President Theodore Roosevelt's secret relationship Verne.
John Lamb
Hi everyone
While on his honeymoon the future President Theodore Roosevelt wrote this to his sister Corinne from Paris on June 13th 1881.
“we also had a very pleasant lunch at the Verne’s where we met ‘Uncle Robinson” a nice old Scotch baronet”
To any Verne scholar, it can only mean that the future President Theodore Roosevelt was having lunch with Jules Verne and alluding to both Verne’s Scottish ancestry and “Uncle Robinson” - the original working title for Verne’s “The Mysterious Island”, the sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Roosevelt had just come from the house of his uncle, James Dunwoody Bulloch, the man who commissioned the Confederate warship CSS Alabama from Nautilus House Liverpool.
I have catalogued the over 100 links between the Birkenhead built CSS Alabama and the largely Birkenhead built Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as well as over 100 links between the layout and landmarks of Mysterious Island and the layout and landmarks of Birkenhead. This is the subject of a soon to be published paper that examines how Verne uses just one Birkenhead landmark across three different novels.
The original letter alluding to Verne is held by the Theodore Roosevelt Centre and can be viewed here.
In Mysterious Island, the character of Herbert (Be Thee R) is 15 years old, the same age as Theodore Roosevelt was in 1873 when Mysterious Island was written.
Verne writes (Kravitz translation)
Pencroft came to Richmond at the beginning of the year with a 15-year-old boy, Herbert Brown of New Jersey. The young boy was very strong in natural history and had a veritable passion for the science. His father had encouraged him in this line by letting him take courses with the best professors in Boston.
Roosevelt’s father (Theodore Senior) was a founder member of the Natural History Museum in New York and encouraged young Theodore's interest in natural history.
The young Roosevelt even donated animal specimens to the museum which are still on display today. A sculpture of Roosevelt is in the foyer. In 1873, the young Theodore Roosevelt was being privately tutored by Arthur Cutler, one of the best professors at Harvard (Boston). The inference from Verne's novel and Roosevelt's own words is that the character of Herbert was specifically written for the young Roosevelt and that Roosevelt knew about it.
According to Herbert Lottmann’s biography of Verne, the by now President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Jules Verne in 1904 to say he had now read every single one of his novels, which would have included Mysterious Island (it is the only Verne novel listed in Roosevelt’s personal library). Did Roosevelt not recognise himself as the 15-year-old (in 1874) natural historian tutored by the best professors in Boston in Mysterious Island?
There are over 50 links between the character of Herbert and Theodore Roosevelt in Mysterious Island (please see the attachment).
In the Floating Island (1895) the character of Athanase Doremus (Theodore’s Museum NH) is also modelled on Roosevelt with Doremus repeating the phrase ‘delighted’ over 20 times - this was Theodore Roosevelt’s catch phrase and embellished on postcards. I have also catalogued over 50 links between The Floating Island and Birkenhead.
To those who say all these links are 'coincidences' - all I can say that this is a hell of a lot of coincidences and I am amazed that no one on this forum's 170 odd members thinks the same. Please see the attachment.
best wishes John Lamb
Alex Kirstukas
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John Lamb
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James D. Keeline
The bow of the Nautilus is used as a ram to damage or sink ships. Describing the construction of the submarine, Nemo mentions the ram as separate part of the hull, saying it was made in Motola, Sweden. Iron and steel forgings are still made in Motala. Perhaps Verne imagined the ram as a single steel casting several meters long, part or all of the forward conical section of the hull. In the early part of the novel, Aronnax mentions a Cunard steamship, the Scotia, which collided accidentally with the Nautilus, suffering a hole like an isosceles triangle 2 meters across, as if made by a cutting machine. So Nemo's ram seems to have some kind of a point with three edges, modifying its basic conical shape. The Scotia was a real steamship, which carried Theodore Roosevelt and
his family to Europe the same year in which it supposedly was struck by the Nautilus, without encountering submerged obstacles. Such details exemplify how Verne used actual circumstances of his time to provide a basis in reality.
John Lamb
I was also introduced to two strangers as Mr Smith and Mr Brown and was turning away when a tremendous laugh announced the fact that they were cousins Conseil Roosevelt and Hillborne Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt Diary entry October 26th 1872. (Theodore Roosevelt Centre).
You can find the diary entry here TR Center - ImageViewer
Had Roosevelt never met his own cousins before? This is a family who, Roosevelt’s sister Corinne recalled, entertained in the ‘southern tradition’ of her mother Martha Bulloch. It seems odd that when Roosevelt did meet his cousins for the first time, he was fourteen years old, three thousand miles away from home and in a small house with two 'pirates' (Abraham Lincoln called them this) in Waterloo, Liverpool.
