Category Archives: Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

Preparedness Day 1916

13 Friday May 2016

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Boy Scouts pose with Theodore Roosevelt, May 13, 1916

Boy Scouts pose with Theodore Roosevelt, May 13, 1916

Here is an incredible photo that was taken one hundred years ago today.

May 13, 1916 was Preparedness Day, during which parades advocating for American military planning were held in various locales. This image was taken in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where Theodore Roosevelt led several Preparedness events in his hometown. Here he is on the veranda at Sagamore Hill with a contingent of Boy Scouts. Conspicuously absent from the photo is his wife Edith, who was attending a Preparedness event in Manhattan accompanied by their daughter Ethel Derby, their son Thedore Jr., and Ted’s wife Eleanor. It’s a hunch but I imagine a reason Roosevelt stayed so close to home was that by now he was too infirm to march in that bigger event being held in the city.

(image/Library of Congress)

Signifying Presidents Day

15 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Memory, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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Speaking softlyA friend sent me this image over the weekend. It is an ad for a clothing company’s Presidents Day Weekend sale. He made the interesting observation that former presidents seem to be used more and more often in today’s society to signify something to an intended audience. One sees this invoked in shows like Mad Men all the time. We reflexively use “Eisenhower” as short-hand for the repressiveness of the 1950s without even thinking about it. Juxtapose that with how we invoke “John F. Kennedy” as shorthand for the country’s “innocence” in those years just prior to the escalation in Vietnam, racial unrest, college protests, and assassinations that came in the wake of the young president’s own shooting. Invoking JFK just begs one to think of what might have happened had he not gone to Dallas. We have seen this in a slightly different way these past few months with calls to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name and likeness on the campus of Princeton University in response to his segregationist and other race-based policies.

I know that companies had to pay the Lincoln family to use the 16th president’s name and likeness in the decades after his death. It would be interesting to know more about the hows and whys of using presidents’ images for commercial and other purposes. That said, I have no doubt TR is now safely in the public domain. The purpose of the image above seems to be more mundane than segregation, Vietnam, or misconceptions about 1950s’s America; it’s an ad for a Presidents Day sale. As I mentioned to my friend, I’ll take a stab at this one. The retailer seems to be saying that one should should be reserved (“speak softly”) but also be a little bold (hence the red hat).

(Hat-tip Darrow Wood)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1882-1945

30 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by in Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember, Woodrow Wilson

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A youthful Franklin Roosevelt as he was circa 1916 in his mid-30s. He loved performing these types of duties as assistant secretary of the Navy

A youthful Franklin Roosevelt as he was circa 1916 while in his mid-30s. He loved performing these types of duties as assistant secretary of the Navy

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this day in 1882. It’s interesting how we commemorate Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays and then it drops off from there. I suppose with Washington commemoration had much to do with binding the tenuous nation together through the early decades of the republic; Lincoln then joined pantheon as the first president to be assassinated. That’s pretty much it. I thought it would be interesting to see what FDR was doing a century ago. His tenure as assistant secretary of the Navy is one of the least studied periods of his life, probably because he was not making policy per se but carrying out the orders of Naval Secretary Josephus Daniels and President Wilson.

In January 1916 Roosevelt was campaigning hard for Preparedness. He gave a talk in Binghamton, New York 100 years ago this week in which he averred that the U.S. Navy should give up “not one dollar” in appropriations. He was in accord with Wilson in many respects; the sinking of the Lusitania that past May had hardened Wilson’s stance. What is more, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was gone by this time, having resigned over what he saw as Wilson’s belligerent stance. In many ways Franklin Roosevelt was making the case better and more forcefully than Wilson, whose appeals to Congress and elsewhere were largely met with skepticism from all sides. FDR’s cousins Theodore Roosevelt for one was not impressed with Wilson’s proposals and called them “half-preparedness.” Of course as a former president he had more leeway than his cousin did to call it as he saw it.

