Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [400]
90 Favorable action Miner, Fight for the Panama Route, 197–98. Senatorial patience with the seventy-eight-year-old Morgan was wearing thin. “Impersonating the treaty,” Mark Hanna wrote John Hay, ca. Feb. 1903, “am I not justified in killing him?” (JH).
91 Roosevelt did not TR, Letters, vol. 3, 427–28.
92 On Saturday Review of Reviews, Mar. 1903; Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform, 46. By midsummer, the Department of Commerce and Labor had a Washington staff of more than 1,300 and a budget of ten million dollars. George Cortelyou speech memorandum, ca. 12 Aug. 1903 (TRP).
Chronological Note: On this weekend, TR’s houseguest, John Singer Sargent, was painting an oil portrait of the President pausing halfway down the White House stairway with his hand on a newel. The noticeable sadness in TR’s eyes may reflect the fact that his wife, even as he posed, was suffering her second miscarriage in two years. TR, Letters, vol. 3, 428; Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 265.
93 As a final The agreement protocol was signed in Washington on 13 Feb. 1903. For a brief account of the negotiations, see Gelber, Rise of Anglo-American Friendship, 113–25.
94 THE NEXT MORNING’S Los Angeles Times, 14 Feb. 1903; New York Press, 15 Feb. 1903.
95 “It always pays” TR qu. in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 44; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 450–51. See Marks, Velvet on Iron, 13–15, for a discussion of TR’s “gentlemanly” scruples in foreign policy.
96 It was a Johnson, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Bureau of Corporations”; superscript on George Cortelyou memo for the President, 14 Feb. 1903 (GBC).
97 “Say what has” TR memo, 15 Feb. 1903, and press-release draft for New York Herald, 16 Feb. 1903 (PCK).
98 The result was Literary Digest, 21 Feb. 1903.
99 Nevertheless, Roosevelt Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 555–60; clip ca. Feb. 1903 in John Hay scrapbook (JH).
100 Whether this Nearly a century later, it has so redounded. “The year 1903 is one of the most important in the annals of antitrust. In that year, the nation became conscious for the first time of a President’s taking a personal interest in the application of the law.… [His actions] unmistakably demonstrate the practicability and potentialities of large-scale and purposeful enforcement effort” (Thorelli, Federal Antitrust Policy, 560). 1903 would see only eighteen new trusts formed, as opposed to sixty-three in 1902, and forty-six in 1901.
101 GEORGE BRUCE CORTELYOU Washington Capitol, 21 Apr. 1900, biography file (GBC); National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 14; Lowry, Washington Close-Ups, 104, 127–28; Review of Reviews, Mar. 1903; George Cortelyou to R. A. Maxwell, 16 Feb. 1903 (GBC). For a later assessment, see Benjamin Temple Ford, “A Duty to Serve: The Governmental Career of George Bruce Cortelyou” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1963).
102 the elite company See, e.g., James Garfield diary, 13 Feb. 1903 (JRG).
103 Cortelyou, despite To TR, Garfield was “Jim,” while Cortelyou was always “Mr. Cortelyou.”
104 ON 18 FEBRUARY TR, Letters to Kermit, 30. This ride is misdated as 13 Feb. in Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 426. “Wie gut ist es doch” the Kaiser commented, “that His Majesty’s German representative goes riding mit dem Präsidenten!” Die Grosse Politik, vol. 17, 292.
105 Now that Germany’s Rippy, Caribbean Danger Zone, 198; Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 145.
106 The President’s words Marks, Velvet on Iron, 52–54.
107 When Admiral Dewey Dewey qu. in New York Herald, 27 Mar. 1903; Mrs. Dewey diary, 31 Mar. 1903 (GD); Frederick Palmer, With My Own Eyes (Indianapolis, 1932), 128–29; Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 1, 239; Spector, Admiral of the New Empire, 145–46. According to Mrs. Dewey, TR received the Admiral privately, took his hand in both of his, and said, “My best beloved” (a habitual endearment) then, sotto voce, “Damn the Dutch!” According to Palmer, TR tapped Dewey on the wrist and said, grinning, “Admiral, consider yourself reprimanded.”
108 THE FIFTY-SEVENTH Walter Wellman in Chicago Record-Herald, 28 Feb.–3 Mar. 1903; Stephenson, Nelson