Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  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 econ
omic 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).