Franklin Roosevelt returned to Washington after his Binghamton speech to get back to work and attend to Eleanor and his kids. He needed to be close to home. He and Eleanor’s last child, John Aspinwall Roosevelt, would be born just six weeks later. It is lost on us how young he was when so much of this was going on.

(image/Library of Congress)

Documenting Cadman Plaza

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by in Civil War centennial, Monuments and Statuary, New York City, Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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Friday morning I was out and about taking photographs in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza for a class I will be co-teaching this coming spring semester. This is the first for-credit class I will be teaching and I am nervous and invigorated at the same time. Over the semester the students will be documenting a New York City locale; after some discussion my colleague and I chose Cadman Plaza. It is rife with interpretive possibilities. I have always known a fair amount about the area and am now boning up to bring myself up to full speed. I will talk about it here and there over the course of the term.

Brenner's plaque on the northern face of Brooklyn's Borough Hall

Brenner’s plaque on the northern face of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall

Here are two of the approximately twenty images I took the other day. This first one in on the north-facing wall of Borough Hall. It is hard to make out–my little phone camera will only do so much–but it is the Lincoln penny along with the full Gettysburg Address. When I first saw the tablet the other day–and I walked past it for years without ever noticing it–I figured the plaque was placed in either 1909 (centennial of Lincoln’s birth) or 1963 (centennial of the Gettysburg Address). With a little digging I learned via the Catalogue of the Works of Art Belonging to the City of New York, Volume 1 that the City of New York commissioned the 22″ x 28″ tablet from artist Victor D. Brenner for dedication in 1909. That is the year the Lincoln penny made its debut as well.

Communities large and small erected such works throughout that year to commemorate Lincoln’s 100th. President Roosevelt had commissioned Brenner to design the Lincoln penny a few years previously. Of course Roosevelt’s father was an acquaintance of Lincoln’s and a good friend of his personal secretary John Hay. Roosevelt always had an interest in coinage and medallic arts; TR was a good friend and patron of Augustus Saint-Gaudens as well. Downtown Brooklyn was doing poorly in these years, in large part due to the elevated train line that blighted the neighborhood and the new subway line that took commercial and residential traffic to other parts of the borough. Urban renewal efforts were in the works, but the onset of the Great War brought those plans to an end. I would go further into the story here, but that’s for the students to do this winter. I’m eager to see how the class goes.

The plaque and hall from a distance. The tablet is in the lower left corner above the white car.

The plaque and hall from a distance. The tablet is in the lower left corner above the white car.

Losing Roosevelt’s Badlands?

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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A postcard circa 1930s-1940s

A postcard circa 1930s-1940s

I’m sorry for the lack of posts this past week. I was out of town enjoying some R&R. There is still a few weeks to go but now I am getting ready for the upcoming spring semester. I faced an avalanche of emails when I returned, including one from a friend about a potential gravel mine threatening the vicinity around Theodore Roosevelt’s ranch on the Little Missouri River in North Dakota. Over the past several years the area surrounding Roosevelt’s Badlands has faced considerable environmental threat from the oil boom. The danger, though still real, has subsided in recent months with the drop in gas prices and resulting slowdown in oil field production. The land now in question is managed by the U.S. Forest Service but the mineral rights to the gravel belong to an outside individual.

In many ways the Dakotas made Roosevelt. Yes, he was always first and foremost a New Yorker. Indeed he was the only president to have been born in New York City. He was still finding himself when he began visiting the region while in his twenties, around the time he dropped out of Columbia Law School. It was there that he lost himself in the strenuous life after the death of his wife and mother in 1884. He shed some of his patrician airs while hunting and ranching with the roughnecks who worked the land. Years later his ties the area enabled him to straddle the three regions of the nation during his presidential campaigns. Truthfully and accurately he claimed membership as a bonafide New York Knickerbocker, a Southerner via his unreconstructed Georgian mother, and an adopted Midwesterner. The West, opened up by the railroads and immigration, was coming into its own in these decades between the Civil War and World War One.

It’s hard to see if and how the Forest Service can find a solution to this additional threat. I guess we’ll see what happens.