Raphael Semmes, Captain of the CSS Alabama used an alias on his forged passport and that alias was ‘Smith’, whereas Theodore Roosevelt's character of the young naturalist Herbert (and I am sure on this) in Mysterious Island is also known as Herbert ‘Brown’.
Furthermore I can find no evidence at all of the existence at all, of a 'Conseil Roosevelt' never mind one who was Theodore Roosevelt's cousin. Is this a play on the English 'conceal'?
There was of course a natural historian Conseil in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) could this also have been based on the 12 year old child prodigy and already accomplished natural historian Theodore Roosevelt (at this age he was already donating stuffed animals to the Natural History Museum in New York). I already have Theodore Roosevelt in two novels (Herbert in Mysterious Island and Athanase Doremus in The Floating Island ...and a third novel, but not by Jules Verne. I report back all of my findings one member of the Roosevelt family, who was born in Birkenhead, and is very supportive of my findings.
Hillborne Roosevelt did exist and was a celebrated manufacturer of organs - another Nemo link?....to go with the fact that the Nautilus was mainly manufactured by Lairds shipyard of Birkenhead.
This all relates to my forthcoming published article re Birkenhead being the literary template for three of Verne's novels.
Best John
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James D. Keeline
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mken...@aol.com
Jean-Louis Trudel
"I was also introduced to two strangers as Mr Smith and Mr Brown and
was turning away when a tremendous laugh announced the fact that they
were cousins Conseil Roosevelt and Hillborne Roosevelt."
me. I think it likely that this was either a short-form used within
the family or a misunderstanding by Theodore, and that this is
actually Cornelius Roosevelt (1847-1902), the older brother of
Hilborne Lewis Roosevelt (1849-1886).
Jean-Louis Trudel
John Lamb
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John Lamb
I have pointed out that so far America seems to me only to refresh an old impression to give starkly and startlingly what is going on everywhere, what is indeed as much in evidence in Birkenhead or Milan or London or Calcutta, a huge extension of human power and the scale of human operations. This growth was elaborated in the physical and chemical laboratories and the industrial experiments of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and chiefly in Europe.
In the White House, set midway between the Washington of the sightseers and the Washington of brilliant conversation, I met President Roosevelt. I was[Pg 246] mightily pleased by the White House; it is dignified and simple—once again am I tempted to use the phrase "aristocratic in the best sense" of things American; and an entire absence of uniforms or liveries creates an atmosphere of Republican equality that is reinforced by "Mr. President's" friendly grasp of one's undistinguishable hand. And after lunch I walked about the grounds with him, and so achieved my ambition to get him "placed," as it were, in my vision of America.
In the rare chances I have had of meeting statesmen, there has always been one common effect, an effect of their being smaller, less audible, and less saliently featured than one had expected. A common man builds up his picture of the men prominent in the great game of life very largely out of caricature, out of head-lines, out of posed and "characteristic" portraits. One associates them with actresses and actors, literary poseurs and such-like public performers, anticipates the same vivid self-consciousness as these display in common intercourse, keys one's self up for the paint on their faces, and for voices and manners altogether too accentuated for the gray-toned lives of common men. I've met politicians who remained at that. But so soon as Mr. Roosevelt entered the room, "Teddy," the Teddy of the slouch hat, the glasses, the teeth, and the sword, that strenuous vehement Teddy (who had, let me admit, survived a full course of reading in the President's earlier writings) vanished, and[Pg 247] gave place to an entirely negotiable individuality. To-day, at any rate, the "Teddy" legend is untrue. Perhaps it wasn't always quite untrue. There was a time during the world predominance of Mr. Kipling, when I think the caricature must have come close to certain of Mr. Roosevelt's acceptances and attitudes. But that was ten years and more ago, and Mr. Roosevelt to this day goes on thinking and changing and growing....
For me, anyhow, that strenuousness has vanished beyond recalling, and there has emerged a figure in gray of a quite reasonable size, with a face far more thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a clinched hand that does indeed gesticulate, though it is by no means a gigantic fist—and with quick movements, a voice strained indeed, a little forced for oratory, but not raised or aggressive in any fashion, and friendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses.
It isn't my purpose at all to report a conversation that went from point to point. I wasn't interviewing the President, and I made no note at the time of the things said. My impression was of a mind—for the situation—quite extraordinarily open. That is the value of President Roosevelt for me, and why I can't for the life of my book leave him out. He is the seeking mind of America displayed. The ordinary politician goes through his career like a charging bull, with his eyes shut to any changes in the premises. He locks up his mind like a powder magazine. But any spark may fire the mind of[Pg 248] President Roosevelt. His range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the thought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius. And he does not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks. It is his political misfortune that at times he thinks aloud. His mind is active with projects of solution for the teeming problems around him. Traditions have no hold upon him—nor, his enemies say, have any but quite formal pledges. It is hard to tie him. In all these things he is to a single completeness, to mind and will of contemporary America. And by an unparalleled conspiracy of political accidents, as all the world knows, he has got to the White House. He is not a part of the regular American political system at all—he has, it happens, stuck through.
