Mark Twain on Teddy.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
I quote below from a letter written by Mark Twain two days after Col. Roosevelt left Presidential office. The original is held by Walter Bliss, Hartford, Conn. The article was first printed in the Catalogue of Mark Twain's Library. It seems very apropos to the present situation:
March 6, 1908.
Astronomers assure us that the attraction of gravitation on the surface of the sun is twenty-eight times as powerful as is the force at the earth's surface, and that the object which weights 217 pounds elsewhere would weight 6,000 pounds there.
For seven years this country has lain smothering under a burden like that, the incubus representing, in the person of President Roosevelt, the difference between 217 pounds and 6,000. Thanks be we got rid of this disastrous burden day before yesterday, at last. Forever? Probably not. Probably for only a brief breathing spell, wherein, under Mr. Taft, we may hope to get back some of our health - four years. We may expect to have Mr. Roosevelt sitting on us again, with his twenty-eight times the weight of any other Presidential burden that a hostile Providence could impose upon us for our sins.
Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.
B. F. N.
New York, May 28, 1912.
Return to The New York Times
index
Quotations | Newspaper Articles | Special Features | Links
| Search