Your TR Source
Harry S. Armstrong asks Theodore Roosevelt to write a letter to be distributed in Louisiana and beyond, to encourage farm emigration and investment there. Armstrong suggests specific points Roosevelt might address, including the political independence of Louisiana, as well as the attractiveness of the countryside and the fertility of the soil.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1914-12-18
John W. Osborn enjoyed seeing Theodore Roosevelt last March, but is disappoint Roosevelt will not join him for a bear hunt in November. Osborn hopes Kermit Roosevelt might come and that Roosevelt will also come. Osborn and his wife have had another little girl making four girls and two boys in his family.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-09-01
President Roosevelt enjoyed Senator Bourne’s letter and the quotations from his wife, Lillian Elizabeth Wyatt Bourne. He appreciates Bourne’s support of sending the fleet to the Pacific, which will happen regardless of the approval of Senator Eugene Hale.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1907-08-13
President Roosevelt introduces Cardinal James Gibbons to Civil Service Commissioner John Avery McIlhenny.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1907-08-10
President Roosevelt would like Walter Denis Denegre to come for lunch or dinner and discuss matters relating to Louisiana.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1901-10-19
President Roosevelt is considering Louisiana matters and wonders if Walter Denis Denegre knows John Avery McIlhenny. McIlhenny has indicated that Francis Bennett Williams and Mr. Clark are men that Roosevelt can trust.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1901-10-14
President Roosevelt would like to talk with Justice White about Louisiana matters. He invites White and Leita Montgomery White to dinner when they are in Washington, D.C.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1901-10-08
Thomas T. Wright expresses to Oscar W. Underwood that the U.S. needs more American ships in foreign trade and urges Congress to pass a ship subsidy bill to support the merchant marine and boost the southern economy.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-09-11
James Sullivan Clarkson forwards to William Loeb a dispatch about a situation in Louisiana that he does not understand.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-01-03
Francis Bennett Williams details the political situation in the last election, including voter participation and corruption by Democrats. He suggests possible replacements for Walter L. Cohen and gives a very bad report of H. Dudley Coleman. Finally, Williams states that the opinion of President Roosevelt in the American South is changing, largely due to the effectiveness of his policies and appointments there.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-12-24
Francis Bennett Williams refutes Armand Romain’s criticisms of the Republican Party in Louisiana. Williams writes that Romain’s faction do not always support Republican candidates. He says Romain is angry because he was not appointed to a government job that he wanted and believes it was because he was a Major in a colored regiment. Williams returns Romain’s letter, written to President Roosevelt in November 1904, and encloses a letter Romain wrote to him in 1903.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-12-07
Armand Romain reminds President Roosevelt that last August, a committee of Republicans from Louisiana entered a formal protest against the “policy of inaction and of ostracism” adopted by the “Lilly White” leaders of the Louisiana Republican Party. Romain recounts the injustice and partisanship with which they lead the party, which has led to dismal election results. Some fear that the party is “in a state of complete demoralization and on the eve of annihilation,” and Romain and others hope to get some “word of encouragement and hope” from Roosevelt, as well as assistance if the party collapses. Still, Romain is hopeful, as there is a “strong change of sentiment” in Louisiana and in the South generally, in political matters, and people are beginning to believe the Democratic Party has “outlived its usefulness.” Romain reminds Roosevelt of his offer to consult both factions within the party when the time came, and Romain believes that the time is now. An announcement of Roosevelt’s proposed trip to the area “created an honest and hearty enthusiasm” among Republicans there.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1904-11-21
President Roosevelt stands on the back of a train as he is sent off by several men at the train station and a group of four bears in the canebrakes. The bears say, “Dey-dey. You’re all right,” “You’re a jolly good fellow–but–we’re glad we’re not in the trusts,” “Tra-la. We’ll play tag again,” and “Bye-bye. Come again.”
On the very day that President Roosevelt departed Stamboul, in Louisiana’s “Cajun Prairie” in East Carroll Parish, where he had hunted black bears for two weeks, cartoonist Joseph H. Cunningham imagined the event. A small group of men waving from across the tracks; a small sleuth of bears waving their good-byes from the tall and thorny canebrakes.
