Roosevelt v. The Gorgon | The Oval Office
Whistlestop: Presidential History and Trivia
Slate Podcasts
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2018
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode of Whistlestop travels back to Feb 22, 1902, as Theodore Roosevelt prepares to receive the unhappy company of angry executives hoping to strong-arm the White House into ignoring their monopolies.
Show Notes: The elitist men’s club, the Corsair Club, was reviewed by The New York TImes in 1913.
Whistlestop is Slate's podcast about presidential history. Hosted by Political Gabfest host John Dickerson, each installment will revisit memorable moments from America's presidential carnival.
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Email: whistlestop@slate.com
Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank. Research by Brian Rosenwald.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of CBS this morning. |
| 0:09.0 | You've played Monopoly, right? Well, then you've had the experience, perhaps, when you were raking in the dough, your pile of 500s towering high, as your ownership of the right kind of properties, utilities, and |
| 0:21.1 | railroads put you in the finest fettle. |
| 0:24.5 | You don't spats wore white tie to dinner at home and twirled the wax in your white mustache |
| 0:31.0 | until you could pierce the olive in your martini. |
| 0:34.1 | But then, all of a sudden, in the middle of your monopoly game, your friend, not liking this kind of behavior at all, upended your merriment by flipping the monopoly board over entirely. |
| 0:45.1 | That is the irresistible tease to a whistlestop episode about the conflict between Jay Pierpont Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt. |
| 0:54.1 | Morgan was the wealthy industrialist, after whom the Monopoly Man, known to his creator as rich |
| 1:00.6 | uncle Pennybags, was fashion. |
| 1:04.1 | But instead of your friend Kevin McDonald flipping the board over in the middle of his |
| 1:08.1 | rec room until the little green houses sprinkled the room like |
| 1:11.3 | chives on a twice-baked potato. It was President Theodore Roosevelt who upended the comfortable |
| 1:16.7 | accumulation of de blooms that upset Morgan's plans. Our whistle stop today is Saturday, February |
| 1:23.6 | 22nd, 1902. It's past 10 o'clock in the evening, and President Theodore Roosevelt |
| 1:28.1 | is receiving fancy company in the White House. The executives of some of America's largest |
| 1:33.2 | trusts and businesses have just come over to the White House from a dinner, dinner at the home |
| 1:38.1 | of Senator and former railroad executive Chauncey DePue. |
| 1:48.9 | It was amazing that all of these fancy executives were in town at all. Washington had been muffled in feet and feet of snow from the worst snowstorm of the season. The storm, in fact, |
| 1:54.2 | was so bad it had delayed the arrival of Prince Henry of Prussia, an arrival that captivated |
| 2:00.7 | the city when it finally happened. |
| 2:02.6 | The new President Roosevelt had only been hanging his felt Rough Rider hat in the executive |
| 2:06.9 | mansion for five months. Five months after that gloomy day when he descended the highest peak |
... |
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