Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [411]
12 And he suspected Encouraged by timid signals from Ethel, Dr. Derby had begun to press his suit again in October. Their ultimately fruitful, two-and-a-half-year romance is touchingly documented in WFP.
13 Roosevelt was willing TR to KR, 11 Nov. 1912, ts. (TRC).
14 “I get from” Ibid. TR’s Outlook salary was $12,000.
15 There remained African Game Trails sold 36,127 copies in 1910, about 4,700 copies in 1911, and about 1,019 copies in the first half of 1912. (Charles Scribner to TR, 7 Feb. 1911, 21 Feb. and 22 Aug. 1912 [SCR].) Author’s estimates based on payments to TR, where no sales figures are available.
16 Looking back Charles Scribner to TR, 1 Feb. and 22 Aug. 1912 (TRP). TR had, all the same, an impressive total of 15 titles in print at the end of 1912, many of them in multiple editions, and all still earning royalties. This total did not include the “Elkhorn Edition” of his complete works to date (26 vols.), nor any of his foreign editions and translations.
Biographical Note: The information in these paragraphs is based on scattered royalty statements and “stock accounts” sent to TR by his various publishers in 1912, and preserved in TRC. From 1913 through 1919 he appears to have earned a further $58,125 in advance payments and royalties. (TR file, SCR.) Posthumously, he once again became a bestselling author, thanks to the publication of Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children. (See Epilogue.) It is impossible to calculate how many copies of TR’s books were bought during his lifetime and in the decade or so after his death. A memo prepared by his main publisher, Scribners, in 1933, lists 876,375 copies sold by that house to date. Scribners to William H. Bell, 25 Nov 1933 (SCR).
17 The Century Company Hero Tales from American History (New York, 1895), addressed to young readers, was co-authored by Henry Cabot Lodge. Stories of the Great West (New York, 1909), was a selection of chapters and articles previously published by TR.
18 He was not sure TR to KR, 21 Jan. 1913, ts. (TRC); Charles Scribner to William B. Howland, 2 Dec. 1912 (SCR).
19 not that they John Adams’s autobiography was abandoned in mid-sentence, and John Quincy Adams’s was a scissors-and-paste job compiled by his son Charles Francis.
20 “This is the first” Charles Scribner to TR, 2 Dec. 1912 (SCR).
21 “another proposition” Howland to Scribner, 3 Dec. 1912 (SCR).
22 The proposition had come Macmillan statement, 30 Apr. 1914 (TRP). TR’s advance was not payable until publication day, 19 Nov. 1913. There is no of record what, if anything, he was paid by The Outlook for first serial rights.
23 reputation for promptness See Abbott, Impressions of TR, 173–74.
24 His third book project Charles Scribner to TR, 17 June and 16 Sept. 1913 (SCR).
25 John F. Schrank, meanwhile Remey et al., The Attempted Assassination, 98, 101–2.
26 he insisted that TR was inclined to agree with Schrank. “I very gravely question if he has a more unsound mind than Eugene Debs.” Bishop, TR, 2.344.
27 He bequeathed Gores, “The Attempted Assassination”; Chicago Tribune, 15 Oct. 1912; The New York Times, 19 Nov. 1912; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 15 Oct. 1912.
28 incarceration for life The lunacy commission’s euphemism, “until cured” was understood in 1912 to mean a life sentence. The New York Times, 23 Nov. 1912.
29 “Only Bull Moose” Chicago Tribune, 23 Nov. 1912. TR told St. Loe Strachey on 16 Dec. that he did not consider Schrank to be any more insane than Senator La Follette or Eugene Debs. He blamed his own journalistic enemies for having excited the little man to action. “I have not the slightest feeling against him.” (TR, Letters, 7.676–77.) Schrank was shortly transferred to Wisconsin’s Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and remained there until his death on 15 Sept. 1943—the anniversary of his first vision of the ghost of McKinley. He was a model prisoner and exhibited no further evidence of aberrant behavior until Franklin D. Roosevelt sought a third term as President in 1940. Schrank