Category Archives: Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

Women’s History Month at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace

07 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in Abraham Lincoln, Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father)

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If you are looking for something to do in recognition of Women’s History Month in the coming weeks I might suggest the above programs at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace on these successive Saturdays. A guy with my initials even goes off on the 21st.

These past few weeks I have been pulling together my presentation, which focuses on the Roosevelt family’s response to the American Civil War. Young Teedie’s parents supported different sides during the conflict. His mother Mittie was a Georgia belle from a slave-owning family with a brother and several half-brothers in Confederate uniform; Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was a Union man, a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s personal secretary John Hay, who had his mail sent to the White House in care of Hay while out in the field registering men of the Army of the Potomac up for the allotment of their pay to their families back home. I tell the story in more detail in the manuscript of “Incorporating New York,” my history of Civil War Era New York City that will hopefully get published sometime in the future.

There is a rich assortment of speakers lined up for the house on East 20th Street in the coming weeks. Come out and take part in Women’s History Month in these waning days of winter.

The American dope party

16 Monday Dec 2019

Posted by in American Revolutionary War, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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“The American Dope Party: A Lesson in Practical Patriotism Taught by the Boston Tea Party.”

Earlier today I noted that today is the 246th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. Here we see an extraordinary allusion to that 1773 event: a 1906 Puck magazine centerfold depicting “The American dope party.” Puck began publication in 1877 and ended its run four decades later in 1918. Those who live in New York City may know the Puck Building on Houston Street just east of Broadway. That ornate structure is testimony to the magazine’s financial as well as cultural success. Puck was hugely influential and never afraid to take on all-comers, including the likes of Tammany Hall, industrial titans, robber barons, monopolists, grifters, and just plain cronies of whatever stripe. The magazine neatly coincided with the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, who appeared for good and ill on the cover more than eighty times over the decades.

For most of its long run Puck included a political cartoon centerfold. The one we see here does not depict Roosevelt himself, but does capture an issue close to his heart: his attempts to strengthen the nation’s food and drug laws. Many reformers were active in the cause of ending food and medicine adulteration. A government scientist named Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley created a Poison Squad in 1902 to eliminate Borax, formaldehyde, and other “preservatives” from the food supply. Though removed from the formula for Coca-Cola in 1903, cocaine itself remained legal in the United States until 1914; many Americans used that drug for medical purposes, but many others abused it as well. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, his expose of the meat industry, in February 1906. Puck printed this centerfield on June 27, 1906 of “Indians” dumping unhealthy food, medicine, clothing, and “dope” into the harbor. The subtitle in small print at the bottom reads: “A Lesson in Practical Patriotism Taught by the Boston Tea Party.” It was into this milieu that President Theodore Roosevelt stepped to reform the food and drug industries during his administration.

The political and social pressure worked. That summer of 1906 Congress passed the The Pure Food and Drug Act creating the Food and Drug Administration. President Roosevelt signed both that and the Federal Meat Inspection Act on June 30, the same week this cartoon appeared.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

Sunday morning coffee

22 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson, WW1

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Senator Hiram W. Johnson was a founder of the Progressive Party. In 1912 he ran with Theodore Roosevelt on the Bull Moose ticket against Wilson, Taft, and Debs. After the Great War Johnson helped killed U.S. entry into the League of Nations.

I’m gearing up here in my home office to get some writing done on an article. The project is taking a little longer than I wanted but it will get down in due time. The laundry will get thrown in somewhere along the way as well.

I received an email yesterday from Mike Hanlon at Roads to the Great War, who let me know that they published my piece about Henry A. Wise Wood and the League for the Preservation of American Independence. I’ll let one read the entire thing if inclined, but in a nutshell Wood and like-minded individuals such as Senator Hiram Johnson did everything in their power to kill Woodrow Wilson’s Covenant for the League of Nations.

I don’t want to go into any details here, but some colleagues and I at work received some exciting new this past Friday about a public history project for which we submitted a proposal. We heard that ours was one of the winners. Now comes the task of ironing out some logistics and putting the thing together. When the time comes, I will share more.

Enjoy your Sunday.

