Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [444]
22 the only high official Ibid., 171.
23 “England is fighting” Ibid.; Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him (New York, 1921), 231.
24 A hail of vituperation See, e.g., New York World, 9 June 1915; The Washington Post, Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, and Lowell (Mass.) Sun, 10 June 1915.
25 “God bless you” Atlanta Constitution, 10 May 1915.
26 Next morning Ibid.
27 “Good morning” Levien, “The Great Friend.”
28 Somehow, Roosevelt had Ibid.; TR, Letters, 1.229.
29 “There was” Ibid. The boy in the office was Philip Dunne, later a distinguished screenwriter.
30 “radicals laid” Levien, “The Great Friend.” TR jokingly wrote at the end of a letter to one of Metropolitan’s left-wing contributors, “Your rational-individualist and rational-Socialist friend, Theodore Roosevelt.” TR, Letters, 8.962.
31 Much of the work Levien, “The Great Friend.”
32 “I wonder how” Ibid. One dignified old gentleman was heard breaking into song as he sank to street level.
33 Whatever Roosevelt had lost “How I wish I were President at this moment!” TR to Roman Romanovich von Rosen, 7 Aug. 1915 (TRP).
34 “My hope is” TR, Letters, 8.947.
35 Roosevelt vaguely explained Ibid.; TR to KR, 27 May 1915 (TRC).
36 He knew nonetheless TR, Letters, 8.948.
37 Then, he had called Morris, Theodore Rex, 228–29.
38 Now, he lectured The New York Times, 22 July 1915.
39 “No nation ever” Ibid.
40 “Colonel,” somebody asked Marshall Stimson memorandum, n.d. (TRB).
41 The article described The Washington Post, 15–20 Aug. 1915; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.184–96. Another victim of U.S. wrath was Karl Bünz, Germany’s consul general in New York, arrested on charges of financial conspiracy. Bünz had once performed a useful service to TR during the Venezuela crisis of 1902–1903. TR now sought to repay that old favor by trying, unsuccessfully, to keep him out of prison. (Morris, Theodore Rex, 189; Leary, Talks with T.R., 43–44.) In December, Papen was expelled for complicity in acts of sabotage. He later (1932) served as Chancellor of Germany before stepping aside in favor of Adolf Hitler.
42 “The time for” The New York Times, 22 Aug. 1915.
43 A few days later For the background and subsequent history of the civilian preparedness program centering on Plattsburg, see John G. Clifford, Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement, 1913–1920 (Lexington, Ky., 1972).
44 “I suppose” TR.Jr. to KR, 21 July 1915 (KRP).
45 Roosevelt was amused TR, Letters, 8.962–63; Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 66. By the time TR.Jr. went to war in 1917, he had accumulated a fortune conservatively estimated at $425,000. (EBR to “mother,” 8 Jan. 1919 [TRJP].) For a compact portrait of TR.Jr., see Charles W. Snyder, “An American Original: Theodore Roosevelt, Junior,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, 17.2 (Spring 1991). See also H. Paul Jeffers, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.: The Life of a War Hero (Novato, Calif., 2002).
46 A miserly economy TR copied this extract out by hand, along with similar pronouncements at other stages of his career, for Julian Street to quote in The Most Interesting American. Ms. preserved in JS.
47 The camp was run Clifford, Citizen Soldiers, 48–49, 82–83; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.226. TR.Jr. was a founder-member of a preparedness-advocacy group, formed early in 1915, which at first called itself the American Legion (not to be confused with the permanent organization founded after World War I), then gradually took on more substantial shape and power as the Military Training Camps Association (MTCA). Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 71; Clifford, Citizen Soldiers, 60–69.
Historical Note: TR was no stranger to the fantasy of a surprise invasion of the United States. Earlier in the summer of 1915, he had acted as a consultant to a film entitled The Battle Cry of Peace, produced and directed by his movie-mogul neighbor, J. Stuart Blackton of Vitagraph Pictures. (See 283.) Battle Cry, based on Hudson