Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  4 The little community New York World, 6 July 1902; New York Tribune, 7 July 1902; Washington Times, 5 and 9 July 1902.

  5 The surrey splashed Washington Times, 16 July 1902; New York Herald, 11 Aug. 1902; New York Evening Sun, 7 July 1902; P. James Roosevelt to author, 4, 5, 19, 20 Apr. 1983 (AC); Boston Herald, 3 Aug. 1902; map preserved by Mrs. Philip Roosevelt, privately held.

  6 Turning north, the Boston Herald, 3 Aug. 1902.

  7 A private driveway Washington Times, 17 June 1902; New York Evening Sun, 3 July 1902; New York Herald, 8 July 1902.

  8 RAIN GAVE WAY TR, Works, vol. 3, 314.

  9 “Among Long Island” Ibid., 316–17.

  10 Ovenbirds fluted Ibid., 318.

  11 “They come up” Ibid.

  12 To the west Boston Herald, 3 Aug. 1902; Kermit Roosevelt, The Happy Hunting-Grounds (New York, 1920), 22–23.

  13 No matter how New York Sun, 8 July 1902; New York World, 13 July 1902 (CORDON OF GUARDS ABOUT PRESIDENT); The Washington Post, 11 July 1902. The President’s security detail consisted of five Secret Service men and two policemen (New York World, 6 July 1902). Other agents were stationed twenty-four hours a day in a hotel in the village and at the station. Any given visitor was scrutinized at least three times en route to Sagamore Hill. See Walter S. Bowen and Harry E. Neal, The United States Secret Service (Philadelphia, 1960).

  14 a gun butt protruding Edna M. Colman, White House Gossip (New York, 1927), 284.

  15 Instead, he used Washington Times, 8 July 1902; New York World and New York Sun, 9 July 1902. Poultney Bigelow describes the sensation of one of these Cooper’s Bluff plunges in Contemporary Review clip, ca. 1901, in Presidential scrapbook (TRP).

  16 Yet had it Boston Herald, 3 Aug. 1902; Washington Times, 8 July 1902; Chicago Record-Herald, 12 July 1902.

  17 “Cousin Theodore” Qu. by William E. Curtis in Chicago Record-Herald, 12 July 1902.

  18 Rough Riders The Washington Post, 11 July 1902. Sagamore Hill is now invisible from Oyster Bay, but a contemporary photograph in Cheney, Personal Memoirs, 6, shows Sagamore Hill clearly visible across the water.

  19 About once a week Chicago Record-Herald, 12 July 1902.

  20 One day, he reined The Washington Post, 20 July 1902, Presidential scrapbook (TRP).

  21 Unamused, the reporters New York Sun and New York Journal, 19 July 1902.

  22 “It seems to me” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 303.

  23 Dana withdrew his Paul Dana to TR, 1 Aug. 1902 (TRP).

  24 For the younger Roosevelts Waldon Fawcett, “The President’s Summer Home at Oyster Bay,” Twentieth Century Review clip, n.d., Presidential scrapbook (TRP). When Archibald B. Roosevelt lay dying in Florida in the summer of 1979, after a long life and much world travel, he mumbled repeatedly, “Take me home.” “But you are home, Father.” “No, no—home to Sagamore.” Mrs. Archibald B. Roosevelt, Jr., interview, 20 Sept. 1981. See also Kerr, Bully Father, 151.

  25 The estate, with Mrs. Philip Roosevelt interview, 24 Oct. 1982. See also Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., All in the Family (New York, 1929); Herman Hagedorn and Gary Roth, Sagamore Hill: An Historical Guide (Oyster Bay, N.Y., 1977); David H. Wallace, “Sagamore Hill: An Interior History,” in Natalie A. Naylor, Douglas Brinkley, and John Allen Gable, Theodore Roosevelt: Many-Sided American (Interlaken, N.Y., 1992), 527–46.

