Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [466]
103 Roosevelt heard Panama Star and Herald, 17 Nov. 1906; Palmer, With My Own Eyes, 266–67. For comprehensive accounts of TR’s three days in Panama, see Panama Canal Review, Roosevelt Centennial supplement, 7 Nov. 1958, and McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 492–99.
104 Food was The author is indebted to Palmer, With My Own Eyes, 267–68, for the following story. Palmer accompanied TR through Culebra Cut. Extra details (including TR’s “rapid-fire volley” interrogation style) come from The New York Times, 17 Nov. 1906, and Panama Star and Herald, 17 and 18 Nov. 1906.
105 Taking the hint TR, Letters, vol. 5, 498.
106 Much of it Ibid., 499, 504; Panama Canal Review, 7 Nov. 1958; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 501.
107 He could not wait TR, Letters, vol. 5, 496; Panama Star and Herald, 18 Nov. 1906. The precipitation accompanying TR’s visit was the heaviest in fifteen years.
108 “STEVENS AND HIS” TR, Letters, vol. 5, 497.
109 “a big fellow” Ibid., 495, 497.
110 “so hardy, so efficient” Ibid., 497. See also TR’s Special Message of the President of the United States Concerning the Panama Canal (Washington, D.C., 1906).
111 NEW YORK William H. Taft to TR, 17 Nov. 1906 (TRP). This cable, sent to Colón, missed TR’s departure for Ponce and had to be relayed there.
112 If press reports The reports were accurate. But on 20 November, Taft, worried at TR’s unexplained failure to reply to his cable of three days before, ordered the discharges to proceed. Taft to Mrs. Taft (“The President is worked up on the subject”), 21 Nov. 1906 (WHT); Weaver, Senator, 118; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 498.
113 While he continued Weaver, Senator, 118–19. The last man discharged was also the longest to live. See passim, for the story of Dorsie Willis.
114 BY NOW, A Ibid.; Lane, Brownsville Affair, 226–28.
115 This case was Constitution League pressure had been the indirect cause of Taft’s suspension order. See Lane, Brownsville Affair, chap. 2.
116 At the end Charles [illegible] of IRS, New York, to William Loeb, Jr., 30 Nov. 1907, warning that Stewart was likely to be “impertinent” to the President (TRP). The “communication” of Stewart to TR cited in Lane, Brownsville Affair, 28 and 32, is not in TRP.
117 Beyond ambition Joseph Benson Foraker, Notes of a Busy Life (Cincinnati, 1916), vol. 1, 178. See also Weaver, Senator, 32 and passim.
118 He was so Foraker, I Would Live It Again, 277.
119 “The members of” TR, Works, vol. 17, 414–15.
Historical Note: At thirty thousand words (printed “thruout” in simplified-spelling style), the Message was his longest yet. The progressive themes he had sounded a year before emerged more insistently, in calls for extended employers’ liability, stronger regulation of corporations, a mandatory eight-hour day, and a drastic law against child labor. He condemned the uncontrolled killing of seals in Alaska in language of great zoological precision, and added an income tax as well as an inheritance tax to his suggested (but not requested) revise of internal-revenue law. Elsewhere, invocations of family values and naval might represented the old Theodore Roosevelt, as did an eccentric final suggestion that rifle clubs should be established across the country, in emulation of “the little republic of Switzerland.” TR, Works, vol. 17, 401–80.
120 Unfortunately for Weaver, Senator, 121. It was extraordinary, indeed discourteous, for such a proposal to be made before the traditional reading of the President’s Message. But Foraker’s hand had been forced when Senator Boies Penrose offered a weaker resolution immediately after the convening of Congress on 3 Dec. Both resolutions were approved, forcing both Taft and TR to document their actions. Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 240.
121