So surely it was with sinking hearts that Theodore, brothers Cornelius and James Alfred, and their father received word that brother Rob would shortly announce for Congress on the Tammany ticket.
But only with the onset of summer did life seem suddenly to bear down heavily on Theodore and Mittie. July brought a murderous heat wave, among the worst on record, and from France, where they had left Bamie, came news of the calamitous war with Prussia, which was declared July 15. No actual fighting took place for several weeks and Bamie herself happened to be hugely enjoying the excitement—she would tell in later years how French troops went marching past her school windows singing—but for her father especially it was a time of exceeding tension and worry, a condition felt by the entire household and one not greatly helped by his own fathers insistence that he do something about the child’s safety before it was too late.
Further, in combination with all this—or possibly as a consequence—Teedie, who had been “peculiarly well” since the return from Europe, went into a sharp decline. His attacks resumed, coming so often now that Theodore and Mittie had to take turns rushing him off to some country place or watering spot—to Saratoga or Oyster Bay, a rented house at Spuyten Duyvil, a summer hotel at Richfield Springs. Theodore began to wear thin. “I am away with Teedie again much to my regret,” he told Bamie in an undated letter written from his father’s place on Long Island. “He had another attack, woke me up at night and last night to make a break, I took him to Oyster Bay. It used me up entirely to have another attack come so soon after the last. I know and appreciate all the mercies for which I should be thankful but at the moment it seems hard to bear.”
To drop everything and leave with the boy at any emergency was becoming very difficult for him, he told her in another letter. He had much too much to do.
On August 10 Mittie wrote to Bamie, “Teedie had an attack of asthma on last Sunday night and Papa took him to Oyster Bay where he passed Monday night and Tuesday night. Of course, Teedie was in ecstasies of delight...”
By the time the fighting broke out in France and the vaunted armies of Napoleon III began their spectacular collapse, Bamie was across the Channel safe in the care of Uncle Jimmie Bulloch, her exodus having been arranged by Theodore through American friends in Paris named Lamson. It had gone smoothly according to plan. “Do not let them spoil you in Liverpool,” he chided her; he had troubles enough as it was. Her mother and Teedie were off to “take the waters” at Richfield Springs, for the second or third time, accompanied now by Uncle Hilborne.
“Your mother came back . . .” Theodore reported two weeks later, “Teedie still suffering... and they returned leaving me once more a bachelor.”
Two days later at Richfield Springs, on a Sunday, Teedie had another attack. “The spasm yielded,” Mittie reported, “. . . but [he] passed a wheezy miserable night and I have concluded to leave . . . for New York tomorrow, with the feeling that this last week Teedie has lost all he gained . . . and the sulfur baths and water proved no good.”
“I have just received bad news from your mother,” Theodore wrote to Bamie. “She returns with Teedie asthmatic again. His attacks have been more frequent. . . . All say that Denver City would be just the air for Teedie, but until he is older this seems impossible.”
That was on September 6, when his patience was all but gone. How soon afterward he and Teedie had their talk is not known, but probably it was soon. As Mittie later recounted the scene, he called the boy to him and addressed him as Theodore.
“Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should.” He must build himself up by his own effort. “You must make your body.” It was a summons and the offer of a counterpoise, a way, the one way, to right his own balance.
“It is hard drudgery to make one’s body,” the father said, “but I know you will do it.”
And with that, allegedly, the sorry little specimen threw back his head and declared he would do it.
Instead of Denver City he got Wood’s Gymnasium, Mittie accompanying him—and Elliott as well—for daily workouts under the direction of Mr. John Wood, whose young protégés included Sloanes and Goelets and Vanderbilts and whose tutelage was claimed to be as beneficial to character as to physique. She never missed a session and a more unlikely presence in a gymnasium is hard to picture. She sat alone patiently on a large settee against one wall, intent on every part of the program. Standing in front of a weight machine, body forward, head and chest up, arms out, Teedie pulled and hauled, hoisted the weights up from the floor, then let them ride slowly back down again, time after time. He and Ellie hammered away at punching bags, swung dumbbells, spent hours straining at the horizontal bars. After about three months of this, Mittie had John Wood equip their own back piazza with all the required apparatus and it was thus, under her direction (as Wood later acknowledged), that the famous family gymnasium came into being.
