Online Book Reader

Home Category

Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [410]

By Root 3168 0
that day, TR invited Simon Wolf to join him, Ambassador von Sternburg, and Senator Louis McComas of Maryland on a trip to the German Singing Festival in Baltimore. Dense crowds surrounded their carriage, and someone slammed its door on Wolf’s hand. “When the President saw what had happened he immediately put a cold bandage on my hand, went to the locker and gave me a good swig, bathed my hands and forehead like a trained nurse, and then turned round to Senator McComas and said, ‘Inasmuch as Wolf has been wounded in the public service, I suggest that you introduce a bill in the Senate, pensioning him.’ ” Ibid., 281.

41 HIS EXCELLENCY Arturo The Washington Post, 16 June 1903.

42 “Princess Cassini” William H. Taft to Helen Taft, 5 Apr. 1904 (WHT); Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 578. In her memoir of the Roosevelt era, Marguerite Cassini explains that due to social objections on the diplomatic circuit, her mother, the singer Stefanie von Betz, was obliged to remain in Russia as Cassini’s “legal but unacknowledged wife.” Never a Dull Moment, 6, 224; Thompson, Party Leaders, 344.

43 Cassini’s assurances Education of Henry Adams, 439; Zabriskie, American-Russian Rivalry, 90–91; Foreign Relations 1903, 153–54; Dennis, Adventures in American Diplomacy, 357–58.

44 “Dealing with a” John Hay to TR, 12 May 1903 (TRP).

45 Roosevelt cared little Edward B. Parsons, “Roosevelt’s Containment of the Russo-Japanese War,” Pacific Historical Review, Feb. 1969. TR remarked contemptuously of Korea that it had “an utter inability to stand by itself.” TR, Letters, vol. 4, 1116.

46 If the Open Door Lucius B. Swift to TR, 2 Jan. 1904 (GBC); TR, Letters, vol. 3, 501.

47 “legitimate aspirations” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 497; Frederick Holls to TR, 9 May 1903 (TRP). Russia had a twenty-five-year lease on Port Arthur, not due to expire until March 1923.

48 “Try to understand” Cassini, Never a Dull Moment, 43. “Liaotung” is modern Kwangtung.

49 He played Cecil Spring Rice to Elizabeth Cameron, 3 June 1891 (MHS). See also Sir Mortimer Durand to Earl Grey: “The President … is not good at games. His eye and hand do not go together. He is very energetic and full of keenness, but not skilful. He is conscious of the fact, and deplores it.” British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print. Series C: North America, 1837–1914, ed. Kenneth Bourne (Frederick, Md., 1986–1987), vol. 12, 49 (hereafter British Documents on Foreign Affairs).

50 “To the left” John L. McGrew, former TR aide, to Hermann Hagedorn, 29 Jan. 1958 (TRB).

51 Roosevelt’s favorite James Garfield diary, 19 and 24 June 1903 (JRG); Wister, Roosevelt, 167.

52 ON 22 JUNE TR, Letters, vol. 3, 501; Review of Reviews, Aug. 1903. Despite all indications that Jones had an earnest desire to stamp out peonage, his sentences were usually very lenient, with the accused often being “punished” by the levying of fines. Even those that he did jail received short sentences and often had their sentences suspended and their fines modified. In one 1903 case, on the advice of Judge Jones, TR pardoned two men that Jones himself had sentenced to a year and a day in jail. It is no surprise that this method of “pardoning everyone on a general promise of good behavior” failed to eliminate peonage. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana, Ill., 1990), 43–64.

53 One hundred miles northeast The following account is indebted to the reporting of the New York Sun, 23–27 June 1903, and in particular its exemplary investigatory article, “A Modern Lynching,” on 28 June. White had confessed to the murder of Helen Bishop, the daughter of a local clergyman, just a few days before.

54 Vendors hawked them New York Sun, 24 June 1903. See also George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: A Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York, 1971).

CHAPTER 17: NO COLOR OF RIGHT

1 I’ll tell ye Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 167.

2 Roosevelt, child of Jules Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 30 June 1903 (JJ).

3 He poured

Return Main Page Previous Page Next Page

®Online Book Reader