Few of the Roosevelts could spell very well and punctuation for them, as for so many Victorians, was largely a matter of personal preference. Theodore, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, had the poorest spelling of all. He could handle “hippopotamus” or come close with “antediluvian,” even as a small boy, but words like “Chicago” or “forest” could prove too much for him. His brother, Elliott, had to write him at one point, “As you don’t know how to spell my name, I have entirely forgotten how to spell ‘yourn.’ Elliot does not spell Elliott, my dear Teedore.”
So for the benefit of the reader, the spelling in the writings quoted here has been corrected and punctuation made to conform to present standards, except in a few instances where the idiosyncrasy adds to the spirit of what is being said.
The volume of published work one must become familiar with when dealing with even part of such a life as Theodore led is almost overwhelming. It is not just that so much has been written about him and about other Roosevelts, but that he wrote and published so much himself and read so much that had a direct bearing on his life. Though a bibliography and source notes are included at the back of the book, I would like to express my particular indebtedness to two published works from the 1950s: the monumental The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (in eight volumes), edited by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and John J. Buckley; and Carleton Putnam’s masterful Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years, 1858-1886. Numbers of other books were helpful and a pleasure—Henry F. Pringle’s biased and lively Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Harbaugh’s The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, which is much the best one-volume biography of TR, John Morton Blum’s superb The Republican Roosevelt, Hermann Hagedorn’s Roosevelt in the Bad Lands, Nicholas Roosevelt’s Theodore Roosevelt: The Man as I Knew Him—but the Letters and the Putnam biography have been indispensable.
For his advice on research, his valuable comments on the manuscript, his friendship over the past four years, I thank especially Dr. John Allen Gable, Executive Director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association and author of the definitive The Bull Moose Years. I am also greatly indebted to Wallace F. Dailey, Curator of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard, which in total comprises some seventeen thousand manuscript papers (mostly letters) and ten thousand photographs housed in the Houghton Library plus approximately twelve thousand volumes housed in the Widener Library. I thank Rodney G. Dennis, Curator of Manuscripts at the Houghton Library, and Martha Eliza Shaw and the others of the Houghton Reading Room staff who were so helpful. I salute, too, the resourceful John D. Knowlton of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress for his efforts in determining what was concealed beneath an ink blot in one of TR’s diaries; I thank Timothy Beard of the New York Public Library’s genealogy division for sharing some of his latest findings on the remarkable private life of Robert B. Roosevelt. For the very thorough tour he gave me through TR’s home at Oyster Bay, his quick and helpful answers to my written queries over the years, I thank Gary Roth, Curator of the Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.
In Mr. and Mrs. W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., of Farmington, Connecticut, who were so generous with their time and memories, I found invaluable living links with several key figures in the story. Mr. Cowles, who is the son of TR’s sister Anna, not only talked with me at length about his mother, his Uncle Theodore, his Aunt Corinne, but provided rare documentary material to be found nowhere else and was good enough to go over the manuscript and give me his views.
Other present-day descendants of the family who have been helpful include two of TR’s granddaughters, Sarah Alden Gannett and Edith Roosevelt Williams (Mrs. Gannett also read and commented on the manuscript); Mrs. Philip J. Roosevelt of Oyster Bay, who is the granddaughter of Robert B. Roosevelt; and her son, P. James Roosevelt, who made a remark at lunch one day four years ago that did as much as anything to set the course of my work. Was there, I asked him, any important missing ingredient in the existing biographies of TR? “Yes,” he said. “No writer seems to have understood the degree to which he was part of a clan.”
In no part of the work have I been assisted by others quite so much as in my effort to get to the bottom of Theodore’s asthma, and most helpful in this respect has been Dr. Peter H. Knapp of the Boston University Medical Center, who is a leading authority on the psychosomatic aspects of the disease. My indebtedness to Dr. Knapp is very great. He took hours of his time to discuss the Roosevelt “case” with me, to guide me in my reading, and to go over my work as it progressed, telling me what to watch for in the family record, which were often quite different things from what I would have been watching for normally.
In addition to Dr. Knapp, the following physicians contributed ideas and/or shared with me their experiences in dealing with asthmatic children, for which I am most grateful: Tully Benaron, William H. Dietz, Richard Galdston, Milton Mazer, Shirley Murphy, and George Simson. And for their illuminating comments on the manuscript, I thank Dr. Robert Eisendrath and Dianthe Eisendrath.
Among the first things a layman discovers when trying to learn about asthma is that there is practically nothing in the literature on what the victim of an attack actually feels. (The best, most vivid account I could find was in a professional treatise published in 1864.) So for their willingness to talk openly and subjectively about the disease—something asthmatics commonly refuse to do because even talking about it can be painful for them—I am particularly grateful to Jeanne Crosby, Edward T. Hall, Jack D. Enns, and Cort Sutton. For sharing their experiences and insights as the parents of an asthmatic child, I am also grateful to Mr. and Mrs. John Curtiss. (Most of these interviews were conducted during an extended stay in New Mexico, where I was also fortunate to have access to the Medical Library of the University of New Mexico.)
During my time in North Dakota, I was offered help and hospitality at almost every turn, but wish to thank especially Liess Vantine and Frank E. Vyzralek of the State Historical Society at Bismarck; and in Medora and vicinity, Tom Adams, Mr. and Mrs. William Connell, William Herr, who is the wildlife specialist at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Joe L. Hild, who owns and runs TR’s old Chimney Butte Ranch, John O. Lancaster, Superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Harold and Sheila Schafer, Al Tescher, and Mayor Rod Tjaden; also, Harry Roberts of Dickinson and Mrs. Janet Buldhaupt of Beach.
My thanks to those who have assisted me at the Albuquerque Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, the Georgia State Historical Society in Savannah, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Oral History Collection at Columbia University, the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, the University of New Mexico Library, and the West Tisbury Public Library.
And to all of the following I am grateful for favors large and small, for advice, encouragement, and ideas: Thomas A. Ashley, Clarence A. Barnes, Jr., William Bentinck-Smith, Edith Blake, the late Bruce Catton, J. Felton Covington, Jr., Robert Ferguson, John and Ruth Galvin, John Hawkins, Woody Jackson, David Kahn, Jessica Kraft, George McCullough, Elinor and George Montgomery, Tony de Mores, Elting Morison, Royall D. O’Brien, Audre Proctor, Paul R. Reynolds, Robbin Reynolds, Philippa Roosevelt, Elizabeth Saltonstall, and Margot Street.
I thank my literary agent, Morton L. Janklow, and those at Simon and Schuster who have been such a pleasure to work with and who have contributed greatly: my editor, Peter Schwed; Kim Honig, Edith Fowler, Pat Miller, and Frank Metz.
Above all there is my family: Melissa and John McDonald, David, William, Geoffrey, and Dorie McCullough, who have played a larger part, helped more than they know; and my wife, Rosalee, who with her understanding of people, her editorial judgment, her good spirits, patience, and devotion, has been an unfailing inspiration.
And lastly, thanks to brother Hax for getting up there on the stage in the first place.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH
West Tisbury, Massachusetts
December 5, 1980
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br /> Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Greatheart’s Circle
1
In the year 1869, when the population of New York City had reached nearly a million, the occupants of 28 East 20th Street, a five-story brown-stone, numbered six, exclusive of the servants.
The head of the household was Theodore Roosevelt (no middle name or initial), who was thirty-seven years of age, an importer and philanthropist, and the son of old Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, one of the richest men in the city. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt—Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, or Mittie, as she was called—was thirty-three, a southerner and a beauty. The children, two girls and two boys, all conceived by the same father and mother, and born in the same front bedroom, over the parlor, ranged in age from fourteen to seven. The oldest, Anna, was known as Bamie (from bambina, and pronounced to rhyme with Sammy). Next came ten-year-old Theodore, Jr., who was called Teedie (pronounced to rhyme with T.D.). Elliott, aged nine, was Ellie or Nell, and the youngest, Corinne, was called Conie.
