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be predicted. He is still buffeted by revisionist storms, some emanating from academe and obsessing on the latest idée fixe in that quarter, “masculinity.” But the prevailing breeze of popular opinion is favorable. A C-SPAN survey in 2009, rating the leadership of American presidents, placed “T. Roosevelt” at number four, after Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Substantial books on him continue to appear and are eagerly read. Three recent examples, by Kathleen Dalton, Candice Millard, and Patricia O’Toole, demonstrate that for all the Rough Rider’s machismo, fair-minded women feel no need to condescend to him. Douglas Brinkley’s study of the Rooseveltian conservation record, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (2009) became a national bestseller even though it was over nine hundred pages long.

THE EMPLACEMENT of Theodore Roosevelt Bridge across the Potomac River in Washington gives many commuters the impression that it, and not the forested island beneath, is the twenty-sixth President’s official memorial. Somewhere among those trees, however, he stands eighteen feet tall, one bronze fist upraised, eternally lecturing the doves and mockingbirds.

Solemn words are carved on granite tablets nearby. But they, and all the millions of others that have been published about him, come no closer to the truth than those of a small boy in Cove School, Oyster Bay, on June 16, 1922. As part of a class exercise paying tribute to the late Colonel, Thomas Maher wrote: “He was a fulfiller of good intentions.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE AUTHOR IS VARIOUSLY and often profoundly indebted to the following kind people: Terry C. Anderson; Kay Auchincloss; Lowell E. Baier; John M. Bell; Laurence Bergreen; Douglas Brinkley; Matthew J. Bruccoli; Robert B. Charles; Gleise Cruz; Wallace F. Dailey; Michelle Daniel; Judy Davidowitz; Jack Fisher; Josette Frank; John Allen Gable; Megan Gavin; David Gerstner; Matthew James Glover; Lewis L. Gould; Nan Graham; Francine du Plessis Gray; Susan Hannah; Ruth Hartley; George and Nanette Herrick; John Hutton; Gordon Hyatt; Joseph Kanon; Dodie Kazanjian; Patrick Kerwin; Simon Keynes; Elmer R. Koppelmann; Jennifer Kramer; Gary Lavergne; Mary LeCroy; Richard Lindsey; Alice Low; Andrew Marks; Paul Marks; Curt Meine; Timothy Mennel; Marc Miller; Sylvia Jukes Morris; Thomas R. Mountain; John Novogrod; Martin Obrentz; Joseph A. O’Brien; Allen Packwood; John Gray Peatman; Richard Pennington; Jacqueline Philomeno; Christina Rae; Frederick Roberts Rinehart II; Theodore and Connie Roosevelt IV; Tweed Roosevelt; Benjamin and Donna Rosen; Benjamin Steinberg; Joanna Sturm; Michael and Marcia Thomas; Keith Topley; John Frederick Walker; John D. Weaver; Sara Wheeler; Richard Derby Williams.

ARCHIVES

Papers denoted with an asterisk are located in the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (TRC). It and the Theodore Roosevelt Papers at the Library of Congress (TRP) are the two main repositories of documents relating to the twenty-sixth President. Both collections are in the process of being electronically copied by the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, North Dakota. The aim of this institution is to create a unified digital archive of Roosevelt’s papers, freely accessible to researchers worldwide via the Internet.

ABB Lawrence Abbott Papers*

ABRP Archibald B. Roosevelt Papers*

AC Author’s Collection

AJB Arthur J. Balfour Papers, British Library, London

AL Arthur Lee Papers, Cortauld Institute, London

AMNH American Museum of Natural History, New York

ARC Anna Roosevelt Cowles Papers*

ASP Albert Shaw Papers, New York Public Library

BEV Albert J. Beveridge Papers, Library of Congress

CSR Cecil Spring Rice Papers, Churchill College, Cambridge, UK

DUN Finley Peter Dunne Papers, Library of Congress

EAR Edwin Arlington Robinson Collection, New York Public Library

EMH Edwin M. Hood Papers, Library of Congress

ERDP Ethel Roosevelt Derby Papers*

EW Edith Wharton Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University

FWM Flora