Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [341]
25 His larger concern TR specifically cited such social bacteria as William Randolph Hearst, John P. Altgeld, “and to an only less degree, Tolstoy and the feeble apostles of Tolstoy, like Ernest Howard Crosby and William Dean Howells.” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 142.
26 When, accepting Ibid.; TR, Works, vol. 1, 43–45.
27 Youth, size TR was forty-two years and nearly eleven months old on acceding to the Presidency. He remains the youngest President in U.S. history, John F. Kennedy being the youngest President elected. For a classic statement of his views on “the essential manliness of the American character,” as well as his attitudes toward some of the problems confronting the United States at the turn of the century, see “National Duties,” the speech he delivered at the Minnesota State Fair on 2 Sept. 1901, four days before the attack on McKinley. It is a source of the ideology set forth here. TR, Works, vol. 15, 328–41.
28 He refused to Ibid., vol. 14, 235; vol. 15, 316.
29 Roosevelt, sucking The following survey of press reportage on 14 Sept. 1901 is taken from newspaper clippings preserved in TR scrapbooks (TRP). These volumes, assembled by William Loeb, Jr., and often contributed to by the President himself, form a reliable guide to TR’s own perception of public opinion, 1901–1909.
30 A remarkable consensus New York Sun, New York World, New York Herald, The New York Times, and New York Press, 14–15 Sept. 1901 (originals at TRB). A typical reaction of one Wall Street executive, on hearing that TR was about to become President: “When Teddy’s done with America it’ll require another Christopher Columbus to find what’s left of it” (New York dispatch to The Times [London], 15 Sept. 1901). See White, Masks in a Pageant, 295, and Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, 237ff., for the “terror” that gripped the financial community that weekend.
31 as the news Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 73, 337.
32 In Albany, an old Frances Theodora (Smith) Parsons, Perchance Some Day (privately printed, New York, 1951; copy in TRC), 120, 135–36; also Mrs. Parsons to TR, 14 Sept. 1901 (TRB); Russell B. Harrison to TR, 8 Nov. 1901 (TRP); Arthur Lee, Viscount of Fareham, A Good Innings (privately printed, London, 1939), vol. 1, 254; Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 295.
33 Yet there was All these achievements are described in Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. The best overall survey of TR’s superhuman variety remains Edward Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1958).
34 thousands of people The following account of TR’s arrival and inauguration in Buffalo is based on an October 1902 memorandum by Ansley Wilcox, preserved in the Wilcox scrapbook, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, N.Y.; “Story of the Wilcox House,” recollections of Judge John R. Hazel in Buffalo Evening News, 15 Nov. 1963; and dozens of local and national news clips, 14–16 Sept. 1901, in the Wilcox scrapbook and TRB files. Incidental sources are cited below.
35 Roosevelt’s companion Wilcox memorandum, Wilcox scrapbook.
36 The cavalcade moved Photographs in ibid. Julia Bundy Foraker was in Buffalo that day. “A pall hung over life. The universe lowered its voice.” I Would Live It Again: Memories of a Vivid Life (New York, 1932), 267.
37 Over lunch, he said Wilcox scrapbook; The New York Times and New York Herald, 15 Sept. 1901.
38 He would go there Wilcox scrapbook; Mrs. Nathaniel K. B. Patch interviews, 19 Sept. 1935 and 30 Apr. 1969, t.s. in Wilcox Mansion. Mrs. Patch was the teenage girl outside the house (below).
39 Even now Mrs. Patch interviews, Wilcox Mansion. The New York Times and New York Herald, 15 Sept. 1901, confirm TR’s burst of temper.
40 To swelling cries Buffalo Courier and Buffalo Express, 15 Sept. 1901; Pittsburgh Press, n.d., Wilcox scrapbook. Many years later, Elihu Root recalled