Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [382]
For a detailed account of the Wall Street panic of 1907, centering on the USS/TCC “deal” and upholding TR’s testimony, see Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (New York, 1999), chap. 28. But see also James C. German, Jr., “Roosevelt, Taft, and United States Steel,” The Historian, 34.4 (1972). This article lists at least half a dozen examples of deception practiced by Gary and Frick during their interview with TR on 4 Nov. 1907, including a false statement that Moore & Schley held a majority of TC&I stocks; no mention of the fact that TC&I was U.S. Steel’s principal competitor in iron ore holdings; and concealment of TC&I’s true profitability at the time of the purchase. TR was led to believe that the company’s stock was worthless.
15 Even The New York Times On 6 Aug. 1911. The New York Evening Post agreed, albeit with editorial tongue in cheek. “The Colonel enthusiastically approves everything the President did in 1907 … [as being] the source of unqualified satisfaction and pride to the man best able to judge the whole matter, namely, the principal actor in it” (7 Aug. 1911).
16 “very young looking” TR, Letters, 7.322.
17 News came from San Francisco EKR diary, 17 Aug. 1911 (TRC); TR to TR.Jr., 17 Aug. 1911, private collection. TR probably read Michelet’s famous diatribe against Jesuit misogyny at Harvard, in preparation for his senior thesis, “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights” (1880). As translated into English by Charles Cocks (London, 1845), the preface to the book reads, “Whether we be philosophers, physiologists, political economists, or statesmen, we all know that the excellency of the race, the strength of the people, come especially from the women. Does not the nine months’ support of the mother establish this?… We all are, and ever shall be, the debtors of women” (viii). TR quoted the last phrase, and held to the precept, continually through his life.
18 Grimly determined Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 44–45, 58; TR, quoting Ted, to Cecil Spring Rice, 10 Aug. 1912 (CSR).
19 “Do remember” TR, Letters, 7.344.
20 he was expressing See, e.g., TR’s articles on progressive justice in The Outlook, 24 June and 22 July, and on Alaska land policy in ibid., 22 July, 5, 12 Aug. 1911. See also TR, Letters, 7.323–24.
21 gambled his whole government See Pringle, Taft, 586, for a gaming slogan, coined by Laurier in Aug. 1911, that may have hastened the prime minister’s retirement.
22 About the only Hechler, Insurgency, 185; Mowry, TR, 173–74. La Follette announced for the presidency on 17 June 1911.
23 La Follette imagined The Outlook, 27 May 1911; Mowry, TR, 177–78. In Apr., La Follette, reacting to expressions of Rooseveltian goodwill relayed by an intermediary, Gilson Gardner, had convinced himself that TR wanted him to run against Taft as the official candidate of Republican progressives. Gardner later denied he had transmitted any such message. (La Follette, Autobiography, 512–16.) It is possible that La Follette, like many presidential aspirants before and since, mistook flattery for endorsement.
24 “My present intention” TR, Letters, 7.336. WW then was the strongest candidate, period. A midsummer presidential preference poll of 2,414 primary-state subscribers to World’s Work magazine returned 1,505 ballots, awarding 519 votes to WW, 402 to WHT, and 274 to TR, with all other candidates scoring only double figures. Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton, 1966–1990), 23.234.
25 a second “Morocco crisis” Hew Strachan, The First World War (New York, 2004), 39–40; Gwynn, Cecil Spring Rice, 2.163; TR, Letters, 7.343.
26 Roosevelt raged Lodge, Selections, 2.409. TR added that the Kaiser’s strategists “are under solemn treaty to respect the territories of both countries, and they have not the slightest thought of paying the least attention to these treaties unless they are threatened with war as the result of their violation.” It is difficult to guess from whom TR may have gotten his “personal” information about German war plans, but he did spend many hours