dancers At the Theatro Municipale in Rio on 22 Oct. 1913.

30 “It must indeed be” Baker, notebook III.74 (14 Aug. 1914 [RSB]).

31 On 19 August The New York Times, 28 Oct. 1913; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.43–44. WW’s phrase “impartial in thought” is often misquoted as “neutral in thought.”

32 Boredom gave way Richard Harding Davis, “The Germans in Brussels,” Scribner’s Magazine, Nov. 1914. Davis’s first version of this account, which is less rich in detail, appeared in the New York Tribune on 24 Aug. 1914. The final version was published in his book With the Allies (New York, 1914), 21–28.

33 onslaught on the Sullivan, Our Times, 5.26.

34 the Italian word fasci From the Latin fasces, evoking a bundle of rods, unbreakable because bound, irresistible when rammed. Fascism did not attain the status of a national political party until after World War I. But in Aug. 1914, Mussolini was rapidly converting his personal ideology from pacific socialism to aggressive, interventionist activism, in favor of an all-powerful nation-state. Three months later, he founded a revolutionary newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which bore banner quotes from Louis Blanqui and Napoleon: “He who has steel, has bread,” and “Revolution is an idea that has found bayonets.” On 24 Nov. he formed a pro-war fasci di azione rivoluzionaria (power group for revolutionary action) that quickly grew and claimed 5,000 members by the year’s end.

35 Roosevelt had been confidentially See 146.

36 “If the Franco-British” TR, Letters, 7.810–11. In his long-term scenario, TR included a prophecy that came true after World War II: “If Germany is smashed, it is perfectly possible that later she will have to be supported as a bulwark against the Slav by the nations of Western Europe.” Ibid., 812.

37 The same prospect Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 345–46; Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New York, 2007), 7–11.

38 “The Prussian” Gerard, Face to Face with Kaiserism, 131.

39 It was all Davis, With the Allies, 90–95. See also Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative (New York, 1919), chap. 26.

40 The imperial embassy Sullivan, Our Times, 5.58.

41 “I am an ex-President” TR, Letters, 7.812.

42 “If you have” TR to Frederick H. Allen, 31 Aug. 1914 (TRC).

43 Belle had fallen EKR diary, 16 July 1914 and passim (TRC).

44 “Ted and Eleanor” TR, Letters, 7.816.

45 In a crescendo of carnage The ecstasy affected even Calvinist intellectuals. “This war is great and wonderful beyond all expectations,” Max Weber wrote a friend. The New York Review of Books, 18 Feb. 1988.

46 “The fire-ants” TR, Works, 6.113–14.

47 Elsewhere in Brazil TR, Works, 6.142; Strachan, The First World War, 55.

48 Masses, slaves, arise Eugène Pottier (1816–1887). Author’s translation of French original. The text varies in later Russian, British, and American versions.

49 The government of Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 91; Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 419. On the eve of Germany’s declaration of war against Russia, Sir Edward Grey had passionately burst out, “It is the greatest step toward Socialism that could possibly have been made. We shall have Labour Governments in every country after this.” Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.239–40.

50 When Wilson thought “I find the President singularly lacking in appreciation of the importance of this European crisis,” Colonel House wrote on 28 Sept. 1914. “I find it difficult to get his attention centered upon the one big question.” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.35.

51 “I gather” Cecil Spring Rice to TR, 18 Sept. 1914 (CSR).

52 Before Roosevelt TR, Letters, 8.862.

Biographical Note: Earlier in the year, TR had resisted a suggestion that he should encourage Progressives to support Wilson, rather than allow them to drift back into a Republican Party dominated by the likes of Boies Penrose. He agreed, however, that “permanently, there is only room for two national parties in this country, and one of these must be the opposition.” (TR to Alex Moore, 10 July 1914 [TRC].) Interviewing TR on 14 Aug. 1914, Ray Stannard Baker heard him “express doubt as to whether the American people really know what they [were] doing” in voting for his philosophy of government. “I do not believe,” Baker concluded, “that T. R. has ever really believed in people. He has led people, he has advertised popular measures, but he has never really believed that the people must rule. His idea of leadership has been domination rather than education & service. He has done great good as a publicist, as a political revivalist, but by George, I can’t help feeling that his time has passed.” Notebook III.73 (RSB).

53 “He is most” O’Laughlin to his wife, 6 Sept. 1914 (OL).

54 “there should be” Ibid. See 47.

55 hurricane of steel See 301.

56 The war had wrought The New York Times, 26 Sept. 1914; EKR diary, 27 Sept. 1914, misdated 14 Sept. (TRC). As things transpired, a security scare diverted the ship to Glasgow.

57 Edith said goodbye EKR to ERD, 5 Oct. 1914 (ERDP); TR to KR, 17 Jan. 1915 (TRC).

58 I have something special Trevelyan to TR, 1 Sept. 1914 (TRP).

59 Your mode of thought For recent analyses of TR’s foreign policy toward Britain and Europe, see William N. Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York, 1997), and Serge Ricard, Théodore Roosevelt: principes et pratique d’une politique étrangère (Aix-en-Provence, 1991). Howard K. Beale’s massive Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956) remains the most comprehensive overall survey, and Frederick W. Marks’s elegant Velvet on Iron (op. cit.) the most concise. An excellent specialized study is Henry J. Hendrix, Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy: The U.S. Navy and the Birth of the American Century (Annapolis, Md., 2009). See also Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan (Seattle, 1966), and A. Gregory Moore, “Dilemma of Stereotypes: Theodore Roosevelt and China, 1901–1909,” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1978).

60 Other representatives TR, Letters, 8.819–20; Hengelmüller to TR, 24 Sept. 1914, reprinted at TR’s request in The New York Times, 8 Nov. 1914.

61 Sir Edward Grey asked In his letter, dated 10 Sept. 1914, the foreign minister included a fair amount of anti-German propaganda of his own. See Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.143–44. The author of Peter Pan lunched with the Roosevelts on 3 Oct. He did not like TR, whom he found oppressively talkative, and EKR did not like him. “A mousy, moody little man.” EKR to ERD, 5 Oct. 1914 (ERDP).

62 Rudyard Kipling reported Kipling to TR, 15 Sept. 1914 (TRP).

63 “It is no good” Cecil Spring Rice to TR, 10 Sept. 1914 (CSR). The ambassador’s conspiracists, “toiling in a solid phalanx to compass our destruction,” also included Adolph Ochs and “the arch-Jew,” Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Spring Rice to Valentine Chirol, 13 Nov. 1914 [CSR].) For a brief account of Straus’s negotiations, which were concerned not with commerce but with his plan to launch a new mediatory effort by the Wilson administration, see Straus, Under Four Administrations, 378–85, and Grey,Twenty-five Years, 2.119–21. The plan was rejected by both Germany and Great Britain.

64 “An ex-President” TR to Rudyard Kipling, 3 Oct. 1914 (TRC).

65 Roosevelt did not blame See also TR, Letters, 7.794.

66 Even in the Far East Kiaochow surrendered on 7 Nov. 1914. For a modern endorsement of the view that all the belligerents in World War I were right as well as wrong, see Joachim Remak in Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 147–49.

67 “It seems to me” TR in The Outlook, 23 Sept. 1914.

68 He had read Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (U.S. edition, New York, 1914).

69 “somewhat as my own” TR in The Outlook, 23 Sept. 1914.

70 “living softly” Ibid.

71 butchered some hundreds of thousands Not to be confused with the Turkish-Armenian massacre of 1915.

72 The last two “For this error of judgment … I am afraid Roosevelt never forgave me.” (Abbott, Impressions of TR, 250–51.) TR restored the deleted language when he republished the essay in Jan. 1915.

73 “Surely the time” TR in The Outlook, 23 Sept. 1914. TR’s essay is reprinted in TR, Works, 20.14–35.

Historiographical Note: TR herewith revived his earlier call for “a League of Peace” at Christiania, Norway, in May 1910. Just eight days after the beginning of the war, he had tried the idea out privately on Hugo Münsterberg, envisaging “the kind of caprice among the great powers which will minimize the armaments of all and will solemnly bind all the rest to take joint action against any offender.” (TR, Letters, 7.795–96.) He spelled out this vision in more detail on 18 Oct. in The New York Times, by which time it had become “a great World League for the Peace of Righteousness.” Six weeks later in The Atlantic Monthly, the Cambridge classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson published the first of two influential articles advocating the organization of a “League of Nations.” TR rejected his concept as excessively theoretical and lacking in the vital dimension of “international force.” (TR, Letters, 852–55.) Nevertheless, Lowes Dickinson later helped frame the official League of Nations Covenant of 1919. For a detailed history of TR’s proposal, 1910–1917, see Stephen A. Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t: Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, William Howard Taft and a Legalist League of Nations” (AB diss., Harvard, 2007).

74 Rumors began The New York Times, 14 Sept. 1914.

75 “It would reflect” John N. Wheeler, I’ve Got News for You (New York, 1961), 43–44. TR nursed ancient grudges against the World, going back to its opposition to his candidacy in the presidential election of 1904. For his subsequent persecution of the paper and its publisher, see James McGrath Morris, Joseph Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York, 2010), chaps. 29, 30. By 1914, Pulitzer was dead.

76 “One moment” The New York Times, 27 Sept. 1914.

77 “Under such circumstances” Ibid.

78 Although he did not Wheeler, I’ve Got News, 44–45; John N. Wheeler to TR, 14 Oct. 1914 (TRP).

79 He obliged with The New York Times, 4, 11, 18 Oct., and 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 Nov. 1914. Reprinted with variations in TR, Works, 20.36–216.

80 “the one certain way” TR, Works, 20.107.

81 When he encountered Parsons, Perchance to Dream, 253.

82 Word that Germany TR, Works, 20.4.227. For an eloquent private statement of TR’s war views in the early fall of 1914, see his letter to Hugo Münsterberg, 3 Oct. 1914, TR, Letters, 8.822–25.

83 “You cannot imagine” ERD to EKR, 6 Oct. 1914 (ERDP).

84 Roosevelt had received Rudyard Kipling to TR, 15 Sept. and 20 Oct. 1914 (TRP).

85 “My experience in” TR to Kipling, 3 Oct. 1914 (TRC). Kipling had complained that the tone of TR’s war articles was too mild.

86 He granted that Ibid. Five days before a campaigning TR wrote this letter, he was waylaid in Cleveland by members of a Belgian government commission charged with alerting key American figures to the suffering inflicted on their country. They found the Colonel sympathetic but unwilling to criticize WW’s silence on the issue. “If you were President, what would you do?” “Exactly what Mr. Wilson is doing.” The commissioners said they were going on to meet with former President Taft. “You’ll like him awfully,” TR replied, “he’ll agree with everything you say.” Lalla Vandervelde, relief lobbyist, in Monarchs and Millionaires (New York, 1925), 71–73.

87 an impassioned speech Parsons, Perchance Some Day, 255. See also Robinson, My Brother TR, 282–83: “Unless I am very much mistaken, [that was] the first speech on that subject in the United States during the Great War.” Both women were eyewitnesses to the occasion. For an example of TR’s formidable aggression on this issue, see his letter to the pacifist Andrew Dickson White in TR, Letters, 8.827–28.

88 In a post-election poll The New York Times, 20 Dec. 1914.

89 “utter and hopeless” TR, Letters, 8.831.

90 We, here in America See 180. In a letter to Lyman Abbott, forecasting the death of the Progressive Party, TR made plain that he felt progressivism as a “movement” would go on. “I honestly feel that none of us have any cause to be ashamed of what we did in 1912.” 7 Nov. 1914 (TRP).

Historical Note: The narrative of this book will not deal with the Progressive Party’s prolonged death throes through the spring of 1916. TR dutifully fulfilled his duties as Party chief until then, but his heart was elsewhere. For a detailed account, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chaps. 9 and 10, and the relevant correspondence in TR,Letters, 8.843–1085.

91 “I wish I could stroke” TR, Letters, 8.832.

92 And Edith too Kipling reported that he had seen KR and Belle just before they sailed from Liverpool. “Happiness wasn’t the word to describe ‘em!” To TR, 15 Sept. 1915 (TRP).

93 Roosevelt persuaded himself TR to KR, 11 Nov. 14 (TRC).

Biographical Note: With TR’s approval, John C. O’Laughlin, who had once served as assistant secretary of state and was a capable private envoy, went to London in Nov. 1914 to ask if Sir Edward Grey would be interested in TR as a peace broker between the Powers. The foreign minister, reluctant to go behind WW’s back, was courteously discouraging. He praised TR’s recent war articles, but said that he did not agree with him about the apathy of the Wilson administration. “The President has been strictly correct, as has Ambassador Page.” O’Laughlin to TR, 29 Nov. 1914 (OL).

94 Through the Brazilian See. e.g., The New York Times, 15 Nov. 1914 (“Colonel Roosevelt … is blessed with a power for minute and careful observation.… One more excellent volume [added] to a list which is already a praiseworthy record”); The Spectator, 19 Dec. 1914 (“The art of the narrator is invariably swift and keen. A better record of adventure … it would be difficult to find”); Geographical Journal, Feb. 1915. On 6 Nov., TR sent a copy of Through the Brazilian Wilderness to Cândido Rondon, with apologies for it being in English. “Malheureusement, cette terrible guerre européene a empeché toute traduction allemande et française, aussi ne puis-je vous en envoyer qu’un exception en anglais.” For the full text of his letter, see Vivieros, Rondon, 424–25.

95 For as long as Sullivan, Our Times, 5.199.

96 Next February H. J. Whigham, editor of Metropolitan magazine, recalled in old age that TR at first rebuffed his approaches because he felt that the salary offered ($25,000) was too much for the work required: “I would not feel that if I were writing an article once a month that I was really earning the money properly.” He would prefer, he said, to write many more articles for the Wheeler syndicate for the same sum. It took the combined efforts of Whigham and Harry Whitney, the magazine’s owner, to persuade him to sign on. Whigham interiewed by Hermann Hagedorn, 12 May 1949 (TRB).

