Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [380]
52 He sought to please Stimson would not accept his appointment until he had talked it over with TR. (Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 655.) Many years later, he confirmed that he and Fisher had been appointed as “a sop to the progressives.” Hermann Hagedorn, “Some Notes on Colonel Roosevelt from Henry L. Stimson,” 12 Dec. 1923 (TRB).
53 But Roosevelt felt James Garfield diary, 17 Feb. 1911 (JRGP).
54 “up to the North Pole” The Washington Post, 15 Feb. 1911; Pringle, Taft, 592. For TR’s increasing doubts about Canadian reciprocity, see TR, Letters, 7.241, 297.
55 On Capitol Hill The New York Times, 9, 23 Apr. 1911.
56 “Not a word, gentlemen” The New York Times, 17 Apr. 1911.
57 If anyone was James Garfield diary, 22–23 May 1911 (JRGP). At this time, WW was in the midst of his first, highly successful national speaking tour, espousing a progressive agenda that (apart from some unapologetic Bible-thumping) could have been written by TR. See August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (New York, 1991), 231–35. TR himself had been impressed with WW as a presidential possibility since early in the year. Johnson, William Allen White’s America, 192.
58 a signed editorial TR, “The Arbitration Treaty with Great Britain,” The Outlook, 20 May 1911.
59 a series of arbitration treaties Pringle, Taft, 738–41; TR, Letters, 7.296.
60 “Personally, I don’t see” Pringle, Taft, 738–39.
61 Roosevelt’s hottest language E.g., “Sentimentality is as much the antithesis and bane of healthy sentiment as bathos is of pathos.” TR, Works, 4.224.
62 “The United States ought” TR, “The Arbitration Treaty with Great Britain,” The Outlook, 20 May 1911.
63 a jubilee in Baltimore Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 672–74; William Manners, T.R. and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party (New York, 1969), 210. “They can investigate me until they are black in the face,” TR told John C. O’Laughlin on 2 June (OL).
64 Taft advised him TR, Letters, 7.290; The New York Times, 7 June 1911.
65 Roosevelt denied The New York Times, 7 June 1911; Harbaugh, TR, 374.
66 “this huge big storm cloud” The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 6.444–45.
67 escape the cataclysm In 1911, General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s book Deutschland und der Nächtse Krieg (Germany and the Next War) was published to enormous acclaim in Germany. This influential book persuaded citizens of the Reich that war was a “biological necessity,” creative as well and destructive, and therefore “an indispensable factor of culture.”
68 Roosevelt believed TR to Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, quoted in Tyler Dennett, Roosevelt and the Russo-Japanese War (New York, 1925), 1.
69 it reawakened moral fervor See, e.g., TR’s reaction to a speech by WHT in praise of pacifism. “Taft … committed himself without any qualification to the proposition that in any internecine or international war, the sorrow and the harm caused far outweighed any possible good that was ever accomplished.” (TR, Letters, 7.289.) See also TR’s address to the Sorbonne, 47.
70 friends felt their gorges rise See, e.g., Elmer Ellis, Mr. Dooley’s America: A Life of Finley Peter Dunne (New York, 1941), 171.
71 He used the strongest TR, Letters, 1.509; New York World, 31 May 1911; TR to Hiram P. Collier, Letters, 7.281.
72 Taft remarked WHT to Philander Knox, 9 Sept. 1911, quoted in Pringle, Taft, 748.
73 There is nothing TR, Works, 5.227–28.
CHAPTER 7: SHOWING THE WHITE FEATHER
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 55.
2 He had flabbergasted his parents The New York Times, 5 June 1911. QR’s surviving school reports for 1910–1914, preserved at Sagamore Hill, show that he regularly stood first in his class.
3 Always precocious Earle Looker, The White House Gang (New York, 1929), passim; TR, Letters, 7.235, 468.
4 Archie, Quentin’s former TR to E. Alexander Powell (“My son Archie, a boy with a wooden head”); Powell, Yonder Lies Adventure, 310; TR, Letters, 7.261; Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt,