All up and down the whole creation,
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for the old plantation,
And for the old folks at home.
Champagne was uncorked at midnight and space was cleared for a Virginia reel. “Mamma joined,” wrote Conie, “and Father danced with Mr. Clift, he, ‘Papa,’ acting as a lady—’rather a large one, was he not?’”
But nearing Cairo on the return voyage, Theodore became downcast and sentimental. The boat must soon be turned over to other travelers who would neither know nor care anything about the times they had passed there. The boat was “not to be our home but only one more step on our journey of life.”
The picture is of a family strangely and most contentedly adrift, riding the timeless river, as in some dreamy romantic nineteenth-century painting, an incongruous Stars and Stripes luffing above a huge brown sail. It was a time of transition, as they all appreciated. Their life as a family was about to change dramatically; everything was to be different henceforth, something Theodore felt most acutely.
His own father was dead. Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, “merchant of the old school” (as said The New York Times), had “passed from the scene” July 17,1871. The loss to the family, their grief, had been profound. The old man had seemed inviolable, an institution unto himself, as a neighbor wrote. But with the estate settled, Theodore had been made a very rich man. Though the total left by his father has never been determined for certain, it appears to have been somewhere between $3 million and $7 million, which means Theodore’s share would not have been less than $1 million ($10 million or more in present-day dollars).
A fortune had come into his hands at what was the height of the postwar boom and this Egyptian winter was only among the immediate, more obvious consequences. (Such travel was “horribly expensive,” as Henry Adams had discovered. In two months Theodore spent something over $2,000, or about five times what the average American family had to live on for a year.) Of far greater consequence had been a decision to give up the house on East 20th Street and build anew uptown. Theodore and his brother James Alfred had bought adjoining lots on the south side of 57th Street, just west of Fifth Avenue, which would put them two blocks from Central Park, in the heart of what was becoming “the” section of town. Theodore was brimming with enthusiasm for the project. He and James Alfred had decided on adjoining houses. Their architect was Russell Sturgis, whose Gothic country estates were all the rage. Plans were drawn, approved, construction begun. It was to be no mere brownstone this time. Indeed, little would be spared in the way of expense. All the principal woodwork and furniture, for example, were being custom made in Philadelphia, after designs by still another fashionable architect, Frank Furness.
To uproot everyone from East 20th Street after so many years was no light decision, obviously, but probably a move somewhere would have been forced upon them in any event—with or without their new fortune—for the uptown tide was running strong.
Everything near 20th Street was turning commercial. Union Square was being overrun by the needle trades. The stately old Roosevelt house on Union Square had already been torn down to make way for a sewing-machine factory. Lord & Taylor was moving to new quarters at Broadway and 20th Street, less than a block from Theodore’s front door.
It was because the new house would not be ready until summer that Theodore had planned such an extended stay abroad. After Egypt, the family would tour the Holy Land, then stop in Vienna. By May they were to reach Dresden, where the youngest three were to be placed in the care of a German family, to be tutored in German for a few months. Mittie and Bamie would go on to Paris and Carlsbad, meantime, and he would return to New York to see to business and the final stages of the new house. Lucy Sorrel Elliott and her children—cousins Johnny and Maud—were living in Dresden temporarily, so such an arrangement seemed eminently sensible.
“If one allowed himself to dwell upon the moral to be drawn from all our surroundings here,” Theodore wrote near the end of their time on the Nile, “it would not be enlivening. Our gayest parties are made up to visit tombs .. . of those who have passed away centuries ago and whose names even are now unknown. . . . It is more painful to reflect upon the people gone than even the relics of their greatness.”
His father had died at the age of seventy-seven. He was now fortyone. His fathers dream of a permanent tribal enclave in the vicinity of Union Square and 20th Street had lasted all of twenty years. ”One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.”
But what chance he had for extended reverie seems open to question, given the activities of his older son the nearer they drew to Cairo and journeys end. The “collecting” reached a fever pitch during their last weeks on the river—sixteen pigeons one day, a peeweet, a zick-zack, two snipes, and eleven pigeons on another, never a day but Sunday when the gun ceased blasting. It must have seemed at times as if there were a war raging amid the palms, for the boy was a poor shot, missing many more times than he hit. Some days he hit nothing at all.
The grand total of birds killed during the two months came to something between a hundred and two hundred. He really did not know for certain. He had lost count.
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIX
Uptown
1
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER of 1873, alone in New York, Theodore kept steadily on the move. It was his way of fighting loneliness, he said, though the impression is of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. “You know I never approved of rusting out,” he wrote Bamie, which sounds more like him.
The “perpetual rush” of his day began at six in the morning and seldom ended before midnight. The once leisurely pace at Roosevelt and Son was a thing of the past. Orders for plate glass were pouring in and particularly from Chicago, where a new city was being built in the aftermath of the Great Fire. But there were, besides, questions to be settled pertaining to Roosevelt investments and Roosevelt properties. People like Louisa Schuyler came to discuss further good works, others to talk of business schemes needing Roosevelt money. His museums, the Children’s Aid Society, the Orthopedic Hospital, all suddenly required his attention, while work on the new house demanded that he look in there at least once a day, usually first thing in the morning.
He was staying at the Union League Club. Evenings he dined with friends; weekends, whenever possible, he went to the country. One letter mentions an “unexpectedly pleasant” visit with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish at his home in Garrison; in another he reports on a dinner across the river from Dobbs Ferry, “after which we took our cigars on the edge of the Palisades and enjoyed the last shadows of the setting sun.” He went cruising on Long Island Sound with the Aspinwalls on their yacht Day Dream. He bought an expensive new saddle horse named Fritz of which he was inordinately proud and a “very stylish” new T-cart for drives in the park. “Fritz goes beautifully,” he reported, “and it is glorious to be able to go into the country at once from our door . . .”
Seeing the finished house for the first time, he had been astonished by its size and beauty, astonished and tremendously pleased. There was no better-built house in New York, he declared. When he noticed that the architect had included imitation oak beams—beams done with plaster—in the ceiling of the front hall, he ordered that the ceiling be torn down. It “seemed hard to destroy so much beautifully finished work,” he explained to Mittie, but he knew how dissatisfied she would be with anything artificial. There would be real beams instead.
“I can see all who pass in Fifth Avenue nicely from your room,” he told Bamie, “and just came in time to save a bathtub from going, as originally intended, into your closet.”
Farther uptown, on the west side of Central Park at 77th Street, the new American Museum of Natural History was under construction. For the moment it was only a huge hole in the ground for one wing—this in the center of acres of mud and squatters’ shacks—but the plan was for a great red-brick fortress, going on and on, ne
arly Egyptian in scale, to house one of the most valuable scientific collections in the world. The architect was Calvert Vaux, who, with Frederick Law Olmsted, had laid out Central Park. Theodore, as a member of the committee for plans, had become familiar with every detail. The final complex was to cover fifteen acres, fill a space three times larger than the British Museum. Plate glass for windows and showcases, as it happens, was also to be supplied by Roosevelt and Son.
No other project so appealed to his pride, he wrote Mittie the day he inspected the site. He liked to imagine the value of such a collection for all those who, “like Teedie,” were in quest of scientific knowledge. If there was to be a monument to his own efforts on earth, to prove he had “done something” with his life, he wanted it to be this museum.
“I think without egotism this really would never have been carried through without my aid,” he told her.
His financial contribution to the project that year was $2,250, double what it had been before. When a $10 annual membership was organized, he and five other Roosevelts (brothers, cousins) were among the charter subscribers.
Sunday was his day to write letters. This period was the longest he and the family had been separated since the war and at times his concern for their well-being seems to have been no less than in those earlier years. (One letter is even mistakenly dated 1863.) Bamie was directed to “relieve your mother of every care possible.” Bamie must “bring her home able to undertake the cares of our large house.” Mittie was told to rest, to obey her diet, to avoid “indulgences,” to take every day at Carlsbad very seriously. Mittie must come home strong. “I am so anxious to see you home well, and so well that we will never be obliged to repeat this experiment.”
Her stay at the famous spa had been his idea. (”The more I think of it, the better I am pleased with my own self-denial.”) The regimen at Carlsbad, as he knew from her letters, was a far cry from their life on the Nile or at Vienna. She was living on zwieback and soft-boiled eggs and “nasty glasses” of mineral water, walking, reading, turning in no later than ten. His concern over “indulgences” must have struck her as mildly amusing.
But the main worry, as for so long, was Teedie. His asthma had returned almost from the moment they left the Nile, the first attack coming the Saturday night they reached Port Said after touring the Suez Canal. More attacks followed in the Holy Land, including a “bad” one. He was “very sick” with colic at Constantinople, “had the asthma” again on a cruise up the Danube. At Vienna he turned listless and gloomy. They were staying in the Grand Hotel, enjoying the best of everything. The city’s parks and gardens were in spring bloom. But the “big three” were preoccupied with things in which he could take no part. Theodore had been suddenly pressed into service as a substitute American commissioner for the Vienna Exposition; Bamie and her mother had been taken up by Viennese society, and were busy buying clothes, going to receptions and balls. To Teedie it was all “the most dreary monotony.”
In a letter to Theodore from Dresden, the boy asked forgiveness for his handwriting, since “the asthma had made my hand tremble awfully.” There were more attacks, violent headaches. Alarmed by what she heard, Mittie left Carlsbad for Dresden to find him wheezing badly and forced to sleep sitting up, as he had as a small child. What he needed, he told her, was a change of scene. So a few weeks later came word from the Swiss Alps that all was well. They were enjoying the “bluest of blue skies,” Mittie wrote. Teedie had “improved vastly,” Teedie “goes to bed well.”