97 brilliant young men Soon after the election, TR invited Croly, Lippmann, and another co-founder of The New Republic, Walter Weyl, to dine with him—“just you three and I.” He clearly wanted to pass on his Progressive-ideological torch. Lippmann, who impressed TR as “on the whole, the most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States,” had just brought out a new book of political essays. Entitled Drift and Mastery, it won Lippmann early fame as an astute analyst of American domestic unrest. TR reviewed it favorably, along with Croly’s Progressive Democracy, in The Outlook. Although he later split with The New Republic on its attitude to the war, Lippmann continued to revere him. TR to Croly et al., 11 Nov. 1914; TR, Letters, 8.872; TR Works, 14, 214–22.

98 “It is perfectly obvious” TR, Letters, 8.835–39.

99 “Heartily know” Ibid. TR appears to be slightly misquoting an unidentified verse he had read in Charles Henry Parkhurst’s Portraits and Principles of the World’s Great Men and Women (Springfield, Mass., 1898), 177.

CHAPTER 20: TWO MELANCHOLY MEN

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 27.

2 The winter of 1914 Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 100; Robert Cowley, ed., The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War (New York, 2004), 37.

3 “a war with which” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.88.

4 White House aides Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 340–42.

5 Roosevelt appeared TR, Letters, 8.849; TR to KR, 11 Nov. 1914 (TRC); TR, Letters, 8.903.

6 “Father is” Gordon Johnston interviewed by Ethel Armes, ca. 1920 (TRB). Johnston was shocked by TR’s appearance. “I had never seen him so low.” For other depictions of TR at this time, see Charles Washburn in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 394; Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 155; Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 11, 56.

Biographical Note: A contributing cause to TR’s depression may have been his reading at this time of Adolf Fischer’s Menschen und Tiere in Deutsch-Südwest Afrika. Reviewing it for The Outlook on 20 Jan. 1915, he noted that responsible conservationists had only recently saved the big-game fauna of Southwest Africa (now Namibia) from “almost complete annihilation” by trophy hunters, white and black. “This is one of the many, many reasons why the present dreadful war fills me with sadness. The men, many of whom I have known—Germans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Belgians—who have been opening the Dark Continent to civilization, are now destroying one another and ruining the work that has been done.” (TR, Works, 14.574.) For a brief account of the war in Africa, see Strachan, The First World War, 80–95.

7 “Both you men” Quoted by Knox in Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 164.

8 “Weaklings who raise” TR, Works, 20.77–78 (not included in the original New York Times article of 1 Nov. 1914, but added for republication in Jan. 1915).

9 “Your cistern” William Allen White to TR, 28 Dec. 1914 (TRP).

10 “I am more like” TR, Letters, 8.870–71. TR’s new contract, dated 5 Dec. 1914, required him to “use the Metropolitan Magazine exclusively for three years as your medium for articles on the great social, political, and international questions.” He would receive $25,000 annually for a minimum contribution of 50,000 words. Extra articles would be paid for at the same rate, and he could write on other subjects for other periodicals. Copy in AC.

11 Metropolitan was a large Ellis, Mr. Dooley’s America, 240, describes Metropolitan as “a right-wing socialist periodical.” This paradox is endorsed by Antony C. Sutton in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (Studies in Reformed Theology, 2001, chap. 11,http://www.reformed-theology.org/). Sutton notes Metropolitan’s connection, via Whitney, with the House of Morgan and the liberal financier Eugene Boissevain. He argues that many American plutocrats in the early Bolshevik era, eager to bring down foreign imperialism, aided revolutionary forces in Russia either directly, through cash contributions, or indirectly, by patronizing anti-Tsarist propaganda at home. Editor Whigham’s brand of politics allowed him to employ such relative conservatives as TR and Finley Peter Dunne as well as the outspoken Communist John Reed.

12 “After this January” TR, Letters, 8.871.

13 “To be neutral” Ibid., 8.903.

14 The resultant twelve-chapter volume America and the World War is reprinted in TR, Works, 20.1–216.

15 Critical reaction “In our hour of need,” St. Loe Strachey complained in The Spectator (6 Feb. 1915), “we should have expected a better understanding.”

16 England is not TR, Letters, 8.867.

17 “I ask those” Ibid., 20.105–6. TR’s oft-repeated claim that no shot was fired at a “foreign” foe during his presidency depended on the classification of Filipinos as territorial wards of the United States.

18 He poured scorn TR, Works, 20.94; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.207. Of the stateside army, most troops were required to man coastal defenses, leaving a mobile land force of fewer than 25,000. Ibid.

19 Mr. Bryan came TR, Works, 20.212–13.

20 “I feel in the” Ibid., 20.194 (italics added).

Historical Note: One of the great what-ifs of American history is the course World War I might have taken had TR been returned to the White House in 1912. He speculated often on the subject himself. “If I had been President,” he wrote Cecil Spring Rice late in 1914, “I should have acted on the thirtieth or thirty-first of July, as head of a signatory power of the Hague [conventions] … saying that I accepted [them] as imposing a serious obligation which I expected not only the United States but all other neutral nations to join us in enforcing. Of course I would not have made such a statement without backing it up.” (TR, Letters, 8.821.) In Diplomacy (New York, 1994), 29–50, Henry Kissinger argues that TR would have taken the U.S. into the war for strategic reasons, on the ground that a victory for the Central Powers, and the consequent weakening of Britain’s hold on the North Atlantic, would have threatened the world balance of power in general, and America’s hemispheric security in particular. WW, in contrast, advocated neutrality only for as long as it would take him to impose upon the belligerents his “messianic” vision of a negotiated peace based on American moral principles. While Kissinger regrets that WW’s and not TR’s foreign policy prevailed (fostering the myth of American exceptionalism for the rest of the century), he does not consider the possibility that TR, reelected with all the prestige of his proven success as an international mediator (not to mention his personal knowledge of most of the European potentates prosecuting the war), could have brought about a diplomatic solution before the end of 1914.

Determinists might counter that a certain cosmic inevitability caused Franz Ferdinand’s automobile, on 28 June, to take the wrong turning that proved so right for Gavrilo Princip—leading over the course of the next four years to societal changes that had been generating since the end of the nineteenth century. In such a view, TR might as well have tried to mediate the eruption of Mont Pelée.

21 “As President” TR, Letters, 8.87.

22 In the terrible Ibid., 8.214–16.

23 He was playing Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 57.

24 “He will never” Hamlin Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries: A Literary Log (New York, 1932), 45. The phrase distinctly older is Garland’s.

25 TR (laughing) Dunne, Mr. Dooley Remembers, 184–85.

26 “striking his palm” Ibid.

27 “We cannot remain” Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson, 228.

28 Britain proposed This policy was announced on 1 Mar. 1915. For the Wilson administration’s complicity with it, see Walter Karp, The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (New York, 1979), 176–82.

29 “The waters surrounding” The New York Times, 7 Feb. 1915.

30 “This is in effect” Spring Rice to William Jennings Bryan, 1 Mar. 1915, The American Journal of International Law, 12 (1918), 866.

31 If the commanders Foreign Relations of the United States Supplement, 1915, 98–100.

32 “I hope that” TR, Letters, 8.879, 888–89.

33 In a censuring tone Ibid., 8.889.

34 almost treasonous letter Ibid., 8.876–81; Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.154.

35 For as long as TR, Letters, 8.910, 899, 906–7, 918.

36 “T. Vesuvius Roosevelt” Title of a poem by W. Irwin in Collier’s Weekly, 12 Jan. 1907.

37 he checked Edith Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 406. The operation, performed on 14 Apr., was a success, and restored EKR’s health, which had been troubled for several years.

38 Upon arrival William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York, 1939), 618. Throughout the winter, WHT had been outspoken in his praise of WW’s war policy. It is hard to believe that TR did not say something to him, but Phelps was a close witness to the encounter, and TR’s account of the incident avoids any mention of a verbal response. (TR, Letters, 8.1118.) According to secondary newspaper reports, the two men exchanged the briefest of greetings.

CHAPTER 21: BARNES V. ROOSEVELT

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 230.

2 the most entertaining libel suit See George T. Blakey, “Calling a Boss a Boss: Did Roosevelt Libel Barnes in 1915?” New York History, 60.2 (Apr. 1979).

3 Barnes’s counsel TR.Jr. to KR, 29 May 1915 (KRP). A later version of this anecdote is in Bishop, TR, 2.366.

4 Roosevelt’s classmate Andrews (1858–1936) was a respected judge of the legal-realist school. Elected later to a seat on the New York Court of Appeals, he famously dissented against the majority opinion of Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (1928).

5 “Your Honor, I move” New York (State) Supreme Court, William Barnes, plaintiff-appellant, against Theodore Roosevelt, defendant-respondent, 4 vols. (Walton, N.Y., 1917), 1.129. Except where otherwise indicated, all testimony in the Syracuse trial is quoted from this source (hereafter cited as Barnes v. Roosevelt). Narrative and descriptive details derive from the observant reporting (with illustrations) of the New York World, 19 Apr.–23 May 1915, supplemented by accounts in The New York Times, New York Evening Post, and Syracuse Herald.

6 A roll of fat Visible in a photograph in the New York World, 21 May 1915.

7 William M. Ivins The New York Times, 22 Oct. 1905; New York State Bar Association, Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting (New York, 1916), 505; Julius Henry Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew (New York, 1946), chap. 10.

8 “probably the greatest” Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.142–43.

9 “with the same care” Syracuse Herald, 20 Apr. 1915.

10 In New York State Ibid. See 366.

11 Roosevelt sat mutely New York Evening Post, 19 Apr., New York World, 21 Apr. 1915. Siebold wrote that TR “seemed to be laboring under a degree of depression in striking contrast to the usual volatility of spirit characteristic of him.” The reporter for The New York Times thought TR cheerful enough, but noted his lapses of memory. A careful reading of the transcript supports Siebold’s view, as does a chilling photograph in the same issue of the World.

12 Have you read Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.193.

13 My regiment was Ibid., 1.199.

14 “Why all this” Ibid., 1.206–7.

15 “Mr. Barnes spoke” Ibid., 1.226.

16 Mr. Bowers and Ibid., 1.236–37.

17 “The people are not” Ibid., 1.242.

18 precise citation of names TR’s pronunciation of the word “Barnes” reminded one reporter of the plop of a pebble dropped in water. The New York Times, 21 Apr. 1915.

19 “a very able man” Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.243.

20 It is not my desire Ibid., 1.335–38.

21 In other testimony Ibid., 1.272–73, 307–8; The New York Times, 23 Apr. 1915.

22 Bowers asked Ibid., 1.322.

23 The Colonel looked a happier New York World, 22 Apr. 1915.

24 Court artists For an excellent rendering of the trial’s dramatis personae, including a melancholy-looking TR, see the Syracuse Herald, 20 Apr. 1915.

25 Has your occupation Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.357; New York Evening Post, 22 Apr. 1915.

26 “It is pretty good” Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.363.

27 the tax-avoidance controversy John M. Corry, Rough Ride to Albany: Teddy Runs for Governor (New York, 2000), 142–65.

28 a little book on the subject William M. Ivins, Machine Politics and Money in Elections in New York City (New York, 1887).

29 Now, does that Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.394–95.

30 “You did not” Ibid., 1.401–2.

31 Since [1898] Ibid., 1.407. TR was not exaggerating, although the lower figure was probably the more accurate in 1915. Of his lifetime total of letters, approximately 150,000 survive today.

32 “I particularly wished” Ibid., 1.422.

33 “It is because” Ibid., 1.424.

34 as if activated by a jolt The electrical metaphor comes from the court reporter of The New York Times, 22 Apr. 1915. He applied it also to the audience. See also Blakey, “Calling a Boss a Boss” for TR’s effect on the jury.

35 Mr. Ivins, this witness Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.438.

36 “Mr. Ivins, that is not” Ibid., 1.439–40.

37 “Doctor Jekyll” Ibid., 1.441.

38 Ivins noted that Ibid., 1.442.

39 Yes, sir Ibid.

40 even the most wheedling The New York Times, 27 Apr. 1915.

41 “A little matter” Ibid.

42 Barnes quit attending Ibid.

43 “What relation” The New York Times, 5 May 1915.

44 “I don’t know” Ibid., 7 May 1915.

45 That night, Thursday TR, Letters, 8.921–22.

46 a strange flurry A. A. and Mary Hoehling, The Last Voyage of the Lusitania (New York, 1956), 39–40. One of the telegram recipients was Alfred G. Vanderbilt.

47 An advisory signed Ibid. See ibid., 96, for a facsimile reproduction of the German Embassy warning.

48 “It makes my blood” TR, Letters, 8.922.

49 “I came across this” The New York Times, 8 May 1915. Ivins had probably seen a recent article by TR (Ladies’ Home Journal, Apr. 1915) complaining about having to wade through “a German edition of Aristophanes, with erudite explanations of the jokes.” TR, Works, 4.91.

50 Reading it, his face Bishop, TR, 2.375.

51 Many of the first Syracuse Herald, 7 May 1915. Vanderbilt drowned, but Miss Pope survived after being nearly given up for dead. Later in life, as Theodate Pope Riddle, she designed the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace memorial in New York City.

52 Two or three Bishop, TR, 2.375–76.

53 1,918 souls aboard The New York Times, 8 May 1915. The commonly accepted statistics of the Lusitania disaster are 1,959 passengers and crew, with 1,195 dead and 885 bodies unrecovered. Of the 139 Americans aboard, only 11 survived.

54 “That’s murder” Bishop, TR, 2.376.

55 I can only repeat Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 8 May 1915, e.g. (AP dispatch).

56 Woodrow Wilson’s first Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 364. See also The New York Times, 10 May 1915.

57 “America has come” Edward M. House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols., Charles Seymour, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 1.434.

58 After going to church The New York Times, 10 May 1915.

59 Sitting down Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 364.

60 Late in the afternoon Ibid., 364–65.

61 He talked about Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1918), 88.

62 Roosevelt was not sorry TR to Fanny Parsons, 6 May 1915 (TRC); TR to ERD, 12 May 1915 (ERDP); The New York Times, 11–13 May 1915; TR, Letters, 8.1328.

