Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [448]
Images of the antithesis between mindless materialism at home and a distant Gotterdämmerung threatening the whole world, along with multiple references to “gods” and “gifts,” recur throughout The Man Against the Sky, arguably Robinson’s greatest cycle of poems. TR praised it highly in a letter to KR, 31 Mar. 1916 (KRP). For critical studies of the book, see R. Meredith Bedell, “Perception, Action, and Life in The Man Against the Sky,” Colby Library Quarterly, 11 (Mar. 1976), and Robert S. Fish, “A Dramatic and Rhetorical Analysis of ‘The Man Against the Sky’ and Other Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1970).
50 They met in New York TR, Letters, 8.1029; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.200–201. For a detailed account of the lunch, see Jessup, Elihu Root, 2.344–47.
51 The New York Times See Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 232–45, for the intraparty TR boom in 1916.
52 Pancho Villa’s raid The New York Times, 16 Mar. 1916. Fortunately for his future career, Pershing had by this time managed to euphemize his original nickname of “Nigger Jack,” awarded to him when he commanded a regiment of black cavalry in the Indian Wars. Cowley, The Great War, 415.
53 “into the Ewigkeit” TR to KR, 16 Jan. 1915 (TRC). A cartoon in the New York Sun on 22 Apr. 1916 showed TR, big stick in hand, contemplating the skeleton of a moose. The caption read “Alas poor Yorick.”
54 But his boom Mowry, TR, 342–43; Gable, The Bull Moose Years, 244–45; The New York Times, 1–10 Apr. 1916; TR, Letters, 8.1028.
55 “You know, Colonel” The New York Times, 6 Apr. 1916.
Biographical Note: A comic anecdote by Clara Barrus conveys TR’s tempestuous vigor at this time. On 4 Apr., “fairly bursting with energy and good cheer,” he attended a reception at the salon of the society painter Princess Elisabeth Lwoff-Parlaghy (a world-class eccentric in her own right, and something of a German appeaser). Having “talk[ed] his way through other people’s talk like a snow-plow going through a snow-bank,” TR bade adieu to the princess and began to descend to street level. “He halted abruptly on the steps, his eye arrested by the portrait of Andrew Carnegie which hung above the stairway. Shaking his fist close to the painted face, he exclaimed through his teeth, ‘You look just like what you are—you damned old pacifist!’ And down the stairs he bolted—the solemn, foreign-looking liveried flunkeys standing aghast at the explosion.… The perturbed princess almost screamed her query, ‘Wh—what was that he said?’ And when somebody repeated the remark without any elision, [she], speaking no word, said much in her quickened breath and dilating nostrils.” (Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, 2 vols. [New York, 1925, 1968], 2.230–31.)
In the fall of 1918, Princess Lwoff asked TR to pose for what was to be his last portrait. Privately owned and held by the American Museum of Natural History, it is reproduced on the cover of this biography.
56 The attack on Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 385
57 On 18 April The New York Times, 19 Apr. 1916.
58 a “town meeting” Ibid.
59 Wilson entered Atlanta Constitution, 20 Apr. 1916; speech transcript in The New York Times, 20 Apr. 1916.
60 ferryboats like the Sussex The sinking of the Sussex impoverished the world by more than the loss of a few American lives. Among many others drowned was the great Spanish composer Enrique Granados, whose opera Goyescas had just been produced at the Metropolitan Opera.
61 “I hope you” Atlanta Constitution, 20 Apr. 1916.
62 Roosevelt was one The New York Times, 20 Apr. 1916.
63 he had lost “He has become, in my judgment, almost wholly an evil influence in public affairs,” Ray Stannard Baker noted on 27 Apr. 1916, “an aggrieved and bitter man [who] belongs in the nineteenth, and not the twentieth century.” Notebook IX.118 (RSB).
64 “there is in my” TR to Anna Roosevelt