Earlier this year, the Edmund and Sylvia Morris Collection arrived at Dickinson State University. The university’s Theodore Roosevelt Center stores the collection on behalf of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library (TRPL), an important partnership between two vital keepers of the Roosevelt flame. We are beginning to see the fruit of this collaboration.
Almost as soon as the collection arrived, DSU and TRPL colleagues sifted through the collection for answers to lingering historical questions. For example, the oft-repeated story that Theodore Roosevelt watched Abraham Lincoln’s procession from his grandfather’s second-story mansion lacked concrete evidence. We have relied exclusively on a photograph of what appears to be the heads of two children peeking over the sill of a window as apocryphal proof.
Correspondence within Sylvia Jukes Morris’s papers has led historians to a definitive conclusion that the two heads in the photo are indeed Theodore Roosevelt and his brother Elliott. The doubt vanished when DSU and TRPL colleagues uncovered a letter from Sylvia Morris to biographer Stefan Lorant who had interviewed First Lady Edith Roosevelt about the photograph. Her testimony was critical because she stood in the room with TR and Elliott on that fateful day. TRPL researchers then visited the Stefan Lorant Collection at the Getty Archives in California to glean more from that interview with the First Lady.
The Morris Collection is the first significant physical archive – in terms of size and relevance – to come to DSU’s TR Center. It will begin to attract external researchers in the coming months, building on the Center’s reputation as a world-leading academic institution for the study of Theodore Roosevelt. Who knows what other leads researchers will find.
DSU’s Lowman Walton endowed chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies Dr. Michael Patrick Cullinane plans to conduct research on Edmund Morris and his biography writing. Morris’s diaries are part of the collection and offer an insight into the life of a public intellectual – before and after he gained renown. Cullinane expects to discover more than a personal history. His great hope is that the collection will achieve Morris’s greatest ambition to convey the “flow of human thought, from brain to hand to pen to ink to eye – every waver, every loop, every character trembling with expression.” In an age of electronic messages
and social media, Edmund and Sylvia Morris would be delighted to know someone is still sifting through dusty papers, crooked handwriting, and intricate doodles to catch the meaning of a semi-colon or an ironic line of text.
By: Dr. Michael Cullinane, Professor of History | Lowman Walton Endowed Chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies, Dickinson State University
Comments