  26 These haunts Parsons, Perchance Some Day, 234. “He was the enchanting Pied Piper of our childhood.”

  27 From early morning Longworth, Crowded Hours, 6–8; Roosevelt, Happy Hunting-Grounds, 4–5; Nicholas Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: The Man As I Knew Him (New York, 1967), 21–27. “My children,” TR robustly told a female interviewer, “are not brought up to be cowards. They are not taught to turn the other cheek if they are struck; they are told to hit back and hit hard. I won’t have any weaklings in my household. I want my boys to grow up manly and gently.” He seemed to want the same for girls, encouraging them to participate in the roughest play, and saying that he liked them to be “tomboys when they are small.” Boston Sunday Record, 3 Aug. 1902.

  28 Only when he Archibald Roosevelt interview, 7 June 1977; research memorandum, n.d. (HH). TR’s own children were supplemented, that summer, by eleven Roosevelt nieces and nephews from neighboring estates. Chicago Record-Herald, 12 July 1902.

  29 NO MATTER WHERE New York Evening Sun, 8 July 1902; Chicago Record-Herald, 12 July 1902.

  30 A new magazine “The People at Play,” World’s Work, Aug. 1902.

  31 In the good old Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 347; “In the Good Old Summertime” was the biggest popular hit of the early twentieth century.

  32 THE ONLY MEMBER Alice Roosevelt diary, 21 June 1903 (ARL).

  33 Heedless on the William E. Curtis in Chicago Record-Herald, 12 July 1902. It took TR just eighteen days, from 5 to 22 July, to read this mammoth work. See his report to John Hay in TR, Letters, vol. 3, 300.

  34 ON 14 JULY Schirmer, Republic or Empire, 439.

  35 The general’s fellow TR to Albert Shaw, 1 Sept. 1902 (TRP).

  36 For a moment TR had signed the Act into law on 1 July 1902. It was Taft’s overoptimistic hope that the Philippine legislature could begin functioning as early as 1 Jan. 1904, well in advance of the next presidential election. William H. Taft to Elihu Root, 26 Mar. 1902 (ER).

  37 “I thoroughly believe” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 298.

  38 Smith, however Ibid.; Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, 194.

  39 After dinner Washington Times and New York Sun, 14 July 1902; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 189n, 303–6. For a discussion of the Vatican holdings, see Harbaugh, Life and Times; 182–83.

  40 Both of them New York Sun, 14 July 1902.

  41 Friends again Ibid.; “President’s Official Yacht Rivals Those of Royalty,” unidentified clip, 15 July 1902 (HH); Edwin A. Falk, “USS Mayflower,” pamphlet in TRC.

  42 “Bully! Bully!” New York Sun, 15 July 1902.

  43 ROOSEVELT’S DECISION Literary Digest, 26 July 1902. The dismissal was announced on the sixteenth. It made TR highly unpopular with the Army, and was seen even by anti-imperialists as a stern and cathartic punishment. See, e.g., Charles Francis Adams to Carl Schurz, 31 July 1902 (CS).

  44 Even the Anti-Imperialist League leaders protested that Roosevelt had dramatically sacrificed General Smith in order to protect hundreds of other American war criminals. On 22 July, Charles Francis Adams, Carl Schurz, Edwin Burritt Smith, and Herbert Welsh published an open letter to TR (in TRP), alleging abuses “far more general” than any he had admitted. For negative public reactions to it, see Literary Digest, 9 Aug. 1902.

  45 “I think he” Charles Francis Adams to Carl Schurz, 4 and 21 Aug. 1902 (CS).

  46 ALMOST UNNOTICED TR, Letters, vol. 3, 302; William H. Taft to TR, 27 Oct. 1902 (TRP).

  47 He dreamily informed TR, Letters, vol. 3,288.

  48 “Now … in the” Ibid., 289.

  49 Having thus briskly The Washington Post, 27 July 1902.

  50 FOG DELAYED John A. Garraty, “Holmes’s Appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court,” New England Quarterly, Sept. 1949; G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self(New York, 1993), 301.

