Colonel Roosevelt (153 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
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.
