Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [375]
54 ROOSEVELT LANDED Lung, “Roosevelt’s Narrow Escape.” Lung tried to squeeze TR’s chest to see if any ribs were broken, “but he resented the squeeze and asked to be left alone.” By good fortune, TR had landed in soft earth and alluvial runoff from the hill. The New York Times, 4 Sept. 1902.
55 “No, I guess not,” Lung, “Roosevelt’s Narrow Escape”; New York Sun, 4 Sept. 1902; Lovering in Boston Journal, same date.
56 He saw a man New York Sun, 4 Sept. 1902.
57 “God-damned outrage” Lovering, “Eyewitness.” Many newspapers moderated this language, extremely unusual for TR. But at least two contemporary reporters quoted it verbatim (New York World and Lovering), and TR himself admitted it in an impromptu interview with Lovering later that afternoon. Finley Peter Dunne recounted the incident in his next “Mr. Dooley” column. “I can’t tell ye [what Roosevelt said] till I get mad. But I’ll tell ye this much, a barn-boss that was standin’ by and heerd it, said he niver before regretted his father hadn’t sint him to Harvard.” Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 223–25.
58 As his heir John Hay to Alvey A. Adee, 4 Sept. 1902 (JH).
59 At the time W. Murray Crane to Henry Cabot Lodge, 4 Sept. 1902 (HCL) (“His fighting spirit was up and he wanted to punish someone”); New York Sun, 4 Sept. 1902.
60 Roosevelt did not New York Sun, 4 Sept. 1902.
61 QUENTIN WAS INDEED The New York Times, 4 Sept. 1902. An illustration in Lorant, Life and Times, 380, shows TR speaking in Lenox, Mass., just after the accident, despite the massive disfigurement of his face. He insisted on appearing also at other scheduled stops in Connecticut before returning home on the Sylph.
62 He was sentenced Judgment qu. in Pittsfield Sun, 22 Jan. 1903.
63 Memories of “poor” New York Tribune, 16 Sept. 1902; Harper’s Weekly, n.d., in Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
64 “It takes more” New York Tribune, 16 Sept. 1902. Mark Hanna endorsed at least the first part of TR’s statement. “You may be hung,” he wrote him, “but you will certainly not be killed by a ‘Trolley car,’ ” 4 Sept. 1902 (TRP).
Chronological Note: TR remained only one night in Oyster Bay, before proceeding south on the second of his campaign swings, a five-day trip through West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. His speeches largely echoed those of his New England trip.
65 Only Edith knew For a medical article arguing that the Pittsfield trauma was, at least in part, ultimately the cause of TR’s death, see Robert C. Kimberley, “The Health of Theodore Roosvelt,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal 5.3 (summer 1979).
CHAPTER 10: THE CATASTROPHE NOW IMPENDING
1 It was different Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 49–50.
2 THE PRESIDENTIAL EAGLE New York Herald, 20 Sept. 1902; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 326. 144 The question was Sage, William Boyd Allison, 225–27.
3 “We favor such” Qu. in Literary Digest, 16 Aug. 1902.
4 In other words TR to J. G. Schurman, 11 Aug. 1902 (TRP); Robert LaFollette autobiographical manuscript “B,” 247 (RLF).
5 This “Iowa Idea” TR to J. G. Schurman, 11 Aug. 1902, and TR to Mark Hanna et al., 1 Sept. 1902 (TRP); TR, Letters, vol. 3, 327, 313. For a discussion of the wildly popular Iowa Idea and Western insurgency, see Fowler, John Coit Spooner, chap. 10.
6 Senators Allison Fowler, John Coit Spooner, chap. 10; Merrill, Republican Command, 117; Washington Evening Star, 16 Sept. 1902.
7 But Governor Cummins’s Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois, 37–38; David P. Thelen, Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston, 1976), 49; “Though commercial competitors we are, commercial enemies we must not be.… The period of exclusiveness is past.” Qu. in Alexander K. McClure and Charles Morris, William McKinley (New York, 1901), 309.
8 McKinley’s successor Sereno E. Payne to TR, 15 Aug. 1902 (TRP). Carleton Putnam sagely remarks that TR was not equipped to understand tariff policy because there was no clear right or