As the weeks and months rolled by—as winter came and Bamie returned from Liverpool, as Uncle Rob went off to his newly won seat in Congress, as a besieged and starving Paris at last surrendered to the Germans—Teedie plugged away at his dreary regimen. His sisters would later write that among the most vivid of all childhood memories was the sight of him out on the piazza struggling between the horizontal bars, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”
Long years afterward, reflecting on what had been on his mind at this critical juncture, he would tell a friend of certain lines from the Browning poem “The Flight of the Duchess” that had brought him up short. The passage described the overbred son of a noble line—”. . . the pertest little ape I That ever affronted human shape.”
So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was, without being it; . . .
And chief in the chase his neck he perilled,
On a lathy horse, all legs and length,
With blood for bone, all speed, no strength;. . .
Suddenly, as he told the friend, he saw himself for what he was—an affront to human shape, boneless, all speed, no strength: a pretender. It was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshiped if he made no effort to be like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else.
The sting of the poem was something quite different from and beyond a command to “make” a body. Now shame entered in. He felt “discovered.”
Yet for all he put himself through as time passed, lifting and hauling on weights, his progress was pathetic. He remained embarrassingly undersized and underweight, a scrawny frame with stick arms and stick legs. If he dared venture beyond the family circle, he counted on Ellie to be his protector in case of trouble. Two years later, traveling to Maine for his asthma, but alone, he would be humiliated by a couple of boys of about his own age who, to pass the time during a ride in a stagecoach, decided to make life miserable for him. When at length he tried to fight back, he found either one could handle him with easy contempt, to use his own words, “. . . handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet... prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”
In overall health, he does appear to have improved somewhat, enough at least to lend encouragement. How much direct encouragement he was getting from Theodore, he never said. He did once remark later on, however, that his father “used now and then to say that he hesitated whether to tell me something favorable because he did not think a sugar diet was good for me.”
The attention Theodore devoted to Bamie, meantime—now that she was back in his “possession”—was striking.
Saturday became their special day together. Nothing was allowed to interfere with “our Saturdays,” she remembered. They would spend the morning on horseback in Central Park, usually dropping in at the Museum of Natural History, which was then temporarily located in the old arsenal just inside the park at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue. Or they might stop at one of his Children’s Aid Soc
iety schools. “We would get home for lunch very late,” she wrote, “and as a rule would find whoever was most interesting at the moment in New York lunching with us.” In the afternoon they would go for a drive or visit a hospital. He was exhausting, she said proudly. At the day’s end she was a “complete wreck—deeply attached to my father, but worn to a shred.”
In Mittie’s absences, Bamie ran the house for him. “Order it [dinner] at prompt quarter before seven,” reads a note he left her. He was expecting guests.
Menu as usual—raw oysters if small, soup, oyster coquilles, saddle of venison if in the house, or turkey, croquettes, quail, lobster salad, cheese and crackers, candied fruit, ice cream of course. Give John [the new butler] the wines and tell him and Mary [Ann] that I wish everything nice.
Her life was increasingly determined by such directives, and to her very great satisfaction. Nothing pleased her—nothing pleased any of them—so much as pleasing him. And he appears to have resolved that if she was to have none of her mothers beauty, not a trace of that porcelain delicacy deemed so essential by fashion and that he himself prized so in Mittie, if she was to be homely and handicapped and still have any kind of life, then she must make up for it in other ways. She would know how to manage, to take charge, and be everlastingly useful.