(image by The Hafstrom Co., Bismarck, N. Dakota from the Tichnor Brothers Collection, Boston Public Library)

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Happy Thanksgiving

26 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Washington, D.C., William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, William McKinley, Woodrow Wilson

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St. Patrick's Church, Washington D.C. 26 November 1914: the mood was somber the first Thanksgiving of the Great War

St. Patrick’s Church, Washington D.C., 26 November 1914: the mood was somber the first Thanksgiving of the Great War

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I thought I would share these photographs from the Pan American Mass held at Washington D.C.’s St. Patrick’s Church in 1914. St. Patrick’s Monsignor William T. Russell conceived the idea of a Pan American Mass after hearing President Taft’s Thanksgiving proclamation in mid November. The monsignor pitched the idea to his boss Cardinal Gibbon who signed off on the idea. The Pan American concept goes back to the Pan Am Expo held in Buffalo nearly a decade earlier. That is of course where McKinley was killed and Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1901. William Howard Taft attended all four Thanksgiving Pan American Masses during his presidency.

Though undefined in the crowd, William Jennings Bryan was in attendance that Thanksgiving Day. His attendance assuaged concerns of Protestant exclusion and signaled America's determined neutrality in the escalating war.

Though undefined in the crowd, William Jennings Bryan was in attendance that Thanksgiving Day. His attendance at the Pan American Mass assuaged concerns of Protestant exclusion and signaled America’s determined neutrality in the escalating war.

Woodrow Wilson was there in 1913 but conspicuously absent in 1914. It seems there was a messy public dispute after the 1913 Thanksgiving mass when Protestants complained about what they saw as the mass’s exclusion. Wilson was at his retreat house in Williamsport, Massachusetts with his daughter, the two quietly celebrating Thanksgiving while mourning the death of his wife and her mother Ellen. Mrs. Wilson had hied the first of August during what turned out to be the first week of the Great War. Three months later peace was the topic of the day in St. Patrick’s. The president’s personal aide, Joe Tumulty, and his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, represented his that Thanksgiving day. Tumulty and Bryan were wise if subtle choices; Tumulty was a practicing Catholic and Bryan a devout Protestant pacifist. With war in Europe entering its fourth month Bryan’s attendance signaled to both domestic and foreign audiences that the United States was determined to stay out of it.

St. Patrick’s marked the Pan American Thanksgiving Mass well into the 1950s, with presidents, ambassadors and Supreme Court justices usually in attendance.

(images/Library of Congress)

The Rough Riders in 54mm

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Toy Soldiers

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IMG_2751One thing I love about going to toy soldier shows, especially the big one every November in Hackensack–is that one is pretty much guaranteed to see something that a) one never thought one would see, and b) one never knew existed in the first place. That happened again many time today, not least when I saw this Rough Rider playset. No I did not buy it, but I did make sure to take the above photo. A quick internet search informs us that the set comes with 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, the 71st New York, and individual poses of both John Pershing and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. I have no idea why this set is not better known. The cover art was even done by banality maestro Mort Kunstler. Now you know that I’m not much for the painter’s work; he did do a beautiful job here nonetheless. I believe this set is from the late 60s or early 70s. The already impressive set already contains over 100 pieces; coupled with a few more troopers this would make quite the living room battle scene.

It’s interesting how the Spanish-American War was something of a laboratory for the U.S. Army a decade and a half prior to the outbreak of the Great War. It is roughly parallel to what the Mexican-American War did for the Officers Corps that fought the War of the Rebellion. The Boer War was much the same for the Brits. In every case, though, even more lessons could and should have been learned.

Speaking of the Great War, I met a few people who, if things fall into place, with whom I ay get to collaborate on a few small things. Time will tell.

 

John Kipling, 1897-1915

27 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President), Those we remember

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What do Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Asquith, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling have in common? They are just a few of the prominent fathers of their era to have had their sons killed in the First World War. This was not uncommon. If one visits the Union League or University Clubs here in New York, just to name one city, one see the names of the war dead from some of society’s most prominent families. Rudyard Kipling’s son was killed at the Battle of Loos one hundred years ago today. John Kipling, known as Jack in the family to differentiate him from his grandfather and namesake, was an eighteen-year-old second lieutenant in the Irish Guards fighting. It was the young lieutenant’s first engagement.

