"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
An excerpt from Presidential Courage by Michael Beschloss:
Sunday, March 4, 1905, Roosevelt took his oath on the East Front of the Capitol.
On the eve of his inauguration...TR received an extraordinary gift from his old family friend, Secretary of State John Hay -- a heavy gold ring, including six strands of hair mounted under a tiny oval pane of glass. With the ring came a handwritten note from Hay:
'The hair in the ring is from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Taft cut it off the night of the assassination, and I got it from his son - a brief pedigree.
'Please wear it tomorrow, you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln. I have had your monogram and Lincoln's engraved on the ring.
'Longas, O utinam, bone dux, ferias, Praestes Hesperiae.'
Hay had had the ring engraved with the initials "A.L." and "T.R." He knew how proud TR would be to have his name joined with that of his hero.
Roosevelt pledged that the Lincoln ring would remind him to "put human rights above property rights."
The strands of hair on the ring had been cut away by a doctor just after Lincoln's shooting to look into his open wound. Charles Taft, another physician who treated Lincoln, willed the strands to his son, who sold them to Hay for one hundred dollars a month before Roosevelt's inauguration.
~ Via the Theodore Roosevelt Association's page on Facebook
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Above: President-elect Theodore Roosevelt takes the oath of office on the east portico of the U.S. Capitol, March 4, 1905.
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