Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [389]
52 “Shape your constitutional” The New York Times, 22 Feb. 1912.
53 “I know of no” Ibid.
54 The reaction to Ibid., 5 Mar. 1912; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.477; Current Literature, Apr. 1912. Such comments, however, were all initial, and often reflective of shock. A modern legal historian has shown, in an important corrective article, that as the summer and fall of 1912 wore on, many liberal judicial thinkers inclined to TR’s point of view—Felix Frankfurter, for one, remarking, “Thanks to T.R. there is live thought on the subject.” See Stephen Stagner, “The Recall of Judicial Decisions and the Due Process Debate,” American Journal of Legal History, 24.3 (July 1980).
55 It was to be Heaton, The Story of a Page, 299; Wall Street Journal, quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, 4.537, 490–91; The New York Times, 23 Feb. 1912.
56 Doubts about The New York Times, 28 Feb., 24 Mar. 1912; Sullivan, Our Times, 4.480–81; William Roscoe Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt: An Intimate Biography (Boston, 1919), 353–54; Adams, Letters, 6.518.
57 An appalled Henry The New York Times, 22 Feb. 1912. As early as 5 May 1910, TR had written Lodge from Christiania, Norway, to say there was a need for “very radical change” in the American judiciary. Lodge, Selections, 2.380.
58 “My hat” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.477. The earliest version of this famous quote, consisting of the first sentence only, appears in a no-headline special dispatch out of Cleveland to The New York Times on 22 Feb. 1912, printed in the following day’s paper. TR appears to have said it on board his train to a local county commissioner, William F. Eirick, who leaked their conversation as follows. Q: “Colonel, I have a question I want to ask.” A: “I know what it is. I’ll make a statement on Monday. My hat is in the ring.” A separate article in the same issue reports that TR seemed surprised when his remark was repeated to him by newsmen on his return journey, but did not deny making it. He used it again in a letter to Governor Hadley on 29 Feb. (TR, Letters, 7.513.) Where Mark Sullivan got the second sentence from is unclear.
59 “I will accept” TR, Letters, 7.511. “The Colonel made a mistake when he said he would ‘accept’ the nomination,” George Harvey remarked in Harper’s Weekly, 20 Apr. 1912. “What he meant to say was that he would ‘intercept’ it.”
60 Grant thought Robert Grant’s letter to James Ford Rhodes, 22 Mar. 1912, on which the rest of this chapter is based, is printed as an appendix in TR, Letters, 8.1456–61. See also White, Autobiography, 451–52.
61 William Roscoe Thayer See his account of this evening in Thayer, TR, 351–55.
62 Dante’s phrase “Vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colui / Che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto” (I saw and recognized the shade of him / Who through cowardice made the great refusal), Dante, The Inferno, canto 3, line 60. In TR’s time, this was believed to refer to Pietro da Morrone, later Pope Celestine V.
63 feeling saddened Thayer, TR, 354.
CHAPTER 9: THE TALL TIMBER OF DARKENING EVENTS
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 62.
2 The contrary forces Alexander Lambert address to the Roosevelt Memorial Association, 20 Sept. 1923, transcript in HP; Boston Globe, 29 Feb. 1912. See also Dr. Lambert’s account in TR, Works, 3.xix. Either he or TR misidentified Hallowell as “General.”
3 “I am alone” Quoted in TR, Works, 3.xix. Notwithstanding his assertion to Robert Grant that he felt “as fine as silk,” TR was evidently under considerable stress during his Boston visit. Twice, he turned and snapped