Of the servants little is known, except for Dora Watkins, an Irish nursemaid who had been employed since before the Civil War. Another Irish girl named Mary Ann was also much in evidence, beloved by the children and well regarded by the parents—it was she they picked to go with the family on the Grand Tour that May—but in family papers dating from the time, nobody bothered to give Mary Ann a last name. Concerning the others, the various cooks, valets, coachmen, and housemaids who seem to have come and gone with regularity, the record is no help. But to judge by the size of the house and the accepted standards for families of comparable means and station, there were probably never less than four or five “below stairs” at any given time, and the degree to which they figured in the overall atmosphere was considerable.
The house stood in the block between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, on the south side of the street, and it looked like any other New York brownstone, a narrow-fronted, sober building wholly devoid of those architectural niceties (marble sills, fanlights) that enlivened the red-brick houses of an earlier era downtown. The standard high stoop with cast-iron railings approached a tall front door at the second-floor level, the ground floor being the standard English basement, with its servants’ entrance. A formal parlor (cut-glass chandelier, round-arched marble fireplace, piano) opened onto a long, narrow hall, as did a parlor or “library,” this a windowless room remembered for its stale air and look of “gloomy respectability.” The dining room was at the rear, again according to the standard floor plan. Upstairs were the master bedroom and nursery, then three more bedrooms on the floor above, with the servants’ quarters on the top floor.
Only one thing about the house was thought to be out of the ordinary, a deep porch, or piazza, at the rear on the third-floor level. Enclosed with a nine-foot wooden railing, it had been a bedroom before the Roosevelts tore out the back wall and converted it to an open-air playroom. It overlooked not only their own and neighboring yards, but the garden of the Goelet mansion on 19th Street, one of the largest private gardens in the city, within which roamed numbers of exotic birds with their wings clipped. Daily, in their “piazza clothes,” the children were put out to play or, in Bamie’s case, in early childhood, to lie on a sofa.
The house had been a wedding present from Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt—CVS to the family—whose own red-brick mansion on Union Square, six blocks south, was the figurative center of the Roosevelt tribal circle. The father of five sons, CVS had presented them all with houses as they married and the one given Theodore, youngest of his five, adjoined that of Robert B. Roosevelt, the fourth son, who was a lawyer.
With their full beards and eyeglasses, these two neighboring brothers bore a certain physical resemblance. The difference in age was only two years. Beyond appearances, however, they were not the least alike. Robert was the conspicuous, unconventional Roosevelt, the one for whom the family had often to do some explaining. Robert wrote books; Robert was bursting with ideas. He was a gifted raconteur, a sportsman, yachtsman, New York’s pioneer conservationist (fish were his pet concern), an enthusiastic cook, an authority on family origins. He was loud and witty and cherished the limelight, seeking it inexplicably in the tumult of Tammany politics. Until the Civil War, the Roosevelts had all been Democrats. As late as 1863, Theodore had still been an avowed War Democrat—one who supported the war and thus the Republican Administration—but when he and the rest of CVS’s line at last turned Republican, Robert alone remained in the Democratic fold and was never to be anything but proud of the fact. (”Our party is the party of the people!”)
Robert’s middle name was his mother’s maiden name, Barnhill, but in anticipation of what his political foes might make of this (”manure pile” or variations to that effect), he had changed it to Barnwell and it was as Uncle Barnwell that he was sometimes known to the small nieces and nephews in the house beside his.
Robert’s wife, Elizabeth Ellis Roosevelt, was called Aunt Lizzie Ellis to distinguish her from still another Aunt Lizzie in the family, and she too was considered “unorthodox.” At the back of her third floor—the floor corresponding to the piazza next door—she maintained a marvelous and odorous menagerie of guinea pigs, chickens, pigeons, a parrot, a monkey, “everything under the sun that ought not be kept in a house.” The monkey, her favorite, was a violent little creature that bit. She dressed it like a fashionable child, complete with ruffled shirts and gold studs. Once Aunt Lizzie Ellis aroused the neighborhood with the purchase of a cow that had to be led from East 20th Street into her back yard by the only available route, through the house, an event that, for excitement, was surpassed only by the removal of the cow, once Aunt Lizzie Ellis was threatened with legal action. On the return trip through the house the animal became so terrified it had to be dragged bodily, its legs tied, its eyes blindfolded.
To the children next door such occasions naturally figured very large, as did Uncle Barnwell with his talk of fishing and hunting, his yacht, and his flashy political friends. So it is somewhat puzzling that so little was to be said of him in later years. His immediate proximity would be passed over rather quickly, his influence barely touched on. He is the Roosevelt everybody chose to forget about. Politics undoubtedly had much to do with this, but more important, it would appear, was his private life. For in addition to all else, brother Rob was a bit lax in his morals. He was what polite society referred to as a Bohemian, the kind of man who kept company with “actresses and such.” An admiring later-day kinsman would describe him as an Elizabethan in the Victorian era and a story has come down the generations of the ladies’ gloves Robert purchased in bulk at A. T. Stewart’s department store, these in a violent shade of green. The gloves had been on sale, according to the story, and he distributed them liberally among his “lady friends,” with the result that for years those who knew him well knew also to watch for the gloves while strolling Fifth Avenue or driving in the park.
Ordinarily, such stories might prompt some question as to whether Robert only seemed scandalous—so very straitlaced was the family, so quick was “the best society” to leap on the least deviation from the prescribed code and call it, if not immoral, then indecent. But in truth Robert was something more than a mere rake or charming boulevardier. He was a man living a remarkable double life, keeping another woman and ultimately an entire second family in a house only a block or so distant on the same street, an arrangement that would come to light only long afterward as a result of genealogical research sponsored by some of his descendants. Her name was Minnie O’Shea, or Mrs. Robert F. Fortescue, as he had decided she should be called, and in 1869 she was already pregnant with their first child.
How much of this Theodore knew, how strenuously he disapproved, if at all, is impossible to say. But the contrast between the two could hardly have been more striking.
Theodore was invariably upright, conservative, the
very model of self-control. He cared nothing for public acclaim, “never put himself forward,” as friends would remember. Theodore was the model duty-bound husband and father, a junior partner at Roosevelt and Son. He was a faithful communicant at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, who often attended two services on the same Sunday. He belonged to the Union League Club and the Century Association. He served on charitable boards, raised money for museums. Not in seven generations on the island of Manhattan had the Roosevelts produced so sturdy or so winsome an example of upper-class probity, or so fine a figure of a man—physically imposing, athletic, with china-blue eyes, chestnut hair and beard, and a good, square Dutch jaw. In his formal photographs, the eyeglasses removed, he is someone who will do what he has to, direct, sure of himself. Only the eyes raise questions, with their unmistakable hint of severity, which seems odd in a man remembered mainly for the “sunshine of his affection.”
Clothes concerned him. The choice of a suit, the right hat for the occasion, were issues of consequence. His suits were of the best quality and beautifully tailored. Appearances mattered. Indeed, it may be said that appearances figured quite as much in the life at 28 East 20th Street as everywhere else within the circumscribed world of New York’s “good old families.” “Did I tell you that he took the other end of the table at the dinner I gave to Captain Cook and behaved admirably?” Theodore writes of brother Rob to Mittie. “He was dressed perfectly, except for a colored cravat with his dress suit.”
Together at dinners and balls, he and the exquisite Mittie made a picture people did not forget. It was in the Roosevelt tradition to be solicitous to women. While their mother was alive, the five brothers stopped regularly every morning en route to work to pay her their respects. But Theodore seems to have genuinely preferred the company of women—he had an eye for feminine beauty, his children all remembered—and the attention he showered on Mittie was exceptional even for that day and those circles. An employee at one of his charities remarked that he had never understood the meaning of the word “gentleman” until the evening he watched Theodore Roosevelt escort his wife about the premises.
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