63 Dear Archie TR, Letters, 8.922. The Gulflight, though destroyed, was not actually sunk.

64 “starve the whole” Horace C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman, Okla., 1939), 83.

65 Dr. Bernhard Dernburg The New York Times, 9 May 1915.

66 New York’s own collector The cargo manifest also included an enormous quantity of boxes and barrels labeled “cheese,” “beef,” and “oysters,” whose contents may have been less nutritious than indicated. Dernburg was aware of more munitions aboard theLusitania than he revealed, perhaps because he did not want to betray the presence in the New York port collector’s office of a spy reporting on arms exports. On 3 May 1915 the detective reported to Franz von Papen, the German intelligence officer who had visited with TR after the outbreak of the war (see above, 378–79), that the ship carried 12 crates of detonators, 6,026 crates of bullets, 492 cases of “military equipment,” and 223 auto wheels. (Papen, Memoirs, 42.) In the 1950s, the Royal Navy surreptitiously targeted the submerged hull of the Lusitania in a series of depth-charge “exercises” that shattered it almost beyond recognition. Nevertheless, in 2008 divers found the wreck bestrewn with 4 million rounds of .303 ammunition. Daily Mail, 20 Dec. 2008.

67 Roosevelt knew Dernburg TR, Letters, 8.857–61.

68 “a personal attitude” The New York Times, 12 May 1915.

69 his note responding The note, which was almost entirely the work of WW, was signed by Bryan as secretary of state.

70 Wilson stated that The New York Times, 14 May 1915.

71 Only the most cynical This is the thesis that Walter Karp argues at book length in The Politics of War. Most historians disagree, seeing WW as genuinely peace-minded in 1915–1916, if indeed (in Karp’s word) vainglorious later on. But the President’s flag-waving bellicosity toward Mexican provocateurs in the Tampico and Vera Cruz incidents of 1914 speaks volumes, as does his confession to Colonel House in Sept. 1915 that he had long wanted the United States to join the world war. (Intimate Papers, 2.84.) There is no doubt that the eventual entry of the United States into World War I was the logical, if attenuated, consequence of WW’s demand in Feb. 1915 for a “strict accountability” from Germany for violations of neutrality by its warships.

72 a green and gold fountain pen For the provenance of this instrument, see Ambrose Flack’s enchanting reminiscence, “Theodore Roosevelt and My Green-Gold Fountain Pen,” The New Yorker, 22 May 1948.

73 made a dignified witness Blakey, “Calling a Boss a Boss.” See also Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., “Barnes v. Roosevelt: Theater in the Courtroom,” New York State Bar Journal, 63.8 (Dec. 1991).

74 On Thursday, 20 May Shakespeare, Henry VIII, act 3, scene 2; The New York Times, 21 May 1915.

75 At 3:45 P.M. The New York Times, 23 May 1915.

76 “I will try” Ibid. It turned out that the jury had been unanimously in favor of TR all along, dividing 11 to 1 only on the minor issue of whether or not to split costs. Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., himself an appellate court judge and the son of one of TR’s lawyers, concludes that both plaintiff and defendant scored damaging points against each other, TR being shown to have selective amnesia about his acceptance of “boss” help and corporate contributions as governor and president, and Barnes being exposed as a pig at the public trough. Although the proof “fell far short of portraying Barnes as an evil man,” TR’s 1914 libel had clearly been defamatory. He was saved from conviction by virtue of his role as a “star performer” who “held his audience” for eight full days of arm-waving testimony. (Hancock, “Barnes v. Roosevelt.”) Even EKR, commenting to Cecil Spring Rice on 30 May, wryly described the verdict as “illegal” (CSR).

77 William Ivins returned Ivins died on 23 July 1915. His career is affectionately recounted in Cohen, They Builded Better Than They Knew. Barnes’s fortunes never recovered from the verdict against him. He was passed over for nomination to the U.S. Senate in 1916, and quickly lost force in New York State politics. When he died in 1930 he was remembered only as a figure in “one of the most extraordinary libel suits in the history of the country.” Boston Herald, 1 July 1930.

CHAPTER 22: WAGING PEACE

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 526.

2 The President’s official These two paragraphs owe much to the observations of Margaret Axson Elliott (“Madge,” sister of WW’s first wife) in My Aunt Louisa and Woodrow Wilson (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944). See also Asquith, Autobiography, 330; Thompson,Presidents I’ve Known, 253ff.; and for WW’s sexuality, Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 108–9, 185–88. The evidence of an affair with Mary Allen Peck in 1908 is inconclusive, but certainly suggests that in his sixth decade, WW was not short of testosterone.

3 Now, secretly Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 365; Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 33.133ff.

4 Wilson had in fact Ishbel Ross, Power with Grace: The Life Story of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1975), 36.

5 On 30 May The New York Times, 1 June 1915.

6 “the very nadir” Robinson, My Brother TR, 290.

7 “I have never” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 406.

8 He cheerfully tolerated Sonya Levien, “The Great Friend: A Personal Story of Theodore Roosevelt as He Revealed Himself to One of His Associates in Magazine Work,” Woman’s Home Companion, Oct. 1919.

9 “Villa,” Roosevelt said Barbara Gelb, So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and Lousie Bryant (New York, 1973), 48.

10 Not even an invoice Financial file, 16 June 1915 (TRP). Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 406, estimates TR’s total costs at $42,000; Thayer, TR, 400, at $52,000. Only $1,443 was recoverable from Barnes. Barnes v. Roosevelt, 1.125–26.

11 Congress owed him TR, Letters, 6.1539.

12 “Why, I won it” Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 114–15. Thompson was an eyewitness to this exchange.

13 Each island gave off Most of the language, and all of the natural observations in the next five paragraphs are TR’s. See “Bird Reserves,” in TR, Works, 4.197–227.

14 fashionable ladies Ross, Power with Grace, 18.

15 “Nature is ruthless” TR, Works, 4.206–7.

16 a big humming hornet Ibid., 20.210–11.

17 like U-boats Ibid., 20.213–14. “British Admiralty Confidential Daily Voyage Notice 15th April 1915, issued under Government War Risks Scheme: German Submarines Appear to Be Operating Chiefly Off Prominent Headlands and Landfalls,” American Journal of International Law (New York, 1918), 12.867.

18 Early the following The Washington Post, 12 June 1915; Dudley Haddock to Charter Heslep, 14 May 1963 (EMH); The New York Times, 10 June 1915.

19 “This means war” Haddock to Heslep, 14 May 1963 (EMH).

20 He could have Ibid. The statement did not reach New Orleans until late the following day, 11 June, and Haddock put it out on the wires that night. By the following morning it was front-page news. See, e.g., The Washington Post, 12 June 1915, andFairbanks Daily News-Miner, 12 June 1915.

21 “Why be shocked” Karp, The Politics of War, 200. For Bryan’s frantic efforts to keep the administration neutral in the first half of 1915, see ibid., chap. 9.

22 the only high official Ibid., 171.

23 “England is fighting” Ibid.; Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him (New York, 1921), 231.

24 A hail of vituperation See, e.g., New York World, 9 June 1915; The Washington Post, Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, and Lowell (Mass.) Sun, 10 June 1915.

25 “God bless you” Atlanta Constitution, 10 May 1915.

26 Next morning Ibid.

27 “Good morning” Levien, “The Great Friend.”

28 Somehow, Roosevelt had Ibid.; TR, Letters, 1.229.

29 “There was” Ibid. The boy in the office was Philip Dunne, later a distinguished screenwriter.

30 “radicals laid” Levien, “The Great Friend.” TR jokingly wrote at the end of a letter to one of Metropolitan’s left-wing contributors, “Your rational-individualist and rational-Socialist friend, Theodore Roosevelt.” TR, Letters, 8.962.

31 Much of the work Levien, “The Great Friend.”

32 “I wonder how” Ibid. One dignified old gentleman was heard breaking into song as he sank to street level.

33 Whatever Roosevelt had lost “How I wish I were President at this moment!” TR to Roman Romanovich von Rosen, 7 Aug. 1915 (TRP).

34 “My hope is” TR, Letters, 8.947.

35 Roosevelt vaguely explained Ibid.; TR to KR, 27 May 1915 (TRC).

36 He knew nonetheless TR, Letters, 8.948.

37 Then, he had called Morris, Theodore Rex, 228–29.

38 Now, he lectured The New York Times, 22 July 1915.

39 “No nation ever” Ibid.

40 “Colonel,” somebody asked Marshall Stimson memorandum, n.d. (TRB).

41 The article described The Washington Post, 15–20 Aug. 1915; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.184–96. Another victim of U.S. wrath was Karl Bünz, Germany’s consul general in New York, arrested on charges of financial conspiracy. Bünz had once performed a useful service to TR during the Venezuela crisis of 1902–1903. TR now sought to repay that old favor by trying, unsuccessfully, to keep him out of prison. (Morris, Theodore Rex, 189; Leary, Talks with T.R., 43–44.) In December, Papen was expelled for complicity in acts of sabotage. He later (1932) served as Chancellor of Germany before stepping aside in favor of Adolf Hitler.

42 “The time for” The New York Times, 22 Aug. 1915.

43 A few days later For the background and subsequent history of the civilian preparedness program centering on Plattsburg, see John G. Clifford, Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920 (Lexington, Ky., 1972).

44 “I suppose” TR.Jr. to KR, 21 July 1915 (KRP).

45 Roosevelt was amused TR, Letters, 8.962–63; Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 66. By the time TR.Jr. went to war in 1917, he had accumulated a fortune conservatively estimated at $425,000. (EBR to “mother,” 8 Jan. 1919 [TRJP].) For a compact portrait of TR.Jr., see Charles W. Snyder, “An American Original: Theodore Roosevelt, Junior,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 17.2 (Spring 1991). See also H. Paul Jeffers, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.: The Life of a War Hero (Novato, Calif., 2002).

46 A miserly economy TR copied this extract out by hand, along with similar pronouncements at other stages of his career, for Julian Street to quote in The Most Interesting American. Ms. preserved in JS.

47 The camp was run Clifford, Citizen Soldiers, 48–49, 82–83; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.226. TR.Jr. was a founder-member of a preparedness-advocacy group, formed early in 1915, which at first called itself the American Legion (not to be confused with the permanent organization founded after World War I), then gradually took on more substantial shape and power as the Military Training Camps Association (MTCA). Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 71; Clifford, Citizen Soldiers, 60–69.

Historical Note: TR was no stranger to the fantasy of a surprise invasion of the United States. Earlier in the summer of 1915, he had acted as a consultant to a film entitled The Battle Cry of Peace, produced and directed by his movie-mogul neighbor, J. Stuart Blackton of Vitagraph Pictures. (See 283.) Battle Cry, based on Hudson Maxim’s alarmistDefenseless America (New York, 1915), opened at the same time as the Plattsburg camp, and was a box-office smash, despite negative reviews mocking its deliberate sensationalism.

All that exists of the movie today is a 400-foot fragment, eerily showing choked and blinded New Yorkers trying to escape from a lower Manhattan dense with the smoke and rubble of firebombed buildings. For a full account of the production and phenomenal success of Battle Cry, and the ideological quarrel it caused between TR and Hugo Münsterberg, see chap. 2 of David A. Gerstner, Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (Durham, N.C., 2006). See also TR, Letters, 8.989–91.

48 It was an excellent For the sample sufferings of one trainee, see Arthur Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis (New York, 1992), 315–16.

49 Davis, the only man present Lubow, The Reporter Who Would Be King, 309–12, 315–16.

50 “I like him” Clifford, Citizen Soldiers, 85.

51 It was tempting TR had shown an advance copy of his remarks to Wood and allowed the general to edit them. Charles McGrath clumsily gave the unedited version to the press. The New York Times, commenting on this release, allowed that TR “could use more moderation in his expression,” but nevertheless praised him for performing “a service to his country” in drawing attention to the need for national preparedness. TR, Letters, 8.965; The New York Times, 26 Aug. 1915.

52 “Let him get out” The New York Times, 26 Aug. 1915.

53 “As the Colonel” Street, The Most Interesting American, 5.

54 a reprimand to General Wood Garrison’s furious telegram, which left Wood apologetic but secretly unrepentant, is quoted in Clifford, Citizen Soldiers, 86–87. Dudley F. Malone, a WW appointee who attended Plattsburg as an observer for the administration, denounced TR’s speech as “both novel and treasonable.” The New York Times, 27 Aug. 1915.

55 the Colonel dictated “I am, of course, solely responsible for the whole speech,” TR declared, avoiding comment on his unscripted remarks at Plattsburg station. “General Wood had no more idea than Secretary Garrison what I was going to say.” The New York Times, 27 Aug. 1915.

56 “It was not” Street, The Most Interesting American, 9–10.

57 The young man was convinced Street in TR, Works, 9.203.

58 “The Master of the house” Julian Street, “Mrs. Roosevelt Edits a Statement of Her Husband’s,” ts. (JS).

59 He had to explain TR’s deposition, dated 24 Sept. 1915, is printed as an appendix in TR, Works, 4.604–6.

60 Shaken by the Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 395.

61 Washburn observed Ibid.; Adams, Letters, 6.702; Spring Rice to TR, 10 Oct. 1915 (TRP).

62 a “shifty, adroit” TR to Edith Wharton, 1 Oct. 1915 (EW).

63 “Terse, clear” Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 15.149.

64 “All these letters” Street, The Most Interesting American, 15.

65 the President’s most recent The New York Times, 22 July 1915.

66 On 5 October Bailey, A Diplomatic History, 580–81.

67 Representatives of all Ibid., 581; New York World, 6 Oct. 1915.

68 On the day after Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 302–3. WW married Mrs. Galt on 18 Dec. 1915.

69 “I am giving” TR to QR, 18 Oct. 1915 (TRC).

70 It was obvious TR quoted in Street, The Most Interesting American, 31–32; TR to KR, 15 Oct. 1915 (TRC).

Chronological Note: An important chapter in TR’s life came to an end on 14 Nov. 1915, when Booker T. Washington died. TR spoke at the memorial service in Tuskegee, Ala., on 12 Dec., and lobbied successfully for the appointment of Robert R. Moton to succeed Washington as principal of the Tuskegee Institute. In private correspondence he showed no resentment against Washington for supporting WW in 1912, calling the black educator “a genius such as does not arise in a generation.” Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 345–46; TR, Letters, 8.996–97.