(image/Library of Congress)

Versailles

28 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Great War centennial, Preparedness (WW1), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson

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Summer has come full on. I was off today and had the windows open and fan on as I worked on an article I’m doing about Eleanor Roosevelt. I’ve got about 400 in the books and hope to write another 400 or so this evening before declaring victory. I would be remiss if I did not pause and note that today, June 28, 2019, is the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors. I don’t intend to write too much about it right now because there is already so much good reading out there today. For now I though I would emphasize the quickness and degree to which resistance to the treaty, especially its covenant for a League of Nations, had manifested itself even before the ink had dried.

Henry A. Wise Wood, the son of Civil War Era New York City mayor Fernando Wood, led the campaign against the League of Nations the very day of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

One hundred years ago tonight the League for the Preservation of American Independence held a rally in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. One of the American Independence League’s leaders was Henry A. Wise Wood, an engineer and inventor who had been active in the Preparedness Movement with Theodore Roosevelt and others in the Great War’s early years before American entry into the conflict. Born in 1866, Wood was the son of three-time New York City mayor Fernando Wood. The League for the Preservation of American Independence enjoyed tremendous popularity and easily filled Carnegie Hall that night in protest against Wilson, the Versailles Treaty, and prospective League of Nations. A spinout crowd gathered outside on the sidewalk. Wood asked that the spirit of Theodore Roosevelt fill the hall.

TR had died almost six months previously but almost certainly would have opposed the League of Nations. One Roosevelt who did support it was Franklin, who when he ran for the vice-presidency in 1920 advocated for the League. FDR’s position may or may not have been opportunism based on loyalty to Wilson and the knowledge that, because he and running mate Jacob M. Cox would likely lose the election, he could take a position confident in never having to carry it out. Franklin D. Roosevelt did learn the lesson of the failures of Versailles however, and when he became commander-in-chief began pushing for what became the United Nations a quarter of a century later.

(image/Library of Congress)

 

Remembering Edmund Morris and Tony Horwitz

30 Thursday May 2019

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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I learned yesterday of the recent deaths of both Edmund Morris and Tony Horwitz. It is difficult to process the loss of not just one but two important writers at the same time. Morris’s greatest legacy of course was his three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, which will stand for some time as the source for those seeking a deep dive on the twenty-sixth president. To many people though he is best known as the author of Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. For those who may not remember, Dutch was an authorized biography for which Morris had unfettered access to Reagan’s inner circle during the president’s second term. These were monumental years that today seem so far away, when the Cold War was winding down and so much seemed possible. As he did to most others however, Reagan proved inscrutable to Morris and the biographer ended up writing a semi-fictional account of Reagan’s life in which the author inserted himself into the text. That’s the “memoir” part of the title. Needless to say, there was great piling on when the book came out in 1999–twenty years ago. I always try to be charitable, and instead of joining the dog-pile have always regarded Dutch as an experiment gone wrong. For a good take on the thing, read Andrew Ferguson’s piece in The Atlantic.

North-South Shoot, Civil War reenactment, October 14, 1951. Tony Horwitz wrote of the evolution of Civil War culture in Confederates in the Attic.

Horwitz was only sixty years old when he collapsed the other day near his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Horwitz was a journalist and historian who often worked in the vein of travel writer, visiting people and places and then telling his readers how the weather was. His most famous work was Confederates in the Attic, his account of Civil War culture as it stood in the mid-1990s. The book can still be read today with great profit.

As I have written before, many people’s takeaway from this book was Horwitz’s accounts of reenactors and their quest to achieve a “period rush” when out in the field camping and marching in period garb. My own biggest takeaway was the need to examine Civil War historiography in greater depth. Reading Confederates in 1998 also led me to take my first trip to Shiloh that summer. I went again the following year and alas have not been back since. With my father now gone, there hasn’t been much opportunity to get down to the region. I do hope to take the Hayfoot on a Civil War journey sometime in the next few summers, starting at the Lincoln presidential library in Illinois, the Grant home in St. Louis, Forts Henry and Donelson, and then Shiloh.

(image by Adolph B. Rice Studio via The Library of Virginia)

 

Remembering Margaret Suckley

22 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Libraries, Margaret L. Suckley, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember

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Margaret “Daisy” Suckley aboard the USS Potomac in the Hudson River, 1937. Ms. Suckley was present in Warms Springs, Georgia when Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945.