John ("Jack") Kipling died at the Battle of Loos 100 years ago today.

John (“Jack”) Kipling died at the Battle of Loos 100 years ago today.

Roosevelt and Kipling knew each other quite well and there are parallels and differences in the deaths of their sons in France. Jack and Quentin were both born in 1897, and each was the baby in his family. Like Quentin, Jack was a witty and inquisitive young man who invariably saw the glass as half full. Though they both died young and tragically there was a crucial difference between their deaths: when Quentin was shot down in 1918 the Germans gave him a full burial; Jack’s remains were not found, which caused his father no end of anguish. Rudyard Kipling did all he could to find his son’s remains–indeed he did not give up hope that Jack was still alive until after the Great War’s end–but it was all to no avail. He went to his own grave in 1936 never knowing for certain what happened to his youngest child.

In the early 1990s officials at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission announced that they were now certain Jack was interred in the St Mary’s field hospital cemetery in Loos. That seemed to end the mystery until, in the early 2000s, two scholars released their own research that brought the War Graves Commission’s findings into question. The truth is that we will probably never know for certain. Stalin’s cliché about one death being a tragedy while one million a statistic is as true as it is cynical. Kipling himself channeled his grief into his writing. Later that very year he “My Boy Jack.” The first stanza reads:

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

(image/Rudyard Kipling Papers, University of Sussex Library)

A signed Roosevelt Memorial edition

19 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by in Libraries, Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace (NPS), Theodore Roosevelt Jr (President)

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IMG_2700Here is something you don’t see every day. I was at the New York Public Library today doing some research. The book I am holding here is volume 1 of the Memorial Edition of Theodore Roosevelt’s collected works. For those who may not know their TR, Colonel Roosevelt authored over thirty books in his lifetime. I wrote a Facebook post for the TRB page about a year ago. Hermann Hagedorn edited Roosevelt’s books in the mid-1920s. The collected works were then published in two versions, a limited-run Memorial Edition and a larger National Edition for the general public.

There were 1050 sets of the Memorial Edition. This is 629. What really drew my attention is that it is signed by Edith Roosevelt, Theodore’s wife. This thing has been part of the NYPL collection for 90+ years now. It’s amazing to hold such a thing in your hands.

Connecticut’s 1917 military census

13 Sunday Sep 2015

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Hagedorn ConnecticutAgain I’m sorry about the lack of posts over the past week. I have putting my head down and focusing on the Hermann Hagedorn piece. Happily most of the heavy lifting is now done. I have another 1200 words to go and am going to do all I can to finish the draft by Friday. If all goes well I will hone it next weekend and send off a week from tomorrow. I knew a fair amount about Hagedorn before starting the project but have a better understanding today of all he did for Roosevelt’s legacy. I did not know for one thing that he first met Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill in May 1916 when the Colonel was contemplating another presidential run. Together they did so much to help with the Allied cause during the First World War. I will share those things in the future.

Here is an interesting document I thought I would share tonight. Often I search Ancestry to research people about whom I am writing. One never knows when I good detail will pop out. Here is one such document. It is Hagedorn’s 1917 military census form. Note that he filled it out on March 3, that is one month prior to President Wilson’s request for a declaration of war. Hagedorn lists his employment as writer. It does not say so here, but he was writing at the time for The Outlook magazine, for which Roosevelt had written from 1909-14. The Outlook was a hugely influential periodical and an implacable foe of Woodrow Wilson.

This is not a Selective Service document; the WW1 draft did not come until May 18. Note the ambiguity in the document’s language. The Connecticut governor states that the purpose of the questionaaire is to “procure certain information relative to the resources of the state.” What that really meant was that they were trying to figure how many men of military age were living in Connecticut in case of war. It is amazing what documents will tell you if you know what to look for.

(image via Ancestry.com)