71 Roosevelt had been pleased TR, Letters, 8.1455, 829; TR to KR, 8 Apr. 1915 (TRC).

72 As a token TR to QR, 18 Oct. 1915 (TRC).

73 The extermination of TR, Works, 4.226–27.

CHAPTER 23: THE MAN AGAINST THE SKY

1 Epigraph Robinson, “The Revealer (Roosevelt),” The Town Down the River, 127.

2 “With T.R.” Baker, notebook VIII.63, 11 Jan. 1916 (RSB).

3 “In the present crisis” Ibid. Contributing to the “crisis” atmosphere was the recent sinking, by an Austrian-flagged submarine, of the Italian liner Ancona, with 25 American citizens aboard. The submarine was actually German, but this inflammatory fact was kept secret for years.

4 “I can understand” Baker, notebook VIII.63–64, 11 Jan. 1916 (RSB).

5 Roosevelt was regretfully Street, The Most Interesting American, 32–33; TR to KR, 27 May 1915 (TRC).

6 “I’m a domestic” Street, The Most Interesting American, 33.

7 “Most certainly” Ibid., 53.

8 the possibility of uniting On 11 Jan. 1915, the Progressive National Committee, strong-armed by George W. Perkins, had publicly indicated a willingness to unite with the GOP under “a common leadership,” if Republicans would adopt a sufficiently Rooseveltian (i.e., patriotic, pro-preparedness, and socially fair) platform for the coming campaign. See TR, Letters, 8.1000, and Mowry, TR, 331.

9 persons lacking manly qualities For the effeminacy imputed to pacifists by TR and his fellow interventionists in World War I, see Gerstner, Manly Arts, 53ff.

10 “The way to treat” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.202.

11 the winter so far Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 391–93; The New York Times, 28, 21 Jan. 1916.

12 an appreciable minority The phrase is TR’s, in Letters, 8.1013.

13 Owen Wister’s bestselling Wister, The Pentecost of Calamity, chap. 14. For TR’s influence on the draft of this elegant little book, see Wister, Roosevelt, 349ff.

14 millions of poilus Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (New York, 1915), 238. Mrs. Wharton begged TR in the fall of 1915 to visit the Western Front and publicize the plight of the French. He declined, saying he would do so only when allowed to fight there. “But I won’t have the chance to try. The shifty, adroit and selfish logothete in the White House cannot be kicked into war.” (1 Oct. 1915 [EW].) She replied that she felt the same way about WW. “I think it was the saddest moment of my life when I realized that my country wanted him to be what he is.” (19 Oct. 1915 [ERDP].) Later TR wrote the introduction to Wharton’s The Book of the Homeless (New York, 1916), an anthology raising funds for war refugees.

15 “Does anybody understand” The New York Times, 28 Jan. 1916.

16 “a proper and reasonable” Ibid. At another dinner at the Biltmore later that evening, WW, speaking extemporaneously, made an obtuse reference to certain “humbugs” who had “been at large a long time,” and could be silenced only by allowing them to expose themselves to public ridicule. His audience of movie producers listened mystified as the President rambled on about watching himself on film, in tones that implied he had drunk one toast too many.

17 Wilson proceeded Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 376–79; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.228–30, 277–78; The New York Times, 30 Jan., 4 Feb. 1916. Actually WW had asked Congress to double the size of the standing army to 140,000, and to increase the size of the fleet to 27 battleships, plus ancillary vessels—the largest defense appropriations yet requested in American history.

18 “Each of these” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.230.

19 epithets like “skunk” TR, Letters, 7.809.

20 “a Byzantine logothete” TR, Works, 20.243.

21 “If any individual” Ibid., 20.245–46.

22 “jungle fever” TR.Jr. to KR, 8 Mar. 1916 (KRP).

23 mountains of Allied money Mowry, TR, 333, notes that the earnings of the Dupont Company of Delaware increased from $5.6 million in 1914 to $57.8 million in 1915. For a detailed account of TR’s swing to the right, 1915–1916, see ibid., chap. 13.

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 opera 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 History 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.

38 “Old trumps” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 319. TR had been speaking earlier this night at the Academy of Music in Brooklyn, not, as Stoddard remembers, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia.

Biographical Note: Around this time, TR was asked by Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, to endorse Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (New York, 1916), a pro-Nordic racist diatribe with little foundation in science. “I hope … you may find an opportunity of saying something about it,” Osborn wrote on 16 Oct., “for at this time when the melting pot theory is so popular we cannot dwell too strongly on the value to this country of the finer elements.” TR received and read the book, with his usual speed, on the last day of the month, and responded to Osborn with some uncertainty. “It is suggestive and stimulating, as is true of Gobineau’s and Chamberlain’s books [see above, 647]; it shares their faults, and absolutely lacks the very qualities which Huxley and Darwin so eminently showed.” He said he needed to discuss the question of an endorsement over lunch. Osborn (to whom TR owed many Brazil-related favors) appears to have been a persuasive advocate. TR then allowed his name to be used in publicizing The Passing of the Great Race, doing lasting damage to his reputation.

He immediately regretted what he had done. On 15 Nov., Worral F. Mountain, the mayor of East Orange, N.J., visited TR and listened while “he tore paragraph after paragraph of Grant’s book to pieces of pure facts, and quoted not only American, but German and French historians as his authority.… He pathetically regretted that the book had been dedicated to him.” Osborn / TR correspondence (AMNH); Worrall Mountain diary, 15 Nov. 1916, photocopy provided to author by Thomas R. Mountain (AC). See also Dyer, TR and the Idea of Race, 17, and John P. Jackson, Jr., and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism and Science (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2004), 110ff.

39 a pair of British steamers The New York Times, 31 Oct. 1916.

40 “Just what” Leary, notebook 3, 3 Nov. 1916 (JJL).

41 eleven of the nineteen The New York Times, 1, 2 Nov. 1916. Five more Progressives, including William Allen White, publicly approved the pro-Democrat statement, but declined to endorse WW.

42 “Sir, when I” TR, Letters, 8.1122.

43 During the last Speech transcript from The New York Times, 4 Nov. 1916.

44 Roosevelt threw Leary, Talks with T.R., 332–33.

45 Mr. Wilson now dwells The New York Times, 4 Nov. 1916. Leary makes clear that these last two paragraphs were delivered extempore. At TR’s final, disgusted gesture, “the house was on its feet … storming the platform.” Leary, notebook 3, 3 Nov. 1916 (JJL).

46 “The old man’s” Leary, notebook 5, 5 Nov. 1916 (JJL); see also Leary, Talks with T.R., 3.

47 Wilson took the news Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson, 218.

48 “I hope you are” Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 221.

49 Roosevelt began to pack TR, Letters, 8.1133. By executive order in 1903, TR had transferred to the Library of Congress the papers of Presidents Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe as well as those of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. He now offered his own, asking only that they be held confidential until his death. The papers, forming the nucleus of TRP, arrived at the library in the new year of 1917 in six enormous locked trunks. “The Lord only knows where the key is,” TR advised. “Break the cases open, and start to work on them!” Today, TRP consists of approximately a quarter of a million items. For the full story of its acquisition, see the introduction by Paul T. Heffron to the TRP Index at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem.heffron.

50 “I am of no use” Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 128–29.

51 leadership changes Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 423. Zimmermann was the political ally of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, who by late 1916 had replaced Falkenhayn as the virtual dictators of Reich war policy.

52 The German ambassador Fort Wayne News, 9 Oct. 1916; Grey to Balfour, pencil draft inscribed “about end of Nov / 16” (AJB).

53 The document Bernstorff Sullivan, Our Times, 5.245–46.

54 “The President’s” Spring Rice to Balfour, 15 Dec. 1916 (AJB).

55 Four days later The New York Times, 21 Dec. 1916.

56 “If the contest” Ibid., 21 Dec. 1916.

57 Secretary Lansing felt Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 422.

58 Roosevelt, massively attired Leary, notebook 5 (JJL).

59 a sample list The New York Times, 11 Jan. 1917.

60 certain phrases glinted Edgar E. Robinson and Victor J. West, The Foreign Policy of Woodrow Wilson, 1913–1917 (New York, 1918), 126–28.

61 On 22 January Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 424–25.

62 It was inconceivable Sullivan, Our Times, 5.250–52.

63 only moderate applause Florence Spring Rice (eyewitness) to unnamed aunt, 9 Feb. 1917 (CSR).

64 the German foreign minister was Sullivan, Our Times, 5.256–58.

65 “as if the world” House, Intimate Papers, 1.439.

66 House knew what Ibid., 2.84.

67 Captain Rose of the U-53 Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, 3 Feb. 1917.

68 “If American ships” The Washington Post, 4 Feb. 1917 (italics added). The Housatonic, a freighter loaded with wheat, was sunk at noon GMT, i.e., 7 A.M. Washington time, so WW undoubtedly knew about the disaster when he went before Congress at 2 P.M. However, there was no confirmation that any of the 26 Americans aboard had been killed, and whether Rose had broken international law. In fact he had not.

69 The water cocks Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, 3 Feb., The Washington Post, 4 Feb., Mansfield (Ohio) News, 17 Feb. 1917.

70 Sir: I have TR, Letters, 8.1149–50.

71 “No situation” Ibid.

72 “In view of” TR to Baker (facsimile), 3 Feb. 1917; Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.194.

73 Over the past Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.116–17. See Baker’s reminiscence of the transformative effect of World War I, quoted in ibid., for the lucidity of expression that used to be the norm among American public figures.

74 Among his urgent Ibid., 1.85–86.

75 Ironically, on The New York Times, 6 Feb. 1917.

76 “It is not” Spring Rice to Balfour, 9 Feb. 1917 (AJB).

77 He emphasized that Sullivan, Our Times, 5.264–65.

78 U BOOT KRIEG Thomas Boghardt, “The Zimmermann Telegram: Diplomacy, Intelligence and the American Entry into World War I” (Working Paper No. 6–04, BMW Center for German and European Studies, 2003), 35, http://cges.georgetown.edu/.

79 “that polite, silent” TR, Letters, 8.957–58.

80 “a war in which” See 479.

81 one he had sketched TR to E. A. Van Valkenburg and William Draper Lewis on 5 Sept. 1914. See Bishop, TR, 2.370–71.

82 A new degree of neurosis One theory that did not occur to newspaper readers unschooled in Realpolitik was that Zimmermann might have disbelieved his own telegram—seeking only to curry the favor of his superiors in the Prussian military. A more plausible speculation is British intelligence officials used their intercept to alarm Wilson, in order to goad him and Congress into a declaration of war on their side. At the time, Britain’s role in deciphering and handing over the telegram was kept secret. Boghardt, “The Zimmermann Telegram,” 10–14, 19.

83 “A little group” The New York Times, 5 Mar. 1917.

84 Republicans and Democrats alike Richard Lowitt, “The Armed-Ship Controversy: A Legislative View,” Mid-America, 46 (Jan. 1964).

85 On Monday, 5 March Newark (Ohio) Advocate, 5 Mar., The New York Times, The Washington Post, 6 Mar. 1917.

86 “I beg your tolerance” Syracuse Herald, 5 Mar., The New York Times, The Washington Post, Galveston (Tex.) Daily News, 6 Mar. 1917.

87 “the lily-livered skunk” Leary, Talks with T.R., 327–28; TR to KR, 1 Mar. 1917 (TRC). The newspaper-crumpling incident was one of the few occasions anyone ever heard TR swear. Leary chose not to record the epithet.

88 On 9 March Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 434–35. The USS Algonquin was sunk by a U-boat on 12 Mar. 1917.

89 The first news The New York Times, 12 Mar., Mansfield (Ohio) News, 12 Mar. 1917.

90 The Russian army Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 439, 442; The Washington Post and The New York Times, 17 Mar. 1917.

91 On 20 March Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 437.

92 After the meeting Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 383; TR, Letters, 8.1164.

93 Baker wrote back TR, Letters, 8.1164.

94 “and she has” The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1917.

95 “We can perfectly” Ibid.

96 “I shall not come” Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 421.

97 “a communication” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 437.

98 “I shall be” The New York Times, 24 Mar. 1917. For an account of TR’s expedition—unusual for him, because he had no interest in fishing—see TR, Works, 4.314ff.

99 flaming with flags This phrase, written on 25 Mar. 1917, is taken from Washington Wife: Journal of Ellen Maury Slayden from 1897–1919 (New York, 1963), 296.

CHAPTER 25: DUST IN A WINDY STREET

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 63.

2 Henry Adams was just Adams, Letters, 6.749.

3 Theodore Roosevelt’s slow train Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 3 Apr. 1917. The following account of TR’s brief visit to Washington is taken from this source, plus the Oakland Tribune, same date, The Washington Post, Trenton Evening Times, and The New York Times, 4 Apr. 1917. See also Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 179.

4 another U.S.-flagged steamer The Aztec.

5 With a profound The Washington Post, 3 Apr. 1917. WW began his address with “Gentlemen of the Congress,” ignoring the presence before him of Jeannette Rankin (R, Mont.), the first woman ever to sit in the House of Representatives.

6 Williams had stood The New York Times, 4 Apr. 1917.

7 second largest devilfish TR’s host in Florida, Russell J. Coles, announced that the wingspan of the Colonel’s specimen was 16 feet 8 inches. The only larger devilfish, or manta ray, then known was in the American Museum of Natural History, and spanned 18 feet 2 inches. The New York Times, 4 Apr. 1917.

8 Senator Lodge, of all people San Antonio Light, 2 Apr. 1917. The pacifist, a young man, had called Lodge a “coward” for announcing that he would vote for a war resolution. Accounts vary as to who threw the first punch.

9 The White House was The New York Times, 4 Apr. 1917.

10 Roosevelt asked Oakland Tribune, 3 Apr. 1917.

11 “I don’t know” Lowell (Mass.) Sun, 4. Apr. 1917.

