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Company, largely on the strength of their stuffed-bear sales, in 1903. Family tradition claims that Michtom wrote TR asking for permission to call the bears “Teddy’s Bears,” and TR replied that if his name was worth anything, they were welcome to use it. The story is doubtful. There is no trace of TR’s letter in his conscientiously kept copybooks, and the Michtoms do not seem to have preserved what would be its priceless original. Furthermore, TR disliked being called “Teddy,” and had a strict policy of not endorsing any commercial products, even his own books, when in office. The probable truth is that the Stieff Company produced the first “Teddy Bears” (albeit modeled after bear cubs in the Stuttgart Zoo) in 1902, and that the Michtoms duplicated their design in 1902–1903. By 1904, Roosevelt “Bear Cub” associations were already noticeable in campaign tokens, and in 1906 “The Roosevelt Bears,” a cartoon feature, began to run in The New York Times. The strip was soon parlayed by Seymour Eaton into a wildly popular series of children’s books. An original 1903 Michtom thirty-inch-tall bear is now worth at least forty-five thousand dollars. With this note, the author formally withdraws from the field of Teddy Bear studies.

31 EDITH ROOSEVELT RECEIVED TR returned to Washington on 21 Nov. 1902. For EKR’s extensive work with McKim, Mead & White on restoring the White House, see Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, chap. 19.

32 Gone were the Restoration of the White House: Message of the President of the United States Transmitting the Report of the Architects (Washington, D.C., 1903), passim; Charles Moore, “The Restoration of the White House,” Century, Apr. 1903; Seale, President’s House, vol. 2, 656–84; Ellen Maury Slayden, Washington Wife: Journal of Ellen Maury Slayden from 1897–1919 (New York, 1963), 46–47.

33 For this improvement Restoration of the White House, 17–20, 9; The work, while complete in all essentials by late November 1902, continued for another two months. Washington Evening Star, 31 Jan. 1903.

34 The pavilions flanked Moore, “Restoration”; Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 260.

35 “The first impression” Moore, “Restoration”; Wister, Roosevelt, 108.

36 Roosevelt, marching Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 253. Contrary to popular impression, only one of the game heads was a trophy of his.

37 Breeding, however Wister, Roosevelt, 107.

38 Upstairs, Edith All these apartments had en suite bathrooms. Seale, President’s House, vol. 2, 679.

39 THE DOCUMENT WAS TR’s Second Annual Message is reprinted in TR, Works, vol. 17, 161–95.

40 the United States and Mexico The dispute concerned the Pacific Pious Fund, an annual indemnity promised by Mexico “in perpetuity” to Franciscan friars, as compensation for monastic properties appropriated in 1842. Mexico stopped paying this award after the United States took over California. The Hague court found in favor of resumed payments by Mexico. The New York Times, 27 Dec. 1902.

41 “As civilization grows,” TR, Works, vol. 17, 175.

42 By this he The most exhaustive modern analysis of TR’s close-to-home foreign policy is Richard H. Collin, Theodore Roosevelt’s Caribbean, the Panama Canal, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Latin American Context (Baton Rouge, 1990).

43 the covert diplomat Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), 452–53; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 52. The secret du roi involved covert, personal emissaries of the king, operating often at odds with his official diplomacy. See Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France (New York, 1965), vol. 1, 76, 97. TR’s own preferred term was kitchen ambassadors. TR, Letters, vol. 4, 1102.

44 Foreign policy was TR, Letters, vol. 1, 409. See Nelson M. Blake, “Ambassadors at the Court of Theodore Roosevelt,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1955, and Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.” For a French view of TR’s discreet diplomacy, see Serge Ricard, Théodore Roosevelt: principes et practique d’une politique étrangère (Aix-en-Provence, 1991).

45 Not until