Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [401]
22 a thirtyish surgeon She had met him in Berlin in May 1909. KR to ERD, 19 May 1913 (ERDP).
23 “How is my sweet” Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 829. In a conversation with her piano teacher, ERD said of her shyness, “I wonder if it could be Papa I get it from? Can it be that he seems so terribly the opposite of shy because at heart he really is so?” Emma Knorr in Washington Herald, 27 July 1931.
24 “Oh Dorothy” ERD to Dorothy Straight, ca. 22 June 1912 (ERDP).
25 Archie had little patience ABR to QR, 12–27 Sept. 1917 (ABRP); TR to Cecil Spring Rice, 10 Aug. 1912 (CSR). Archie Roosevelt’s personal characteristics of truculent terseness, intense focus (from a slightly obtuse angle) on one matter at a time, and unconcern about offending people, are consistent with a modern diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome.
26 “tranquil, efficient” TR to ERD, 21 Aug. 1912 (ERDP).
27 “I’m feeling like” Sullivan, Our Times, 4.506. There is some uncertainty as to when TR said this, but it was definitely part of the American political vernacular by the weekend of 22–23 June, when WHT received a telegram congratulating him on “having lassoed the bull moose.” (The New York Times, 24 June 1912.) Before the end of the month the moose had traveled as far as Germany, where it was the subject of a mocking editorial in the Berliner Tagblatt (29 June 1912). TR described himself as feeling “as rugged as a bull moose” as early as 30 Sept. 1894, in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge. TR, Letters, 1.399.
28 Governor Osborn wrote Chase Osborn to TR, 1 July 1912 (TRP); TR, Letters, 7.569.
29 “I suppose that” TR, Letters, 7.567–68.
30 On 7 July The New York Times, 8 July 1912. For a detailed account of the pre-convention work of organizing the Progressive Party, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chap. 2.
31 the Party’s biggest bankroller Mowry, TR, 222. By the end of the 1912 campaign, however, Frank Munsey’s contributions slightly exceeded Perkins’s.
32 “Roosevelt has the right” Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 124.
33 his palatial estate overlooking the Hudson Now Wave Hill, a public park in New York City. Coincidentally, but no doubt pleasingly to both men, TR had summered there as a boy.
34 He had come John A. Garraty, Right-Hand Man: The Life of George W. Perkins (New York, 1960), passim. See also William J. Boies, “George W. Perkins,” World’s Work, Dec. 1901; White, Autobiography, 459–561, 519. In 1912, Perkins told Henry L. Stoddard that he had “all the money a man should possess” and intended to devote the rest of his life to “public affairs.” Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 423.
35 Exquisitely undertailored The phrase is William Allen White’s. See White, Autobiography, 459–561, 519. Since at least the turn of the century, when they had worked together to create the Palisades Intersate Park, Roosevelt had held Perkins to be “one of the most delightful men I have ever met.” TR, Letters, 3.53.
36 White always a surname At least until 1917, when he became “W.A.”
37 To White, that sounded White, Autobiography, 459.
38 One of the reasons Mowry, TR, 225; Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family, 310; TR, Letters, 7.567. “I’d much rather discuss ornithology than politics,” TR told a Columbia University professor in between platform discussions. (Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 263.) For a detailed account of these discussions, see Gable, “The Bull Moose Years” (diss.), 133–40.
39 Excepted only were Gould, Four Hats in the Ring, 129; TR, Letters, 7.564.
40 “I regard” TR, Letters, 7.577.
41 all hailed from Southern states Specifically, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi.
42 his racial views See Morris, Theodore Rex, chaps. 2 and 27.
43 Taft’s deliberate score Butt, Taft and Roosevelt, 511.
44 “inhuman cruelty and barbarity” See Morris, Theodore Rex, 49–50, 110–11, 246, 258–62.
45 Yet stray observations TR, Letters, 5.226; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, James Ford Rhodes: American Historian (New York, 1929), 119–20; Bull, Safari, 179. Rhodes’s account of a conversation on race with TR (16 Nov. 1905) should