Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [464]
67 Around three o’clock The New York Times, 12 Nov. 1918.
68 Steam whistles Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 200; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.520–25; The New York Times and New York Tribune, 12 Nov. 1918.
69 Dr. John H. Richards The New York Times, 12, 14 Nov. 1918.
70 On 21 November Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 202.
71 After some chat Ibid., 202–3.
72 Garland came back EKR to KR, 24 Nov. 1918 (KRP); Garland, My Friendly Contemporaries, 204.
73 Edith, Roosevelt said Ibid. The idea of doing something about QR’s grave nevertheless continued to haunt TR. On 3 Dec. he wrote Ted to ask if French authorities would let him buy the field himself, and perhaps inter there the bodies of “two or three others like Ham Coolidge.” (TR, Letters, 8.1411.) Nothing came of this plan.
74 and a weak choice Hammond, Autobiography, 640. Even Colonel House, who was a delegation member along with White, Robert Lansing, and General Tasker H. Bliss, thought that WW should have sent a team consisting of three Democrats plus Root and WHT. Ibid., 639.
75 Roosevelt was mostly Nevins, Henry White, 350ff.; Biddle, The Whitney Women, 49; TR, Letters, 8.1400. During his three-month spell of illness beginning in early Oct. 1918, TR dictated 22 articles for the Kansas City Star, plus others for Metropolitan magazine and a review for American Museum Journal of Leo G. Miller’s In the Wilds of South America. (“A Faunal Naturalist in South America,” TR, Works, 24.525–29.) The period also saw the publication, by Scribners, of the book version of The Great Adventure.
76 He scoffed TR, Letters, 8.1400. The phrase self-determination was actually borrowed by WW from Lloyd George. Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 421. After the last League advocate left, a perplexed-looking TR remarked, “I want to get along with those fellows and especially Will Taft.…[But] if the League of Nations means that we will have to go to war every time a Jugo Slav wishes to slap a Czecho Slav in the face, then I won’t follow them.” Dr. John H. Richards interview, ts. (HP).
77 Two of his future Abbott, Impressions of TR, 167; Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Notes and Anecdotes of Many Years (New York, 1925), 149–50.
78 She was learning QR to ERD, 12 Feb. 1918 (ERDP).
79 He did what TR, Letters, 8.1415. See also ibid., 8.1396–1411, and TR, “President Wilson and the Peace Conference,” Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, 272–77.
Biographical Note: TR’s vision of the postwar world included (along with harshly punitive containment of Germany), “a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” But he insisted to an American rabbi that the latter state should have “full religious freedom,” and that American Jews who felt a “kinship” for it, rather than for the United States, should immigrate there and “become emphatically … foreigners.” He also favored an independent Armenia and Ukraine, although he saw the latter joining Russia. He doubtfully agreed with James Bryce that there was “just a chance” that Arab lands freed from Ottoman oppression might develop a religious toleration to emulate that of Moorish civilization “in the golden days of Baghdad and Cordova.” Germany’s former colonies in Africa should become protectorates of strong powers experienced in colonial administration (Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal), rather than the kind of weak neutrals WW preferred, such as Holland and Sweden. The United States should remain disinterested in this reapportionment: the prime purpose of its defense and foreign policy must be to maintain a republican independence from Old World empires. (TR, Letters, 8.1372–97, 1400.) See also Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, 241–95.
79 Except for TR, Letters, 8.1415; John Milton Cooper, “If TR Had Gone Down with the Titanic: A Look at His Last Decade,” in Naylor et al., TR, 500, 511.
80 “Since Quentin’s death” Bishop, TR, 2.468; White, Autobiography, 548–49. According to White, TR’s “rather radical” article draft called for an eight-hour day, old age pensions, and social insurance. It does not appear to have survived.
81 “I tell you” Stanley Washburn