Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [463]
50 He was much Lee, Good Innings, vol. 1, 324–26.
51 “I would walk” Oscar K. Davis, Released for Publication: Some Inside Political History of Theodore Roosevelt and His Times, 1898–1918 (Boston, 1925), 54. See also Dunn, From Harrison to Harding, vol. 2, 38.
52 Taft was warm According to George Harris, a photographer assigned to the Roosevelt White House, TR decided against Root when he noticed the Secretary at a social reception, pacing alone with his hands behind his back. Elsewhere in the room, Taft jovially entertained a circle of guests. Harris in The Washington Post, n.d. 1952 (HKB).
53 Roosevelt was not “You, Mr. Speaker, will be the next President of the United States,” TR told Joseph Cannon at a Sagamore Hill ceremony on 17 August. “Uncle Joe” had begun to fancy himself as the party’s nominee in 1906, after hearing a few compliments too many during his recent seventieth-birthday celebrations. The Washington Post, 18 Aug. 1906; Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois, 10.
54 The Washington Post 28 June 1906, qu. by Durand in British Documents on Foreign Affairs, vol. 12, 49.
55 JOSEPH B. FORAKER Foraker to TR, 26 Sept. 1906 (TRP).
56 Roosevelt could not Taft himself, en route to Cuba, had queried TR’s willingness to act unilaterally, only to be told that the President “would not dream of asking the position of Congress” in such an emergency. Nothing but “a long wrangle” would result, while the emergency worsened. A strong President must “accept responsibility to establish precedents which successors may follow even if they are unwilling to take the initiative themselves.” TR, Letters, vol. 5, 414–15.
57 “I am sure” Ibid., 430–31.
58 The Senator had Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 264–65; Weaver, Brownsville Raid, 24; John D. Weaver, The Senator and the Sharecropper’s Son: Exoneration of the Brownsville Soldiers (College Station, 1997), 91. TR told Charles Dawes in Jan. 1904 that he regarded Foraker as “insincere.” Dawes, Journal of the McKinley Years, 363.
59 “He is a” TR, Letters, vol. 5, 428–29.
60 “I can only” Ibid., 409. The allusion is to the court scene in The Pickwick Papers, wherein Sam Weller informs the judge that he spells his surname with a v. A confirmatory shout comes from the gallery: “Quite right too, Samivel.… Put it down a ‘we,’ my Lord, put it down a ‘we.’ ”
61 “Simplified Spelling” Except where otherwise indicated, this section is based on Mark Sullivan’s unsurpassed short history of spelling reform in Our Times, vol. 3, 162ff. See also Clyde H. Dornbusch, “American Spelling Simplified by Presidential Edict,” American Speech 36 (1961), and John H. Vivian, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Spelling Reform Initiative: The Newspaper Response,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, summer 1978.
62 diarrhea Sullivan himself spells this word with the Greek vowel œ. Our Times, vol. 3, 164.
63 u in honor TR was himself an excellent speller, as his autograph manuscripts attest. He nevertheless had a few quaint foibles, such as writing Wednsday for Wednesday, atall for at all, and inserting, for reasons best known to himself, an extra apostrophe in did’n’t.
64 It seemed to TR, Letters, vol. 5, 390–91.
65 addresst blusht Office of the Public Printer, Simplified Spelling: For the Use of Government Documents (Washington, D.C., 1906), 15–23.
66 Soon, the nation’s Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 1906; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 389.
67 ON 29 SEPTEMBER Ibid., 424–26; Perkins, Constraint of Empire, 18; Minger, “William H. Taft,” 85.
68 In his last TR, Letters, vol. 5, 435, 438.
69 Color had become Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 460; Review of Reviews, Oct. 1906; Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 239.
70 Only those with Henry Cabot Lodge to TR, 13 Oct. 1906 (TRP); TR, “Legislative Actions and Judicial Decisions,” Works, vol. 18, 83; David H. Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Harrisburg Speech: A Progressive Appeal to James Wilson,” Pennsylvania