  51 Oliver Wendell Holmes Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (Boston, 1944), 120; photographs in Supreme Court Historical Society, Washington, D.C.; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 5.

  52 In his world Alexander M. Bickel and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., The History of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 1984), vol. 9, 70–71; Holmes, Common Law, 5. Sheldon Novick, Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston, 1989), 283.

  53 Theodore Roosevelt TR, Letters, vol. 3, 288.

  54 After returning to Novick, Honorable Justice, 235–36; Garraty, “Holmes’s Appointment.”

  55 Roosevelt agreed with Garraty, “Holmes’s Appointment”; Henry Cabot Lodge to TR, 25 July 1902 (TRP). Holmes, for his part, had to admit that Roosevelt “said just the
right things and impressed me far more than I had expected.” Qu. in White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, 312.

  56 “We shall have to” Garraty, “Holmes’s Appointment”; Bowen, Yankee from Olympus, 348. TR announced Holmes’s appointment on 11 Aug. 1903.

  57 In the good old Lyrics in Music Division, LC. In 1903, the song was sung as a waltz.

  58 Grotesque as it Archibald B. Roosevelt interview, 7 June 1977. TR had been peripherally involved in the coal strike since early June. See, e.g., Washington Times, 7 June 1902.

  59 One hundred and forty-seven Anthracite Coal Commission, Report to the President on the Anthracite Coal Strike of May–October 1902 (Washington, D.C., 1903), 37; Washington Times, 7 June 1902. For background to the anthracite strike, see Donald Miller and Richard E. Sharpless, The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise, and Ethnic Communities in the Mine Fields (Philadelphia, 1985).

  60 A visiting British Stuart Uttley, quoted in Literary Digest, 8 Feb. 1902.

  61 Roosevelt concluded Eitler, “Philander Chase Knox,” 148; Proceedings of the Anthracite Coal Commission (Washington, D.C., 1903), vol. 28, 4377ff.

  CHAPTER 9: NO POWER OR DUTY

  1 What d’ye think Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 218–19.

  2 FOR ELEVEN WEEKS Rosamond D. Rhone, “Anthracite Coal Mines and Coaling,” Review of Reviews, July 1902.

  3 What made Sheriff George E. Leighton, “Shenandoah, Pa.: Story of an Anthracite Town,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1937; Literary Digest, 24 May and 7 July 1902; Elsie Glück, John Mitchell: Miner (New York, 1929), 111; Stewart Culin, A Trooper’s Narrative of Service in the Anthracite Coal Strike, 1902 (Philadelphia, 1903), 36–37. See also Victor R. Greene, The Slavic Community on Strike: Immigrant Labor in Pennsylvania Anthracite (Notre Dame, 1968).

  4 Only when a Leighton, “Shenandoah”; Walter Wellman in Chicago Record-Herald, 14 Sept. 1902: “Their faith in him is completely sublime.”

  5 John Mitchell Robert H. Wiebe, “The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902: A Record of Confusion,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1961; Leighton, “Shenandoah”; Miller and Sharpless, Kingdom of Coal, 254–55; Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 116–18. This concession amounted to a personal triumph for Mitchell, who argued passionately against a national strike.

  6 Swarthy, silent Glück, John Mitchell, 106, 98; Wiebe, “Anthracite Coal Strike,” 240–41.

  7 Mitchell’s concessions Miller and Sharpless, Kingdom of Coal, 256; Anthracite Coal Commission, Report to the President, 35. See Eliot Jones, The Anthracite Coal Combinations (Cambridge, Mass., 1919).

  8 When the miners Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 115.

  9 Roaming the anthracite Wiebe, “Anthracite Coal Strike,” 237–38; Mark Hanna to George Perkins, 19 May 1902 (GWP).

  10 “The coal presidents” The New York Times, 30 July 1902.