Several men drag bears to be tied to stakes as reporters wait in the canebrakes for President Roosevelt to arrive at his tent.
This cartoon was published before or during President Roosevelt’s descent into the dark, dangerous and almost mysterious canebrakes of Louisiana in October of 1907. In the two middle weeks of an extensive speaking tour through the Midwest and South, Roosevelt hunted black bears, not so much for a vacation (his summer vacation in Oyster Bay that year had been longer than most of his presidency) as a quest to fulfill his frustrated goal in the same general area of bayous, swamps, dense growth, snakes, panthers, wild boars, and several varieties of black bears. That 1902 trip resulted, at least, in a legend that inspired the teddy bear. But in 1907 Roosevelt would not be put off.
A group of bears march toward President Roosevelt holding a rifle on his right shoulder in the canebrakes. The bear in the front holds a sign, “We want federal regulation of bear hunters.”
The first vignette depicts President Roosevelt and his dogs marching into the canebrakes to find a bear. The second vignette shows a lot of downed trees and the sun high in the sky. The third vignette shows Roosevelt in his tent and a tired dog outside the tent with the moon in the background.
Cartoonist Ralph Wilder quotes a newspaper headline, or plausible rumor, about President Roosevelt’s hunting dogs being exhausted during the two-week tracking of black bears in the Louisiana canebrakes. In fact the bayous and canebrakes — tall and dense, rather like bamboo — and the boggy bayous were inhospitable to hunters and their hounds alike.
A “sheriff” holds a rope over his shoulder with several men attached to it walking along a path “to the jail.” In the foreground is a bear near a sign, “Line of march of bear hunt,” with several reporters and photographers taking pictures. Other reporters and photographers sit in trees saying, “Photo of primeval forest” and “bear before being shot.”
The day after President Roosevelt commenced his two-week black-bear hunt in the Louisiana canebrakes, cartoonist Ralph Wilder of the Chicago Record-Herald — certainly not alone among his fellow artists — began to draw comments on the trip. It was a period in the middle of a wide-ranging speaking tour when reporters and cartoonists would not be allowed to cover or even pursue the president at a distance. The same unofficial but stern prohibition would be imposed on Roosevelt’s African safari eighteen months later.
President Roosevelt and several other men rush toward a tent with an “odor of fried ‘baar'” and “odor of hot coffee” as the cook beside the tent says, “Breakfast!”
As would happen during Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari eighteen months in the future, reporters (and cartoonists) were denied the privilege of accompanying the hunting party as the president spent two weeks chasing black bears in central Louisiana. Cartoonists were virtually addicted to Roosevelt as a subject and object, so newspapers abounded between October 6 and 19 with speculations, political allegories, and fantasies of Roosevelt in the dense and wild canebrakes.
Newspaper reporters, photographers, and cartoonists gather outside a forest with several signs: “Where the president was last seen,” “To the canebrakes,” and “Posted.”
The day after the presidential hunting party was absorbed into the bayous and canebrakes of central Louisiana on what would be an extended black-bear hunt (October 6-19), Clifford Kennedy Berryman of the Washington Star vented the frustration of journalists and commentators that the object of their affection, or attention, would be off the boards.
President Roosevelt, with a rifle in his right hand, runs after a bear with a chain and a stake attached to it. Bears hiding in the canebrakes all say, “Saved.”
Joseph Harry Cunningham’s cartoon was rather snide, considering it appeared in the Republican Washington Herald, as it shows President Roosevelt, in odd hunting attire, chasing a black bear in the Louisiana canebrakes. As other bears — presumably free and wild — hide in the dense bamboo-like brakes, Roosevelt chases a bear who has broken loose of fetters. The reference is to a bear hunt in the same general area, but closer to, or in, Mississippi, earlier in his presidency. Roosevelt’s failure then to bag a bear, and refusal to shoot one that had been tied to a spike, led to the creation of the teddy bear at the hands of cartoonists and doll-makers.