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Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge

Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge

With delight, President Roosevelt shares with Senator Lodge the newspaper account of a riot in Brownfield, Texas, over the erection of a Roosevelt statue. He is glad for the invitation from George Nathaniel Curzon, the Chancellor of Oxford, to present the Romanes lecture on his return from Africa. It is an honor, and it gives him a legitimate reason for visiting England. The matter of renominating Governor Charles Evans Hughes grows worse, and Roosevelt worries about the impact it may have on William H. Taft’s election.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1908-08-18

Sacagawea statue

Sacagawea statue

Photograph of a Sacagawea statue located 25 miles northwest of Bozeman, Montana. Picture is part of a photograph collection in a binder kept by Chandler D. Fairbank, a foreman at the northern unit of the Roosevelt Recreational Demonstration Area in western North Dakota.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt National Park

Creation Date

1936

Our uncrowned kings

Our uncrowned kings

Three statues labeled “Cook, Walking Delegate, [and] Head Waiter” stand on the left and three statues labeled “Coachman, Car Porter, [and] Janitor” stand on the right. People are bowing down, kneeling, and performing other acts of veneration before them. In the center, Puck has unfurled a banner showing citizens pulling down the equestrian statue of King George III. Caption: Puck — Where is the spirit of ’76? This is what your forefathers did to King George.

comments and context

Comments and Context

Sometimes a cartoon tells more about its times than its intended point. Cartoonist Ehrhart addresses the vagaries of modern life — the imperious attitudes, approaching arrogance and greed — as routine laborers and employees asserted themselves in modern life. Of course the cartoonist employed hyperbole, characterizing people in these positions as latter-day tyrants.

St. Louis’s object lesson to anti-expansionists

St. Louis’s object lesson to anti-expansionists

A statue labeled “Thomas Jefferson The Father of Expansion” stands at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, Missouri, with Puck directing the attention of George Frisbie Hoar and other anti-expansionists Edward Atkinson, Carl Schurz, and Charles Francis Adams, who look on in disbelief.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was planned for 1904 to commemorate the centennial of President Jefferson’s acceptance of Napoleon’s offer to sell vast Western lands — actually French claims to lands — on the American continent. It was planned for St. Louis, the “Gateway To the West,” then one of the largest cities in the United States.

Justice versus prejudice

Justice versus prejudice

President Roosevelt stands with his right hand on the left shoulder of an African American man, probably Booker T. Washington but not identified, and his left hand on a paper labeled “15th Amendment.” Behind them is a statue labeled “Lincoln – With Malice Toward None With Charity Toward All,” showing Abraham Lincoln standing at the top with freed African American slaves. Caption: President Roosevelt–Lincoln emancipated you, the people gave you citizenship and I’ll protect your rights.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The controversy that clearly inspired this cartoon by Keppler was the famous Indianola, Mississippi, post office matter. In the weeks preceding this cartoon’s publication, Minnie Cox, the black postmistress of Indianola (having been appointed by President Harrison and again by President McKinley), was forced from her office by white Democrats of her town under threats including lynching. President Roosevelt exercised his prerogative as president and ordered her reinstated, and the post office closed until she returned to her post. Residents were obliged to travel 30 miles to transact postal business. Roosevelt had offended Southern whites by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House shortly after his assuming office. President Cleveland had invited the pioneer crusader for Black rights, Frederick Douglass, to the Executive Mansion amid even greater outcries, perhaps because Mrs. Douglass was white. It is interesting that Keppler here shows Roosevelt assuring a man (likely an unlabeled Booker T. Washington) and not Postmistress Minnie Cox herself.  There is no record of a public outreach to Booker T. Washington during this affair; however, he had become a political adviser publicly identified with Roosevelt, to whom he often turned for matters of policies and patronage.

The modern Cassandra

The modern Cassandra

William II, German Emperor, pushes a statue of “Frederick the Great” seated on horseback, behind a female figure labeled “‘Cassandra’ Stephens,” who is approaching Uncle Sam sitting on the U.S. Capitol Building. “Cassandra” represents a public personage named Stephens, nicknamed in the cartoon for the Greek goddess with the gift of prophecy.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The statue of Frederick the Great was one of Germany’s gestures associated with the American visit of Prince Henry, the Kaiser’s brother, in 1902. The legendary leader was an ancestor of Kaiser Wilhelm and Prince Henry. The equestrian statue originally was placed in front of Roosevelt Hall at the Army War College in Washington, D.C. Because of sensibilities during two World Wars, as well as the relocation of the War College itself, the statue has also stood at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, and its current location at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The figure “Stephens” in Pughe’s cartoon is lost to history.