  11 SHENANDOAH WAS QUIET Culin, Trooper’s Narrative, passim; Leighton, “Shenandoah,” 136.

  12 Centre Street was Leighton, “Shenandoah,” 136; Rhone, “Anthracite Coal Mines.”

  13 Shortly before 6:00 Harrisburg Patriot, 31 July 1902. The deputy, Thomas Bedall, was the nephew of Sheriff S. Rowland Bedall. Their identical surnames have confused some historians—e.g., Miller and Sharpless in Kingdom of Coal.

  14 He was accompanied The New York Times, 31 July 1902; Literary Digest, 9 Aug. 1902; Leighton, “Shenandoah,” 143. See also Glück, John Mitchell, 111ff.; Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 151–52.

  15 guns and bayonets The New York Times, 31 July 1902; Harrisburg Patriot and The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1 Aug. 1902.

  16 This freed Roosevelt TR, Letters, vol. 3, 359; Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 109; Literary Digest, 9 Aug. 1902.

  17 Ten thousand bared Philadelphia Public Ledger, 2 Aug. 1902.

  18 Few among the Wiebe, “Anthracite Coal Strike,” 240, 235.

  19 “If you lose” Glück, John Mitchell, 94; Philadelphia Public Ledger, 2 Aug. 1902.

  20 For the next Philadelphia North American, 1 Aug. 1902. See Glück, John Mitchell, 104–5, for the visits of intellectuals to anthracite country that summer.

  21 Roosevelt began to William Lemke, “Teddy Downeast: The 1902 New England Tour and the Style and Substance of Roosevelt’s Leadership,” in Naylor et al., Theodore Roosevelt, 190–200.

  22 From what he heard Norton Goddard to TR, 12 Aug. 1902 (TRP).

  23 The feeling went The following account is taken from a scoop in the Philadelphia North American, 9 Aug. 1902.

  24 (Some years before) Ibid.

  25 “Will you send” TR to E. H. Harriman, 16 Aug. 1902 (TRP).

  26 “My day has” E. H. Harriman to TR, 18 Aug. 1902 (TRP).

  27 Some paragraphs Ibid.

  28 “The rights and” Facsimile in Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 2, 425.

  29 This pious protestation Cornell, Anthracite Coal Strike, 170–72; The New York Times and New York Tribune, 21 Aug. 1902.

  30 Roosevelt, about TR to Philander Knox, 21 Aug. 1902 (TRP); Eitler, “Philander Chase Knox,” 148; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 359. 137 THE SYLPH steamed Frank W. Lovering in Boston Journal, 23 Aug. 1902; The New York Times, 23 Aug. 1902; unidentified news clips, Presidential scrapbook (TRP).

  31 Three traveling aides For an example of TR’s continuing management of press relations, see his letter to the editor of the New York Sun, asking for Lindsay Denison to accompany him on tour. “He is a trump, and as you know I can tell him everything” (TR to Chester S. Lord, 12 Aug. 1902 [TRP]). Denison rewarded him for this encomium with favorable Sun coverage and a major article, “The President on His Tours,” World’s Work, Nov. 1902.

  32 Roosevelt had grown Frank W. Lovering in Boston Journal, 4 Sept. 1902; unidentified news clip, Presidential scrapbook (TRP).

  33 AT NOON THE TR reached Providence after a night stop in Hartford, Conn., where he created a sensation by publicly associating himself with the city’s blue-collar Democratic mayor. Local GOP organizers had snubbed the mayor by putting him far back in the welcoming parade. Annoyed by their discourtesy, TR mentioned the mayor by name in his speech, and afterward granted him the only private audience of his visit. This gentlemanly behavior, widely reported, was not lost on ordinary Americans. See Harper’s Weekly, 6 Sept. 1902.

  34 Squinting against The New York Times and Boston Herald, 24 Aug. 1902.

  35 “We are passing” White House speech transcript, 23 Aug. 1902 (TRP).

  36 Human law, he Ibid.

  37 Roosevelt noticed Illustration in Frank W. Lovering, “Eyewitness Tells of TR’s Pittsfield Outrage,” unidentified Berkshires news clip, ca. 20 Aug. 1962 (TRB); Boston Herald, 24 Aug. 1902.

