Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784

President Roosevelt holds two revolvers and fires at a dictionary, which has a variety of holes in it. Beside him is “amunishon from A. Carnege Skidoo Castel” and a bouquet “from the Simplified Spelling Board.” Ghosts of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Johnson come out of the dictionary. Caption: “What Mr. Roosevelt means is to scrap the English language. He is a patriot, not a pottering philologist.”—The London “Saturday Review.”

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1906-09-22

Postcard showing the dining area of an inn with tables around a fireplace and pictures hanging on the walls, including a portrait. Charles C. Myers identifies it as Ye Cheshire Cheese Restaurant in London, England, where writers Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens often visited. The portrait is of Johnson. Myers notes that he ate Thanksgiving dinner at the restaurant in 1910.

Comments and Context

In Charles C. Myers’s own words, “This being about noon on Thanksgiving Day 1910. We now visit the Old Cheshire Cheese Restaurant which is one of the oldest and most noted of small eating places in London. This place originally got its name from the excellent way in which they serve the noted Cheshire Cheese. This is preserved in its original old way and is very interesting place to visit. It was in this same room that Dr. Johnson, author of the Dictionary, and Charles Dickens used to meet and dine together and Dr. Johnson spent much of his time here–his picture is hanging on the wall in the corner of the room. The chair in which he used to sit is still preserved in a glass case in an up stairs room. There are several pictures there of President Taft, ex-president Roosevelt and others that have visited that place in recent years.”

Collection

Charles C. Myers Collection

Art Koch reveals the subjects and context of the second “TR-era image” which features Theodore Roosevelt with fellow hunters near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in the spring of 1905. Koch notes that one of the subjects in the picture had her head erased by the photographer under direction of Roosevelt who was offended that she had intruded herself among his hunting companions. The third image features a cartoon of Roosevelt shooting at a dictionary with two revolvers while the ghosts of three famous writers hover over the dictionary.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal

Creation Date

1905

John H. Vivian examines the controversy that swirled around President Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order of August 1906 mandating a simplified form of spelling in certain government documents. He looks at the reaction of newspapers from around the country, and says that their initial reactions were overdone but were later tempered. He also examines the reaction from some agencies of the federal government, and notes  opposition to the plan in Congress that centered less on concerns about spelling and more on Roosevelt’s use of executive power.

 

This article is also noteworthy as it is the first article in the Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal to have endnotes.

 

Ambassador Reid delivers a speech on William Makepeace Thackeray and his special place of respect among the American people at the Titmarsh Club Dinner in London, recounting the kind recollections of men who knew Thackeray while he visited the United States. Reid acknowledges that Charles Dickens’s less flattering depictions of Americans in his own works have their merit, but restates that Thackeray’s writings on his time in America and his skill as a writer have left him as well loved by Americans as the English.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-12

Oscar S. Straus gives an address at the University of Georgia tracing the development of religious liberty in the United States. Beginning with the founding of several American Colonies, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, Straus examines how many of the colonies dealt with religious freedom, or lack thereof, and how as the United States has developed as a nation it has set forth the law that no religion or sect of religion is above any other, and that the laws apply to all equally.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1907-05-13