Last night I finished Edward P. Kohn’s new book Heir to the Empire City: New York and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt. In my Interp at the TRB one of the things I stress is that it was New York City that most shaped Roosevelt. For starters he was the only president born in NYC, and his family traced traced its roots back to the original Dutch settlers of the seventeenth century. There are Roosevelts still living in New York City.

Roosevelt as New Yorker is an important point to make because the perception of him is that he is of the West. I guess when you write a four volume history called The Winning of the West that is bound to happen. And of course there was the ranching, the conservationism, and the mammoth bust carved into Mount Rushmore as well.

Part of these perceptions are the fault, if that is the right word, of Roosevelt himself, who as a national candidate had an interest in fostering a national image. Thus, he campaigned in, say, Kansas as a Westerner and in Georgia, the state of his mother’s birth, as a Southerner once removed. That’s what good candidates do.

That said, it was in New York State that TR took on Tammany Hall as an assemblyman, in New York City that he was police commissioner, and in Albany where he served in the executive mansion before becoming vice-president. As Kohn describes so well, the national policies he pursued through his Square Deal–immigration reform, the safety of our foods and drugs, labor negotiations & worker safety, government corruption–came from the challenges he faced here in the Empire State. It is something to remember.

(image/Library of Congress)

Yesterday over at the TRB Facebook page I posted about Roosevelt’s 1909 speech in Hodgenville, Kentucky for the Lincoln centennial. Today we continue with the Roosevelt/Lincoln meme, turning our attention to 1905.

Reproductions of the menu and Roosevelt’s semi-extemporaneous remarks on behalf of Lincoln Memorial University

That month Roosevelt was excitedly preparing for his first elective term, his first 3 ½ years in office of course having come after the assassination of William McKinley. Roosevelt was here in New York City to give a talk at the Lincoln Dinner of Republican Club Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. It seems the dinner was held on the 13th and not the 12th because Lincoln’s Birthday had fallen on a Sunday that year.

One of the guests that evening was retired general Oliver O. Howard. After the Civil War Howard had been the leader of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and later the namesake of Howard University in Washington, DC. He had hoped Roosevelt would speak at a fundraiser that night for Lincoln Memorial University. The president was unable to do so, however, because of this engagement at the Waldorf. Still, Roosevelt agreed to plug the Lincoln Centennial Endowment Fund and invited Howard to come along. It was all very last minute.

The inaugural a few weeks later

Roosevelt and Howard were somewhat familiar. The previous year on Memorial Day he and Dan Sickles had given the president a tour of the Gettysburg battlefield. Howard had always been a TR man. He had campaigned for the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket in 1900, and stumped for Roosevelt in 1904 as well. He was especially grateful for Roosevelt’s efforts for Lincoln Memorial University at the Waldorf that night. Howard led a contingent of Civil War veterans at Roosevelt’s inaugural.

(Images/Library of Congress)

Last night I finished Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation. Deborah Davis’s book tells the story of Booker T. Washington’s October 1901 visit to the White House and the succeeding fallout. African Americans had been guests at the Executive Mansion before; what made this so controversial was that it was the first time a black person had sat sat down there for supper.

Gwine to Change dat White House Black, sheet music

Booker T. and Roosevelt had met previously and, hitting it off, agreed to meet again. The circumstances had changed significantly in the meantime. Now he was President Roosevelt. The youngest president ever had only been in office for all of a month. What’s more, he had ascended to the presidency because of the McKinley assassination, not the electoral process. He was turning to Booker T. for advice on governmental appointments throughout the Land of Dixie. A wise judge of character, Washington proved to be a good consultant.

To say that there was an uproar over the dinner would be an understatement. Bourbon Democrats such as Pitchfork Ben Tillman had a field day explaining the political and sexual implications of the dinner to outraged constituents. Ragtime musician Scott Joplin even wrote an opera, called “A Guest of Honor,” about the episode. Sadly, the musical score has been lost and so we know little about it today other than the title. As you can see from the image above, Joplin was not the only one finding material in the controversy.

The book is an easy read and I learned a great deal about both men, especially Washington. Davis does a good job explaining who these men are and how they arrived at where they are. There is much on the relationship between Washington and W.E.B. DuBois as well.

Roosevelt was taken aback by the controversy and did not have Washington or any other African American to the White House during his presidency. Still, the two had a good working relationship. Many judges, postmasters, and others–white and black–would eventually owe their presidential appointments to Washington’s invisible hand. This was no small think in the impoverished postwar South.

