Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [447]
29 Roosevelt had been the first Achille, Visite, 1–3. For the happy effect of the Mont Pelée eruption on TR’s plans for a Panama Canal, see Morris, Theodore Rex, 113.
30 “Je vois que” Achille, Visite, 6.
31 the governor recalled Ibid., 8–9.
32 Vous nous donnez Ibid., 9. In reply, TR, speaking in French, said again how profoundly touched he had been to see Martinique’s young men preparing to fight for the rights of small as well as great nations. He raised his glass in salute: “Mesdames, Messieurs, je bois à la santé de la France toujours glorieuse et bientôt victorieuse.” Ibid., 13–14.
33 After visiting For an account of this episode, see TR’s essay “A Naturalist’s Tropical Laboratory,” in TR, Works, 4.255–72. Beebe’s tribute to TR, “The Naturalist and Book-Lover: An Appreciation,” is printed as an introduction to this volume.
34 No less a GOP The New York Times, 2 Mar. 1916. Gardner was also an outspoken advocate of preparedness. For more on his current political maneuverings, which greatly annoyed TR, see TR, Letters, 8.1034–35.
35 They spent an afternoon TR, Works, 4.278–82.
36 I MUST REQUEST Stoddard, As I Knew Them, 429–31; The New York Times, 10 Mar. 1916. The full text of TR’s cable is reprinted in TR, Letters, 8.1024–26.
37 A joke went around Mowry, TR, 346.
38 a surprise bestseller George H. Doran, Chronicles of Barabbas, 1884–1934 (New York, 1935), 217. Doran’s royalty statement to TR, 16 Oct. 1916, shows 12,128 copies of the original edition sold in North America (TRP). In mid-1916, according to Doran, the retail magnate Walter Scott underwrote a mass-market edition of Fear God at 50 cents a copy. The entire 100,000-copy print run sold out. The book was also published in Great Britain.
39 “In America” Karp, The Politics of War, 222.
40 Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid The raid occurred on 9 Mar. 1916, the same day TR issued his “Trinidad statement.” Mexican bandits had earlier, on 10 Jan., massacred 16 Texan businessmen en route to San Ysabel. WW declined military revenge, arguing that the Texans traveled at their own risk.
41 “another Wilson” TR, Letters, 8.1026.
42 mass of mail TR’s boom in the spring of 1916 increased his mail receipt to 1,000 letters a day. TR, Letters, 8.1039.
43 “I don’t know” Edwin Arlington Robinson to KR, 23 Feb. 1913 (KRP).
44 The Roosevelts had EKR to KR, 20 Jan. 1913 (KRP); Scott Donaldson, Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life (New York, 2007), 313–14. For a recent sampling of Robinson’s work, perceptively introduced, see Robert Mezey, ed., The Poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York, 1999).
45 He confessed The note has been lost, but its content may be extrapolated from TR’s reply, and the known circumstances of Robinson’s life.
46 “Your letter” TR, Letters, 8.1024. TR added that he had used some lines of Robinson as the epigraph to A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. See TR, Works, 20.3.
47 After that, from everywhere Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Man Against the Sky (New York, 1916), 97.
48 Robinson had long ago Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Town Down the River (New York, 1910), 125–29; Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 392.
49 The title poem Robinson, who was habitually self-mocking when commenting on his own work, joked that the purpose of this apocalyptic 300-line poem, one of the most difficult in the American canon, was “to cheer people up.” He added more seriously that he meant also “to indicate the futility of materialism as a thing to live by—even assuming the possible monstrous negation of having to die by it.” (To Albert R. Ledoux, 2 Mar. 1916 [EAR].) An earlier letter to Lewis Isaacs, written at the time of the poem’s composition (30 Aug. 1915), refers to the German threat to civilization, and another (6 Jan. 1916) makes plain his continuing awareness of TR