Jokes began to circulate that “Terrible Teddy” was good for nothing but dining with black men and exercising the diplomatic corps. When the jokes reached Princeton, the beaky professor who had interviewed Roosevelt at Buffalo made a public demand that he be treated with more respect. “He really determines an important part of the destinies of the world,” Woodrow Wilson said. Americans would discover soon enough that Theodore Roosevelt was “larger” than they knew, “a very interesting and a very strong man.”
