Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [335]
A Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association was formed to reconstruct the Colonel’s vanished birthplace, at 28 East Twentieth Street in Manhattan, as a museum and educational center. Designed by a Lusitania survivor, Theodate Pope Riddle, in consultation with the two surviving Roosevelt sisters, it was dedicated to the public as “Roosevelt House” in 1923. Four female trumpeters in Grecian robes blew a voluntary over the entryway where Teedie Roosevelt and Edie Carow had sat reading over half a century before.
Simultaneously, a rival, masculine Roosevelt Memorial Association launched a campaign to create shrines in Washington, D.C., and downtown Oyster Bay, Long Island. (Sagamore Hill was obviously destined to become another such site one day, but for as long as Edith survived, it would remain her private property.) The group, dominated by Hermann Hagedorn as executive director and backed by such dignitaries as Elihu Root and Leonard Wood, took advantage of Roosevelt’s posthumous reputation to accumulate an impressive fund for the Washington memorial. In 1925, Hagedorn unveiled a design for it, by John Russell Pope, which was so grandiloquent—a two-hundred-foot ejaculation of Potomac water from a white granite island in Tidal Bay, triangulated between the Lincoln and Washington monuments—that even President Coolidge wondered if more time should not pass before Theodore Roosevelt was accorded his proper place in history. Southern lobbyists planning a Jefferson memorial for the site successfully held the RMA off.
Meanwhile the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had been among the Progressive delegates nominating Roosevelt for president in 1912, conceived of a bas-relief in the Black Hills of South Dakota that would proclaim the Rough Rider unequivocally, and for all time, as the co-equal of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Not for him Pope’s fragile fountain, subject to winds, ice, and drought. He meant to carve his quartet out of imperishable rock, each face sixty feet high. Coolidge agreed to write an appropriate entablature, identifying them in English, Latin, and Sanskrit. In October 1927, the first contours of Washington’s face began to emerge from Mount Rushmore. The other three colossi would have to wait their turn.
By the end of the decade, Theodore Roosevelt was commonly regarded as the third greatest American president, after Washington and Lincoln. Then, in 1931, Henry F. Pringle, a political journalist whose only previous book was a study of the government of Al Smith, published Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. Soundly researched and brilliantly written, it coincided not only with the onset of the Great Depression—that apparent proof of the vanity of American ideals—but with a postwar revulsion against military values, and a consensus among those making policy never again to attempt the kind of democratic imperialism that Roosevelt (and for that matter Woodrow Wilson) had wished upon the world.
Even more damaging was the fact that Pringle was the first major biographer who declined to take Roosevelt seriously. He mocked the Rough Rider’s fake humility and, with documentary evidence and authoritative anecdote, demolished many legends that Hagedorn and others had so long taken as gospel. He made full use of the Roosevelt presidential papers on deposit in the Library of Congress, and was clever enough to conceal the fact that he knew little about the final decade of his subject’s life. If he was often unfair, his prejudice was excusable as a reaction against too much myth. When the time came to award that year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography, Pringle was the obvious recipient.
Undeterred in 1931, the Roosevelt Memorial Association