IⒶtextual note saw only three references to that curious Presidential performance of two or three weeks ago—the one where the Chief Magistrate treated a young girl harshly. One of these was in the New York Times Ⓐtextual note. The substance of it, as I remember it, was to this effect. An article or an editorial in the Sun Ⓐtextual note charged Mr. Roosevelt—who was out riding in the country, with friends—with striking, with his “crop,” the horse of a young girl who violated etiquette by riding past him. It was further charged thatⒶtextual note Mr. Roosevelt sternly rebuked the girl, besides, for her lack of manners. Continuing, the Times Ⓐtextual note added some elephantine attempts at sarcasm, to the effect that the girl and her father were arrested and sent to a military dungeon to be tried by court martial, etc. I could make nothing out of the thing. I could not make out whether anything at all had happened or not. There seemed to have been a Rooseveltian incident, but the size and style of it were hopelessly obscured by the Times’sⒶtextual note unhappy attackⒺexplanatory note of clumsy and idiotic satirics.
But we have a visitor, to-day, who furnishes what he claims to be the factsⒺexplanatory note. He got them from a friend of the girl’s father. To witⒶtextual note. The President, with three friends, was out in the country taking a horseback ride. Presently a girl of fifteen appeared in the rear—on horseback. She closed the interval, and was intending to ride by, when she recognizedⒶtextual note the PresidentⒶtextual note by his shoulders, or perhaps his ears,Ⓐtextual note and slackened her pace and fell back a few paces. After a little, the Head of the Greatest Nation on Earth whirled about and charged rearward and exclaimed to the child—
[begin page 298] “Don’t you know who I am? You have followed me long enoughⒶtextual note. Where are your manners?”
The frightened girl explained.
“I was in a hurry, and was going to ride by, but when I saw it was the President, I—”
“Never mind about that! Yonder’sⒶtextual note a side-road—take it. Go!”
The girl burst into sobbings and said—
“It is the road to my father’s house, sir. I was going to take it as soon as—”
“Go—will you!”
Which she did. The father wrote a note to the President complaining, but got no replyⒺexplanatory note.
Have we ever had a President before of whom such a story could be told and find believers? Certainly not. It would be recognized as a foolish and extravagant invention, a manifest lie; for we have never had a President before who was destitute of self-respect and of respect for his high office; we have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive-keeper or a bully, and missed his mission by compulsion of circumstances over which he had no control. Will the story be believed now? Yes, and justifiably. No one who knows Mr. Roosevelt will doubt that in its essence the tale is true. This is the same ruffian whose subordinate ruffian brutally treated a lady in the waiting-room ofⒶtextual note the White House three years ago, and was rewarded for it by being appointed postmaster of WashingtonⒺexplanatory note.
title Dictated at Stormfield, January 5, 1909] This “dictation” is actually based on a manuscript.
Presidential performance of two or three weeks ago . . . Times’s unhappy attack] The account of the riding incident, involving “Miss May Rhodes, daughter of a wealthy resident of Los Angeles,” appeared in the New York Sun on 19 December 1908 (“Girls Angry at Roosevelt,” 3). The following day, the Times printed an article accusing the Sun of “grossly imperfect reporting” that betrayed
an obvious inclination to belittle the importance of the incident, to make out as good a case as possible for Mr. Roosevelt, in The Sun’s accustomed way. Why suppress the fact that the President, drawing a hammerless, self-cocking revolver of the machine gun type from his right hip pocket, shot the horse and sent the girl rider, although she was severely injured by the fall of her mount, to Fort Monroe?
Only the poor thing’s parents and those of her companions, who were placed in irons and sent to Washington to await the inquiry of a secret tribunal, have known until now how hard the mailed hand of authority can bear upon the offenders in such a case as this. A weak, piffling attempt to make light of an incident which must have its influence on all the future history of the country, to treat of it in print in so trivial a manner as to make the ordinary reader regard it as a “fake,” or at best as an exaggeration of a gossipping school girl’s all but baseless yarn, deserves the severest condemnation. (“Careless Reporting,” 10)
we have a visitor, to-day, who furnishes what he claims to be the facts] Two visitors came to Stormfield on 5 January 1909, but it is not known which one furnished “the facts.” On 21 December 1908 Paul Thompson, an agent for authors and photographers, had written to Clemens: “Several English and European publications whom I represent have asked me to secure photographs of you and your family in your new home. . . . If you can see your way clear to permit my sending a photographer to Redding to take them I will appreciate it very much” (CU-MARK). Thompson (1878–1940), a Yale graduate, and his photographer (“Mr. Taylor,” according to the Stormfield guestbook) visited Stormfield on 5 January: “There the humorist was snapped playing billiards, writing at his desk and in other familiar positions. The immediate sale of this set of pictures brought in $1,000, which became the initial capital for the establishment of Mr. Thompson as an independent news photographer” (“Paul Thompson, 62, Early Cameraman,” New York Times, 28 Nov 1940, 23; Stormfield guestbook, entry for 5 January 1909, CU-MARK). Four of the photographs taken at Stormfield appeared in the March 1909 issue of The Burr McIntosh Monthly (Paul Thompson 1909; see the photograph following page 300).
The father wrote a note to the President . . . but got no reply] No letter of complaint from the girl’s father, Alonzo Willard Rhodes, a prominent Los Angeles banker and financier, has been found; but her mother wrote to Roosevelt “to deny that her daughter’s horse had been struck by the President while riding past her in a road near Washington” (“Thanked by Roosevelt: President Writes to Mother of Girl,” New York Times, 9 Feb 1909, 1; “A. W. Rhodes, Financier, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, 5 Nov 1937, A23). Roosevelt replied in early February:
My Dear Mrs. Rhodes, I thank you for your letter of the 20th ultimo, and am glad to hear from you that your daughter denied the story that I struck her horse. Of course, I never struck her horse or any other lady’s horse. The whole story was so absurd as not to be worth denial. Numerous stories of this kind are started from time to time by foolish or malicious people. Occasionally I am obliged to deny them, but as a rule I find it best simply to ignore them, because denying them calls attention to them and gives a chance to mischief-makers to mislead well-meaning people by further repetitions of the stories.
Sincerely yours,
theodore roosevelt.
subordinate ruffian brutally treated a lady . . . postmaster of Washington] Benjamin F. Barnes, an assistant presidential secretary, forcibly ejected Mrs. Minor Morris from the White House in January 1906. Clemens discusses the incident at length in the Autobiographical Dictations of 10, 15, and 18 January 1906, and again on 3 and 4 April 1906 ( AutoMT1 , 256–59, 279–81, 292–93, 551 n. 258.34; AutoMT2 , 6–12).
Source document.
MS Manuscript, leaves numbered [1]–4, Shapell Manuscript Foundation.MS is now in private hands, and no contemporary typescript of it has been found. Its form, however, which includes ‘Dictated at Stormfield’ and the date, exactly matches that of two autobiographical typescripts of the period (for which no manuscripts are known to exist): the ADs of 6 October and 24 November 1908. The presumption is that this “dictation” was also intended to be part of the Autobiography.