12 Edith was brooding EKR to Flora Whitney, 11 Mar. 1918 (FWM). QR came down from Harvard two days later. EKR diary, 5 Apr. 1917 (TRC).

13 Quentin might have On 14 Apr., a Royal Flying Corps spokesman announced in Montreal that “if no American troops go to France, young Roosevelt will serve with the Canadian air forces.” The New York Times, 15 Apr. 1917.

14 “A state of war” The New York Times and Decatur Daily Review, 6 Apr. 1917.

15 “Of course, when” Metropolitan, Apr. 1917.

16 “I’ll take chances” Leary, Talks with T.R., 93.

17 When, at eleven The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1917. This visit has been frequently misdated by biographers, and as frequently misrepresented as the first encounter between TR and WW in the White House. See above, 348–52.

18 “The President received” Ibid. There is a photograph of TR holding this impromptu press conference in Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 610.

19 “If I say” Ibid.

20 Uninhibited, he Titusville (Pa.) Herald, 11 Apr. 1917; TR, Letters, 8.1173; The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1917.

21 “I have been” The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1917.

22 receiving visitors that evening Pringle, TR, 594–95 (misdated).

23 “I am aware” Newton D. Baker to Henry Pringle, 6 Nov. 1930, quoted in Pringle, TR, 595; The New York Times, 6, 11 Apr. 1917.

24 “I had a good” Leary, Talks with T.R., 96, 99. Remarks like these betrayed one of TR’s weaknesses—an inability to understand his opponents. WW had obviously not been briefed on his proposed division, and wanted to know where TR thought its equipment might come from. The regular army itself was woefully short of rifles and ammunition, and conscription would make it shorter still. TR replied that the French might help. “They have the equipment. They need men.” He added that he and his volunteers, many of them men of wealth, would initially fund the division themselves. The President seemed interested, but kept asking questions. Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 181; Leary, Talks with T.R., 97–98.

25 Let us use TR, Letters, 8.1171.

26 The Roosevelts knew Longworth, Crowded Hours, 254; The New York Times, 15 Apr., La Crosse Tribune, 22 Apr. 1917.

27 waited with Archie Since graduating from Harvard, ABR (who had a tendency to follow in the footsteps of his eldest brother) had been working for a carpet company in Thompsonville, Conn. ABR, “Lest We Forget,” Everybody’s Magazine, May 1919.

28 the hasty departure On 27 Mar., Trotsky had sailed from New York to join his radical colleagues in Petrograd. He was secretly arrested in Halifax, Canada, by British military authorities fearful that he would work against the Allied cause in Russia. The New York Times, 11 Apr. 1917.

29 Count Ilya Tolstoy The New York Times, 21 Apr. 1917; TR, Letters, 8.1186. The commission was eventually headed by Elihu Root.

30 Describing himself TR, Letters, 8.1186.

31 Privately, he told Leary, Talks with T.R., 98.

32 “If we do not” Ibid., 99.

33 “This policy” TR, Letters, 8.1174–75.

34 “My dear sir” Ibid., 8.1176–84, 1177, 1178, 1180.

35 “a repetition of” Alvin Johnson, Pioneer’s Progress: An Autobiography (New York, 1952), 253.

36 “For obvious reasons” TR, Letters, 8.1183–84.

37 and looking ahead Harding was also uneasy about having a flagrantly pro-German mistress. See James D. Robenalt, The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War (New York, 2009). Nobody in 1917 was so cynical as to suggest that Harding might have an interest in making it possible for Roosevelt to die gloriously in battle, but nine decades later, the thought does arise.

38 assuming that Wilson While remaining cagey about TR’s chances of being accepted for a command, WW had personally encouraged him to push for the volunteer amendment. TR, Letters, 8.1170.

39 “He is known” The New York Times, 29 Apr. 1917.

40 While the debate Ibid.; Spring Rice to TR, 19 Apr. 1917 (CSR).

41 “It will give me” Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.206.

42 Quentin was summoned Longworth, Crowded Hours, 254–55; Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 32.

43 By the first week Bishop, TR, 2.424.

44 “All the lines of him” Slayden, Washington Wife, 308. Balfour’s depressed look can clearly be seen in a photograph opposite p. 148 of Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.

45 His government was Strachan, The First World War, 228.

46 They agreed, in other Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.202.

47 Marshal Joffre’s pleadings Strachan, The First World War, 248. Joffre’s current army rank was ambiguous, because he himself had been replaced by Nivelle. But as the hero of the Marne, and leader of a crucially important mission, he was still perceived in America as the embodiment of France’s war effort.

48 Roosevelt and Joffre Leary, Talks with T.R., 222; TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 17 May 1917 (ARC); Leary, notebook 5 (JJL).

49 “He did not tell” Leary, Talks with T.R., 223.

50 There was another Charles Hanson Towne, The Balfour Visit (New York, 1917) 59ff.; Leary, Talks with T.R., 223–24; Leary, notebook 5 (JJL). To avoid upsetting the State Department, TR announced afterward that he and Balfour had been discussing the latter’s Gifford lectures on “Theism and Humanism.” See 673.

51 “Since the responsibility” Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.202.

52 Roosevelt believed Bishop, TR, 2.424.

53 “Tumulty tells me” O’Leary to TR, 17 May 1917, OL.

54 “It would be very agreeable” Ibid., 2.425.

55 an old military showman Claude Debussy, Préludes, bk. 2.6 (Paris, 1913).

56 James Amos Amos, TR: Hero to His Valet, 67; TR, Letters, 8.1195.

57 “I don’t care a continental” Leary, Talks with T.R., 239.

58 Kermit was at Plattsburg TR, Letters, 8.1194.

59 “My dear General” Ibid., 8.1193.

60 Pershing replied TR, Letters, 8.1193. The general did not add that he agreed with Baker and Wilson about the unwisdom of sending a TR-headed division to Europe. Cowley, The Great War, 417.

61 “army of the air” Cowley, The Great War, 294.

62 “Colonel Roosevelt is” Quoted in a memo by Parker, ca. 1928, transcribed and edited by Gary L. Lavergne in “John M. Parker’s Confrontation with Woodrow Wilson,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 10.2. During his interview with WW on the afternoon of 18 May 1917, Parker enraged the President by calling him an “autocrat” and “hired man of the people.”

63 “Never, except” Leary, Talks with T.R., 115. TR’s only ally in the Wilson administration wrote years later, “The only fault I ever had to find in him was that he took defeat too hard.” Anne W. Lane and Louise H. Wall, eds., The Letters of Franklin K. Lane(New York, 1922), 306.

64 “as good American” TR, Letters, 8.1195–97.

65 “It is possible” The New York Times, 28 May 1917.

66 “I told Wilson” Pringle, TR, 599.

67 secretly become engaged QR recalls their betrothal this month in a letter to Flora Whitney, ca. Nov. 1917 (FWM).

68 Edith Roosevelt had taken QR to Flora Whitney, 15 Nov. 1917 (FWM); EKR to QR, quoted in QR to Flora Whitney, 18 May 1918 (FWM). EKR was a woman whose affection had to be earned by prospective daughters-in-law. Eleanor qualified by virtue of shared Mayflower ancestors. Belle, regrettably, was a Democrat. Grace was too independent and pushy. Flora was a touch nouveau, but she had been received by British royalty, and there was much to be said for her expectations. Moreover, the girl spoke French as well as QR, and might pass for a Parisienne with her darkness and smallness and balletic way of posing for photographs.

69 “Ah, Fouf” QR to Flora Whitney, 28 May 1917 (FWM).

70 He was a year Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.287; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 289; Palmer, Newton D. Baker, 1.287; The New York Times, 9 Apr. 1917.

71 The war had so QR to KR, 19 June 1917.

72 Flora was as sure For a full account by Thomas Fleming of the love affair of QR and Flora Whitney, see Cowley, The Great War, 286–303.

73 Ted and Archie EKR diary, 20 June 1917 (TRC); TR to Lloyd George, 20 June 1917 (TRC). See also TR, Letters, 8.1201–3; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 256–57; EKR diary, 14 July 1917 (TRC).

74 Quentin simultaneously The New York Times, 15 July 1917; Parsons, Perchance Some Day, 265.

75 He told Edith EKR diary, 21 July 1917 (TRC); TR, Letters, 8.1356.

76 Dearest … Flora to QR, 19 July 1917 (FWM).

77 On Monday morning EKR diary, 23 July 1917 (TRC); EKR to ERD, 23 July 1917 (TRC).

78 She murmured Flora to ERD, 24 July 1917 (FWM); Longworth, Crowded Hours, 257–58.

CHAPTER 26: THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 81.

2 “I have always believed” TR to H. C. Stokes, 5 Aug. 1914 (TRC).

Biographical Note: TR’s last major statement on religion, an essay entitled “Shall We Do Away with the Church?” appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, Oct. 1917. It confirmed that faith, for him, was a social rather than spiritual force. Decrying clerical formalism as “the enemy of religion” from the days of the Pharisees to those of modern “ultra-sabbatarians,” he argued that nevertheless, “a churchless community … is a community on the rapid downgrade.” Conversely, communities already depressed by economic or other misfortune, such as the “abandoned-farm” regions of New York and the poor-white South, became revitalized when church activities resumed. The church was a sort of moral gymnasium: to attend Sunday services was to “tone up” one’s system for the rest of the week. Communal worship gave the individual a sense of belonging to a larger whole. It helped resolve the opposing tensions of “envy and arrogance.” There was much to be said, too, for the aesthetic beauty of the litany and religious music. TR acknowledged that charismatic evangelists could arouse “that flame of the spirit which mystics have long known to be real and which scientist now admit to be real,” but he noted that such ardor subsides quickly. He was contemptuous of Calvinism because of its “tendency to confuse pleasure and vice.” The ideal faith was democratic rather than domineering, and valued good works over dogma.

3 He was being punished In an impotent gesture, TR published his entire correspondence with Newton D. Baker in the Aug. 1917 issue of Metropolitan magazine.

4 “I love you, dearest” QR to Flora Whitney, 23 July 1917 (FWM).

5 “Flora came over” TR to QR, 28 July 1917 (FWM).

6 It was too early Flora to QR, 18 Dec. 1917; Flora to ERD, 24 July 1917 (FWM).

7 “I am so sorry” Flora to ERD, 24 July 1917 (FWM).

8 On 9 August TR, Letters, 8.1221–22. ABR was transferred to the Twenty-sixth Infantry in late July 1917. ABR, “Lest We Forget.”

9 “I had no idea” TR, Letters, 8.1221–22.

10 In a snub The New York Times, 8 Aug. 1917; TR to Julian Street, ca. 8 Aug. 1917 (JS). Taft had his own joke during this period of delay-plagued mobilization. “When I see the way things are going in Washington, it makes my blood fairly boil,” he told Albert Beveridge. “But when I think how much madder they must make T.R., I feel a whole lot better.” Leary, Talks with T.R., 200.

11 symptoms of extreme stress Carleton B. Case, Good Stories About Roosevelt (Chicago, 1920), 115; TR, Letters, 8.1207; EKR to KR, 19 Aug. 1917 (KRP).

12 “an absolutely selfish” TR, Letters, 8.1224. For an example of TR’s paranoia about WW at this time, see his reprimand to William Allen White for a making a complimentary reference to the President in ibid., 8.1197–99.

13 Seven months after TR to KR, 10 Dec. 1917 (TRC); TR, Letters, 8.1225.

14 He was diverted KR to TR, 12 Aug. 1917 (KRP); TR, Letters, 8.1226–27.

15 Another thing Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 77–78; TR, Letters, 8.1207.

16 “One of the” TR, Letters, 8.1229.

17 Dearest Quentin Original in TRC.

18 “I confess” QR to Flora Whitney, 19 Aug. 1917 (FWM).

19 “appalling reality” Ibid.

20 “The thing that” Ibid.

21 called on to interpret QR to Flora Whitney, 20 Aug. 1917 (FWM).

22 Flora registered QR to EBR, 20 Jan. 1918 (TRJP). Flora’s later feelings about Edith Normant are suggested by a large cross drawn over the girl’s image in a photograph QR sent her. Scrapbook, 17 Feb. 1918 (FWM).

23 “Ah, dearest” QR to Flora Whitney, 31 Aug. 1917 (FWM).

24 Among the lucrative Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 415; H. J. Whigham interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, 12 May 1949 (TRB).

25 It was therapeutic EKR to KR, 19 Aug. 1917 (KRP); TR, Letters, 8.1347.

26 No less a bandmaster EKR to KR, 22 Sept. 1917 (KRP); Oakland Tribune, 23 Sept. 1917; Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (New York, 1987), 68. TR’s contributions to the paper were posthumously collected and published as Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star: War-time Editorials (Boston, 1921).

27 The Roosevelts moved The New York Times, 27 Sept. 1917; TR, Letters, 8.1243.

28 Edith became concerned EKR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 26 Sept. 1917 (TRC); Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 553; unidentified news photographs, Sept. 1917, Pratt Collection scrapbook (TRB).

29 Other women EKR to Ruth Lee, 26 Sept. 1917 (AL); Mary Roberts Rinehart, My Story (New York, 1931), 241; Ida Tarbell in Baker, notebook XIV.74–75 (RSB); EKR to ERD, mid-Oct. 1917 (ERDP).

30 “The household enthralls” TR, Letters, 8.1246.

31 “What’s the matter” Jack Cooper interviewed by J. F. French, ca. 1922 (TRB).

32 Cooper said that Ibid.

33 The Reducycle, a machine Ibid.

34 “Cooper’s not” EKR diary, 22 Oct. 1917 (TRC). TR had, nevertheless, reduced his waist measurement by “three or four inches,” according to EKR’s count, “and he is just hard muscle.” EKR to KR, 27 Oct. 1917 (KRP).

35 Flora received QR to Flora Whitney, 9, 13 Sept. 1917 (FWM).

36 “I don’t see” QR to Flora Whitney, 15, 25 Sept. 5 Dec., Oct. 1917 (FWM).

