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By Root 3257 0

… There’s steam around you. Somewhere in New England.” When a high school graduate said shyly that he would not remember her, TR put his hand in front of his eyes and said, “Yes, you were in a rodeo in Denver two years ago and you were riding on a calico pony.” To an elderly correspondent that same year, he wrote: “I remember you very well, and to show it I will tell you that you were wounded at a battle in the Civil War, and stayed to look on at the fight, and then found your wounds so stiff that you could hardly move.”

TR frequently flattered authors by quoting their work at length—in the case of the essayist Edward S. Martin, “word for word a bit of dialogue … that I suppose was ten lines long.” He astonished the humorist George Ade by recalling in detail a short story Ade himself had forgotten. When he met the poet Edgar Lee Masters, “he talked of [my] Spoon River Anthology, and seemed to know it all … some of it by heart.” TR’s memory in later life, however, was not infallible, and throughout his career he suffered from the selective amnesia characteristic of politicians. Albert Shaw, “Reminiscences of Theodore Roosevelt,” ts. (SHA); TR, Works, 3.xvi; James H. Morse diary (italics added), 9 Nov. 1911 (JHMD); Champ Clark, My Quarter Century of American Politics (New York, 1912), 1.437–38; George W. Smalley, Anglo-American Memories: Second Series (New York, 1912), 378; Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 5.3 (Summer 1979); Stanley M. Isaacs interviewed by Hermann Hagedorn, ca. 1920s (TRB); TR, Letters, 7.477; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 381, 382, 375, 389, and passim. See also Biographical Note below, 661.

52 “So, with the lion-skin” TR, Works, 5.184.

53 The Nation noted 22 Sept. 1910.

54 he intended to Theodore Roosevelt and Edmund Heller, Life-Histories of African Game Animals, 2 vols. (New York, 1914).

55 Lloyd Griscom arranged TR, Letters, 7.135; Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 516–21.

56 Covers were laid Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 517, 522–25; Patricia O’Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House (New York, 2005), 107–8. TR wrote Henry Cabot Lodge afterward, confirming that WHT had raised the subject of the convention. He quoted the President as saying that “Barnes and Company were crooks, and that he hoped we would beat them.” TR, Letters, 7.135.

57 To Roosevelt’s annoyance TR told Ray Stannard Baker that he felt that WHT and his aides had entrapped him. “It happened once: but never again!” Baker, notebook K, 155 (RSB).

58 “If you were” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 524.

59 “Twenty years ago” Bishop, TR, 2.304.

60 Now here he was The New York Times, 27 Sept. 1910; Abbott, Impressions of TR, 35ff.

61 He did it by exuding New York Evening Post, 27 Sept., The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1910.

62 He soothed it Ibid.; TR, Letters, 7.176.

63 “We are against” The New York Times, 28 Sept. 1910.

64 He paced the stage Davis, Released for Publication, 224–25. Writing about fourteen years after the event, Davis claimed that his editors in New York, unaffected by TR’s onstage personality, had found the speech itself too “dull and prosaic” to print. Davis remembered wrongly: it was published in full by The New York Times on 28 Sept. 1910.

65 “Theodore,” said Elihu Root Overheard by William N. Chadbourne. Chadbourne interview, Apr.–May 1955 (TRB).

66 “If it means” Elihu Root to Willard Bartlett, 1 Oct. 1910 (WB).

67 “It shows an utter” The New York Times, 29 Sept. 1910. Two days earlier, the New York Evening Post described TR as “the big, overshadowing, indisputable ‘it’ of this gathering.”

68 “I do not think” Davis, Released for Publication, 225–26.

69 “We have got” Literary Digest, 8 Oct. 1910.

70 Home at Sagamore Hill Baker, notebook K, 153–57, 4 Oct. 1910 (RSB). Elihu Root’s response when Stimson reported that TR meant to take no future part in politics was “Bet you a dollar.” Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson (Boston, 1960), 136–38.

71 “The time to beat” Mowry, TR, 154.

72 Roosevelt spent Davis, Released for Publication, 263;