“That’s just it,” he flashed out, “the time to set a setting hen is when she wants to set!”
He looks a little older and stouter, but his perfectly tremendous personality impresses one more than ever. He is more like the Corliss engine than anything else!
February 27, 1912. Yesterday Roosevelt announced that he would accept the nomination for President if offered to him. He is staying at the Brandegees’ in Brookline, and spent the day with Robert Grant. Matsu (a highly educated Japanese servant) says he is like Napoleon and is turning from his greater to his lesser self. I do not see it so, but many people do. I feel Loudon was right. When you have a man of genius it seems a pity not to use him.
Newport, March 17, 1912. Worked on my paper, “Artists’ Life in Rome”, for the Current Topics Club. I tried to give three vivid pictures,—Ancient Rome, the Renaissance, Modern Rome.
March 19, 1912. Much telephoning about the pictures for the little show to be held in connection with my lecture.
March 20, 1912. A fine day for our show. To town on the nine o’clock trolley to help hang the pictures. Wm. Sargeant Kendall generous in lending several of his best canvases. The show proves amazingly good and is very well hung. The audience remarkably large for winter Newport. The lecture a little heavy, must lighten it with a few more laughs.
March 21, 1912. Harrison Morris writes me that he and Mrs. M. are for Roosevelt. I am thankful to find at last some one among my friends who feels as I do. The papers continue to slang him. The great, patient, silent army of men and women at the bottom of the ladder are silent. Will they be allowed to lift their voices and speak at the election? There is no doubt for me that we should elect T. R. unless all our delegates are “inflooenced” by fear, the trusts, and the sacred property-right idiots. Property isn’t sacred—only ideals. Much embarrassed to defend my views, as I am attacked by nearly every friend I possess. This doesn’t change my conviction that he is the man of the hour. He has a mind large enough to cope with the loosened floods of humanity that socialism and practical Christianity have partly freed from their frozen slavery. Taft is the mouthpiece of the rich class, Roosevelt is the tribune of the people.
March 31, 1912. Made a great effort to go to church, it being Palm Sunday. Ill rewarded. The minister made a most unchristian address. He began by analyzing Judas Iscariot, found that wounded pride was the cause of his downfall, and coupled with him Daniel Webster, Aaron Burr, and Theodore Roosevelt. A bitter, burning attack. I wept with anger and was on the point of rising and walking out of church to show my disapproval, when the thought that I was sitting in Mother’s seat and that she might not approve the action restrained me. After church I avoided speaking to the minister as I usually do.
April 17, 1912. To-day came the awful news of the sinking of the White Star Steamer Titanic. Even greater loss of life than when the Ville du Havre sank some forty years ago. Little news yet, but apparently all the great ship’s company, save some six or eight hundred, went down in that icy polar sea. First reports say there are six hundred survivors on the Carpathia. The ominous words, “boats all accounted for”, mean no hope of other rescues. We have more than one acquaintance on board. It is believed that Frank Millet is among the survivors. Poor John Jacob Astor is apparently lost, his wife and her maid saved. The romance of the rescue is soul-stirring. No one thinks of anything else.
April 27, 1912. Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi recited a parody of the Apostles’ Creed in the Senate as an attack upon Roosevelt. The most blasphemous happening that has ever disgraced the Senate in my memory or knowledge. Feel to write a protest and will try to do so.—Did write the protest and sent it to the Boston Herald and Woman’s Journal.