Now my picture of America is, as I have tried to make clear, one of a gigantic process of growth, of economic coming and going, spaced out over vast distances and involving millions of hastening men; I see America as towns and urgency and greatnesses beyond, I suppose, any precedent that has ever been in the world. And like a little island of order amid that ocean of enormous opportunity and business turmoil and striving individualities, is this District of Columbia, with Washington and its Capitol and obelisk. It is a mere pin-point in the unlimited, on which, in peace times, the national government lies marooned, twisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently stranded. And[Pg 249] peering closely, and looking from the Capitol down the vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White House, minute and clear, with a fountain playing before it, and behind it a railed garden set with fine trees. The trees are not so thick, nor the railings so high but that the people on the big "seeing Washington" cannot crane to look into it and watch whoever walk about it. And in this garden goes a living speck, as it were, in gray, talking, swinging a white clinched hand, and trying vigorously and resolutely to get a hold upon the significance of the whole vast process in which he and his island of government are set.
Always before him there have been political resultants, irrelevancies and futilities of the White House; and after him, it would seem, they may come again. I do not know anything of the quality of Mr. Bryan, who may perhaps succeed him. He, too, is something of an exception, it seems, and keeps a still developing and inquiring mind. Beyond is a vista of figures of questionable value so far as I am concerned. They have this in common that they don't stand for thought. For the present, at any rate, a personality, extraordinarily representative, occupies the White House. And what he chooses to say publicly (and some things he says privately) are, by an exceptional law of acoustics, heard in San Francisco, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in New York and Boston, in Kansas, and Maine, throughout the whole breadth of the United States of America. He[Pg 250] assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes and reverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself.
What is America saying to itself?
I've read most of the President's recent speeches, and they fall in oddly with that quality in his face that so many photographs even convey, a complex mingling of will and a critical perplexity. Taken all together they amount to a mass of not always consistent suggestions, that and conflict overlap. Things crowd upon him, rebate scandals, insurance scandals, the meat scandals, this insecurity and that. The conditions of his position press upon him. It is no wonder he gives out no single, simple note....
The plain fact is that in the face of the teeming situations of to-day America does not know what to do. Nobody, except those happily gifted individuals who can see but one aspect of an intricate infinitude, imagines any simple solution. For the rest the time is one of ample, vigorous, and at times impatient inquiry, and of intense disillusionment with old assumptions and methods. And never did a President before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend is altogether away from the anarchistic individualism of the nineteenth century, that much is sure, and towards some constructive scheme which, if not exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at any rate, closely analogous to socialism. This is the immense change of thought and attitude in which President Roosevelt participates, and to which he[Pg 251] gives a unique expression. Day by day he changes with the big world about him—contradicts himself....
I came away with the clear impression that neither President Roosevelt nor America will ever, as some people prophesy, "declare for socialism," but my impression is equally clear, that he and all the world of men he stands for, have done forever with the threadbare formulæ that have served America such an unconscionable time. We talked of the press and books and of the question of color, and then for a while about the rôle of the universities in the life of the coming time.
Now it is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in the garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings which is America, convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment whatever? Much makes for construction, a great wave of reform is going on, but will it drive on to anything more than a breaking impact upon even more gigantic uncertainties and dangers. Is America a giant childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long succession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable years—may be indeed altogether until the end—man's social history? I can't now recall how our discursive talk settled towards that, but it is clear to me that I[Pg 252] struck upon a familiar vein of thought in the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of any pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.
That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort of apology for his life against the doubts and scepticisms that, I fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man who is intellectually alive. He mentioned a little book of mine, an early book full of the deliberate pessimism of youth, in which I drew a picture of a future of decadence, of a time when constructive effort had fought its fight and failed, when the inevitable segregations of an individualistic system had worked themselves out and all the hope and vigor of humanity had gone forever. The descendants of the workers had become etiolated, sinister, and subterranean monsters, the property-owners had degenerated into a hectic and feebly self-indulgent race, living fitfully amid the ruins of the present time. He became gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying this as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden movements of his, he knelt forward in a garden chair—we were standing before our parting beneath the colonnade—and addressed me very earnestly over[Pg 253] the back, clutching it, and then thrusting out his familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.
"Suppose after all," he said, slowly, "that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn't matter now. The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's worth it—even then."...
I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying "The effort—the effort's worth it," and see the gesture of his clinched hand and the—how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that, as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence amid perplexities and confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting—and his setting is the White House with a background of all America.
I could almost write, with a background of all the world—for I know of no other a tithe so representative of the creative purpose, the good-will in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his limitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just as much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open intelligence, he stands for his people and his kind.