The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [199]
BY MID-MARCH he had a contract from Putnam’s—committing him rather ambitiously to deliver his first two volumes in the spring of 1889106—and he plunged at once into the somewhat rodent-like life of a professional historian. He burrowed through piles of ancient letters, diaries, and newspapers in Tennessee, and unearthed many long-forgotten documents in Kentucky, including six volumes of Spanish government dispatches, and some misspelled but priceless pioneer autobiographies; he inquisitively searched some two or three hundred folios of Revolutionary manuscripts in Washington, and ferreted out thousands of letters by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, untouched by previous scholars; he devoured the published papers of the Federal, Virginia, and Georgia governments in New York, and pestered private collectors as far away as Wisconsin and California to send him their papers.107 By the end of April he had amassed the bulk of his source material, and began the actual writing of The Winning of the West on 1 May, at Sagamore Hill.108
As always, he found it difficult to marshal his superabundant thoughts on paper. A perusal of the manuscript of Volume One shows what agonies its magnificent opening chapter, “The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples,” cost him. A veritable thicket of verbal debris—interlineations, erasures, blots, and balloons—clogs every page: only the clearest prose is allowed to filter through.109
DURING ALL THE SPRING and summer of 1888 Roosevelt complained about the slowness of his progress on The Winning of the West: “it seems impossible to write more than a page or two a day.”110 As if from another land, another century, he heard distant shouts that General Benjamin Harrison of Indiana had been nominated by the Republicans for the Presidency—James G. Blaine having withdrawn on the grounds that a once-defeated candidate might, after all, be a burden to the party. Other shouts, even more distant, told him that Grover Cleveland had been renominated by the Democrats. But he paid little attention, and hunched closer over his desk. “After all,” he told a friend, “I’m a literary feller, not a politician these days.”111
To maintain the Sagamore household and bolster Edith’s constant sense of financial insecurity, Roosevelt had to earn at least $4,000 in fees and royalties that year.112 This meant a considerable amount of hackwork over and above his labors on The Winning of the West. Scarcely a month, accordingly, passed without at least one book or article from his pen. Although some of these had been written before—or published in a different form—merely to edit and proofread them made heavy inroads upon his time.
A survey of their various titles justifies his growing reputation as a Renaissance man. In February the North American printed his “Remarks on Copyright and Balloting,” while Century put out the first of six splendid essays on ranch life in the West. This series, which included his long-delayed account of the capture of Redhead Finnegan, continued through March, April, May (a month which also saw the publication of his Gouverneur Morris), and June. The essays attracted the admiring attention of Walt Whitman, who wrote, “There is something alluring in the subject and the way it is handled: Roosevelt seems to have realized its character—its shape and size—to have honestly imbibed some of the spirit of