Theodore Roosevelt

by Peter Cates

Theodore Roosevelt

As the 25th former President William McKinley was slowly dying in a bed chamber, in Buffalo, New York, of a gangrenous infection from Leon Czolgosz’s bullet, Vice-President Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919) was still vacationing with his family high up in the Adirondacks 400 miles due northeast in the Empire State, but felt the increasing urgency necessitated that he hurry to Buffalo.

The first seven hours of descent down the steep, slippery, curving trails to the trains were via horse and buggy, the driver instructed by his lone passenger to proceed at full speed.

This incident conveys the frequently much too brash boldness with which the first President Roosevelt proceeded through life. He was a total believer in the active strenuous life, both physically and intellectually.

Roosevelt could box, wrestle, hunt wild game and rope steers with expertise. He also mastered languages, speedred two or three books a day and wrote several highly acclaimed volumes of history.

I wrote in an earlier column of how McKinley and Roosevelt had a very wary relationship. Basically, it boiled down to McKinley having serious misgivings about Roosevelt’s much too brash boldness versus his own circumspect caution and consummate diplomacy in his career as a public servant; to the credit of both men, each believed in doing what was right.

There is a fascinating photo of President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt sitting together on the White House porch but neither one is smiling. Supposedly, McKinley, who had seen a lot of bloodshed as a Major in Civil War battles, was turned off by Roosevelt’s Rough Rider enthusiasm in seeing duty in the Spanish-American War while Roosevelt considered McKinley, according to biographer Edmund Morris, “a cold-blooded politician.”

President McKinley and Vice-President Roosevelt

I admit to a bias towards McKinley as a more decent human being the more I read about him, whereas Roosevelt has increasingly struck me as a combination of the bull in a china shop, personally enjoying upper class luxury and hobnobbing with his rich and famous friends while maybe pretending to have sympathy for the common man and being one himself.

But Roosevelt’s presidency did achieve much in the government trust busting and other such crusades. Health and safety standards in industry were enforced . Roosevelt fought for preservation of wilderness park lands, spearheaded the building of the Panama Canal, and mediated peace talks to end the 1905 war between Russia and Japan.

There have been hundreds of books written about Roosevelt. Years ago, I read Hermann Hagedorn’s 1954 The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, the author having been a close friend of TR and the family, and having access to droves of letters, journals and other archived materials. The book recounted much first hand knowledge about Roosevelt’s personality with his family and friends at home – Sagamore Hill being the mansion in Oyster Bay on the northernmost end of Long Island, New York, where he resided most of his adult years.

Alice Roosevelt

Roosevelt’s first wife Alice Lee (1861-1884) died two days after giving birth to a baby girl named Alice. She also died the same night as Roose­velt’s mother, a double tragedy that traumatized Roosevelt so much that he left his daughter in the care of his sister Anna and moved out west to the Dakota badlands to be a rancher for two years.

Edith Roosevelt

In 1886, he returned East and married Edith Carow (1861-1948) who gave birth to five children. She epitomized classy poise and dignity, displayed phenomenal gifts at managing five very rambunctious children and yet would join her husband and kids on horseback rides through the woods surrounding the Sagamore Hill estate.

She and stepdaughter Alice had a contentious relationship; she had known Alice’s mother and made a hurtful comment that, if her mother had lived, she would have eventually bored her father with her insipid personality.

However, daughter Alice could hold her own with the sharp tongue; she once summed up her father’s ego-driven need to be the center of attention everywhere: “He wants to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every christening.”

After leaving the White House in 1909, Roosevelt remained active in both public and private life. He hoped that his like-minded friend Howard Taft, whom he helped win the Republican nomination and presidency, would continue his policies but Taft became his own man.

In 1912, Roosevelt ran as an independent Bull Moose candidate against Taft, splitting the vote and giving the White House to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson.

All four Roosevelt sons served in World War I, inspiring much pride in their father but tragedy struck in mid-1918 when youngest son Quentin was killed in France at the age of 21.

After that Roosevelt basically lost his own will to live and died on January 6, 1919, of a heart ailment, at the age of 60.

Elisabeth Ogilvie

by Peter Cates

Elisabeth Ogilvie

The consistently intriguing Maine Speaks anthology contains a short story, Scobie, by Elisabeth Ogilvie (1917-2006), which was first published in the August, 1951, issue of Woman’s Day magazine.

The story is set in a fishing village along the Maine coast and is recounted from the point of view of a first person unnamed narrator who is living presently in the early 1950s and, in visiting with a childhood friend, Rhoda, is recalling memories of those 1920s or ’30s yesteryears when the village only had “a general store, a filling station, a sardine factory, a fish-and-lobster buyer, and a fifteen-room hotel that catered for three summer months to artists and elderly people….” and in particular of an eccentric named Scobie who lived for a year on the very edge of the village in a “pinkie” or discarded boat with his well-trained pet baby pig, Barnaby.

The story has a very commendably achieved sense of time and place in its details of local color but the main plot in its depiction of the girls interactions with Scobie when they visited him a few times (and without their parents’ permission) was unfortunately a bit wooden and desultory.

Still, one paragraph stood out in its vividness, when the narrator is describing her father’s job as a warden of the village “fisheries”:

“At the far curve of the harbor, away from the sardine factory and the big wharves, there was a regular settlement of lobstermen, who preferred to live in sight of the harbor and the moorings rather than in the town. Their houses, with neat white clapboards or silvery shingles, were sheltered by the spruce woods behind; the grassy ground sloped down to the shore, where their boats were hauled up for painting; and their traps were stacked against wildrose bushes and blackberry vines. My father spent a lot of time over there.”

The potential for further reader interest in the lives of these inhabitants in a separate universe from the other villagers may have been a lost opportunity.

Ogilvie was a Massachusetts native but, in 1944, she moved into a 33-acre farm, on Gay’s Island, in Cushing, where she died from a stroke in 2006. She published more than 40 novels, mostly based on life in the islands along the Maine coast; along with an autobiography.

Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff

April 1 was the 150th birthday anniversary of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). YouTube contains a highly recommended recording of his ever justly popular 2nd Piano Concerto, which he composed in 1901, after recovering from a deep depression through the help of hypnosis from a Doctor Dahl. The performance is a 1960 Columbia Masterworks collaboration between pianist Philippe Entremont and the late Leonard Bernstein, with the New York Philharmonic.

It was the first LP I ever owned of the work and its power and poetry had a uniquely gripping eloquence of its own. The second movement was slowly paced and milked for maximum sentiment while the concluding 3rd movement was paced with lightning speed until the magnificent concluding three minutes when, with slower tempos, the music exploded with beauty.