Colonel Roosevelt (166 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
29
Roosevelt had been the first
Achille,
Visite
, 1–3. For the happy effect of the Mont Pelée eruption on TR’s plans for a Panama Canal, see Morris,
Theodore Rex
, 113.
30
“Je vois que”
Achille,
Visite
, 6.
31
the governor recalled
Ibid., 8–9.
32
Vous nous donnez
Ibid., 9. In reply, TR, speaking in French, said again how profoundly touched he had been to see Martinique’s young men preparing to fight for the rights of small as well as great nations. He raised his glass in salute: “Mesdames, Messieurs, je bois à la santé de la France toujours glorieuse et bientôt victorieuse.” Ibid., 13–14.
33
After visiting
For an account of this episode, see TR’s essay “A Naturalist’s Tropical Laboratory,” in TR,
Works
, 4.255–72. Beebe’s tribute to TR, “The Naturalist and Book-Lover: An Appreciation,” is printed as an introduction to this volume.
34
No less a GOP
The New York Times
, 2 Mar. 1916. Gardner was also an outspoken advocate of preparedness. For more on his current political maneuverings, which greatly annoyed TR, see TR,
Letters
, 8.1034–35.
35
They spent an afternoon
TR,
Works
, 4.278–82.
36
I MUST REQUEST
Stoddard,
As I Knew Them
, 429–31;
The New York Times
, 10 Mar. 1916. The full text of TR’s cable is reprinted in TR,
Letters
, 8.1024–26.
37
A joke went around
Mowry,
TR
, 346.
38
a surprise bestseller
George H. Doran,
Chronicles of Barabbas, 1884–1934
(New York, 1935), 217. Doran’s royalty statement to TR, 16 Oct. 1916, shows 12,128 copies of the original edition sold in North America (TRP). In mid-1916, according to Doran, the retail magnate Walter Scott underwrote a mass-market edition of
Fear God
at 50 cents a copy. The entire 100,000-copy print run sold out. The book was also published in Great Britain.
39
“In America”
Karp,
The Politics of War
, 222.
40
Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid
The raid occurred on 9 Mar. 1916, the same day TR issued his “Trinidad statement.” Mexican bandits had earlier, on 10 Jan., massacred 16 Texan businessmen en route to San Ysabel. WW declined military revenge, arguing that the Texans traveled at their own risk.
41
“another Wilson”
TR,
Letters
, 8.1026.
42
mass of mail
TR’s boom in the spring of 1916 increased his mail receipt to 1,000 letters a day. TR,
Letters
, 8.1039.
43
“I don’t know”
Edwin Arlington Robinson to KR, 23 Feb. 1913 (KRP).
44
The Roosevelts had
EKR to KR, 20 Jan. 1913 (KRP); Scott Donaldson,
Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life
(New York, 2007), 313–14. For a recent sampling of Robinson’s work, perceptively introduced, see Robert Mezey, ed.,
The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson
(New York, 1999).
45
He confessed
The note has been lost, but its content may be extrapolated from TR’s reply, and the known circumstances of Robinson’s life.
46
“Your letter”
TR,
Letters
, 8.1024. TR added that he had used some lines of Robinson as the epigraph to
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
. See TR,
Works
, 20.3.
47
After that, from everywhere
Edwin Arlington Robinson,
The Man Against the Sky
(New York, 1916), 97.
48
Robinson had long ago
Edwin Arlington Robinson,
The Town Down the River
(New York, 1910), 125–29; Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 392.
49
The title poem
Robinson, who was habitually self-mocking when commenting
on his own work, joked that the purpose of this apocalyptic 300-line poem, one of the most difficult in the American canon, was “to cheer people up.” He added more seriously that he meant also “to indicate the futility of materialism as a thing to live by—even assuming the possible monstrous negation of having to die by it.” (To Albert R. Ledoux, 2 Mar. 1916 [EAR].) An earlier letter to Lewis Isaacs, written at the time of the poem’s composition (30 Aug. 1915), refers to the German threat to civilization, and another (6 Jan. 1916) makes plain his continuing awareness of TR as a force
redux
in American life: “Tell Marian [MacDowell] that if she keeps on hating me hard enough she will probably get over it in time—just as others are getting over hating the Colonel” (EAR).
