Theodore Roosevelt, the Big Apple, and the Great War

The study of the life and times of Theodore Roosevelt has now entered a phase where historians are tackling discrete parts of his career to illuminate the larger whole. This turn of events is a promising development and should furnish new depth and sophistication to the understanding of Roosevelt's role in U.S. history. Unfortunately, as these two books demonstrate, the process is one that demands extensive manuscript research, a strong command of the secondary literature on TR, and an intense concentration on the analytic issues that his life raises. In the case of Edward P. Kohn, it has resulted in an interesting, plausible idea about Roosevelt and New York City rendered in a badly flawed and almost unusable volume. J. Lee Thompson's treatment of Roosevelt and World War I offers a comprehensive chronicle of Roosevelt from 1914 to his death in 1919 but, because of self-inflicted research lapses, falls well short of a compelling and reliable analytic narrative.

Edward Kohn, who teaches at the University of Bilkent in Turkey, faced some self-imposed obstacles in writing this book about Theodore Roosevelt and the city of New York from the 1880s to his presidency in 1901. Nowhere in the book is it explained why there is no annotation for the text. There is a brief bibliography and something called “Specific Sources by Chapter,” but, for most of the narrative, the quotations and generalizations float in the air.

If Kohn were a reliable conveyer of facts, perhaps a note-free approach could be somewhat justified. Assertions that Alton B. Parker was once mayor of New York City (p. 181) or that John C. Spooner of Wisconsin opposed “the Old Guard” in the Senate (p. 212) might just be the kind of slips that any author could commit. In the case of the 1877 nomination by President Rutherford B. Hayes of Roosevelt's father to be the Collector of Customs in New York City, however, Kohn encounters more serious difficulties. Senator Roscoe Conkling opposed Roosevelt's selection and, as Kohn notes, the appointment had to pass through Conkling's Commerce committee. Thus, Kohn concludes that, on December 3, 1877, Conkling had “prevented Roosevelt's confirmation from coming to a vote in the Senate, and the issue died” (p. 35). This, according to Kohn, was a shaping event in the life of young Teddy. If a researcher looks at The New-York Tribune for December 13, 1877, though, a front-page story reported that the elder Roosevelt's name had come before the Senate, six hours of debate had ensued, and then the nomination had gone down by a vote of 25 to 31. The Tribune called this executive session “one of the longest and most remarkable which has been held in many years.”¹

To the degree that Theodore Roosevelt was all mixed up in the politics of New York City, the historian who writes about him must follow the primary sources where they lead. Kohn cites seven collections that comprised his original research. If one compares Kohn's less than magnificent seven collections with the seventy cited in Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State (1981), one gets a vivid sense of how expectations for manuscript research have declined over the past four decades.

Kohn apparently decided not to examine such pertinent collections as the Nicholas Murray Butler Papers at Columbia, the Albert Shaw Papers at the New York Public Library, and the George W. Perkins Papers at Columbia. As John A. Garraty showed in 1960 in his biography of Perkins (Right-Hand Man: The Life of George W. Perkins, 1960), the New Yorker and J. P. Morgan partner was instrumental in securing the support of President McKinley for Roosevelt...