Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [467]
122 Roosevelt remained TR, Letters, vol. 5, 521.
123 ALL IN ALL Ibid., 524. TR was the first American to win a Nobel Prize. The award was announced on 10 Dec. 1906, but he appears to have been informed at least five days earlier (521).
124 He added Ibid.
Historical Note: This project never materialized. The foundation, constituted by an act of Congress in 1907, let TR’s prize money lie unused for ten years. In July 1917, TR asked Congress to return it to him, and distributed it to various charities offering relief to victims of the Great War. By then, the sum had grown to more than $45,482, or $818, 676 in contemporary dollars. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 240–42.
125 To Kermit, he TR, Letters, vol. 5, 520–21.
126 laughter seemed strained Sir Mortimer Durand to Sir Edward Grey, 14 Dec. 1906 (HMD). TR could hardly be expected to find funny a blackface skit in which an old Negro from Tuskegee allowed, “I had a boy in dem colored troops down at Brownsville, but I ’spect he’s on his way home now.” Weaver, Senator, 125.
127 “Now don’t” The author takes the liberty of inferring damn from the four hyphens in Sir Mortimer’s above-cited report.
128 “It is not” Durand diary, 10 Dec. 1906 (HMD).
Chronological Note: Another probable reason for TR’s strain this evening was a current sensation in the press over his dismissal, earlier in the year, of the United States Ambassador to Austria, Bellamy Storer. Mrs. Storer, an aunt of Nicholas Longworth, had for years been monomaniacally lobbying every person of influence in the Northern Hemisphere in behalf of a red hat for her favorite archbishop, John Ireland of St. Paul. Her willingness to use TR’s name, and even private letters from him, in efforts to cow the Pope, ended her husband’s somewhat somnolent diplomatic career. The “ ‘Dear Maria’ Affair,” as it came to be known, reached its climax on 8 Dec. 1906, after Bellamy Storer’s own self-pitying account of his dismissal, quoting other Roosevelt letters, was leaked to the Boston Herald. TR, more amused than annoyed, issued a devastating public response on 10 Dec. He would have been less amused if he had known that the paper’s informant was Joseph B. Foraker. For full accounts, see Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 128, and Gatewood, Theodore Roosevelt and the Art of Controversy, chap. 6.
129 A good motto Sir Mortimer Durand, “Report on the United States of America for the Year 1906,” in British Documents on Foreign Affairs, 159. The noun rem in Horace’s epigram is often inaccurately given as “money.”
130 a special message The quotations from TR’s first Brownsville message are taken from Richardson, Compilation, vol. 10, 7710–11.
131 As to the Ibid., 7712.
132 “WHEN YOU TURNED” The following dialogue is taken from Wister, Roosevelt, 225–26. Wister does not give the date of this walk, but says that it occurred “just in the middle of the Brownsville disturbance. This, plus TR’s invitation of 5 Nov. 1906, “Do let me see you as soon as possible after I come back from Panama,” suggests a White House visit before the end of the year (264).
133 “And then jump” According to Isabel Anderson, Presidents and Pies (Boston, 1920), 29, a popular riddle in Washington at this time was:
Q: Why is Roosevelt like a grasshopper?
A: Because you never know which way he’ll hop, but when he does, he hops like hell.
CHAPTER 28: THE CLOUDS THAT ARE GATHERING
1 “We’ve been” “Mr. Dooley” in Washington Evening Star, 30 Dec. 1906.
2 luxuriate in his Nobel TR’s Nobel Prize now glitters on the mantelpiece in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
3 note of grimness New York Sun, 2 Jan. 1907. For a detailed account of this reception, see the Prologue to Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. TR’s handshake record still stands in the Guinness Book of World Records, 2001.
4 quarter of a century See Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt, 249–51.
5 Then, as ever Ibid., 255. The dominant note of TR’s Sixth Annual Message, Literary Digest (15 Dec. 1906) remarked, had been “a demand