Images of the antithesis between mindless materialism at home and a distant
Gotterdämmerung
threatening the whole world, along with multiple references to “gods” and “gifts,” recur throughout
The Man Against the Sky
, arguably Robinson’s greatest cycle of poems. TR praised it highly in a letter to KR, 31 Mar. 1916 (KRP). For critical studies of the book, see R. Meredith Bedell, “Perception, Action, and Life in
The Man Against the Sky,” Colby Library Quarterly
, 11 (Mar. 1976), and Robert S. Fish, “A Dramatic and Rhetorical Analysis of ‘The Man Against the Sky’ and Other Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1970).
50
They met in New York
TR,
Letters
, 8.1029; Sullivan,
Our Times
, 5.200–201. For a detailed account of the lunch, see Jessup,
Elihu Root
, 2.344–47.
51
The New York Times
See Gable,
The Bull Moose Years
, 232–45, for the intraparty TR boom in 1916.
52
Pancho Villa’s raid
The New York Times
, 16 Mar. 1916. Fortunately for his future career, Pershing had by this time managed to euphemize his original nickname of “Nigger Jack,” awarded to him when he commanded a regiment of black cavalry in the Indian Wars. Cowley,
The Great War
, 415.
53
“into the
Ewigkeit
”
TR to KR, 16 Jan. 1915 (TRC). A cartoon in the New York
Sun
on 22 Apr. 1916 showed TR, big stick in hand, contemplating the skeleton of a moose. The caption read “Alas poor Yorick.”
54
But his boom
Mowry,
TR
, 342–43; Gable,
The Bull Moose Years
, 244–45;
The New York Times
, 1–10 Apr. 1916; TR,
Letters
, 8.1028.
55
“You know, Colonel”
The New York Times
, 6 Apr. 1916.
Biographical Note:
A comic anecdote by Clara Barrus conveys TR’s tempestuous vigor at this time. On 4 Apr., “fairly bursting with energy and good cheer,” he attended a reception at the salon of the society painter Princess Elisabeth Lwoff-Parlaghy (a world-class eccentric in her own right, and something of a German appeaser). Having “talk[ed] his way through other people’s talk like a snow-plow going through a snow-bank,” TR bade adieu to the princess and began to descend to street level. “He halted abruptly on the steps, his eye arrested by the portrait of Andrew Carnegie which hung above the stairway. Shaking his fist close to the painted face, he exclaimed through his teeth, ‘You look just like what you are—you damned old pacifist!’ And down the stairs he bolted—the solemn, foreign-looking liveried flunkeys standing aghast at the explosion.… The perturbed princess almost screamed her query, ‘Wh—what was that he said?’ And when somebody repeated the remark without any elision, [she], speaking no word, said much in her quickened breath and dilating nostrils.” (Clara Barrus,
The Life and Letters of John Burroughs
, 2 vols. [New York, 1925, 1968], 2.230–31.)
In the fall of 1918, Princess Lwoff asked TR to pose for what was to be his last portrait. Privately owned and held by the American Museum of Natural History, it is reproduced on the cover of this biography.
56
The attack on
Heckscher,
Woodrow Wilson
, 385
57
On 18 April
The New York Times
, 19 Apr. 1916.
58
a “town meeting”
Ibid.
59
Wilson entered
Atlanta Constitution
, 20 Apr. 1916; speech transcript in
The New York Times
, 20 Apr. 1916.
60
ferryboats like the
Sussex
The sinking of the
Sussex
impoverished the world by more than the loss of a few American lives. Among many others drowned was the great Spanish composer Enrique Granados, whose opera
Goyescas
had just been produced at the Metropolitan Opera.
61
“I hope you”
Atlanta Constitution
, 20 Apr. 1916.
62
Roosevelt was one
The New York Times
, 20 Apr. 1916.
