Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library

10/16/2026

One hundred and twenty-five years ago today, Booker T. Washington became the first African American to dine as a guest of the President and his family at the White House.

Every word of that sentence is doing work. Black Americans had been to the White House before — Sojourner Truth met Lincoln in his office in 1864, Frederick Douglass came to the second inaugural reception in 1865, the soprano Marie Selika Williams sang there in 1878. What had not happened was this: a seat at the family table.

Washington had come into Washington by train from a lecture tour in Mississippi and was staying at the house of Whitefield McKinlay on Eleventh Street. The invitation was waiting when he got there. He wrote about it ten years later:

"When I reached Mr. McKinlay's house I found an invitation from President Roosevelt asking me to dine with him at the White House that evening at eight o'clock."

The note Roosevelt actually sent said half past seven. Eight o'clock is Washington's memory, a decade on.

Roosevelt had been President for a month. At the table were Edith, four of the children — Kermit, Ethel, Archie and Quentin — and one other guest, Philip Stewart of Colorado. Washington and Stewart sat on either side of the President.

It was a working dinner. The two men had been corresponding since Roosevelt's first week in office about federal appointments in the South, and that is what they discussed. Washington's own account of the evening is four sentences long:

"At the hour appointed I went to the White House and dined with the President and members of his family and a gentleman from Colorado. After dinner we talked at considerable length concerning plans about the South which the President had in mind. I left the White House almost immediately and took a train the same night for New York."

No photograph of the dinner exists. Two years later a Chicago company printed the last picture in this post — an invented scene, the two men alone at a small round table, Lincoln's portrait on the wall, the word Equality across the cloth. Its own caption dates the dinner to October 17th, which is the day the story broke, not the day it happened. It is not a record of the evening. It is a record of what some Americans wanted the evening to mean.

What happened next was not planned by anyone. The White House gave reporters its routine list of the day's callers, as it did every day. One line went out on the wires overnight.

Booker T. Washington, of Tuskegee, Ala., dined with the President last evening.

Tomorrow: the country reads it.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/presidency/booker-t-washington

10/15/2026

"The idea is to learn from TR, not about TR."

Interim CEO Robbie Lauf joined Peter Greenberg on Peter Greenberg Worldwide, broadcast from the Library on Oct. 10, to talk about Roosevelt's Dakota chapter and why this is where the adventure starts.

Hear the full show: https://petergreenberg.com/2026/10/10/peter-greenberg-worldwide-medora-north-dakota-october-10-2026/

10/15/2026

in 1886, a twenty-seven-year-old was nominated for mayor of New York without being in the room. He found out from a reporter.

The Republican county convention met at the Grand Opera House and named him by acclamation. Theodore Roosevelt was across town at the Union League Club when a man from the Tribune brought him the news.

"It comes to me somewhat in the nature of a surprise, for, until eight o'clock last evening, I had not been spoken to formally on the subject of the nomination for the Mayoralty. While very reluctant to accept it, the matter has been presented to me in such a light as to make me feel it impossible to refuse."

On what the job would take, he was less careful: the man who held it "must be willing and able to use the knife with merciless thoroughness in cutting out the countless already long-existing abuses."

Consider where he was standing. Two years and eight months earlier, his wife and his mother had died in the same house on the same day. He had gone to the Dakota Badlands. He came back east that autumn with a book written and a ranch behind him, and the party handed him a race it did not expect him to win.

It did not. On 2 November the count was Abram Hewitt 90,552, Henry George 68,110, Theodore Roosevelt 60,435. Third, in his own city — and by then he was twenty-eight, the formal ratification having been at Cooper Union on the 27th, his birthday.

And then he did something nobody in that convention hall knew about.

For eleven months he had been secretly engaged to Edith Kermit Carow, a childhood friend, a fact he had kept from almost everyone because a widower remarrying so soon was a thing people talked about. Four days after losing the election he sailed for England on the Cunard liner Etruria. He had booked passage for himself and his sister Bamie as "Mr. and Miss Merrifield" — the name of his Dakota ranch partner.

On 2 December they were married at St George's, Hanover Square, in a London fog so thick that link-bearers had to guide his carriage to the door and the fog hung inside the nave. He wore orange gloves.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/rise-to-power

10/14/2026

The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library mourns the passing of Dr. Stephen Dow Beckham, a Trustee since 2016, who died Saturday, October 10.

A distinguished historian of Native America and the American West, Dr. Beckham taught at Lewis & Clark College for more than three decades and was named Oregon Professor of the Year. His work on tribal history, treaty rights, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition shaped how generations of students understood the West.

He brought that same commitment to accuracy and care to the Library, helping guide it from its earliest vision through opening day. He and his wife, Patti, traveled to Medora to celebrate the Library's opening and see that vision realized.

The Library extends its deepest sympathy to Patti and the entire Beckham family.

10/14/2026

What happens when you give a group of landscape architecture students a beautiful landscape, a sketchbook, and a few hours? ✏️

Last week, first-year landscape architecture students from Iowa State University added the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library to an annual regional field trip, and they came ready to put pencil to paper.

