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differed in several particulars from Thomas’s, although he correctly reproduced the exclamation mark that inflected her repetition of “Castile.” He erred on one image, writing “Gordian knife” instead of “Indian blade,” and divided four lines that should have been couplets. Otherwise, he got the poem as right as if he had memorized it hours before. In fact, he was remembering its first printing in 1894, in an issue of The Atlantic Monthly that had coincidentally carried an article by himself. The poem must have registered there and then, because he had quoted a phrase from it, probably without thinking, two years later in the fourth volume of his book The Winning of the West: “Dark faces frowned through the haze, the war-axes gleamed, and on the frozen ground the soldiers fell.” Edith M. Thomas, “A Good-By” and TR, “The College Graduate and Public Life,” The Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1894; TR, The Winning of the West (New York, 1896), 4.60.

80 What pleased Roosevelt Other American works TR singled out for especial praise were Kate T. Cory’s “Arizona Desert,” Mahonri Young’s studies for the Sea Gull Monument in Salt Lake City, Leon Dabo’s “Canadian Night,” Amos Chew’s plaster, “Pelf,” and Émile Bourdelle’s “Heracles.” TR, Works, 14.410.

81 European moderns The Armory Show grouped artists geographically according to their current domicile. Hence Whistler was hung in the British galleries, and Kandinsky in the German.

82 Then came the slap See Brown, Story of the Armory Show, 168ff.

83 obviously mammalian The phraseology here is TR’s, in Works, 14.408.

84 A phrase he TR, Letters, 7.710.

85 Nakedness seemed Henri’s “Figure in Motion,” clearly influenced by the photography of Eadweard Muybridge, was described by William Zorach as “the “nudest nude I ever saw.” It and Pascin’s “Three Girls” may be seen on the above-cited website of Shelley Staples.

86 As James Bryce Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of TR, 22.

87 his subsequent review TR, Works, 14.405. The tone of TR’s review may be contrasted with that of, e.g., Kenyon Cox in Harper’s Weekly, 15 Mar. 1913: “This thing [modernism/Cubism] is not amusing: it is heartrending and sickening … nothing less than the total destruction of the art of painting … revolting and defiling … pathological.… As to Matisse … it is not madness that stares at you from his canvasses, but leering effrontery.”

88 What disturbed him “Something is wrong with the world,” the financier James D. Stillman wrote after touring the Armory Exhibition. “These men know.” McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, 241.

89 In this recent TR, Works, 14.407.

Biographical Note: Joseph Masheck, “Teddy’s Taste: Theodore Roosevelt and the Armory Show,” Art Forum, 9.2. (1970), challenges the received opinion of TR’s review as unsubtle and uninformed. He points out that TR’s personal collection of art and objets d’art, much of which can still be seen at Sagamore Hill, contains some “very fine items,” including Oriental bronzes and screens, a signed drawing by the Roman Baroque master Pietro Testa, a few “sublime landscapes,” including those of Marcius-Simons, plus French porcelains, a large corpus of statues by Frederic Remington, and “a number of truly superb Indian rugs and blankets.” As for TR’s seeing eye, Masheck notes that he already had demonstrated, in his criticism of the Thayer theory of protective coloration (see above, 141, 623), “a grasp of the total visual field … quite out of Thayer’s reach,” plus an “extremely Post-Impressionistic” ability to identify with both observer and observed. Masheck agrees with several Rooseveltian assessments of individual items on display in the Armory, especially the “very remarkable works” of Chanler. He traces and authenticates all TR’s quotes of pretentious art-writing, and remarks that even a humorous reference to “colored puzzle-pictures” in the Sunday papers was well-chosen, since John Sloan had long earned money doing just that. As for the Navajo rug, “Roosevelt needs no utilitarian apology for formal beauty: in fact, what he seems to be after is pure decorative value.” As a postscript,