Some may remember a year ago March when I wrote about Nora E. Cordingley for the Feminist Task Force of the American Library Association’s Women of Library History page. Cordingley was a librarian at the Roosevelt Memorial Association Library on East 20th Street, working for many years under the direction of Hermann Hagedorn. I knew even at the time that I wanted to write in 2019 for the same venue about Margaret Suckley, a confidante and sixth cousin of Franklin Roosevelt who went to work at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park in 1941. Earlier today they posted that piece. I was very happy with how it came out and see the Cordingley and Suckley articles as bookends of one another. These two did such important work and deserve to be remembered.

In a related note, if you live in the Greater New York area, or will be in the city between now and May 31, it is not too late to see “Affectionately, F.D.R.” This exhibit is a display of over one dozen letters written between President Roosevelt and Ms. Suckley over a ten year period between 1934-44. The letters were recently given to Roosevelt House on East 65th Street by a generous couple. None of the letters has ever been on display until this exhibit. Check out the directions and hours here. I have been to scores of events at Roosevelt House over the years and can attest to what a special place it is.

(image/FDR Presidential Library & Museum)

Sunday morning coffee

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Beatles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Style, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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A First Army field jacket seen at Brooklyn Flea, March 2019

I hope everyone’s week was good. Blogging will continue to be light in the coming days while the semester is in full swing. There is just so much going on. Yesterday I began Eric Rauchway’s new book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt and the First Clash Over the New Deal, which is about the four month interregnum between the November 1932 election and March 1933 inaugural. Almost fifteen years ago now I read Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America for a class on the Gilded Age with David Nasaw. I’m only about fifty pages in but the tone so far is very harsh toward Hoover. I’ll come back to it with more observations when I finish the book.

I was at Brooklyn Flea across the street from the Barclays Center yesterday, where I bough a small leather wallet and a pair of cuff links. I’m transitioning to wearing suits more and am making French cuff shirts part of my arsenal. I have three suits now and intend to get a solid grey worsted or flannel number over the summer in time for the fall semester. All in due time.

When I was at the flea market yesterday I saw what I though might be a pasteover Beatles Butcher cover. I don’t own any vinyl, nor do I plan on going down that rabbit hole, but when I saw a copy of Yesterday and Today in a bin I had to stop and look. The anodyne trunk photograph was pasted on, which led me to think it might have been a second state copy. I mentioned it to the vendor, telling him what he may have on his hands, and even got him to take a picture of me with the album cover. When I got home I examined the photo while reading online about ways to tell if a record is indeed a Butcher second state. (First and third state versions are obvious.) To make a long story short it was not a Butcher cover, and the giveaway was right there even though I was unaware of it in the moment: the copy I saw had an RIAA Gold Record seal, an indicator that this was a later pressing. And that was the end of that.

I did see and photograph the First Army field jacket you see above. Even had it been in my size I would not have purchased the coat. Putting it mildly, it is bad form to wear military gear with patches if one has not served with said unit. Seeing it though was something special. I always wonder when I encounter such things in second-hand places how they got where they did. Who owned it and where & when did he serve? Two years ago I bought a heavy winter coat, made in England many decades ago, in a thrift store in Pompano Beach. It is entirely speculation on my part but I can surmise that the double-breasted, full-length coat once belonged to a retiree who brought the piece down with him from the Northeast only to bring it to Goodwill upon realizing he would never need it in sub-tropical Florida. I think of him and who he might have been every time I put it on, and try to live up to his legacy.

“Our Soldiers in Siberia!”

25 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Woodrow Wilson

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I hope everyone has been enjoying the day. I wanted to share this extraordinary poster from 1918 urging Americans to purchase was savings stamps. I think it illustrates–quite literally–that peace, if we can even call it that, was a tenuous thing six weeks after the Armistice. Americans and their allies were occupying Germany. Allied troops were also stationed in remote, freezing Siberia. This was in the wake of the assassination of the czar and his family. These were the early stages of the Russian Civil War.

“Our Soldiers in Siberia!”: This 1918 Christmas poster of a doughboy in Russia accompanied by a Czech or Slovak counterpart reminded Americans at the time of how fragile peace was after the Armistice and, intentionally or not, hinted of strains to come at the Versailles negotiating table.