63
he had lost
“He has become, in my judgment, almost wholly an evil influence in public affairs,” Ray Stannard Baker noted on 27 Apr. 1916, “an aggrieved and bitter man [who] belongs in the nineteenth, and not the twentieth century.” Notebook IX.118 (RSB).
64
“there is in my”
TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 24 Apr. 1916 (ARC);
The New York Times
, 20 Apr. 1916.
65
Secretary Lansing replied
Sullivan,
Our Times
, 5.132.
66
“I have been”
TR to Fanny Parsons, 30 May 1916 (PAR). For a letter from TR to Ford, considerably gentler than his speech, explaining why he found pacifism “the enemy of morality,” see TR,
Letters
, 8.1022.
67
“It matters”
Ray Stannard Baker,
American Chronicle
(New York, 1945), 287.
68
“So sincerely”
Heckscher,
Woodrow Wilson
, 392.
69
was willing to trade
As a lollipop, TR let it be known that if elected in November, he would reappoint Elihu Root as his secretary of state. Albert Shaw, “Reminiscences of Theodore Roosevelt,” ms. (ASP).
70
“All were united”
Cecil to Florence Spring Rice, 8 June 1916 (CSR). For an eyewitness account of the Progressive proceedings, see Julian Street, “The Convention and the Colonel,”
Collier’s Weekly
, 57.5 (1 July 1916). TR characteristically cited this article as “The Colonel and the Convention.” TR,
Letters
, 8.1085.
71
The European situation
Ecksteins,
Rites of Spring
, 144; Gilbert,
A History of the Twentieth Century
, 397.
72
Roosevelt had once taunted
See 70.
73
“They believed”
Cecil to Florence Spring Rice, 8 June 1916 (CSR).
74
“We all look”
Adams,
Letters
, 5.323.
75
By nine o’clock
Mowry,
TR
, 351–52. TR’s preference was for Wood, as a preparedness man as committed as himself. He had already privately ascertained that Wood was willing to run. (Nicholas Roosevelt,
TR
, 108.) Lodge he regarded merely as “a stopgap” who could not be nominated, but who would block the boom for Hughes, and then transfer his support back to TR. Thomas Robins interview, n.d. (TRB).
76
another telegram declining
TR,
Letters
, 8.1062–63.
77
“Around me”
Villard,
Fighting Years
, 316. See TR,
Letters
, 8.1074 for the devastated reactions of two Progressives, Thomas Robins and William Allen White.
78
“Theodore”
Robinson,
My Brother TR
, 303.
79
With other family
TR to Anna Roosevelt Cowles, 16 June 1916 (ARC); Leary,
Talks with T.R.
, 31; Micah 6:8.
80
His secretary interrupted
Leary, notebook 3, 18 June 1916 (JJL). A slightly different version of this conversation appears in Leary,
Talks with T.R.
, 65–69.
81
“If they were mine”
Leary, notebook 3, 18 June 1916 (JJL).
82
“Now, Theodore”
Hermann Hagedorn (eyewitness) in
Roosevelt House Bulletin
, 6.10 (Fall 1948).
24: S
HADOWS OF
L
OFTY
W
ORDS
1
Epigraph
Robinson,
Collected Poems
, 17.
2
As a boy
Kermit Roosevelt,
Happy Hunting Grounds
, 15–16.
3
In recent years
Morris,
Theodore Rex
, 424; TR,
Letters
, 8.1064–65; Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 388ff.; TR,
Letters
, 8.887. See Edgar Lee Masters, “At Sagamore Hill” in
Starved Rock
(New York, 1919), 95ff., for an unforgettable account in verse of being received by TR.
4
By good rights
Robinson,
My Brother TR
, 324; Robert Frost,
North of Boston
(New York, 1915), 72. Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, herself a published poet
(The Call of Brotherhood and Other Poems
[New York, 1913]) and officer of the Poetry Society, maintained a salon at her Madison Avenue home for bards visiting New York. TR’s encounter with Frost appears to have taken place in late 1916. For more on TR’s poetic tastes, see TR,
Letters
, 8.1228, and chap. 2, “The World of Thought,” in Wagenknecht,
The Seven Worlds of TR
.