  38 “Where men are” White House speech transcript, 23 Aug. 1902 (TRP); Merrill, Republican Command, 21.

  39 E. H. Harriman could Providence Sunday Journal, 24 Aug. 1902. TR felt somewhat responsible for a current drought in GOP campaign contributions, brought about by the Northern Securities prosecution. TR, Letters, vol. 3, 317.

  40 His audience began Boston Herald, 24 Aug. 1902.

  41 By now, he Photograph and report in Denison, “The President on His Tours.”

  42 THERE WAS SOME Literary Digest, 6 Sept. 1902.

  43 PRESIDENT WOULD The New York Times, 24 Aug. 1902, e.g., TR has been criticized by John M. Blum in The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (New York, 1980), 29, for saying nothing against the trusts that had not already been said by, e.g., President McKinley’s Industrial Commission. But as Galambos, Public Image, 258, points out, popular anger against the trusts had cooled by 1902. TR sought to rekindle it by restating old truths in his new, harsh, twentieth-century voice. For reactions to his antitrust oratory on tour, see Literary Digest, 6 Sept. 1902, and articles by Joseph Auer in North American Review, Dec. 1902, and Albert Shaw in Century Magazine, Jan. 1903.

  44 THE PRESIDENTIAL SPECIAL Sixty years later, Frank W. Lovering, who covered the trip for the Boston Journal, was driving along Bayshore Drive in Miami and noticed an old P
ullman car in a siding, silhouetted against the moonlight of Biscayne Bay. “Something impelled me … to cross the tracks.… I walked along beside the Pullman. Bright in gold leaf I read by the sputtering glow of an arc lamp, Mayflower. I put my hand affectionately on the polished railing of the observation platform. Time fell into retreat. It was September again in the Berkshires.” Lovering, “Eyewitness.”

  45 At Bangor, Maine Mrs. F. H. Eckstrom to C. H. Ames, 30 Aug. 1902 (TRP); Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, 153ff. See also The Washington Post, 28 Aug. 1902. Afterward, TR invited Sewall to visit the White House with “as many of your family as you can persuade to come.” For an account of their stay, see TR, Letters, vol. 3, 422.

  46 “Not since the” Literary Digest, 6 Sept. 1902.

  47 All Europe Ibid., 20 Sept. 1902. In London, the Westminster Gazette hailed TR as “one of the most courageous political adventurers of our time” (ibid.).

  48 THE TRAIN SWUNG Presidential itinerary (TRP).

  49 To Roosevelt, as Burlington Free Press, 2 Sept. 1902; unidentified news clip, Presidential scrapbook (TRP); John Hay to Alvey A. Adee, 30 Aug. 1902 (JH); Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 738.

  50 Big Bill extra When the gaslights failed at a crowded Vermont reception, Craig was seen jumping “like a tiger” in front of TR. Reillumination of the room disclosed a wall of Secret Service agents around the President. Boston Herald and Philadelphia Press, 1 Sept. 1902.

  51 Brattleboro. Girls Boston Journal, 4 Sept. 1902; TR, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, vol. 1, 134–36, 143, 145.

  52 Wednesday. Last day The following account is based on Lovering, “Eyewitness”; Boston Journal, 4 Sept. 1902; New York Herald, 4 Sept. 1902; George A. Lung, “Roosevelt’s Narrow Escape From Death,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 9 Jan. 1919; photographs donated by W. Murray Crane (TRB); and an official report by W. T. Meyer, 1 Oct. 1902, Precautionary File (GBC).

  53 “Oh my God!” New York Sun, 4 Sept. 1902; the accident happened near the foot of Howard’s Hill. See Stefan Lorant’s photohistory, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1959), 380.

  54 ROOSEVELT LANDED Lung, “Roosevelt’s Narrow Escape.” Lung tried to squeeze TR’s chest to see if any ribs were broken, “but he resented the squeeze and asked to be left alone.” By good fortune, TR had landed in soft earth and alluvial runoff from the hill. The New York Times, 4 Sept. 1902.