Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [391]
30 A childhood friend Frances Theodora Parsons, Perchance Some Day (privately printed, 1951), 238. For the teenage relationship of Fanny Parsons and TR, see Morris, The Rise of TR, 50–52.
31 Carnegie Hall was crammed The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912; TR, Letters, 7.529.
32 “It will be” The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912.
33 “The courts should” Ibid.; TR, Works, 19.206–8. William Draper Lewis of the University of Pennsylvania Law School suggested in a scholarly article that TR was clearly talking about judicial opinions on the constitutionality of acts, rather than decisions on practical points of law. (Stagner, “The Recall of Judicial Decisions.”) See also William Draper Lewis, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt (Philadelphia, 1919), 340–42.
34 sheet after sheet The New York Times, 21 Mar. 1912.
35 The leader for TR, Works, 19.222–23. See also Abbott, Impressions of TR, 80–83, and for an affecting account of how this speech was written, Lewis, TR, 444–46. The latter source makes plain that Corinne Roosevelt Robinson erred in assuming that TR improvised his peroration. (My Brother TR, 267.) It was in fact carefully written out in pencil on “several soiled sheets of gray tissue manuscript,” which TR kept separate from the text he intended to give out to the press. Evidently he did not want to blunt the drama of viva voce delivery of one of his most eloquent utterances.
36 “Roosevelt, confound him” Abbott, Impressions of TR, 82–83. The political oratory of TR and WW in 1912 has been collected in two complementary anthologies: Lewis L. Gould, ed., Bull Moose on the Stump: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt (Lawrence, Kan., 2008) and John W. Davidson, ed., A Crossroads of Freedom: The 1912 Campaign Speeches of Woodrow Wilson (New Haven, Conn., 1956).
Historiographical Note: Since few stenographic records of what TR actually said on the campaign trail in 1912 are available in TRC or TRP, Gould’s anthology relies much on contemporary newspaper reports. So does this biography. Journalistic transcripts, however, often vary considerably one from another. They may simply reproduce TR’s own typed speech scripts, handed out in the form of press releases (but he was inclined to reshuffle or even toss aside such scripts on the podium, talking off the cuff when the mood struck him). Throughout his public career, he could be cavalier, even with the scripts of his major addresses printed as urtext in TR, Works. The improvisational humor he used to temper his seriousness can only be imagined—along with the radiance of the personality that infused these frequently dull texts with life. For a rare example of TR interacting with his audience, see Gould, Bull Moose, 18–30.
37 Republicans amenable The New York Times, 27 Mar. 1912.
38 It turned out that Ibid., 27, 28 Mar. 1912.
39 The net results Ibid., 27, 31 Mar. 1912.
40 He received the news TR took a three-day swing to Portland, Maine, after his Carnegie Hall speech, then campaigned in the Midwest from 26 to 30 Mar.
41 “They are stealing” The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1912; Pringle, Taft, 771.
42 Roosevelt roared Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, 28 Mar. 1912.
43 He was back On 2 Apr., Republicans in Wisconsin, a progressive primary state that TR had ceded to its favorite son, awarded 133,354 votes to La Follette and 47,514 to Taft. TR netted 628.
44 At the top Owen Wister, who had not seen TR for several years, briefly traveled with him during this campaign swing. “The energy, the action, the hammered words, the blaze of genial, jocund power, the prompt and marvelous application of some special sentence to some special place—I can call it nothing but gigantic.” Wister, Roosevelt, 307.
45 a major address In this uncompromising speech, TR castigated the august Joseph Choate and other Wall Street lawyers who had united in opposition to the referendum and recall, and compared their conservatism to that of New Yorkers defending the Dred Scott decision of 1857. See TR, “The Recall of Judicial Decisions” in TR, Works, 19.255ff., and,