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Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History, to endorse Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (New York, 1916), a pro-Nordic racist diatribe with little foundation in science. “I hope … you may find an opportunity of saying something about it,” Osborn wrote on 16 Oct., “for at this time when the melting pot theory is so popular we cannot dwell too strongly on the value to this country of the finer elements.” TR received and read the book, with his usual speed, on the last day of the month, and responded to Osborn with some uncertainty. “It is suggestive and stimulating, as is true of Gobineau’s and Chamberlain’s books [see above, 647]; it shares their faults, and absolutely lacks the very qualities which Huxley and Darwin so eminently showed.” He said he needed to discuss the question of an endorsement over lunch. Osborn (to whom TR owed many Brazil-related favors) appears to have been a persuasive advocate. TR then allowed his name to be used in publicizing The Passing of the Great Race, doing lasting damage to his reputation.

He immediately regretted what he had done. On 15 Nov., Worral F. Mountain, the mayor of East Orange, N.J., visited TR and listened while “he tore paragraph after paragraph of Grant’s book to pieces of pure facts, and quoted not only American, but German and French historians as his authority.… He pathetically regretted that the book had been dedicated to him.” Osborn / TR correspondence (AMNH); Worrall Mountain diary, 15 Nov. 1916, photocopy provided to author by Thomas R. Mountain (AC). See also Dyer, TR and the Idea of Race, 17, and John P. Jackson, Jr., and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism and Science (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2004), 110ff.

39 a pair of British steamers The New York Times, 31 Oct. 1916.

40 “Just what” Leary, notebook 3, 3 Nov. 1916 (JJL).

41 eleven of the nineteen The New York Times, 1, 2 Nov. 1916. Five more Progressives, including William Allen White, publicly approved the pro-Democrat statement, but declined to endorse WW.

42 “Sir, when I” TR, Letters, 8.1122.

43 During the last Speech transcript from The New York Times, 4 Nov. 1916.

44 Roosevelt threw Leary, Talks with T.R., 332–33.

45 Mr. Wilson now dwells The New York Times, 4 Nov. 1916. Leary makes clear that these last two paragraphs were delivered extempore. At TR’s final, disgusted gesture, “the house was on its feet … storming the platform.” Leary, notebook 3, 3 Nov. 1916 (JJL).

46 “The old man’s” Leary, notebook 5, 5 Nov. 1916 (JJL); see also Leary, Talks with T.R., 3.

47 Wilson took the news Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson, 218.

48 “I hope you are” Alice Hooper to Frederick Jackson Turner in Turner, Dear Lady, 221.

49 Roosevelt began to pack TR, Letters, 8.1133. By executive order in 1903, TR had transferred to the Library of Congress the papers of Presidents Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Monroe as well as those of Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. He now offered his own, asking only that they be held confidential until his death. The papers, forming the nucleus of TRP, arrived at the library in the new year of 1917 in six enormous locked trunks. “The Lord only knows where the key is,” TR advised. “Break the cases open, and start to work on them!” Today, TRP consists of approximately a quarter of a million items. For the full story of its acquisition, see the introduction by Paul T. Heffron to the TRP Index at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem.heffron.

50 “I am of no use” Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 128–29.

51 leadership changes Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 423. Zimmermann was the political ally of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, who by late 1916 had replaced Falkenhayn as the virtual dictators of Reich war policy.

52 The German ambassador Fort Wayne News, 9 Oct. 1916; Grey to Balfour, pencil draft inscribed “about end of Nov / 16” (AJB).

53 The document Bernstorff Sullivan, Our Times, 5.245–46.

54 “The President’s” Spring Rice to Balfour, 15 Dec. 1916 (AJB).

55 Four days later The New York Times, 21 Dec. 1916.