4/1/23
Newsletter #293
The Crack of Dawn
The winter of 1886 in the Dakota Territories was a killer: week after week of sub-zero temperatures and eight feet of snow. No matter how hard they tried, or how many hours a day they worked, both Teddy Roosevelt and the Marquis de Morès lost their entire herds of cattle. Both of them had failed as cattle ranchers, and both were now out of business.
After a horribly futile day of trying to pull baying, freezing cattle out of snow drifts and failing, they both give up and go to the one saloon in Medora.
Having not given you all of the story set-up, Teddy Roosevelt was a very sickly child, spending a lot of time home in bed. At the age of twelve, when the doctors had given up hope, his father put him on a strict regimen of exercise, including boxing. Teddy grew healthier and stronger, and continued with the extreme exercise program for the rest of his life. Since his family was so rich, I have a scene with Teddy in college at Harvard being trained and sparring with the world’s heavyweight champion, John L. Sullivan, who gives him pointers and compliments him on his footwork.
Back in the terrible winter of ’86, Teddy and the Marquis both drag their weary, frozen carcasses into the saloon at the same time. There are just a handful of people there. The Marquis, who is now financially destroyed, is so angry and disgusted that he vents his spleen on Teddy Rosenfeld, that Goddamned Jew. Teddy asks the Marquis if he’s acquainted with the new Marquise of Queensbury rules of boxing? The Marquis de Morès says snidely, “The Marquise of Queensbury is my cousin, of course I know the rules. But you’re too small, and wear glasses, I can’t fight you.” Teddy removes his glasses, and says, “I’ll chance it.” Tables and chairs are moved out of the way, and the two men fight. This is the scene that didn’t really happen; I made it up. These two guys should have fought. In my script it’s a close fight and Teddy has been bloodied, but he finally puts together a twelve-punch combination; upstairs, downstairs; in the gut, in the face, and KOs the Marquis. Since he’s been in a prick to everybody in town, they strip him down to his Union suit and toss him out in the snow.
Having failed as a cattle rancher, Teddy gloomily heads back to NY. He’s 28 years old and thinks that life now has nothing left to offer him. His ranch is gone, his wife is dead, he is a total failure, and his life is over. As he rides wearily across the plain, a title rolls: “Teddy Roosevelt would go on to be the Chief of Police in NYC, then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, which he quit to become the biggest hero of the Spanish-American War with the Rough Riders, then he was the Governor of New York, then Vice-President, then President.”
The Marquis de Morès moved back to France and became a leader of La Ligue antisémitique de France (Antisemitic League of France), which was becoming very popular. He brought the movement to Africa in 1896 where he attempted to carry out a wild scheme to unite the Muslims in a Holy War against the British and the Jews. He was killed by North African tribesmen. In my version the tribesmen cover the Marquis in mud, bind him to a stick, then roast him over a fire.
I never sold that script. It seemed like a perfect TV movie. But even by then in the late-1990s, the macho hero who settled his conflict with his fists was going out of style. The joke of Teddy Roosevelt being a macho hero is summed up in Gore Vidal’s wonderful essay, Teddy Roosevelt: Sissy (in his essay collection, The Second Revolution). Until Teddy was twelve, everybody thought he was an idiot, and since he was also sickly, he very naturally became a sissy (as per Gore Vidal). This being 1870 and medical care not being everything it could be, Teddy was finally diagnosed as being nearly blind. He got his first pair of glasses and his life changed. He went from being an idiot to being the smartest president in United States’ history. He had to experience extreme loss to achieve astounding gain. Even though he was a lifelong Republican, he was the “Trust Buster” who broke up the monopolies like Standard Oil. He personally pushed through the seemingly impossible Panama Canal. Teddy won a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War. Teddy even stuck to his word and did not run for a third term (his first term was actually McKinley’s, so he would’ve actually been running for his second term), even though his ratings were so high he would have certainly won.
So dig this: Teddy took his son Kermit on an African hunting safari, and it was a big, worldwide news story. Teddy and Kermit joyously killed every kind of animal in Africa. Journalists from all over the world covered it, Teddy wrote a bestselling book, African Game Trails (I have an early, 1910 edition), and American politics went on without him. First came Republican Taft, then Democrat Woodrow Wilson. World War I started in 1914, and many people believed that if Teddy was president we would have gone to war right away. Teddy said as much. Luckily, he wasn’t president, and the Democrat Wilson kept us out of WWI until the very end. America only fought in that war for less than six months.
But at his father’s “Bully” urging, Teddy’s youngest son, Quentin, twenty years old, rushed to join the newly-formed air force, and was shot down and killed right away. Teddy never recovered. He died at the age of sixty-one; three years younger than his severely sick cousin, Franklin. But Teddy’s life certainly wasn’t over when he left the Dakota Territories and returned to New York at the age of 28, like he thought it was.
I would like to have made that movie. Alas.
And yet one more day dawns, ain’t that a pisser?