Colonel Roosevelt (142 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
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.
7: S
HOWING THE
W
HITE
F
EATHER
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.