The story among Roosevelts of later generations was that she actually took over from her mother and ran the household from the time she was about fifteen, but this simply was not so. It was only that she seemed to be running everything, she was so capable and eager to cope. Spinsterhood seemed her certain destiny, but one could also be a force in this world, like Theodore’s fellow toiler in philanthropy, Louisa Schuyler, who, as was said, had the willpower of a captain of industry.
2
Alone of the family the boy had his alternative world, his own dark continent to explore.
Once, as a very small child, he had seen the face of a fox in a book and declared it was the face of God. Father, he said, had the head of a lion. He drew endless numbers of mice and birds, filled notebooks with written descriptions of ants, spiders, beetles, dragonflies, all such entries being “gained by observation.”
Nor was he ever anything but serious about his “career” in science, as he called it, the beginnings of which could be traced, he later said, to a dead seal he had seen laid out on a plank in a market on Broadway. He seems to have been about seven or eight at the time, which, interestingly, would correspond with his anguish over the “zeal” in the Madison Square Church.
“That seal,” he later wrote, “filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure.” He asked where it had been killed and was told in the harbor. He kept coming back to see it, day after day as long as it was there. He brought a pocket rule and measured it. He wanted to buy it for his “museum,” but wound up getting the skull only—a memorable incident, since it was one of the few times in his life when he had not gotten what he wanted.
Dozens of books had passed through his hands, beginning with David Livingstone’s mammoth Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa, discovered when he was too young to read and barely big enough to lift it, but could gaze by the hour at the pictures. He liked the second part of Robinson Crusoe for its account of wolves, and then with the books of Captain Mayne Reid he was borne off spellbound to the Great West.
Captain Reid was among the most popular authors of the day and especially with boys. (Other contemporary devotees included young Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.) An Irishman, Reid had exchanged the life of a tutor for that of trapper and trader on the American frontier and his books—The Boy Hunters, Hunter’s Feast, The Scalp Hunters—were rollicking adventures, full of action, violence, and grand-scale visions of the out of doors. God was in nature—a force—and nowhere so plainly as beyond the Mississippi.
Unroll the worlds map [begins The Scalp Hunters], and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild West—away towards the setting sun—away beyond many a far meridian. . . . You are looking upon a land . . . still bearing the marks of the Almighty mold, as upon the morning of creation. A region, whose every object wears the impress of God’s magic. His ambient spirit lives in the silent grandeur of its mountains, and speaks in the roar of its mighty rivers. A region redolent of romance—rich in the reality of adventure.
Reid’s world was all that the boy longed for, one of great manly quests and boundless inspiriting freedom. In such settings, with such a life, one could be reborn, made brave, made strong. He read “enthralled,” curled in a chair or standing on one leg, “like a pelican in the wilderness,” the other leg raised and propped, foot on thigh, to make a bookrest.
What with the wild gallops by day, and the wilder tales by the night watch fires [says one hero] I became intoxicated with the romance of my new life.... My strength increased both physically and intellectually. I experienced a buoyancy of spirits and vigor of body I had never known before. I felt a pleasure in action. My blood seemed to rush warmer and swifter through my veins; and I fancied my eyes reached to a more distant vision.
Along with his rollicking yarns Reid regularly provided descriptions of birds, animals, plant life, quantities of geology, geography—most of it quite accurate. A story suddenly stops so a Darwinian “chain of Destruction” may be dramatized. (A tarantula is killed by a hummingbird, which is eaten by a chameleon, which is done in by a scorpion lizard, which is swallowed by a snake, which falls prey to a kite; then the kite is the victim of an eagle and the eagle is shot by the boy-hero who is the “last link.”) Even proper zoological names may appear in the midst of a story, as though the reader will of course wish to know such things.
About noon, as they were riding through a thicket of the wild sage (Artemisia tridentata), a brace of those singular birds, sage cocks or prairie grouse (Tetrao urophasi), the largest of all the grouse family, whirred up before the heads of their horses.
