Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [374]
39 Throughout his address Nebraska State Journal, 1 Sept. 1910.
40 Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” New York Evening Post, 31 Aug., Fort Wayne Sentinel, 1 Sept., The New York Times, 3 Sept. 1910; Harbaugh, TR, 369; Harper’s Weekly, 10 Sept., Literary Digest, 10 Sept., New York Tribune, 1 Sept. 1910.
41 He never once New York Evening Post, 1 Sept. 1910.
42 Roosevelt himself granted TR, Letters, 7.797; Bishop, TR, 2.303; Mowry, TR, 132.
43 He tried to sound Proceedings of the Second National Conservation Congress (Washington, D.C., 1911), 12–34, 82–93; WHT to Charles P. Taft, 10 Sept. 1910 (WHTP). On 24 Sept. 1910, TR published a defensive essay, “Criticism of the Courts,” in The Outlook, attempting to show that what he had said in Denver and Osawatomie was less sensational than newspaper reports implied.
44 “when a majority” James Bryce to Sir Edward Grey, Bourne, British Documents, pt. 1, ser. C, 13.381. Bryce was an old friend of TR’s. They first met in 1887, when Bryce was researching his classic The American Commonwealth. “He has immense go and quickness—alertness—of mind.” Bryce to Cecil Spring Rice, 19 May 1887 (CSR).
45 “A break between” Harper’s Weekly, 10 Sept. 1910.
46 “When I see you” Lodge, Selections, 2.389–90.
47 Roosevelt answered that TR, Letters, 7.123. In “Criticism of the Courts,” TR noted that Stephen A. Douglas, in debate, had attacked Abraham Lincoln for “making war” on the Supreme Court. “If for Abraham Lincoln’s name mine were substituted,” he wrote, “this para [of invective] would stand with hardly an alteration.” Throughout the campaign of 1910, TR did not hesitate to compare himself to the Emancipator.
48 To Edith EKR to Jules Jusserand, 6 Oct. 1910 (JJJ); Abbott, Impressions of TR, 88–89; WHT to Charles P. Taft, 10 Sept. 1910 (WHTP).
49 There was one By the end of Sept., African Game Trails, published on 24 Aug., had sold 25,000 copies. (Robert Bridges to TR, 4 Oct. 1910.) It went through five printings in 1910 alone. See, however, chap. 13 for its subsequent publishing history.
50 “rather like the diary” Cecil to Florence Spring Rice, 1 Nov. 1910 (CSR).
51 the author’s movie-camera memory See, e.g., TR, Works, 5.148ff.
Biographical Note: Anecdotes about TR’s memory are so numerous that it is difficult to select the best examples. He himself described it as “photographic” to Albert Shaw, editor of the American Review of Reviews, while his doctor, Alexander Lambert, noted that “his ear memory was as accurate as his eye memory.” Oscar Straus told James Morse that TR “read books not by lines but by pages, [and] could quote the exact words and imitate the tones of all who conversed with him.” Champ Clark once visited him in the White House to plead the case of a cadet who had been court-martialed, along with six others, at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. On this minor matter, TR amazed the congressman by repeating “substantially the entire transcript[s]” of all seven cases, totaling some 49 pages of closely typed legal cap. George Smalley, foreign correspondent of The Times, watched the President receiving a series of senators, and was reminded of the omniscience that had made Léon Gambetta a master of French politics. “He knew as much as they did about their districts and candidates and local affairs.” On another occasion, TR learnedly lectured some Chinese diplomats on their society and its problems. He explained afterward that he was remembering a book he had read about China some time before, “And as I talked the pages of the book came before my eyes.” (He said the same in 1910, after treating members of the Hungarian parliament to a surprise flood of rhetoric on the Mongol invasions of the Danube Valley.) His memory for people was contextual as well as visual. In 1912, he recognized a train engineer he had seen ten years before in Lenox, Mass. “Do you wear over-alls?