In September when the terrible Panic of 1873 burst upon the country, Theodore was as incredulous as everyone else. There had been warnings and most notably a run on the Vienna bourse in May, at the time the Roosevelts were there. Some newspapers and financial specialists kept insisting the country was sound, even as railroads began to fail, that this was only another “Wall Street panic,” like that of 1869, and would soon pass. In fact, a great depression had begun, the worst of the century thus far, the causes of which were many and complex—the staggering costs of the Civil War and of the Franco-Prussian War, overspeculation in railroads, trade dislocations resulting from the opening of the Suez Canal, heavy borrowing to rebuild Chicago, too-easy credit, worldwide inflation. The heady postwar boom had ended with shattering finality. The suffering was to be widespread and of much longer duration than anyone as yet imagined.
It began in Philadelphia September 18 with the bankruptcy of Jay Cooke and Company. When the firm closed its doors shortly before eleven, it was as if the Bank of England had failed. In New York nearly forty banks and brokerage houses went under that same day. September 20 all trading was stopped, the Stock Exchange closed for ten days. “The failures continue in unheard-of numbers,” Theodore wrote Mittie from the quiet of his club. Banks were being mobbed. Henry Clews and Company, a Wall Street bastion, had gone down that afternoon (September 23). He pitied especially “poor Mr. Clews, who has made his business his life. He told me a short time since that he had not for years taken a holiday. . . . Now all. . . is swept away in a day.”
Mittie, again in Paris, wrote of feeling “very anxious” over the news from New York. “At supper last evening a note was handed [to me] telling of the suspension of three banks and [the] Union Trust Company.” But then this seems to have ended such distasteful topics. Their correspondence returns at once to private matters. She is buying china soap dishes for the new house and bolts of claret-colored cloth for new livery for the servants. He is hiring servants (a much larger staff will be needed). A marble mantelpiece has arrived; the new furnace is in and going “full blast.” A carpet she picked out earlier in Paris is in port. He has ordered gas fixtures that he hopes she will like and the old chandelier from the 20th Street library looks quite well, he thinks, in the room that is to be his study.
“I have left the billiard room without any chandelier at present,” he tells Bamie, “only side lights, so if you do find it will answer for dancing it will [not] be in your way.”
Everything on order from Philadelphia—furniture, woodwork, a huge hand-carved front staircase—was behind schedule. When the staircase arrived and was put in place, it missed its connection with the second floor by three feet. The architect had given the wrong measurements, with the result that the entire thing had to be taken out and remade.
The house was filled with ladders and workmen on October 5, the day Theodore moved in, and there was still considerable disorder and no front staircase when the family arrived on the Russia a month later to the day. But with Dora Watkins, Mary Ann, a footman named Frank, some four or five further additions to the “family below stairs,” including a Sophie, a Mary, a George, and a black groom named Davis, they moved in bag and baggage—”all the way up on 57th Street.” The new address was Number 6 West 57th Street.
A remark by Bamie years later that her mother’s European buying spree for the house “proved rather fatal to the family fortunes” would seem to have no basis in fact. Nothing—not the house or its furnishings or the panic—appears to have put the slightest dent in the family fortune. The one inconvenience suffered was the postponement of Bamie’s debut, which was to have taken place before Christmas. As it was, the party was given in January, and in the interim, to please her, Theodore arranged another dance in her honor in Philadelphia.
The house was a showplace, even by the extravagant standards being set in the vicinity along upper Fifth Avenue. There was no resemblance whatever to the house on East 20th Street. To move “uptown” was to move up in the world, but this was something more. The whole feeling was different, foreign. It was as if one had entered the domain of an altogether different family, another kind of people.
Rooms, hallways, mirrors, fireplaces, bookcases, furniture, everything was larger and infinitely more luxurious. There were tremendous mirrors everywhere, tasseled chandeliers, walls of glassed-in books, intricately carved sliding doors, paneled and tiled fireplaces, huge urns, inlaid woods, polished silver, Persian rugs on Persian rugs. East 20th Street had
had a degree of restraint, even simplicity—or at least simplicity as understood by mid-Victorians. There the furniture had been largely the standard pieces for the standard domestic gentility. (Grandmamma Bulloch, it will be remembered, warned of “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.”) But the sumptuous pieces conceived by Furness were all one of a kind, all of rich inlaid woods and mighty in scale—great hand-carved, leather-upholstered, brass-studded dining-room chairs, heavy as thrones and broad enough to accommodate even the very largest of that era’s well-fed gentry; a bed for the master of the house and his lady that might have been commissioned for an oriental potentate.
No one knows what such things cost. A generation later they would be considered in “horrid taste,” “utterly ghastly,” and, except for the bed and one or two other pieces, they would be happily sold off for little or nothing. A generation after that each would be a rare and magnificent period piece.
Windows were few and heavily curtained, closing off the world beyond. On the top floor was a fully equipped gymnasium. (”We are going to have boxing lessons . . .” wrote Ellie; “it will be jolly fun.”) Space for Teedies museum was provided in the attic, his collection now greatly expanded by the birds from the Nile, each of which was to be properly identified with its Latin name on a little card printed in pink.
For Bamie’s “at home” debut, it is recorded, some five hundred invitations were sent, which gives an idea of how large a house it was.
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