Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [457]
4 “the most popular” Washington Evening Star, 17 Jan. 1906.
5 “The newspapers are” Ibid. Tillman is here creatively misquoting Julius Caesar, I.ii.
6 Another weapon Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 202; Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt, 420; Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 166.
7 In consequence of Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 159.
8 He was fifty The author owes much to Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 213ff., for this description of LaFollette. Other sources are Ray Stannard Baker, Notebook no. 2 (RSB); Mowry, Era of Theodore Roosevelt, 72–73; and Thelen, Robert M. LaFollette, which reveals among other things that the Senator subsisted on a diet of “granose biscuits, English walnuts, zwieback, butter and milk” (36). See also LaFollette’s Autobiography, ed. Allan Nevins (Madison, 1960 [1913]).
9 “Mr. Roosevelt is” Twain to Albert B. Paine, 9 Jan. 1906, in Mark Twain, Autobiography (New York, 1924), vol. 2, 290–91.
10 the outdated system On the same day that TR welcomed LaFollette to Washington, the banker Jacob Schiff was warning the New York Chamber of Commerce that the booming American economy was destined to collapse if something was not done about the currency question. Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism, 152ff.
11 Elihu Root, a These sentences closely paraphrase Root’s language in an interview with N. W. Stephenson, 26 Jan. 1925, on the subject of TR v. Nelson Aldrich in early 1906. Copy in NWA.
12 “the radical elements” Ibid. The New York Herald, early in 1906, estimated that seventy Americans were worth more than $35 million, or $630 million apiece in contemporary dollars, untaxed. Along with five thousand lesser multimillionaires, they controlled one sixteenth of the nation’s wealth. The Herald darkly predicted “billionaires” by mid-century, unless some redistribution took place. Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois, 16–17.
13 “He told me” Sir Mortimer Durand to Sir Edward Grey, 11 Jan. 1906 (HMD).
14 “study of Cromwell” TR had written a biography of the Protector, Oliver Cromwell (New York, 1889). See Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 705–7.
15 The trouble with George E. Mowry and Judson A. Grenier, introduction to David Graham Phillips, The Treason of the Senate (Chicago, 1964), 23; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 131.
16 As if on Mowry and Grenier in Phillips, Treason, 28.
17 Roosevelt was not Ibid., 26; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 131; Baker, American Chronicle, 184–85. TR looked with particular displeasure on the Cosmopolitan series because, six months before, Phillips had published a book of essays, The Reign of Gilt, mocking him for monarchical behavior.
18 IN ALGECIRAS Marks, Velvet on Iron, 67; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 145.
19 White was under Larsen, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Moroccan Crisis,” 162–63.
20 SENATOR ELKINS TOOK Lambert, Stephen Benton Elkins, 268–70.
21 On 27 January Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 159.
22 Tall and stately Powers, Portraits of Half a Century, 219; Dunn, From Harrison to Harding, vol. 2, 6. See also John Ely Briggs, William Peters Hepburn (Des Moines, 1919).
23 the greatest challenge Lambert, Stephen Benton Elkins, 267–68.
24 More precisely Blum, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Hepburn Act,” 1563; Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 226.
25 At one o’clock The following account is taken from Ray Stannard Baker, Notebook no. 2 (RSB). See Steffens, Autobiography, 509–11, for another such interview.
26 (as Elkins preferred) Lambert, Stephen Benton Elkins, 275.
27 “I do not represent” Baker repeated these words to Lincoln Steffens that night, and Steffens said, “I gave him that yesterday” (Baker notebook no. 2 [RSB]). This is entirely possible: TR had previously borrowed the phrase fetish of competition from Baker. However, there is no record of Steffens visiting the White House for at least a week prior to 8 Feb. 1903, and readers of his memoirs will be familiar with his