Details
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE, President. Typed letter signed ("Theodore Roosevelt") to Mrs. A.W. Nicholson of Portland, Oregon, with numerous handwritten corrections and additions in ink by TR, Oyster Bay, 27 May 1916. 2 pages, 4to, the typewriter ink slightly pale.
An unusual, highly personal, somewhat distracted letter to a friend and neighbor, perhaps evidencing the strain under which Roosevelt worked at this time: "I am now receiving nearly two thousand letters a week, and it is almost impossible to deal with the mail, and utterly out of the question for me to answer the letters I prize the most with more than a few lines...I am happy to say I was of a little assistance in getting Homer's son a place on a railroad where...he was doing well. My dear Mrs. Nicholson, if I start a movement to give a stone to Homer, you have no conception of the multitude of similar movements I would have to go into. It seems churlish not to do as you request, but if you were in my place you would understand I simply can't undertake one such matter, without inviting like demands in hundreds of other cases. By George, I wish I had met your boy...If I had realized who he was, when he was playing polo on Long Island, I would have gotten him to come over to lunch. I understand exactly how you feel...in having him among those men...with whom he is entitled to associate as a gentleman -- and I never met a more typical gentlewoman, (one whom Mrs. Roosevelt and I both felt in the same way about!) than a certain gentlewoman who brought her boys up on a ranch...[m]y experience has been exactly like yours as to the cowardice and hypocrisy of so very many of the professional 'uplifters' with whom we are dealing..."
An unusual, highly personal, somewhat distracted letter to a friend and neighbor, perhaps evidencing the strain under which Roosevelt worked at this time: "I am now receiving nearly two thousand letters a week, and it is almost impossible to deal with the mail, and utterly out of the question for me to answer the letters I prize the most with more than a few lines...I am happy to say I was of a little assistance in getting Homer's son a place on a railroad where...he was doing well. My dear Mrs. Nicholson, if I start a movement to give a stone to Homer, you have no conception of the multitude of similar movements I would have to go into. It seems churlish not to do as you request, but if you were in my place you would understand I simply can't undertake one such matter, without inviting like demands in hundreds of other cases. By George, I wish I had met your boy...If I had realized who he was, when he was playing polo on Long Island, I would have gotten him to come over to lunch. I understand exactly how you feel...in having him among those men...with whom he is entitled to associate as a gentleman -- and I never met a more typical gentlewoman, (one whom Mrs. Roosevelt and I both felt in the same way about!) than a certain gentlewoman who brought her boys up on a ranch...[m]y experience has been exactly like yours as to the cowardice and hypocrisy of so very many of the professional 'uplifters' with whom we are dealing..."