The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [434]
3. TR to B, Apr. 26, 1893.
4. Wis.36.
5. Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1974) 340.
6. Mor.320.
7. Adams, Education, 343.
8. Mor.317. TR had recently been retained by Cleveland as Civil Service Commissioner, after handing in his formal resignation at the beginning of the new Administration. Although he explained the act was prompted by his desire “to relieve the President any embarrassment and … to get back to his books,” he did not need much persuading to stay. See New York Times, May 4, 1893, and Mor.314.
9. Morley in 1903, qu. TRB mss.
10. TR.Wks.VII.3.
11. Ib., 3, 7.
12. Ib., 111.
13. Mor.440.
14. TR.Wks.VII.108.
15. Ib., 380, 403–4, 377–9, 331, 279
16. Ib., 57.
17. Ib.
18. See Cut.36–7 and Bur.14 on TR’s observations of the rule of tooth and claw in nature.
19. Ib., 58.
20. Ib., 57–8.
21. See Bea.31.
22. For examples of Commissioner Roosevelt’s abhorrence of racial discrimination in hiring practices, see Mor.373, 381, 402; also TR.Wks.XIV. 165. In 1954, Edmund Wilson, reviewing Vols I and II of Mor., remarked: “It is impossible to go through the correspondence of Roosevelt’s early official life without being convinced that he pretty consistently lived up to this principle.” Wilson, “The Pre-presidential TR” in Eight Essays (NY, 1954) 211.
23. TR.Wks.X.479–509.
24. See Billington, Ray Allen, Frederick Jackson Turner (Oxford U. Press, 1973) passim for the genesis and presentation of Turner’s great thesis.
25. The Dial, August 1889 (see p. 462). See also Jacobs, Wilbur R., The Historical World of Frederick Jackson Turner (Yale, 1968) 4. Jacobs says that Turner wrote an unpublished essay, “The Hunter Type,” in 1890, “based almost entirely upon the early volumes of The Winning of the West.” The essay depicted a Rooseveltian warrior-hero of the border, represented as an evolutionary American type. Massive, scholarly reading went into the subsequent preparation of “Significance,” but it may well be, as Jacobs suggests, that WW “provided the inspiration for his frontier thesis.” For a full account, see Billington, Turner, 83–4, 108–25.
26. Qu. ib., 127. See also Knee, Stuart E., “Roosevelt and Turner: Awakening in the West,” Journal of the West 17 (1978) 2.
27. Lasch, Christopher, ed., WW by TR (NY, 1963) xii; qu. Billington, Turner, 128.
28. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, ed. Ray Allen Billington (Prentice-Hall, 1961) 61.
29. Ib., 37.
30. Ib., 62.
31. See Billington, Turner, 129–30.
32. Mor.363.
33. Ib.
34. See Billington, Turner, passim for further details of the TR/Turner relationship.
35. See Wag.44.
36. Forum, Apr. 1894; TR.Wks.XIII. 13–26, 151.
37. Ib., 13–26.
38. Qu. Wag.63.
39. TR.Wks.XIII.20; James, Henry, The American Essays, ed. Leon Edel (Vintage Books, 1956).
40. Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Master (London, 1972) 275–76. Overhearing TR characterize an unidentified contemporary novelist, possibly James, as “a malignant pustule,” George Kennan reflected, “If this young Civil Service Commissioner fully develops his capacity for hatred and his natural gift for denunciation, he will be, in the maturity of his powers, an unpleasant man to encounter.” Kennan, Misrepresentation in Railroad Affairs (Garden City, NY, 1916), 49.
41. Reprinted in TR.Wks.XIII.200–222.
42. Ib., 203.
43. Ib., 206.
44. Ib., 208–9.
45. Ib., 214.
46. Ib., 216.
47. Ib. For TR’s enlightened interpretation of Social Darwinism, see his review of Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (NY, 1894), published in North American Review, 161.94–109 (July 1895) and reprinted in TR.Wks.XIII. John M. Blum exhaustively and brilliantly discusses this and other aspects of TR’s intellectual development in an essay, “TR: The Years of Decision,” printed as Appendix IV to Mor.2.1484–94.
48. TR.Wks.XII.219.
49. Ib., 222.
50. Space does not permit an extended description of this richly detailed, sweet-natured book. Suffice to say it has all the freshness of observation of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, even