Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [438]
92 And Edith too Kipling reported that he had seen KR and Belle just before they sailed from Liverpool. “Happiness wasn’t the word to describe ‘em!” To TR, 15 Sept. 1915 (TRP).
93 Roosevelt persuaded himself TR to KR, 11 Nov. 14 (TRC).
Biographical Note: With TR’s approval, John C. O’Laughlin, who had once served as assistant secretary of state and was a capable private envoy, went to London in Nov. 1914 to ask if Sir Edward Grey would be interested in TR as a peace broker between the Powers. The foreign minister, reluctant to go behind WW’s back, was courteously discouraging. He praised TR’s recent war articles, but said that he did not agree with him about the apathy of the Wilson administration. “The President has been strictly correct, as has Ambassador Page.” O’Laughlin to TR, 29 Nov. 1914 (OL).
94 Through the Brazilian See. e.g., The New York Times, 15 Nov. 1914 (“Colonel Roosevelt … is blessed with a power for minute and careful observation.… One more excellent volume [added] to a list which is already a praiseworthy record”); The Spectator, 19 Dec. 1914 (“The art of the narrator is invariably swift and keen. A better record of adventure … it would be difficult to find”); Geographical Journal, Feb. 1915. On 6 Nov., TR sent a copy of Through the Brazilian Wilderness to Cândido Rondon, with apologies for it being in English. “Malheureusement, cette terrible guerre européene a empeché toute traduction allemande et française, aussi ne puis-je vous en envoyer qu’un exception en anglais.” For the full text of his letter, see Vivieros, Rondon, 424–25.
95 For as long as Sullivan, Our Times, 5.199.
96 Next February H. J. Whigham, editor of Metropolitan magazine, recalled in old age that TR at first rebuffed his approaches because he felt that the salary offered ($25,000) was too much for the work required: “I would not feel that if I were writing an article once a month that I was really earning the money properly.” He would prefer, he said, to write many more articles for the Wheeler syndicate for the same sum. It took the combined efforts of Whigham and Harry Whitney, the magazine’s owner, to persuade him to sign on. Whigham interiewed by Hermann Hagedorn, 12 May 1949 (TRB).
97 brilliant young men Soon after the election, TR invited Croly, Lippmann, and another co-founder of The New Republic, Walter Weyl, to dine with him—“just you three and I.” He clearly wanted to pass on his Progressive-ideological torch. Lippmann, who impressed TR as “on the whole, the most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States,” had just brought out a new book of political essays. Entitled Drift and Mastery, it won Lippmann early fame as an astute analyst of American domestic unrest. TR reviewed it favorably, along with Croly’s Progressive Democracy, in The Outlook. Although he later split with The New Republic on its attitude to the war, Lippmann continued to revere him. TR to Croly et al., 11 Nov. 1914; TR, Letters, 8.872; TR Works, 14, 214–22.
98 “It is perfectly obvious” TR, Letters, 8.835–39.
99 “Heartily know” Ibid. TR appears to be slightly misquoting an unidentified verse he had read in Charles Henry Parkhurst’s Portraits and Principles of the World’s Great Men and Women (Springfield, Mass., 1898), 177.
CHAPTER 20: TWO MELANCHOLY MEN
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 27.
2 The winter of 1914 Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 100; Robert Cowley, ed., The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War (New York, 2004), 37.
3 “a war with which” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.88.
4 White House aides Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 340–42.
5 Roosevelt appeared TR, Letters, 8.849; TR to KR, 11 Nov. 1914 (TRC); TR, Letters, 8.903.
6 “Father is” Gordon Johnston interviewed by Ethel Armes, ca. 1920 (TRB). Johnston was shocked by TR’s appearance. “I had never seen him so low.” For other depictions of TR at this time, see Charles Washburn in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 394; Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 155; Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 11, 56.
Biographical Note: A contributing cause to TR’s depression may have been his reading