Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [385]
53 “He presents” New York World, 18 Nov. 1911.
54 As so often TR, Letters, 7.455; Harbaugh, TR, 381–83, analyzes the “inconsistencies” in TR’s basically moralistic economic thinking.
55 Or so he TR, Letters, 7.441–42; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.461–62.
56 “since Mr. Roosevelt” Boston Globe, 28 Nov. 1911.
57 La Follette was Margulies, “La Follette”; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 388; Wall Street Journal, 9 Nov. 1910.
58 On 11 December Pavord, “The Gamble for Power”; Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 388ff. For political gossip emanating from the RNC meeting, see Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 784ff.
59 A group of three Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 390–91; TR, Letters, 7.261–62.
60 Colonel, I never knew Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 391–92. See also TR, Letters, 7.469.
Historiographical Note: A letter from John C. O’Laughlin to a fellow journalist, James Keeley (16 Dec. 1911 [OL]), contains the following indiscretion about a conversation he had just held with TR: “Probably the sensational aspect of our talk related to a proposition which was made to him by Taft through a mutual friend. He told me this in dead confidence, but I can repeat it to you because I know he would not object. The President said he would withdraw and support Mr. Roosevelt provided the latter would agree to appoint him on the Supreme bench. I cannot conceive of a President of the United States making such a proposal. Mr. Roosevelt, of course, refused to listen to anything of the kind. He will enter into no deal for the presidency.” The story is unsupported by other evidence. An expert on the partisan politics of this period points out WHT was in too strong a position to risk the disgrace of such a ploy being made public. WHT in any case had turned down an offer of an associate seat on the Supreme Court during TR’s presidency, saying that he was interested only in becoming chief justice. That office was unlikely to become vacant for some years, since Edward Douglass White had assumed it only recently. Lewis L. Gould to author, 3 Aug. 2009 (AC).
61 There was no arguing Knox, however, was convinced that “if he [TR] is drafted for service by the people not the politicians he will not refuse.” La Follette got similar intimations from other attendants at the meeting. Pavord, “The Gamble for Power”; La Follette, Autobiography, 551–52.
62 “The Search for Truth” The Outlook, 2 Dec. 1911, reprinted in TR, Works, 14.418–38. All quotations below are from this source.
63 Arthur Balfour alone excepted Although Balfour was a bona fide published philosopher and a politician at least as skilled and successful as TR, it could be argued that the latter’s empirical understanding of the world—the basis, rather than the goal, of philosophy—was larger and more sympathetic. Balfour remained to the end of his life an intellectual elitist comfortable only in his own aristocratic class, and even within that class he held himself aloof. See John David Root, “The Philosophy and Religious Thought of Arthur J. Balfour (1848–1930),” Journal of British Studies, 19.2 (Spring 1980).
64 Reyles’s dying swan Originally La Muerte del Cisne. TR read this text in a French translation (Paris, 1911). Bibliographical details of all the books cited in his essay appear in TR, Works, 14.52–93.
65 “Subject to bursts” Henry Osborn Taylor, The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages (1910), quoted in TR, Works, 14.420.
66 He took up In the year preceding TR’s essay, the issue of fides versus ratio had become fraught in Roman Catholicism. Sparked by Pope Pius X’s reactionary encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), attacking the validity of intuition, scientism, and mystical aspirations as bases for belief as opposed to scriptural orthodoxy, it had burst into doctrinal flame in 1910, when the pontiff ordered all Catholic clerics to swear an oath repudiating modernism. The resultant ideological schism tormented the Church for the rest