Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [392]
46 “No one can explain” Adams, Letters, 6.532. Under intense pressure from TR and Medill McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, Governor Charles Deneen had followed the example of Governor Hughes of New York in 1910, and called a special session of the Illinois legislature to authorize a direct, preferential presidential primary. It did so on 30 Mar., undeterred by William B. McKinley’s ban on “changes in the rules of the game while the game is in progress.” Other legislatures were encouraged to move just as fast, and do the same. Matthew James Glover, “Theodore Roosevelt Wins Illinois’ First Presidential Primary,” unpublished ms. (AC).
47 “The Titanic is wrecked” Adams, Letters, 6.534. For the next few days Adams obsessedly drew comparisons between the great shipwreck and the blow that TR, iceberg-like, had inflicted on the GOP. The former called into question the efficiency of modern mechanics; the latter, the smooth workings of the American political system. “We are drifting at sea in the ice, and can’t get ashore.… Our Theodore is not a bird of happy omen. He loves to destroy.” Adams, Letters, 6.534–38.
48 The President, nearly frantic The New York Times, 16 Apr. 1912.
49 “Major Butt was” Ibid., 20 Apr. 1912. According to local survivors, Butt had handled the catastrophe as if on army duty, controlling crowd hysteria and helping women and children aboard lifeboats. Marie Young, who had taught music to Archie and Quentin Roosevelt in the White House, was reportedly the last woman to catch a glimpse of him, waving to her from an upper deck as her boat pulled away. (Ibid.) Walter Lord, in A Night to Remember (1955), doubts the legend of Butt’s heroism on the ground that the accounts of it by Ms. Young and another Washington woman sound over-embellished. As quoted in the Times, they certainly sound so. But the two women nevertheless corroborated each other, and the behavior they describe is consistent with the punctilio and physical forcefulness self-evident in Butt’s three volumes of correspondence. A memorial fountain to him and his traveling companion, the Washington artist Frank Millett, survives on the Ellipse south of the White House.
50 “Theodosus the Great” Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 123.
51 I am the will See Lorant, Life and Times of TR, 560–61 and 571.
52 They did what they could TR, Letters, 7.542–43; The New York Times, 21 May 1912.
53 “Since I have been” TR, Letters, 7.507–8.
54 “I think Taft” Ibid., 7.537.
55 “I am in” Thompson, Presidents I’ve Known, 220. The following account is based on reports in the Boston Globe and The New York Times, 26 Apr. 1912. All quotations are taken from the former source.
56 Moreover, Taft was Mowry, TR, 226–27.
57 Mr. Roosevelt ought not Boston Globe, 26 Apr. 1912.
58 After returning Pringle, Taft, 781–82. The New York Times, annoyed that Taft should stoop to the level of a personal attack, called his Boston appearance “one of the most deplorable occasions in the history of our politics.” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.482.
59 a momentary shiver The image of the shiver comes from the Boston Globe’s report of this meeting (27 Apr. 1912), as do the words of TR’s speech quoted here. See also Sullivan, Our Times, 4.482–85.
60 Roosevelt said that TR’s criticism was well founded. One of WHT’s self-quotations was to the effect that reciprocity would make Canada “only an adjunct of the United States.” These words caused an explosion of outrage both in Canada and Britain, where on 4 May the Pall Mall Gazette remarked that the President’s “blazing indiscretion” might cause embarrassed Americans “to turn to Roosevelt after all for political sobriety.”
61 Later he spoke The New York Times, 28 Apr. 1912.
62 “Now you have me” Ibid.
63 “He is essentially” Harbaugh, TR, 402.
64 “VOTE OF BAY STATE” The New York Times, 27, 30 Apr., 2 May 1912. In TR’s own wry summing-up of the vote, “Apparently there were about eighty