Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [368]
54 George Bernard Shaw Shaw quoted in Chicago Tribune, 3 June 1910; Stead in Manchester Guardian, 2 June 1910. TR reciprocally considered Shaw to be “a blue-rumped ape.” Wagenknecht, Seven Worlds, 137.
55 “I was an auditor” TR, Letters, 7.403.
56 “I should have thought” Ibid., 7.404.
57 lunching with a grateful King For an account of this haut-bourgeois luncheon, see ibid., 7.414–15. TR also dined with Robert Scott on the eve of the latter’s last voyage to the Antarctic.
58 “He has enjoyed himself” Gwynn, Cecil Spring Rice, 2.151.
59 STATEMENT INCORRECT TR, Letters, 7.87.
60 One last public appearance The following account of TR’s honorary degree ceremony at Oxford is based on reports in The New York Times, 8 June, and The Times, 9 June 1910. See also TR, Letters, 7.406–7 and Sullivan, Our Times, 4.431. Quotations from the proceedings are taken from TR, African and European Addresses, 175–249.
61 For once, Roosevelt was Among the scholars whom TR consulted in preparing his lecture were Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, and James Bryce, the former regius professor of modern law at Oxford, and current British ambassador to the United States. After a blue-pencil review of the draft manuscript, which contained specific comparisons of two moribund European monarchies to the megatherium and glyptodon, Osborn wrote: “I have left out certain passages that are likely to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred to.” (Pringle, TR, 519.) For the long and eventually strained relationship of TR and Bryce, see Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.”
62 Behold, Vice-Chancellor This translation seems to have been written by Curzon himself.
63 More than ever TR, Works, 14.66. For the complete text of TR’s Romanes Lecture, see ibid., 65–106.
64 Roosevelt was using According to Douglas Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary, the word ethnic acquired racial overtones only in American English, ca. 1945.
65 “It would appear” Nicholas Murray Butler, Across the Busy Years: Recollections and Reflections (New York, 1939), 1.321. The “longitude” of TR’s text, running to almost 12,000 words, was apparent even to the speaker. According to one report, his voice began to fail, and he dropped whole chunks of text toward the end. Even so, TR spoke for an hour and a quarter. The New York Times, 8 June 1910.
66 attended by the heads Prime Minister Herbert Asquith; Chief Justice Lord Alverstone; Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury.
67 “at the time of the singing” Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.90.
68 the two men took a preliminary hike This account of TR’s expedition with Grey is based on his own narrative in TR, Works, 22.364–69, and a detailed map of the expedition route in The New Forest Commemorative Walk (Nature Conservancy of Britain, 1979). See also Paul Russell Cutright, “TR Listens to the Music of British Birds,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, Spring 1987. In the summer of 2006, the author retraced TR’s steps with a British ornithologist, Mr. Richard Pennington, who identified twenty-eight of the species seen and heard in 1910.
69 Roosevelt listened and watched TR, Works, 22.365–67.
70 the unstoppable mockingbird See TR’s rapturous description in Works, 2.61–62. Grey wrote years later that he “had one of the most perfectly trained ears for bird songs that I have ever known.” Cutright, “TR Listens to the Music.”
71 “the woods and fields” TR, Works, 22.369. The Forest Park Hotel, where TR and Grey stayed, still operates in Brockenhurst, Hampshire.
72 “Take care of him” Kipling to Brander Matthews, 10 June 1910, quoted in Bishop, TR, 2.259.
73 Similar imagery The New York Times, 9 June 1910; The New Age, 16 May 1910; Literary Digest, 18 June 1910.
74 eight thousand letters Chicago Tribune, 10 June 1910. Most of these letters were mailed after TR’s Guildhall