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)