37 She felt the same Flora Whitney to QR, 1 Nov. 1917 (EDRP).

38 He confessed to her QR to Flora Whitney, 15 Nov., 11 Oct. 1917 (FWM).

39 Belle had allowed The New York Times, 27 Sept. 1917.

40 For Theodore Roosevelt Boston Evening Transcript photograph, ca. 4 Oct. 1917 (KRP); TR, Letters, 8.1245.

41 At the beginning of November Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 474–77.

42 The Willy-Nicky Correspondence New York, 1918.

43 “the folly of” Ibid., iii.

44 The Foes of Our Own Household New York, 1917. Reprinted in TR, Works, 21.

45 He argued that The Nation, 15 Nov. 1917.

46 The critic was Ibid.

47 “I have never” To TR, 8 Oct. 1917, Georges Clemenceau, Correspondance, 1858–1928 (Paris, 2008), 523.

48 Flora no longer In an effort to cheer Flora (and himself) up, TR took her with him on a short speaking trip to Toronto at the end of November. His rapturous reception in that city, where he spoke in favor of Canada’s Victory Loan, served only to intimidate Flora. The New York Times, 27 Nov. 1917.

49 There is ruin Robinson, Collected Poems, 82.

CHAPTER 27: THE DEAD ARE WHIRLING WITH THE DEAD

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 355.

2 partying with the Ned McLeans Longworth, Crowded Hours, 266.

3 The Colonel agreed Wallace, Sagamore Hill, 1.30.

4 “If you wish to” TR, Letters, 8.1266–67.

5 Ted and Dick Derby Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 77–78; TR, Letters, 8.1266–67.

6 This imbalance The United States had declared war on Austria-Hungary on 7 Dec. 1917.

7 mud and Scheisse The latter was real. Torrential rains, combined with British bombardment of the clay fields around Passchendaele, destroyed the area’s intricate sewage system and turned the mud into a slough of human and animal waste.

8 On Saturday, 5 January Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 321; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.446; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 482–83; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 470–71.

9 Wilson presented Lloyd Morris, Not So Long Ago (New York, 1949), 414; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 471. For a newsman’s take on the hyperactive Creel, who may have been an inspiration to Joseph Goebbels, see Sullivan, Our Times, 5, chap. 21.

10 “A general association” WW’s original typescript text quoted in Daniel Boorstin, ed., An American Primer (Chicago, 1966), 2.772ff.

11 The last point Lloyd George had proposed many of the same ideas as WW, only three days before in London. Strachan, The First World War, 303–4.

12 “Le bon Dieu” Charles à Court Repington, The First World War: 1914–1918 (Boston, 1920), 472.

13 “I am sorry” Leary, notebook 8 (JJL).

14 ten speeches in nine days TR, Letters, 8.1493. For a charming account of TR’s tour of city child-welfare facilities on 16 and 17 Jan. 1918, see Sara J. Baker, Fighting for Life (New York, 1939), 176–82.

15 Witty and graceful Baker, notebook XV.42 (RSB). Offstage, Carl Akeley found TR to be consumed that night with a sense of doom threatening one or more of his sons.

16 Republican strategists A front-page story in the The New York Times, 24 Jan. 1918, reported that TR had again become “leader of the Republican Party.”

Biographical Note: The immediate reason for TR’s visit to Washington in Jan. 1917 was a crisis in confidence in the administration’s management of the war effort. He and Senator George F. Chamberlain, a respected Democrat and chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, had attacked Newton D. Baker’s War Department at a meeting of the National Security League in New York, Chamberlain sensationally announcing, “The military establishment of America had broken down.” The result was a short-lived bipartisan campaign, involving TR, to create a coalition war cabinet like that of Lloyd George’s government in Britain. However, Roosevelt Republicans—the old term could now be revived—had been trying since Nov. 1917 to get the Colonel to come to town and help them plot ways to break the Democratic monopoly of the government. “They were all of them anxious to have me take some position of leadership,” TR reported to William Allen White, “and equally anxious that … I should not think it committed them to making me the candidate in 1920.” He was being coy when he wrote this, because Senators Smoot and Bourne had already made clear that they wanted him to run for another term as president. Alice exulted in the prospect of a resurgent GOP. “My father president again and my husband speaker.…” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.74–75; TR, Letters, 8.1274, 1307; ERD to Richard Derby, 6 Dec. 1917 (ERDP); Cordery, Alice, 264.

17 He took Edith TR, Letters, 8.1276–77; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 264ff.; The Washington Post, 22–25 Jan. 1917 passim; Adams, Letters, 2.782; Cecil Spring Rice to Florence Spring Rice, 13 Sept. 1917 (CSR). Spring Rice, never popular with the Wilson administration, had been effectively sidelined as British ambassador since Balfour’s visit to Washington in the spring of 1917. He was succeeded by Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Lord of Reading, in the new year of 1918, allegedly on the grounds of ill health.

18 “Mother found” TR to KR, 29 Jan. 1918 (TRC). TR unconsciously inverted Wilde’s original lines, from The Harlot’s House (1885): The dead are dancing with the dead, / The dust is whirling with the dust.

19 severe pain in the rectum The following narrative of TR’s near-death experience in Feb. 1917 is largely based on information collected by John J. Leary in notebook 7 (JJL), and on daily letters sent by ERD to her husband in France (TRC). Specific medical details come from the report of Dr. Walton Martin to Richard Derby, 16 Feb. 1918 (ERDP). Quotations are cited separately.

20 An abscess had formed The abscess, inflaming his right buttock, appeared near the site of the one lanced by Dr. Cajazeira in Brazil. EKR to KR, 10 Feb. 1918 (KRP); Walton Martin to Richard Derby, 16 Feb. 1918 (ERDP).

21 Around four Josephine Stricker, “Roosevelt a Hero to His Private Secretary,” New York Tribune, 5 Oct. 1919; Leary, notebook 7 (JJL). Apparently, TR felt he had to keep an engagement back at his club, where a gathering of artists and writers expected to have dinner with him. They were informed that the Colonel was “ill with jungle fever.” Baker, notebook XV.73, 5 Feb. 1917 (RSB).

22 His pain Walton Martin to Richard Derby, 16 Feb. 1918 (ERDP).

23 The name of the James R. Lathrop, History and Description of the Roosevelt Hospital, New York City (New York, 1893). The hospital was endowed by James Henry Roosevelt (1800–1863).

24 “Father looks terribly” ERD to Richard Derby, 6 Feb. 1917 (ERDP). ERD inadvertently transposed the last two words.

25 Roosevelt’s only complaint Leary, notebook 7 (JJL).

26 At 4:10 P.M. The details of this operation, in which four surgeons participated, are in the report of Walton Martin to Richard Derby, 16 Feb. 1918 (ERDP).

27 “should have no” Leary, notebook 7 (JJL).

28 On the contrary Walton Martin to Richard Derby, 16 Feb. 1918 (ERDP). Duel told Julian Street that he had operated on four cases similar to TR’s, and all the patients had died. Memo, “In the Roosevelt Hospital, February 1918” (JS).

29 “He’s a peach” Leary, notebook 7 (JJL).

30 He was told Walton Martin to Richard Derby, 16 Feb. 1918 (ERDP).

31 The first he WHT to TR, 8 Feb. 1918 (TRP); TR to WHT, 12 Feb. 1918 (WHTP). In 1902, as governor of the Philippines, WHT reported his alimentary problems to the War Department in more detail than seemed necessary for national security. See Taft file #164, Elihu Root Papers, Library of Congress.

32 Edwin Arlington Robinson penned To TR, 5 Mar. 1919 (TRP); TR, Letters, 8.1298.

33 “You stand” TR to QR, 16 Feb. 1918 (TRC).

34 When, at last ERD to Richard Derby, 27 Feb. 1918 (ERDP); QR to Flora Whitney, 16 Feb. 1918 (FWM); QR to EBR, 20 Jan., 4 Feb. 1918 (TRJP) (“How can I write ‘interesting’ letters like Arch’s when, aside from my epistolary talents, he is at the Front & I’membuscé?”); Edith Normant scrapbook (FWM).

35 in Gallic tastes Hamilton Coolidge to Flora Whitney, 18 Sept. 1918 (FWM). In another letter Ham spoke enviously of QR’s “complete mastery of the language.” (To “Mother,” 10 Mar. 1918 [TRC].) “[The Normants] say I must be half French.” QR to Flora Whitney, 13 Feb. 1918 (FWM).

36 YOUR LETTER Original, ca. 28 Feb. 1918, in TRC. There is no record of TR reprimanding ABR for demoralizing QR. In late Apr., the latter heard from Eleanor that ABR was saying “I had more brains than any of the rest of the family, but he didn’t think I’d get as far as the rest of the family.… I lacked push.” QR to Flora Whitney, ca. May 1918 (FWM).

37 “There is therefore” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 474. On 8 Mar. 1918, Clemenceau reminded the French Chamber of Deputies “that we are at war, that it is necessary to wage war, to think only of war.… So let us wage war.” Strachan, The First World War, 259–60.

38 still unsteady John Leary compared TR’s gait at this time to that of “a landlubber on a pitching deck at sea—with his legs wide apart as though to brace himself.” Leary, notebook 8 (JJL).

39 Cove Neck exuded ERD to Richard Derby, 24 Feb. 1918 (ERDP); TR to QR, 5 Mar. 1918 (TRC). QR had not known about his father’s near-death experience until he picked up a French newspaper and read, five days after the event, “La condition de M. Roosevelt est sérieuse, et les médicins ont conseillés une nouvelle opération.” He had had to wait three more days for a reassuring telegram from Flora. QR to Flora Whitney, 13 Feb. 1918 (FWM).

40 “I wish you” TR to QR, 5 Mar. 1918 (TRC).

41 On 13 March EKR to KR, 17 Mar. 1918 (KRP); TR, Letters, 8.1300–301. ABR, fighting in the Twenty-sixth Infantry’s first line engagement of the war, had been wounded in the Toul sector. ABR, “Lest We Forget.”

42 just given birth On 18 Feb. 1918. In the author’s opinion, “Archie Junior” was, of all TR’s direct descendants, the one who inherited the most of the Colonel’s personal and intellectual characteristics. See Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer (Boston, 1988).

43 “At lunch Mother” TR, Letters, 8.1301; ERD to Richard Derby, 12 Mar. 1918 (ERDP). TR wrote Clemenceau to say that ABR had won a French medal, and added, “I am prouder of his having received it than of my having been President!” TR, Letters, 8.1303.

44 A few days TR, Letters, 8.1301; Richard Derby to TR, 13 Mar. 1918 (ERDP).

45 now wished to fight TR, Letters, 8.1310.

46 “Father had 2” ERD to Richard Derby n.d., ca. Mar. 1918 (ERDP). The Sagamore Hill farm raised cows, hogs, and chickens, and was therefore self-supporting in milk and eggs. Crops included standard vegetables and fruits, plus hay, corn, and apples for sale. TR, Letters, 8.1352.

47 It was intended TR, Letters, 8.1299.

48 poisonous phosgene fumes Strachan, The First World War, 295.

49 Under the circumstances The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1918.

50 He returned home On his way back, TR stopped in Boston to admire Archie, Jr. TR, Letters, 8.1494.

Biographical Note: TR flattered himself that his mammoth Portland speech, which took three hours to deliver, “amounted to the acceptance, by the Republicans of Maine, of the Progressive platform of 1912 developed and brought up to date.” (TR, Letters, 8.1307.) But its title (“Speed Up the War and Take Thought for After the War”) made clear what his current priorities were. He berated the administration for its unpreparedness and consequent slow pace of mobilization, recommended the creation of a five-million-man army (on the assumption the war would last another three years), demanded that Congress revoke the charter of the German-American Alliance, and called for a declaration of war against Turkey. Although he did, in fact, lay out a domestic policy plan far more detailed and progressive than that of the Democrats in 1918, his bellicose rhetoric naturally got most coverage in the national press. The speech was printed and widely circulated. See The New York Times, 29 Mar. 1918.

51 A terrified Jules Jusserand Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 474.

52 “Wilson always follows” ERD to Richard Derby, quoting an attendee at the dinner, 27 Mar. 1918 (ERDP); Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 475. McAdoo’s remark was particularly striking because he happened to be WW’s son-in-law.

53 a place for Kermit TR, Letters, 8.1316.

54 He calculated QR to Flora Whitney, 24 Mar. 1918 (FWM).

55 As for your getting killed (handwritten) TR to QR, 17 Mar. 1918 (TRC).

56 Quentin foresaw QR to Flora Whitney, 27 Mar. 1918 (FWM).

57 When Quentin next heard TR, Letters, 8.1311.

58 What information reached Richard Derby to TR, 13 Mar. 1918 (ERDP); medical report, 12 Mar. 1918 (ERDP); Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 95; QR to Flora Whitney, 30 Apr. 1918 (FWM).

59 Quentin was lucky QR to Flora Whitney, 30 Apr., 2 May 1918 (FWM); Eleanor Roosevelt to mother, 19 Apr. 1918 (TRJP); Richard Derby to TR, 13 Mar. 1918 (ERDP).

60 Roosevelt chafed TR, Letters, 8.1311; ERD to Richard Derby, 22 Apr. 1918 (ERDP); TR, Letters, 8.1312. Shipments of men and matériel, Stout wrote, were in fact accelerating at a compound rate. By June, the flood should be overwhelming. “Neither a newspaper or a public man,” he cautioned TR, “can afford to be too far ahead of the people.” Quoted in ERD to Richard Derby, 22 Apr. 1918 (ERDP).

61 Ethel wrote Dick, 17 May 1918 (ERDP).

62 Two days later Edith Normant scrapbook (ERDP).

63 Roosevelt had the Leary, notebook 8 (JJL).

64 Roosevelt took his Ibid.

65 “Theodore!” Ibid.; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 435 (eyewitness account).

66 “He feels” Leary, notebook 8 (JJL). See also TR’s follow-up letter to WHT: “What a dreadful creature he [WW] is!… In this really very evil crisis, we need a leader and not a weathercock.” (TR, Letters, 8.1336–37.) WHT, evidently no longer a pacifist, believed that WW was more interested in talking than fighting, and was a Bolshevik sympathizer to boot.

