Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [471]
56 Only after the “The opponents of the Forest Service turned handsprings in their wrath,” TR gleefully wrote in his Autobiography (419). The other major conservation measure of this session was TR’s creation of the Inland Waterways Commission on 14 Mar. 1907. See chap. 29, below.
57 ON 4 MARCH British Documents on Foreign Affairs, 171–72. For a short sketch of Ambassador Bryce, see Burton, “Theodore Roosevelt and His English Correspondents.”
58 the first Jew According to Straus, TR said when offering him the appointment, “I want to show Russia and some other countries what we think of Jews in this country.” Straus had assumed office on 17 Dec. 1906. Straus, Under Four Administrations, 210.
59 Cortelyou had been Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, 509; Strouse, Morgan, 565–66.
60 “a demonstration” Klein, E. H. Harriman, 399; Adler, Jacob H. Schiff, vol. 1, 44–50.
61 his native Germany Schiff was also rather deaf. An enduring joke in Rooseveltian circles was that the President, boasting at a dinner of New York notables about his appointment of Oscar Straus without any regard to ancestry or creed, turned to Schiff for corroboration (“Isn’t that so, Mr. Schiff?”) and got it: “Dot’s right, Mr. President, you came to me and said, Chake, who is der best Choo I can put in my Cabinet?”
62 “We are confronted” Adler, Jacob H. Schiff, vol. 1, 44–45.
63 Roosevelt wrote back Klein, E. H. Harriman, 398; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 631. TR’s naïveté in financial matters is indicated not only by the remark he made about Harriman, but also in his disinclination to call what might have been an important conference. He had not hesitated, seven weeks before, to invite Mayor Schmidt and the entire San Francisco school board to Washington, at government expense.
64 “This has been” Klein, E. H. Harriman, 400.
65 “your stern and” Adler, Jacob H. Schiff, vol. 1, 47.
66 the macabre artifact The New York Times, 14 Apr. 1907.
67 More rational admirers Adams, Letters, vol. 6, 55–57; Bliss Perry, The Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (Boston, 1921), 361; TR, Letters to Kermit, 184.
68 Spring came TR, Letters to Kermit, 186, 189.
69 In early May James Bryce to Sir Edward Grey, British Documents on Foreign Affairs, 203–4; Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
70 It also revived Ibid., 204; TR, Letters to Kermit, 195.
71 second elective term Longworth, Crowded Hours, 148. “No one will ever know how much I wished, in the black depths of my heart, that ‘something would happen’ and that Father would be renominated.”
72 nine tenths of him TR made this admission on 10 Oct. 1908, long after the question of a third term had become academic. Butt, Letters, 125.
73 Having thus made TR, Letters to Kermit, 196.
74 HE SAW THEM TR to C. Hart Merriam, 23 May 1907 (TRP). Except where otherwise cited, the source for the following section is Alton A. Lindsey, “Was Theodore Roosevelt the Last to See the Passenger Pigeon?” Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science for 1976 86 (1977). The authoritative work on TR as ornithologist and natural historian is Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt.
75 He had collected Cutright, Theodore Roosevelt, 78.
76 “The passenger pigeon” Lindsey, “Was Theodore Roosevelt?” notes that the last known surviving passenger pigeon died in captivity in Ohio, on 1 Sept. 1914.
77 the last bird William B. Mershon, The Passenger Pigeon (Deposit, N.Y., 1907), 223. A more recent authority cites a specimen shot in Fairfield County, Conn., in 1906. Lindsey, “Was Theodore Roosevelt?”
78 saw no evidence See also Alton A. Lindsey, “The Sighting at Pine Knot,” Natural History, Nov. 1977.
Historical Note: Only after TR got back to Washington did he ponder a remark about some “wild carrier pigeons” by Dick McDaniel, the foreman of a farm adjoining Pine Knot, and realize that he had a possible supporting witness. Subsequent