Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [377]
98 “I think you are a trump” TR, Letters, 7.176–77.
99 That did not stop Amassa Thornton to WHT, 25 Nov. 1910 (WHTP); TR, Letters, 7.128, 135. Hughes had been sworn in as an associate justice on 10 Oct. 1910. TR’s admiration for White derived from the justice’s dissent in Lochner v. New York.
100 Taft was happy TR, Letters, 7.180, 179; WHT to TR, 30 Nov. 1910 (WHTP). In a further gesture of goodwill, WHT sent EKR a mahogany settee that she had bought for the White House and regretted having to leave behind her. He personally paid for a duplicate settee to be installed in its place. Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 337–38.
101 Notwithstanding their politesse Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 185, 504–73 passim. Apparently, even the President’s tongue was overweight, causing severe obstructive sleep apnea. For more on the alarming state of WHT’s health in the fall of 1910, see O’Toole, When Trumpets Call, 143–14.
102 What I now TR to Eleanor B. Roosevelt, 27 Nov. 1910 (TRJP).
CHAPTER 6: NOT A WORD, GENTLEMEN
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 59.
2 his first attempt at autobiographical writing TR’s 1880 manuscript article, “Sou’-sou’westerly,” was finally published in Gray’s Sporting Journal, 13.3 (Fall 1988).
3 But to older ears TR, Letters, 7.182, 196; Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 164.
4 Henry Stimson, a close Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB); EKR diary, 23 Jan. 1911 (TRC).
5 “You are now” George H. Haynes, The Life of Charles G. Washburn (Boston, 1931), 147.
6 It had the used The word used is Washburn’s. Details in this paragraph not taken from his eyewitness description are from Baker, notebook K, 153–60 (RSB) and David A. Wallace, Sagamore Hill National Historic Site: Historic Furnishings Report, Vol. 1, Historical Data (Harpers Ferry, Va., 1989), 96ff.
7 Their breeding showed According to ARL, TR thought that addressing servants by their first names, without an honorific, was demeaning.
8 “I adhere to” Haynes, Washburn, 147.
9 Because Roosevelt was TR, Works, 14.ix. Literary Digest referred to TR on 27 Nov. 1915 as “our nineteen-sided citizen.” TR himself remarked that “most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions,” implying that he did not. Harbaugh, TR, 384.
10 “a changed man” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 579.
11 “I don’t see” Ibid., 580–81.
Historiographical Note: The year 1911 marks a climacteric in the life of Theodore Roosevelt. As Taft discerned, he needed philosophy to get through it, and rebuild his political personality while he adjusted to grandfatherhood and the closing-in of middle age. The Roosevelt that emerged from this period was, if not ambivalent about his future course in life, ambiguous enough politically that biographers have never achieved consensus as to whether that course was vainglorious or self-sacrificing. The philosophical historian David H. Burton suggests that this disagreement may be explained in terms of the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty. (“History, Hubris, and the Heisenberg Principle,” Thought, Mar. 1975.) Normally applied to physics, the principle also applies to the tension inherent in any biographical narrative between action and character. Heisenberg held (in Burton’s paraphrase) to “the practical impossibility of simultaneously stating the exact position and momentum of [any] object in question.” When a usually fast-moving man decelerates to near-stasis, as TR did after the election of 1910, it is easy to agree on where and what he is, as a sum of his experiences so far. But “a perfect measurement of position entails less than a perfect assessment of momentum.” Hence, Burton writes, “the perennial problem of historical subjectivity” in chronicling the later life of Theodore Roosevelt. Narrative biographers, preoccupied with “a past which is more or less fixed,” are confused by the non sequiturs of his post-1911 career, which ideological biographers twist into theory, at cost to general understanding. Whether the aging TR indeed brought “hubris