On the heels of Reid’s books came those of J. G. Wood, an entertaining English writer who specialized in natural history, and by age ten or so, even before the trip to Europe, he was led by Uncle Hilborne, “my father in Science,” to On the Origin of Species. Later, staying with the Wests in Philadelphia, he would report to Theodore, “I go to the Academy every spare moment and am allowed to have the run of all the 38,000 books in its library. They have got quite a number of specimens, also.” Mittie, writing from a summer house at Dobbs Ferry, tells how Hilborne “talked science and natural history and medicine, etc., with Teedie, who craves knowledge.”
Summers now—those of ’71 and ’72, when Theodore rented a succession of country houses in the hills along the Hudson—were very near to paradise for the boy. No letup in lessons was permitted. (”I study English, French, German, and Latin now,” he wrote to Aunt Annie.) It was also a rule that at the dinner table they speak only French. But the drudgery of weights and parallel bars could be replaced with riding, swimming, running barefoot; and nothing, not even French, could offset the ecstasy of open fields and living things. As a family they all adored the country. Summers, Conie wrote, were “the special delight of our lives.” But Teedie led “a life apart,” his love of nature becoming a passion and one which they all had to learn to live with. There were snapping turtles tied to laundry tubs, a litter of newborn squirrels, their eyes still closed, that needed feeding with a syringe three times daily. A tree frog positioned beside the lamp on the parlor table “proved a remarkable fly catcher,” and when Mittie found he was storing dead mice in the icebox and ordered that they be thrown in the garbage, he despaired over “the loss to science.”
His reading became steadily more ambitious. He moved on to the works of Audubon and those of Spencer Fullerton Baird, the foremost American naturalist of the day (Catalogue of North American Birds, Review of American Birds, North American Reptiles, Catalogue of North American Mammals).
The first encounter with actual wilderness came the summer of ’71, in August, when Theodore initiated an expediti
on to the Adirondacks. Their destination was Paul Smith’s, on Lake St. Regis, a favorite summer hostel among well-to-do sportsmen and their families.
They all went—in true Roosevelt fashion, in a swarm—Theodore, Mittie, and the four children, Uncle Cornelius and Aunt Laura, Uncle Hilborne, Aunt Susy, and Cousin West. Theodore packed a copy of The Last of the Mohicans to read by the campfire after dark and he, Teedie, Ellie, Uncle Hilborne, and Cousin West, separating from the others (who happily remained at Paul Smith’s), spent three days roughing it “in the bush.” So at long last Teedie could write from personal experience of “those grand and desolate wilds,” write pages in his own journal that might have been penned by Captain Reid himself.
We wandered about and I picked up a salamander (Diemictylus irridescens). I saw a mouse here which from its looks I should judge to be a hamster mouse (Hesperomys myoides). We saw a bald-headed eagle (Halietus leucocephalus) sailing over the lake.
From the Adirondacks they went to the White Mountains, where the three boys climbed Mount Lafayette, and at no point in the journal for all the month of August is there even one mention of asthma.
That fall, at the American Museum of Natural History, it was officially recorded that the year’s acquisitions (in addition to a human hand bestowed by Mr. P. T. Barnum) included one bat, twelve mice, a turtle, the skull of a red squirrel, and four birds’ eggs presented by Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
A year later he was receiving lessons in taxidermy from a striking old man who had been the great Audubon’s own “stuffer.” John G. Bell, who kept a musty little taxidermy shop on Broadway, had been to Dakota Territory with Audubon and to the upper reaches of the Yellowstone. It was for him that Audubon named the Vireo belli. Once on the Yellowstone he had actually saved Audubon’s life by grabbing a rifle and shooting a wounded bull buffalo that was within feet of trampling Audubon to death. The boy would remember Bell for the rest of his life as a tall, white-haired figure in a black frock coat, “straight as an Indian,” who had done “very valuable work for science.”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 288