Theodore Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill on Christmas Day afternoon after having spend almost two months in a Manhattan hospital. In early December he had been too infirm even to walk; he was also blind in one eye and still feeling the effects of the jungle disease that had nearly killed him four years earlier on his expedition down the River of Doubt. Despite all this, there was nonetheless talk that Christmas week of 1918 of Colonel Roosevelt traveling to Europe to participate in the peace negotiations. Colonel Roosevelt quickly dispelled these rumors. Franklin Roosevelt, still the assistant secretary of the navy, was scheduled to sail for Europe aboard the Leviathan on December 31 to start wrapping up naval contracts and other business. Already in Europe was Woodrow Wilson, who spent December 25 in Chaumont, France with Pershing and the troops before heading to London. American and allied troops were also in Siberia, and General Pershing was talking over Christmas about transferring an entire division from Germany there to further support them.

The reference in the poster to the Čecho-Slováks–peoples formerly under rule of the now-dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire–hints at the complexity of the task Wilson and other leaders would face when trying to put the world back together. 1919 would be a fraught time.

(image/Library of Congress)

Mrs. Roosevelt’s 1918 Christmas Eve

24 Monday Dec 2018

Posted by in Quentin Roosevelt, Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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Eleanor Butler Alexander Roosevelt, Ted Roosevelt’s wife, seen here in center holding knitting, as she was in France during the Great War. On Christmas Eve 1918 she was back in New York City and talking to the media of the work she and others did with the Y.M.C.A. in France.

In December 1918, weeks after the Armistice, Americans were arriving back in the United States, often on such massive transport ships as the Leviathan carrying as many as 9,000 doughboys. It was not just the men however. On December 16, 1918 the Lorraine arrived in New York Harbor carrying Mrs. Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Mrs. Vincent Astor, a noticeably gaunt Scottish soprano Mary Garden, and Eleanor Butler Alexander Roosevelt, Ted Roosevelt’s wife. It was a difficult time for the Roosevelt family. Quentin had been killed that past July, and the other boys gravely wounded at different times during the war with physical and emotional injuries from which they would never entirely recover. Eleanor’s father-in-law, former president Theodore Roosevelt, had been failing for some time and was quite infirm by this time. He had spent almost all of the past two months in the hospital.

Eight days after her arrival Mrs. Roosevelt was again settled in to her and Ted’s home on East 74th Street. Her husband was still in France with the First Infantry Division. On Christmas Eve 1918 Mrs. Roosevelt gave an interview at the Upper East Side house to expand on, and even defend from some doubters, the work of the Y.M.C.A. that she and so many others had conducted during the war.

(image/New York Times)

The United War Work Campaign of November 1918

18 Sunday Nov 2018

Posted by in New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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The YMCA was one of the seven organizations involved in The United War Work Campaign in November 1918.

The Armistice of November 11, 1918 coincided with the start of The United War Work Campaign, a national initiative to raise a staggering $170,500,000 in 1918 dollars to aid the American Expeditionary Forces. The project began back in the summer and was, to put it mildly, a massive undertaking; in addition to raising that extraordinary sum, organizers hoped to marshal one million Victory Boys between the ages of 12 and 20 to feed, entertain, and provide educational instruction to doughboys. The United War Work Campaign was the effort of seven agencies: the YMCA, the YWCA, the National Catholic War Council of the Knights of Columbus, the Jewish Welfare Board, Salvation Army, American Library Association, and the War Camp Community Community Service. Clearly the intent was to involve as many constituencies as possible across religious and other lines. The chairman of the initiative in New York City was none other than John D. Rockefeller  Jr., who spoke at various functions around the city in early October drumming up interest. Another prominent New Yorker involved in the campaign was Theodore Roosevelt, who spoke at the Manhattan Opera House on November 1 for that same purpose. Colonel Roosevelt implored his audience that while the kaiser was on his heels there was still much work to be done in winning the war.

As mentioned above the campaign began on November 11 just as news of the Armistice was coming in. For much of the the next week while the celebrated Americans still went out and participated in charity gold tournaments, bake sales, benefit concerts, and so many others things besides. When it became obvious that the funding goal would be a bit short come the November 18 deadline organizers pushed the date back, first to the 20th and then to the 25th. This had the desired results. In those two weeks just after the German surrender Americans donated $203,179,038 to the campaign.

(poster/Library of Congress, designed by Neysa McMein)