Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [157]
He must ever remember that while the worst offense of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he cannot write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the whole truth.
Alice Hooper of Boston, sitting in for Frederick Jackson Turner of “Frontier Thesis” fame, did not know whether to be approving or critical of the Colonel’s performance. “He is so self-impressed and so thoroughly sure,” she wrote Turner afterward, “… and is so anxious to make a ten strike every time he opens his mouth that it detracts from the profoundness of his learning.… His personality thunders too loud! But in spite of that—what an amount of things he carries about in his head doesn’t he—and admiration for his capacity must be acknowledged when all is said and done.”
Whatever others present thought of Roosevelt the historiographer, they basked in his celebrity at a post-lecture reception in the Copley Plaza Hotel. So many of them crammed in to meet him that the grand ballroom had to be opened up. He spent the night in the house of his friend William Sturgis Bigelow, a Buddhist scholar, and enjoyed himself at breakfast next morning with a couple of Harvard historians receptive to his views.
“T.R. came and went,” Bigelow reported to Henry Cabot Lodge in Washington. “He was apparently never better. You never said a truer thing that he has no spilt milk in his life. He was just as much interested in the next thing as if the last one had never existed.”
“ ‘UNLESS HE WRITES VIVIDLY HE CANNOT WRITE TRUTHFULLY.’ ”
The manuscript of Roosevelt’s autobiography, 1913. (photo credit i13.1)
ONE CONSEQUENCE OF Roosevelt’s recent escape from death was an end to his estrangement from Lodge. Since the latter’s declaration of neutrality in the presidential contest, they had had little politically to do with each other. But the personal bond between them remained strong, and Lodge had reaffirmed it in an emotional telegram immediately after the shooting. With some awkwardness, they began to correspond again on the subject of Roosevelt’s lecture, and on the coincidental fact that they were both engaged in writing their autobiographies.
A much frostier estrangement showed no signs of thaw on 4 January 1913, when the Colonel and President Taft were seated opposite each other at the funeral of Whitelaw Reid in New York. Appropriately bitter weather buffeted the Cathedral of St. John the Divine throughout the service, which was attended by many of the eminent Republicans who had once thought of themselves as a team: Lodge, Elihu Root, Robert Bacon, Philander Knox, Henry White, J. P. Morgan, Joseph H. Choate, Andrew Carnegie, Frank Munsey, and others. By no attempt at a smile, or even a nod of the head, did Taft acknowledge his predecessor’s presence across the chancel. After the benediction, he rose quickly and marched down the stone aisle, his aides clattering after him. Eleanor, sitting with her father-in-law, asked if it was protocol for a president to walk out ahead of the coffin.
“No, dear, no,” Roosevelt said. “It is not customary, but in this case Mr. Taft probably thought there should be precedence even between corpses!”
His wisecrack may have been overheard by the President’s brother Henry, who was sitting close by. In a bizarre speech that night, at a GOP fund-raiser in the Waldorf-Astoria, Taft described himself as “deceased,” and the dinner in his honor “a wake.” He blamed Roosevelt (who was not present) for eliminating him, saying that a million Republicans had voted Democratic in order to avert the Progressive