Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [476]
8 Roosevelt’s surprise attack “If Hughes is going to play the game,” TR had said, grinning after hogging the headlines with his Special Message, “he must learn the tricks.” William Manners, TR and Will: A Friendship That Split the Republican Party (New York, 1969), 49.
9 With that, he For another presidential reprimand, involving the gang’s embellishment of White House portraits with spitballs, see ibid., 16, and TR, Letters, vol. 6, 1004.
10 as had Mark Beer, Hanna, 586.
11 The famous MacMillan Looker, White House Gang, 120–21. “Time and again, afterwards, I have thought of these enchanting models—realizing that it was a rare privilege given me, to see the genesis of Quentin’s interest in the air.”
12 “I have two” TR, Letters, vol. 6, 1044.
13 For some time Ibid., vol. 5, 679; TR, Letters to Kermit, 238, 240; Carl Akeley, introduction to TR, Works, vol. 5, x–xi. The date of Akeley’s dinner (or lunch) with TR is uncertain, but it appears to have occurred between 25 Oct. and 7 Nov. 1907, after the President’s return from Louisiana. See also Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 224, and Kermit Roosevelt, Happy Hunting-Grounds, 11–14. From April 1908 on, the “note of Africa” is increasingly sounded in TR’s correspondence.
14 “I think I” TR, Letters, vol. 6, 1060. Another person who got an advance indication of TR’s designs on African wildlife was John Burroughs, who joined him around this time for a weekend at Pine Knot. One night after dinner, while EKR knitted, TR gave the naturalist J. H. Patterson’s The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures (London, 1907) to read by lamplight, and himself read Cromer’s Modern Egypt (London, 1908) at a table in the big bare room. “Suddenly Roosevelt’s hand came down on the table with such a bang that it made us both jump, and Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed in a slightly nettled tone, ‘Why, my dear, what is the matter?’ He had killed a mosquito with a blow that would have demolished an African lion.” Hearing this story years later, the essayist Gamaliel Bradford commented: “He killed mosquitoes as if they were lions, and lions as if they were mosquitoes.” John Burroughs, Under the Maples (New York, 1921), 106; Wagenknecht, Seven Worlds, 6. Note: Burroughs’s chapter on Pine Knot contains a spurious refutation of TR’s sighting of passenger pigeons there in 1907. See Lindsey, “Was Theodore Roosevelt?”
15 ROOSEVELT STAMPEDE Washington Evening Star, 3 June 1908.
16 (Charles P. Taft) was Taft’s mentor-like half-brother.
17 “If your friend” Cullom, Fifty Years, 303.
18 At latest count Pringle, William Howard Taft, vol. 1, 348; Gould, Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, 284.
19 The giant airship A photograph of the zeppelin appears on p. 537 of Sullivan, Our Times, vol. 3, directly opposite a paragraph on p. 536 describing the nomination of Taft.
20 On Tuesday Pringle, William Howard Taft, vol. 1, 350–51; Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Presidential Nominations and Elections (New York, 1916), 72.
21 The proceedings in The New York Times, 18 June 1908; Pringle, William Howard Taft, vol. 1, 352; Alsop, “Autobiography,” 7.
22 “That man is” Official Report of the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Republican National Convention (Columbus, Ohio, 1908), 88.
23 Joseph Bucklin Bishop For Bishop’s anti-Semitism, see, e.g., his letter to TR of 21 Oct. 1903: “I have just had the exquisite pleasure of trampling upon the Jew [newspaper editor Moses Strauss] as he crawled at my feet” (TRP). In a follow-up letter, dated 24 Oct., he warned TR against a “Jew syndicate” attempting to control the New York press. Waspish, emotional, unctuous, and conniving, Bishop was also an antifeminist. “I never met a man who had so low an opinion of women as human beings” (Villard, Fighting Years, 129). These traits did not dissuade TR from choosing Bishop, years later, as his authorized biographer.
24 He saw no reason Bishop, Presidential Nominations, 72–73.
25 At 1:30 Ibid., 73; TR, Letters to Kermit, 250.
26 Bishop remained Except where otherwise