(image/D. Long Miller’s popular song is believed to be a response to Booker T. Washington’s 1901 visit to the White House)

Proclamation 776 – Thanksgiving Day, 1907
October 26, 1907

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

Once again the season of the year has come when, in accordance with the custom of our forefathers for generations past, the president appoints a day as the special occasion for all our people to give praise and thanksgiving to God.

During the past year we have been free from famine, from pestilence, from war. We are at peace with all the rest of mankind. Our natural resources are at least as great as those of any other nation. We believe that in ability to develop and take advantage of these resources the average man of this nation stands at least as high as the average man of any other. Nowhere else in the world is there such an opportunity for a free people to develop to the fullest extent all its powers of body, of mind, and of that which stands above both body and mind – character.

Much has been given us from on high, and much will rightly be expected of us in return. Into our care the ten talents have been entrusted; and we are to be pardoned neither if we squander and waste them, nor yet if we hide them in a napkin; for they must be fruitful in our hands. Ever throughout the ages, at all times and among all peoples, prosperity has been fraught with danger, and it behooves us to beseech the Giver of all things that we may not fall into lose of ease and luxury; that we may not lose our sense of moral responsibility; that we may not forget our duty to God, and to our neighbor.

A great democracy like ours, a democracy based upon the principles of orderly liberty, can be perpetuated only if in the heart of ordinary citizens there dwells a keen sense of righteousness, and justice. We should earnestly pray that this spirit of righteousness and justice may grow in the hearts of all of us, and that our souls may be inclined ever more both toward the virtues that tell for gentleness and tenderness, for loving kindness and forbearance, one toward another, and toward those no less necessary virtues that make for manliness and rugged hardihood; for without these qualities neither nation nor individual can rise to the level of greatness.

Now, Therefore, I, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, do set apart Thursday, the 28th day of November, as a day for general Thanksgiving and Prayer, and on that day I recommend that the people shall cease from their daily work, and in their homes or in their churches, meet devoutly to thank the Almighty for the many and great blessings they have received in the past, and to pray that they may be given the strength so to order their lives as to deserve a continuation of these blessings in the future.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the city of Washington, this the 26th day of October in the year of our Lord, 1907, and of the Independence of the United States, the 132nd.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

(source/The American Presidency Project)

E. B. Meyrowitz & Dell Opticians, since 1875

A friend of mine just got a new pair of glasses. As it turns out, he got his new specs at the same place Theodore Roosevelt got his. Knowing of my interest in TR and my volunteer work at the Birthplace, he grabbed me this brochure.

Eyewear played a significant role in Roosevelt’s life. When he was a boy, young Teedie was bullied on a carriage ride by some older toughs who mocked and bullied him because of his small stature and spectacles, a humiliation he never forgot. Years later he decked a man in a Montana bar for calling him “Four Eyes” and otherwise being a menace. The beat down added to the city slicker’s prestige among the locals, who had previously viewed him as an effete New Yorker and not the rugged outdoorsman and boxer he had been at Harvard. Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt  reported for duty during the Spanish-American War with multiple pairs on his person; his eyesight was so poor that he was afraid an only pair might get damaged.

Meyrowitz was begun by Emil Bruno Meyrowitz of Prussia, and has been around since 1875. It is kind of cool that it is still here.

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace

I finished David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback last night. This is the ur-text for anyone who works or volunteers at the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace. As McCullough points out in the introduction, Mornings is not so much a biography as an exploration of how this man born just prior to the CIvil War became the man he did. The book ends in the mid-1880s with Theodore’s life less than half lived. It hardly seemed that way however, given how much he managed to pack in before his 30th birthday. The White House is still fifteen years in the distance.

This is the prep work leading up to my own Interpretive programs, which I am looking forward to doing once I have the narrative down firmly. What I am finding I love about the Roosevelt story is the number of ways it can be told. Walk around the Flatiron District in the East Twenties and you are stepping back into an Edith Wharton novel. Tell the story of how his mother Mittie, raised in Georgia, was an unreconstructed Southerner and you have the Cvil War. Assemblyman Roosevelt? That’s him taking on Tammany Hall. And oh yes, it is a human story too. His wife and mother did die on the same day in the same house–two days after his daughter was born. That does not even get you to San Juan Hill, the Albany governors mansion, the White House or the decade of his life that came afterward. It is hard to believe he died at sixty. I can’t tell you how much I am enjoying this.

Make the TRB part of your New York City experience. It’s the real deal.

(image by J. Conacher/NYPL)