Your TR Source
President Roosevelt introduces Henry Fairfield Osborn to Evelyn Baring, Earl of Cromer. He explains that Osborn wishes to study mammalian paleontology in the Fayum Desert, and asks that Baring “give him what aid can legitimately be given.”
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1906-12-24
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1916-05-08
Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919
English
Theodore Roosevelt is sending Robert Bridges the article. Roosevelt is not sure whether it can be published in a magazine.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1915-09-01
Theodore Roosevelt wants to be helpful to Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and while he does not believe that making an appeal on his own would be helpful, he will join with Henry Fairfield Osborn in making such an appeal.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1915-02-01
Theodore Roosevelt thanks George Herbert Sherwood for the check. He enjoyed giving the lecture. Roosevelt would like Sherwood to tell President Osborn that he has just received the skin, the fragments of a rib, and some of the dung of the Mylodon. Roosevelt thinks they should be in the American Museum of Natural History.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1915-01-04
Theodore Roosevelt was pleased to read the extracts from Frederick Sturges Osborn’s journal. The “Ed Mearns” mentioned in the journal was Edgar Alexander Mearns, who joined Roosevelt for the African trip.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1914-12-16
President Roosevelt asks if Gifford Pinchot will write to Fairfield Osborn who is very anxious to talk over forestry matters.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1908-07-12
President Roosevelt was just about to order the Life of Hamilton when he received the book and letter from Lucretia Thatcher Osborn, and thanks her for her generosity. He invites Osborn and her husband, Henry Fairfield Osborn, to visit the White House for a couple days sometime in 1907, when they would be able to come to a reception and have lunch with Roosevelt, as he would like to talk with both of them.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1906-08-02
President Roosevelt tells Alexander Graham Bell that while he believes George Ellery Hale to be “an excellent man,” he does not think it would be a good idea to appoint another astronomer as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution right away. Roosevelt comments on several other suggestions by Bell, including Henry Fairfield Osborn, David Starr Jordan, and Charles D. Walcott, all of whom would be good choices, although several have difficulties standing in the way of their selection.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1906-03-27
Charles D. Walcott signed a letter to Henry Fairfield Osborn notifying him of the transfer of two white rhinoceros skins that Theodore Roosevelt collected. He was sorry to hear of Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt’s accident and hopes she is recovering, especially as he knows what it is like to have someone close experience a serious accident. Childs Frick and Edmund Heller are in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to augment the specimens collected while on safari with Roosevelt. Walcott will soon be in New York City and hopes to see Roosevelt.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-11-03
Caspar Whitney informs Theodore Roosevelt about a symposium of opinions he is planning on the relative value of recreational fishing versus recreational shooting, an inquires if Roosevelt would like to contribute an opinion. Whitney lists individuals he has already solicited opinions from, and requests to hear back from Roosevelt by the end of next week, as any symposium on the subject matter would be incomplete without a word from him.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-05-31
A. M. Corwin heard that taxidermist Carl Ethan Akeley is in Africa with a fever. Akeley’s condition is serious. Corwin is contacting Henry Fairfield Osborn, the American Museum of Natural History president, to help get Akeley out of Africa. He asks Theodore Roosevelt to contribute to the endeavor.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-04-06
Edmund Heller thanks Theodore Roosevelt for his reply. He regrets the oversight that delayed the rhinoceros horns’ shipment to James L. Clark. Heller discusses his current study of the specimens in the African collection, specifically the antelopes.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-01-17
Ernest Thompson Seton asks Theodore Roosevelt for his opinion of his two volumes of Life Histories of Northern Animals.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1910-12-31
Endicott Peabody accepts an invitation from President Roosevelt to lunch at Oyster Bay. Peabody suggests Henry Fairfield Osborn might be the right Princeton man for the job of negotiating football rules. He also discusses Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt’s upcoming visit to Groton School to visit Kermit Roosevelt.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-09-21
Margaret P. Griffin chronicles the evolution of Theodore Roosevelt as a naturalist in the years 1874 and 1875. She highlights the creation of a “Natural History Society” composed of Roosevelt and several of his friends who shared nature observations, read papers, and organized outings. Griffin focuses on Roosevelt’s avid interest in ornithology, and she provides excerpts from Roosevelt’s notebooks to demonstrate his detailed knowledge of different species. Griffin notes Roosevelt’s encounters with the now extinct passenger pigeon, and she details the death of Frederick Sturges Osborn, one of Roosevelt’s closest friends and fellow ornithologist.
Seven photographs accompany the essay, including one of Roosevelt and another showing examples of his bird taxidermy.
Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal
2014
Seven books, including two memoirs, are examined in six review essays in this edition of the “Book Notes” section. Michael L. Manson reviews two books on Theodore Roosevelt’s 1914 scientific expedition to Brazil; one penned by Roosevelt and the other by Joseph R. Ornig. Manson praises the forewords to both books written by Tweed Roosevelt, and he finds Ornig’s book provides a detailed look at the expedition and the cast of characters besides Roosevelt who made it successful. Stacy A. Cordery notes that journalist Joseph Alsop’s memoirs deal mostly with the major events and figures of the mid to late twentieth century, and she reveals Alsop’s opinions of various senators, presidents, and generals.
Richard P. Harmon faults Peter Collier’s The Roosevelts: An American Saga for focusing too much on the private lives of the two Roosevelt families, and he says that many of Collier’s assertions are not backed by evidence and that the book relies too much on a psychohistory approach. James Summerville asserts that H. Paul Jeffers’s look at Roosevelt’s tenure as Police Commissioner of New York City, Commissioner Roosevelt, disappoints and that readers should turn to Jay S. Berman’s study or to coverage of this period of Roosevelt’s career in biographies. John A. Gable provides a positive and short review of a short book, William H. Harbaugh’s fifty page history of Pine Knot, which Gable says is written with “charm and style.” Robert D. Dalziel, President of the Theodore Roosevelt Association (TRA), reviews the memoirs of Hamilton Fish, a winner of the TRA’s Distinguished Service Medal. Dalziel says that Fish’s opinions are straightforward and blunt like their author.
Two photographs appear in the section: one shows three members of the Rio Roosevelt Expedition of 1992 and the other dignitaries of the Dutch government at the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands.
Three books and an essay are reviewed in the “Books” section. John A. Gable examines Kristie Miller’s biography Ruth Hanna McCormick and finds that it provides not only a look at her pioneering life in Republican politics, but that it also shows the impact of the Progressive Party into the 1920s. Gable notes that McCormick achieved many firsts for women in politics. Dennis Flanagan reviews War Plan Orange, the winner of the 1992 Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize, and reveals that American strategists had been debating about how to conduct a war against Japan decades before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In “Theodore Roosevelt, Carl Akeley, and the American Museum of Natural History,” Debby Applegate reviews a biography of Akeley and an essay that examines his work at the museum. Applegate highlights Akeley’s relationship with Roosevelt that began with his African safari, and she highlights how the works under review stress that the museum and its Roosevelt Memorial Hall are not “timeless” but represent the thinking of the men and the times in which they were built, and she cautions against casually condemning their work. A separate “Book Notes” section mentions twenty-five books on Roosevelt related topics or from Roosevelt historians, ranging from children’s books to biographies to a cookbook. The work of David G. McCullough, Douglas Brinkley, and Sylvia Jukes Morris are highlighted.
Photographs of Miller, Akeley, and the Barosaurus exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History illustrate the sections.
In this chapter excerpt from his book John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement, Stephen Fox examines efforts to expand Yosemite National Park, the battle between preservationists and conservationists over the use of forests, and provides portraits of John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, John Burroughs, and Theodore Roosevelt. He looks at the work undertaken by the conservation movement to preserve Niagara Falls, the redwood forests of California, and Mount Desert Island in Maine. Fox concludes the chapter with a look at the battle over the city of San Francisco’s desire to build a dam at the southern end of Hetch Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park. In addition to looking at the life and work of Muir, the chapter provides information on many lesser known figures in the turn of the twentieth-century conservation movement.
A listing of the officers and the members of the executive, finance, and Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace committees of the Theodore Roosevelt Association is found on the second page of the excerpt.
Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal
1981
Alan R. Havig explores the ways in which Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) used the memory and legacy of Theodore Roosevelt (TR) to advance his own political career and causes. In doing so, he actually helped burnish the reputation of Theodore Roosevelt as a Progressive reformer. He looks closely at the 1920 campaign when FDR, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, attacked the Republican nominee, Warren G. Harding, for denouncing TR and the Progressives in 1912. Havig examines how FDR attacked the Republicans for abandoning TR’s Progressive legacy and how FDR’s adoption of TR’s mantle led to a long feud between the two wings of the Roosevelt family. He also looks at how FDR supported the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Havig also looks at how FDR used TR in 1936 to argue that the latter’s Square Deal had been a predecessor to his New Deal program. FDR, on the occasion of the dedication of the Roosevelt Memorial Hall in January 1936, quoted extensively from TR to demonstrate that he would have supported FDR’s extensive use of government to address the problems faced by the nation in the 1930s.