67 If present trends Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 496.

68 like summer lightning The image is Eleanor’s, in Day Before Yesterday, 97.

69 Just as disturbing EBR to mother, 4 June 1918 (TRJP); Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 97; official citation for “conspicuous gallantry” published in Harvard Club Bulletin, Aug. 1918 (KRP).

70 With this and TR, Letters, 8.1338; QR to Flora Whitney, 2 June 1918 (FWM). QR to Flora Whitney, 2 June 1918 (FWM).

71 “La guerre est finie” Cowley, The Great War, 424.

72 General Pershing tried Strachan, The First World War, 298; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 499.

73 On 7 June EKR to KR, 9 June 1918 (KRP); Leary, notebook 9 (JJL); EKR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 16 June 1918 (CRR).

74 When they got back EKR to Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, 16 June 1918 (CRR).

75 “My joy for you” TR to QR, 19 June 1918.

76 “He evidently felt” QR to Flora Whitney, 17 June 1918 (FWM).

77 “It is really” QR to ERD, 17 June 1918 (FWM); QR to Flora Whitney, 17 June 1918 (FWM).

78 “Colonel, one of” TR to KR, 25 June 1918 (KRP).

79 a pile of books One item on TR’s reading pile reflected his understandable new interest in combat flying. It was Henry Bordeaux’s Le Chevalier de l’air: Vie héroïque de Guynemer (Paris, 1918). TR appears to have read it in French, but he wrote an introduction to the American edition, translated by Louise M. Sill and published as Georges Guynemer, Knight of the Air (New Haven, Conn., 1918). With palpable concern for Quentin, he wrote that “the air service in particular is one of such peril that membership in it is of itself a high distinction.”

80 “I have finished” TR to QR, 19 June 1918 (TRC).

81 a macabre souvenir QR to Flora Whitney, 20 June 1918 (FWM).

82 “There’s no better” QR to Flora Whitney, 23 Feb. 1918 (FWM).

83 “The real thing” QR to EKR, 25 June 1918 (TRC); QR to Flora Whitney, 29 June 1918 (FWM). This posting was to Touquin, a patrol center for the area between Château-Thierry and Reims. QR was billeted in the adjacent village of Mauperthuis.

84 On the Fourth Parsons, Perchance to Dream, 274.

85 Little tricolors Ibid.

86 Six days later QR to Flora Whitney, 11 July 1918 (FWM). A later letter from Hamilton Coolidge to Flora revealed that inexperience had something to do with this encounter: at first QR had “joined [the] Boche formation by mistake,” thinking it was his own. 16 July 1918 (FWM).

87 He and Eleanor Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 100. During this visit, QR told EBR that if any of his family were to die in the war, he hoped it would be himself, because his other brothers and Dick all had children. “I think he had a very distinct feeling that he might never get home again,” EBR wrote her mother. 28 July 1918 (TRJP).

88 a little French town Mauperthuis, adjacent to Saints and Touquin.

89 “O ruin!” QR to Flora Whitney, 11 July 1918 (FWM).

90 “Whatever now befalls” TR, Letters, 8.1351.

91 On the afternoon TR to KR, 21 July 1918 (KRP); The New York Times, 18 July 1918; Philip Thompson, “Roosevelt and His Boys,” McClure’s Magazine, Nov. 1918; Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 412.

92 “It seems dreadful” TR to KR, 16 July 1918 (KRP).

93 Then a cable John J. Pershing to TR, 17 July 1918 (ERDP). The chronology of events affecting TR and EKR over the next few days is somewhat confused, due to conflicting newspaper reports. It is reconstructed here on the basis of primary accounts. Pershing’s cable was not released to the press until late on 18 July.

94 At sunset Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 423.

95 “But—Mrs. Roosevelt?” Thompson, “Roosevelt and His Boys.” By now (7:30 A.M.), TR had at least informed EKR that QR was missing. Her telegram transmitting this news to ERD in Maine was received “early” on the 17th. ERD to Richard Derby, 17 July 1918 (ERDP).

96 He disappeared Thompson, “Roosevelt and His Boys.”

97 “Quentin’s mother” The New York Times, 18 July 1918.

98 “I must go” Bishop, TR, 2.452.

99 Telegrams of condolence Josephine Stricker, “Roosevelt a Hero to His Private Secretary,” New York Tribune, 5 Oct. 1919.

100 “We must do” Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 423.

101 Roosevelt had no sooner Hermann Hagedorn memo, 20 Sept. 1923 (HP).

Biographical Note: The Harvard-educated Hagedorn (1882–1964) had attracted TR’s attention in 1912 by publishing a poem and contributing the fee ($10) to the Progressive Party. A friend and patron of Edwin Arlington Robinson, he began accumulating biographical materials on TR in 1917. His research materialized in three valuable if saccharine books, The Boys’ Life of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1918), Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston, 1921), and The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill (New York, 1954). From 1918 on he dedicated most of his career to memorializing TR, editing the National and Memorial editions of TR’s collected works and serving as director of three successive Theodore Roosevelt associations. A letter TR wrote introducing Hagedorn to William W. Sewell in 1917 should serve as a model to public figures entrusting their lives to a responsible biographer: “I want you to tell him everything, good, bad and indifferent. Don’t spare me the least bit. Give him the very worst side of me you can think of, and the very best side of me that is truthful.… Tell him about our snowshoe trips.… Tell him about the ranch. Tell him how we got Red Finnegan and the two other cattle thieves. Tell him everything.” TR, Letters, 8.1244–45.

102 “Now, Colonel” Hermann Hagedorn memo, 20 Sept. 1923 (HP).

103 Afterward Hagedorn noted Pringle, TR, 601. See also Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 429–30.

104 Edith came ERD to Richard Derby, 17 July 1918 (ERDP).

105 “Before the Colonel” The New York Times, 19 July 1918.

106 “My fellow voters” Lafayette Gleason, verbatim transcript of TR’s remarks at Saratoga on 17 July 1918, preserved by Elmer R. Koppelmann. Copy in AC.

107 “Surely in this great crisis” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.500.

108 Before he got TR, Letters, 8.1341; WHT to TR, 19 July 1918 (WHTP); Bishop, TR, 2.453–54.

109 “I have only one” Robinson, My Brother TR, 346.

110 QUENTIN’S PLANE The New York Times, 20 July 1918.

111 EVERY REASON 12:50 P.M., 19 July 1918 (FWM).

112 Newspapers got The New York Times, 20 July 1918.

113 The Colonel, clutching F. Trubee Davison interviewed by Mary Hagedorn, 30 Mar. 1955 (HH).

114 speech exquisitely calligraphed One of these copies is preserved in the Pratt Collection (TRB). Included is an introduction by J. B. Millet, who collaborated on the speech, noting that after the first report of QR’s disappearance, he had suggested to TR that they postpone their work (presumably on the afternoon of 16 July). TR insisted on finishing it. “I saw by his manner, and by his kindly words to me, that it was a relief to have a subject before him to which he could give his whole heart.” Ibid.

115 “What hope” Ibid. “It was one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of control and courage that I have ever seen.”

116 The telegram confirmed WW to TR, 20 July 1918 (TRP).

117 On Saturday Original in ERDP. Chamery is misspelled “Chambry.” According to an American POW who witnessed the ceremony on 15 July 1918, QR was buried in the presence of a detachment of approximately 1,000 German soldiers, with officers standing at attention before the ranks. “I was told afterward … that they paid Lieut. Roosevelt such honor not only because he was a gallant aviator, who died fighting bravely against odds, but because he was the son of Colonel Roosevelt, whom they esteemed as one of the great Americans.” Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 175–76.

CHAPTER 28: SIXTY

1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 97.

2 When American forces A friend [“Bill”] to Flora Whitney, 10 Aug. 1918 (FWM). This description, reporting a personal visit to QR’s grave shortly after his burial, is cited as more primary than that given in Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 176.

3 The autopsy Official German press announcement, relayed to the Roosevelts from the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, quoted in ERD to Flora Whitney, “Thursday,” July 1918 (FWM). See also Kermit Roosevelt, Quentin Roosevelt, 172–74.

4 Woodrow Wilson’s telegram The New York Times, 21 July 1918. See also EBR to mother, 19 July 1918 (TJRP).

5 “Ex-Tsar of Russia” The official Russian wireless announcement quoted by The Times reported only Nicholas’s death on 16 July. His wife and son were said to be “in a place of security.” No mention was made of the four Romanov daughters.

6 That Sunday happened ERD to Richard Derby, 21 July 1918 (ERDP).

7 They returned home Ibid.; Robinson, My Brother TR, 346.

8 “Why not come” ERD to Richard Derby, 22 July 1918 (ERDP).

9 brown-shingled “cottages” Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., The Summer Cottages of Islesboro, 1890–1930 (Islesboro, Maine, 1989), 28 and passim; Belfast (Maine) Republican Journal, 1 Aug. 1918. Ethel’s summer home is now known as the Edward Adams Cottage. Other visual and atmospheric details in this section derive from a tour arranged for the author by the Islesboro Historical Society in Sept. 2006.

10 He and Edith arrived EKR to KR, 28 July 1918 (KRP); Belfast (Maine) Republican Journal, 1 Aug. 1918.

11 “In time” TR, Letters, 8.1360.

12 That was even ERD to KR, 28 July 1918 (KRP); TR to ABR, 21 July 1918 (ABRP); ERD to Richard Derby, 21 July 1918 (ERDP).

13 “I can see” TR to KR, 28 July 1918 (KRP).

14 Nevertheless, the place TR, Letters, 8.1358; Belfast (Maine) Republican Journal, 1 Aug. 1918; Flora Whitney to ERD, 28 Aug. 1918 (ERDP).

15 “It is no use” TR, Letters, 8.1360.

16 Even his poems QR, untitled poem about star-gazing, 1915, preserved in FWM.

17 explosive rather than propulsive “I do lack push, and I haven’t any idea why.” QR to Flora Whitney, ca. early May 1918 (FWM).

18 “black gloom” Hamilton Coolidge memorial to QR, unfinished ms., copied in ERD to Flora Whitney, 4 June 1919 (FWM); Coolidge to Flora, 16 July 1918 (FWM).

19 As Edith had Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 397; EKR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 5 May 1912 (ARC).

20 Only in two As far as one can tell, QR’s affair with Flora was unconsummated. His letters to her are devoid of any hint of sexual intimacy. One (6 Oct. 1917 [FWM]) loftily invokes the virtue of coming to marriage “clean and pure.” As such, it reads like an outtake from his father’s college diary of 38 years before. See Morris, The Rise of TR, 63.

21 Test-piloting QR to ERD, 22 Dec. 1917 (ERDP); QR to Flora Whitney, 27 Jan. 1918 (FWM).

22 “The months that” QR to Flora Whitney, 21 Feb. 1918 (FWM).

23 “His back will” Quoted in ERD to KR, 25 Aug. 1918 (KRP).

24 “form succeeds form” TR, Works, 14.70.

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 forMetropolitanmagazine 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 ofThe 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.

80 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.

81 “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.

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

83 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.

84 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.

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

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

87 He would have to Ibid.

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

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

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

91 “Well, anyway” Ibid.

92 “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.

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

94 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).

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

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

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

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

99 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.

100 “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.)

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

102 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.

103 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.

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

105 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.

106 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.

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

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

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

110 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.”

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

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

113 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.

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

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

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

117 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.

118 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.

5 “the cause of death” Speculative report on TR’s final illness, compiled by Drs. Paul and Andrew Marks, 19 Jan. 2010 (AC). The authors of this document are, respectively, president emeritus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and cardiologist/professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

6 a broken heart John H. Richards quoted in New York Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1919; ERD to KR, 6 Jan. 1919 (ERDP). “Mother and I felt that part of his illness was due to his grief for Quentin—It took the fight from him … must have been his heart.”

Biographical Note: Drs. Marks and Marks comment further, in a review of the medical narrative provided them by the author, as follows: “One can speculate that in the 1870s, when [TR] was ‘advised by Harvard doctors on graduation to lead sedentary scholarly life because of heart weakness,’ that the examining physician may have heard a heart murmur. The heart murmur could have been secondary to early childhood rheumatic heart disease or a congenital heart valve abnormality.” However, “his rigorous [subsequent] life suggests that if he did have a heart murmur it did not significantly impair cardiac function.” TR’s recurrent attacks of “Cuban fever” after 1898 were consistent with malaria. “The parasite can reside in the liver for years—with bouts of septicemia recurring and causing these symptoms.” His frequent “acute joint pains” probably were attacks of gout. Given his increasing weight, after his 50th birthday, joint symptoms could also reflect degenerative osteoarthritis, particularly of the hip, knee, and ankle joints.” Returning to the question of TR’s coronary vulnerability, the doctors concede some likelihood of endocarditis. “But if he had endocarditis, possibly related to his leg infection seeding a damaged heart, his terminal course would have been marked by high fevers and evidence of infectious, embolic showers which would have been noticed by his physicians, i.e. hemorrhages, speech or motor deficiencies etc.… Further, embolism is unlikely since Faller recorded [six hours before TR’s death] ‘normal heart and pulse’—and this is very unlikely associated with a pulmonary embolus.” Allowing that the undisclosed amount of morphine administered to the patient four hours before his death may have caused the respiratory depression noticed by James Amos, the doctors nevertheless conclude that TR’s “recurrent chest pain/discomfort, obesity, and high blood pressure all make coronary artery disease likely,” leading to their speculative diagnosis of “myocardial infarction” as the prime cause of death.

For a conflicting opinion, stating that TR’s final illness was “most compatible with polyarticular gout,” but also with “reactive arthritis [and/or] rheumatic fever,” see Robert S. Pinals, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Inflammatory Rheumatism” Journal of Clinical Rheumatology, 14.1 (Feb. 2008).

The author has deposited a copy of his narrative of TR’s recorded medical problems in TRC.

7 it spread around the world Arthur Krock of The New York Times told Henry Pringle that he had watched President Wilson receiving cabled news of TR’s death en route to Modena, Italy. According to Krock, who was looking through a window of the presidential car, WW’s face registered “transcendent triumph.” Pringle treated this anecdote, which Krock retailed to him eleven years later, seriously in his 1931 biography of TR (602). It is true that WW received the news while traveling, but his reaction (so far as Krock could discern it through plate glass) can only be guessed at.

