Colonel Roosevelt (149 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
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.