After touring the Library, students headed outside to study the site firsthand. Each selected three favorite site elements to document through sketches and cross sections, along with elevation drawings that captured the landscape from a different perspective.

The sketches were impressive, but so were the students behind them. They were happy to share their work, explain the assignment, and even teach the TRPL team a thing or two along the way!

Thank you, Iowa State University, for making TRPL part of the journey. Visits like this are exactly what the campus is for: learning, observing, asking questions, and experiencing the landscape firsthand.

TRPL looks forward to welcoming more students to learn from the landscape in the years ahead. Come back anytime, Cyclones! 🌪️✏️

10/14/2026

in 1912, at ten past eight at night, Theodore Roosevelt left a Milwaukee hotel, stepped into a waiting car and stood up to raise his hat. A man six feet away shot him in the chest.

His first concern was the man who shot him.

Over a crowd shouting "kill him": "Don't hurt him; bring him to me here!" They dragged the man to the car, and Roosevelt looked at him: "Officers, take charge of him, and see that there is no violence done to him."

He refused the hospital and went to the hall. A stenographer took down what he said to nine thousand people.

"Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible," he said. "I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose. (Cheers.) But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech (holds up manuscript with bullet hole) and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through and it probably saved me from it going into my heart."

He was right that it helped, and generous about how much. It had gone through an overcoat, fifty pages of typescript folded double — a hundred thicknesses of paper — a metal spectacle case and a double fold of heavy suspenders. The surgeons put it carefully: its force "was much diminished," and the wound showed "evidence of a much bent bullet."

He spoke for about eighty minutes. Partway through he turned to the stage: "How long have I talked?" Told three-quarters of an hour, he said, "Well, I will take a quarter of an hour more."

Then he said this about the man who shot him:

"Now friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him, but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr. Debs but of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taft."

And then, immediately:

"Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party."

The bullet lodged between the fourth and fifth ribs, three and a half inches in, just short of the lining of the lung. It was never taken out; it was still there when he died in 1919.

The man was John Flammang Schrank, a former New York saloonkeeper born in Bavaria. Five doctors found him insane. He was never tried, and died in a Wisconsin hospital in 1943.

Taft wired him that he was "greatly shocked to hear of the outrageous and deplorable assault." Wilson kept the engagements already booked, then stopped until Roosevelt could return, having "no desire to be the single candidate on the stump engaged against no active antagonist." Roosevelt, from his hospital bed: "I shall be sorry if Mr. Wilson does not keep on the stump."

He lost the election.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/post-presidency/assassination-attempt

10/13/2026

in 1902, at about a quarter to ten at night, there was a knock at the President's door. The financier J. Pierpont Morgan had come down from New York, and he had an answer.

The anthracite strike was 154 days old and the country was out of coal. Roosevelt was in temporary quarters on Jackson Place — the White House was being rebuilt — and on crutches. A trolley had run into his carriage in September, killing a Secret Service agent, and a surgeon had scraped his shinbone three weeks later.

What the winter looked like, from the New-York Tribune: on the East Side, people filling coal pails at fifteen cents apiece — at least fifty thousand of them in a day.

Ten days earlier he had brought the operators and the miners' president into that parlour and failed. What he did next he told plainly years later. He sent for Major-General John M. Schofield.

"I sent for him, telling him that if I had to make use of him it would be because the crisis was only less serious than that of the Civil War, that the action taken would be practically a war measure, and that if I sent him he must act in a purely military capacity under me as commander-in-chief, paying no heed to any authority, judicial or otherwise, except mine."

The orders, if they came, were to dispossess the operators and run the mines. They never came.

On the 11th, Secretary of War Elihu Root went to New York and spent most of a day with Morgan aboard his yacht, the Corsair. Root's account, in a letter to Roosevelt the following June: "we drafted an agreement of arbitration for a commission to be appointed by you."

Two days later Morgan came to Washington with Robert Bacon, reached the Arlington at half past nine, and fifteen minutes later walked over with Root, carrying the operators' answer. The conference ran to ten minutes to twelve. Morgan left and said nothing to reporters.

The operators would take a commission — but one built of five named categories, none of them a labour man. Two nights later he broke that by appointing the head of a railway union and calling him the "eminent sociologist." He never got over it:

"I shall never forget the mixture of relief and amusement I felt when I thoroughly grasped the fact that while they would heroically submit to anarchy rather than have Tweedledum, yet if I would call it Tweedledee they would accept it with rapture… In order to carry the great and vital point and secure agreement by both parties, all that was necessary for me to do was to commit a technical and nominal absurdity with a solemn face. This I gladly did."

The names went out at twenty past two in the morning on the 16th; the miners went back on the 23rd. The award came the following March: a ten per cent raise, a shorter day, and no recognition of the union.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/presidency/coal-strike

10/12/2026

in 1912, a weekly newspaper in Ishpeming, Michigan, printed one sentence about Theodore Roosevelt. Seven months later it cost its publisher six cents and the central charge he had made.