8 headed again for the presidency “Among party leaders today it was conceded that if Colonel Roosevelt had lived, he undoubtedly would have had the nomination for the presidency.” The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919.

9 took refuge in metaphor Henry A. Beers, Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman (New Haven, Conn., 1919), 8; “Theodore Roosevelt in Memoriam,” Natural History, Jan. 1919; William Dudley Foulke, A Hoosier Autobiography (New York, 1922), 221; New York Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1919; Slayden, Washington Wife, 354; Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 214; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 435.

10 Archibald Roosevelt announced The New York Times, 7, 8 Jan. 1919.

11 “It was my father’s” Ibid.

12 In a further Ibid.

13 ROOSEVELT DEAD A large fragile scrapbook album in TRC contains a collection of these headlines.

14 Even so, he Undated news clip in “Theodore Roosevelt” scrapbook, Pratt Collection (TRB).

15 “Mother, the adamantine” TR, Letters, 8.1266.

16 “Gone … gone” George Syran to Mr. and Mrs. Osbourne, 11 Jan. 1919.

17 “You did not” Ibid.

18 “She had a” Ibid. [sic]. During the afternoon of 6 Jan., the sculptor James Earle Fraser took a plaster cast of TR’s face. The macabre result may be seen in Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 627. According to Hamlin Garland, some books TR had been reading were still resting on the counterpane. Roosevelt House Memorial Bulletin, 2.2 (Fall 1923).

19 A perpetual drone The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 434; undated news clip in “Theodore Roosevelt” scrapbook, Pratt Collection (TRB). The air vigil was ordered by General William L. Kenly, director of military aeronautics.

20 The aerial watch The New York Times, 9 Jan. 1919.

21 The snow tapered off Except where otherwise indicated, the following account of TR’s funeral is based on ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP), and EBR to “mother,” 8 Jan. 1919 (TRJP), supplemented by reports in The New York Times, New York Evening Post, New York World, Oakland Tribune, Waterloo (Iowa) Evening Courier (AP), Greenville (Pa.) Evening Record (UP), 8 and 9 Jan. 1919, and clippings and photographs in the “Theodore Roosevelt” scrapbook, Pratt Collection (TRB).

22 “He looked” ERD to Richard Derby, 8 Jan. 1919 (ERDP).

23 Roosevelt’s disdain for pompe See 67.

24 He noticed a distraught EBR to “mother,” 8 Jan. 1919 (TRJP).

25 When through fiery trials Copied by John J. Leary (JJL).

26 “Theodore,” he said Abbott, Impressions of TR, 313; New York World, 9 Jan. 1919.

27 A single pull John J. Leary funeral notes (JJL).

28 As the engraved words TR’s coffin was lowered into the ground by a compressed-air device at 1:47 P.M. New York World, 9 Jan. 1919.

29 Lieutenant Otto Raphael “Roosevelt Night,” Middlesex Club proceedings, Boston, 27 Oct. 1921, 4–5 (TRB). For TR’s relationship with Raphael, see TR, An Autobiography, chap. 6.

30 One of the last Albert Cheney interview, 1920, TRB. Youngs Cemetery still functions. TR’s grave is maintained by the town of Oyster Bay.

31 “The man was” Carl Bode, ed., The New Mencken Letters (New York, 1997), 96.

32 Among the superlatives Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 380; The New York Times, 7 Jan. 1919; White, Autobiography, 552.

33 Woodrow Wilson’s sentiments The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1919.

34 Something like a superman New York Evening Post, 6 Jan. 1919.

35 He was hailed “Theodore Roosevelt” scrapbook, Pratt Collection (TRB); The New York Times, 8 Jan. 1919; Aimaro Sato, former Japanese ambassador to the United States and delegate to the Russo-Japanese peace conference at Portsmouth, N.H., in 1905, quoted in The New York Times, 10 Jan. 1919; Jules Jusserand address at Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 27 Oct. 1919, in Journal of American History, 13.3 (Fall 1919). Edith Wharton, recalling her meetings with TR in 1933, used the same simile as Jusserand: “Each of these encounters glows in me like a tiny morsel of radium.” Wharton, A Backward Glance, 317.

36 His survey of New York Tribune and The New York Times, 10 Feb. 1919. The quotation is from part 2 of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

37 “Mr. Roosevelt’s great” The Nation, 109.2836 (8 Nov. 1919).

38 Mr. Roosevelt has attained Ibid.

39 “Teddy” the lovable When Walter Lippmann was the senior statesman of American political journalism, he looked back on the many presidents he had known, and wrote that TR was the only one who could be described as “lovable.” Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston, 1980, New Brunswick, N.J. 1999), 64.

40 the book of all his books Joseph Bucklin Bishop, ed., Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children (New York, 1919). Largely as a result of this book, TR’s royalties increased from $3,150 in 1919 to $31,930. A modern reissue, illustrated and edited by Joan Paterson Kerr, is A Bully Father (New York, 1995).

41 Roosevelt’s mammoth 1911 letter Bishop, TR, 2.184–259; TR, Letters, 7.348–99. Even Stuart Sherman allowed, in a review of Bishop’s biography, that the Trevelyan letter was “a masterpiece … probably one of the longest epistles in the world.” The Nation, 112.2896 (5 Jan. 1921).

42 “The man was” William Allen White, Masks in a Pageant (New York, 1928), 326. The luxury Memorial Edition of TR’s Works was limited to 1,500 copies, 500 “for presentation” and 1,000 for sale. Hagedorn also published, in 1926, a cheaper National Edition, differently distributed among 20 volumes. For a summary of the contents of the Memorial Edition, see Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR, 345.

Personal Note: The author of this biography hereby expresses gratitude to the memory of John Gray Peatman, who in 1980 offered him a set of the Memorial Edition, “at the same price I paid for it in 1924—ten dollars a volume.”

43 Four female trumpeters John R. Lancos, “Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace: Study in Americanism,” in Naylor et al., TR, 26ff.; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 18. “Roosevelt House” is now Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site.

44 In 1925, Hagedorn Nan Netherton, “Delicate Beauty and Burly Majesty: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt Island,” National Park Service draft ts., 1980, 76–77. Copy in AC. Pope’s column of spray was intended to evoke TR’s geyser-like energy. Roosevelt Memorial Association, Plan and Design for the Roosevelt Memorial in the City of Washington (New York, 1925).

45 “fifth cousin by blood” See 416.

46 “greatest man I ever knew” James L. Golden, “FDR’s Use of the Symbol of TR in the Formation of His Political Persona and Philosophy,” in Naylor et al., TR, 577.

47 Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. The principal source for the following paragraphs is Charles W. Snyder, “An American Original: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.” in Naylor et al., TR, 95–106. The most comprehensive family history of the Roosevelts after TR’s death is Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 441–516.

48 Cousin Eleanor made things Eleanor Roosevelt’s campaign behavior sparked decades of hatred between the Oyster Bay (Republican) and Hyde Park (Democratic) branches of the Roosevelt family.

49 It was a question TR.Jr. could never bring himself to acknowledge that TR, reelected in 1912, would have been as centralized an authoritarian as FDR.

50 “one of the bravest” Patton quoted in Naylor et al., TR, 103. After World War II, a sentimental desire for juxtaposition led the Roosevelt family to override TR’s and EKR’s wishes (see 546) and transfer QR’s remains to the same cemetery. The bones of the two brothers now lie side by side.

51 nothing left to stand on See 554.

52 War in the Garden of Eden New York, 1919.

53 His nomadic nature Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 492–507.

54 Archie went to work See David M. Esposito, “Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt, 1894–1979,” in Naylor et al., TR, 107ff.

55 a selection of Archibald Roosevelt, ed., Theodore Roosevelt on Race, Riots, Reds, Crime (Metairie, La., 1968).

56 “Beatniks” Esposito in Naylor et al., TR, 115.

57 “I’m going to” Quoted by Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., interview with author, 3 Oct. 1981.

58 bellow the word “Americanism” Author’s personal recollection.

59 Flora Whitney died Biddle, The Whitney Women, 45–68 and passim. Gertude Vanderbilt Whitney’s statue of Flora is reproduced in Flora, 17.

60 “Hell, yes” Cordery, Alice, 314. For full details of this episode in ARL’s life, see ibid., chap. 15.

61 lifelong passion for reading See New York Society Library, The President’s Wife and the Librarian: Letters at an Exhibition (New York, 2009).

62 Perhaps the earliest Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 1–2; Stefan Lorant, “The Boy in the Window,” American Heritage, 6.4 (June 1955).

63 filled a lacuna For other lacunae in TR, Works, see Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR, 345.

64 Theodore Roosevelt Collection This archive, which the RMA began to amass in New York immediately after TR’s death, temporarily transformed his birthplace into the nation’s first presidential library. Removed to Harvard University’s Widener and Houghton libraries and endowed with a curator in 1953, it now (2010) totals 56,000 manuscript, print, and visual items.

65 Whatever the Colonel’s Harbaugh, TR (1961), 521–22.

66 On 22 November 1963 John Robert Greene, “Presidential Co-option of the image of TR,” in Naylor et al., TR, 601–2.

67 Richard Nixon invoked Ibid., 603.

68 Three decades later Notable post-centennial books about TR unmentioned in this Epilogue are George Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958); Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan (Seattle, 1966); Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy: Episodes of the White House Years (Baton Rouge, La., 1970); John Allen Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, N.Y., 1978); Frederick W. Marks III, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (Lincoln, Neb., 1979); Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton Rouge, La., 1980); John Milton Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); Paul Russell Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Conservationist (Urbana, Ill., 1985); Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kan., 1991); John D. Weaver, The Brownsville Raid(College Station, Tex., 1992); Natalie Naylor et al., Theodore Roosevelt: Many-Sided American (Interlaken, N.Y., 1992); Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York, 2001); Henry J. Hendrix, Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy: The U.S. Navy and the Birth of the American Century (Annapolis, Md., 2009).

69 Three recent Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York, 2002); Millard, The River of Doubt (2005); O’Toole, When Trumpets Call (2005).

70 “He was a fulfiller” Manuscript in TRC.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Unless otherwise credited, all images are from the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Frontispiece Theodore Roosevelt by George Moffett, 1914.

p.1 The Roosevelt Africa Expedition, 1909–1910.

p.2 Kermit Roosevelt in 1909.

p.3 TR’s safari gets under way, May 1910.

p.4 TR records his kills on 5 and 6 October 1909.

p.5 Edith Kermit Roosevelt in 1909. Library of Congress.

i1.1 TR arrives in Khartoum, 14 March 1910. Library of Congress.

i2.1 Gifford Pinchot. Library of Congress.

i2.2 Germany around the time of TR’s visit. Library of Congress.

i2.3 Emperor Wilhelm II, ca. 1910. Library of Congress.

i2.4 Wilhelm II and TR at Döberitz. Library of Congress.

i3.1 Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ca. 1910. Chicago Historical Society.

i3.2 TR marches in the funeral procession of Edward VII, 20 May 1910.

i4.1 Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., at the time of his engagement.

i4.2 Joseph Youngwitz presents a bouquet to TR, 18 June 1910.

i4.3 Governor Charles Evans Hughes. Library of Congress.

i4.4 Taft’s summer White House in Beverly, Massachusetts.

i5.1 William Barnes, Jr. Library of Congress.

i5.2 TR reading, fall 1910.

i6.1 The North Room of Sagamore Hill, ca. 1911. Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

i6.2 President William Howard Taft. Library of Congress.

i6.3 Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Arizona. Library of Congress.

i7.1 Ethel Roosevelt, ca. 1911. Library of Congress.

i10.1 Senator Elihu Root. Library of Congress.

i11.1 TR, third-party candidate (cartoon), 1912.

i11.2 TR addresses the Progressive National Convention, 6 August 1912. Library of Congress.

i12.1 TR’s perforated speech manuscript, 14 October 1914.

i12.2 John Schrank under arrest after attempting to kill TR.

i13.1 The manuscript of TR’s autobiography, 1913.

i13.2 TR gives Ethel away in marriage, 4 April 1913.

i14.1 Natalie Curtis in Indian dress. Courtesy NatalieCurtis.org.

i15.1 Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. Acervo do Museu do Indio/FUNAI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

i15.2 The Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, 1914.

i15.3 Expedition members at dinner.

i15.4 TR writing, surrounded by Nhambiquaras. American Museum of Natural History.

i15.5 TR prepares to descend the Dúvida, 27 February 1913.

i16.1 The expedition undertakes one of its many portages.

i16.2 Rondon rebaptizes the Dúvida in TR’s name. Acervo do Museu do Indio/FUNAI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

i17.1 President Woodrow Wilson. Library of Congress.

i17.2 TR revisits Washington, 19 May 1914. Chicago Historical Society.

i19.1 TR and Alice Longworth, summer 1914.

i20.1 The Metropolitan, TR’s journalistic outlet from 1915 to 1918. Author’s collection.

i21.1 William M. Ivins. New York Public Library.

i21.2 Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Chicago Historical Society.

i21.3 The evening newspaper that greeted TR, 7 May 1915. NewspaperArchive.com.

i22.1 TR and General Leonard Wood at Plattsburg, 25 August 1915.

i22.2 Bird life on Breton Island, La., summer 1915.

i23.1 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.

i24.1 Flora Payne Whitney. Library of Congress.

i24.2 The U-53 pays a visit to America, 7 October 1916. Library of Congress.

i24.3 TR on the campaign trail, fall 1916.

i24.4 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Library of Congress.

i25.1 Arthur Balfour in Washington, April 1917. Library of Congress.

i25.2 Quentin Roosevelt, 1917.

i26.1 Theodore and Edith Roosevelt, 1917.

i27.1 Archibald Roosevelt in traction, 1918.

i28.1 Quentin photographed in front of his crashed plane, 14 July 1918.

e.1 Air Corps vigil over Sagamore Hill after TR’s death.

e.2 TR’s coffin is carried to his grave, 8 January 1919.