Iron Ore, Saturday, October 12, 1912, under the heading "The Roosevelt Way":

"Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way; he gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimates know about it."

Most of the editorial is about the other charge — that he called everyone else a liar and could not take it back. It ends: "For so great a fighter, self-styled, he is the poorest loser we ever knew."

Roosevelt sued. He was in Mercy Hospital in Chicago when the papers were filed, with a bullet in his chest from Milwaukee two days after the editorial ran.

The trial opened at Marquette in May 1913. He brought his witnesses north on a train — Jacob Riis, his physicians, three men who had sat in his cabinet — and read in the depositions of a dozen more.

"I have never been drunk or in the slightest degree under the influence of liquor."

"I have never drunk a high-ball or cocktail in my life. I have sometimes drunk mint juleps in the White House. There was a bed of mint there, and I may have drunk half a dozen mint juleps a year, and certainly no more."

On May 31 the publisher, George A. Newett, read a statement. He had taken more than forty depositions. He had found people who would swear they had watched Roosevelt speak and believed he was drunk. He had found no one who had seen it.

"It is fair to the plaintiff to state that I have been unable to find in any section of the country any individual witness who is willing to state that he has personally seen Mr. Roosevelt drink to excess… I am forced to the conclusion that I was mistaken."

The suit had asked $10,000. Roosevelt stood and gave it up on the spot.

"Your Honor, in view of the statement of the defendant, I ask the Court to instruct the jury that I desire only nominal damages.

I did not go into this suit for money. I did not go into it for any vindictive purpose. I went into it, and, as the Court has said, I made my reputation an issue, because I wished, once for all during my lifetime, thoroughly and comprehensively to deal with these slanders, so that never again will it be possible for any man, in good faith, to repeat them.

I have achieved my purpose, and I am content."

Nominal damages under Michigan law were six cents. The court found Newett had published in good faith and without malice.

Two things the record is careful about. Newett was a teetotaler, and he had been postmaster of Ishpeming — an appointment, as he said on the stand, "from the plaintiff in this case."

And he took back only the drinking charge. On the other, Riis testified that he had never heard Roosevelt "use any unclean or profane language," only "the expression 'Godfrey' when he gets very much excited."

More: trlibrary.com/tr/post-presidency/bull-moose

10/11/2026

in 1910, a former president climbed into an open biplane at a field outside St. Louis, sat down on the wing beside the pilot, and went up. No cockpit. No belt.

He had not planned it. He was on a campaign swing for the Missouri Republicans, and the aviator — Arch Hoxsey of the Wright exhibition team — had set an American distance record three days earlier, flying 104 miles from Springfield, Illinois. By Hoxsey's own account in the New-York Tribune the next morning, he made the offer and Roosevelt took about a second over it.

"Here's your chance."

"All right; let's not make too much fuss about it while I am getting into the machine."

Then two laps of Kinloch Field — about three miles, at something like a hundred feet, in three minutes and twenty seconds. Partway round he caught sight of the grandstand and waved at it, which made the machine wobble.

On the ground he turned to the pilot: "Hoxsey, you're all right!"

To the reporters: "It was great! First class!… I wish I could stay up for an hour, but I haven't the time this afternoon."

And that evening, at the governor's dinner: "That was the bulliest experience I ever had. I envy you, your professional conquest of space."

He was the first American president ever to leave the ground — but the word order matters. He was a *former* president, nineteen months out of office. No sitting president would fly for another thirty-two years, when Franklin Roosevelt crossed the Atlantic to Casablanca in January 1943.

Not quite seven years had passed since Kitty Hawk.

Someone was filming, and the reel survives at the Library of Congress: a fifty-one-year-old ex-president in a cloth cap, being handed up into a machine made of spruce, wire and muslin.

Arch Hoxsey was in his twenties. Eighty-one days later, on the last day of that year, he took a Wright biplane up over Dominguez Field in Los Angeles to beat his own altitude record of 11,474 feet. He was killed in the fall.

More: trlibrary.com/tr/post-presidency

10/10/2026

Building a presidential library on a Badlands butte meant a remote jobsite, unpredictable weather and thousands of decisions that all had to work together.

In Prairie Business magazine, Marc Mellmer of JE Dunn Construction — a Dickinson native who leads the firm's North Dakota and South Dakota operations — shares what the team learned. The Library includes a two-acre green roof planted with more than 140,000 native plugs, a mass timber structure and a curved rammed-earth wall in the main hall.

Thank you, Marc, and thank you to every JE Dunn team member, trade partner and subcontractor who built the Library. Your craftsmanship greets every participant who walks through the doors.

Read the article: https://www.grandforksherald.com/prairie-business/lessons-learned-from-building-the-theodore-roosevelt-presidential-library-in-the-badlands

The building is one of the first presidential libraries to pursue Living Building Challenge Certification, along with LEED Platinum and SITES Platinum certifications.