How much of the interior look had been dictated by the architects, or to what degree it was expressive of Mittie or Theodore, is impossible to say. Nor is there any record of what the final bill came to. But it was the only time Theodore had everything built to order for him, and if, as he said, he expected to live out his days there, he obviously intended that no comforts be spared. Had his name not been Roosevelt, he might have been fairly accused of “ruinous display.”
To keep the two boys and Conie on an upward path that winter, he hired a new tutor, a young Harvard graduate named Arthur Cutler, in whose care Cousin West, the son of Theodore’s late brother Weir, was also placed. For several months, until Teedie began pulling ahead, the four youngsters worked at the same pace; but that summer—the summer of 1874—by which time Teedie was working six to eight hours a day at his studies, it was determined that he would be going on to college, whereas Ellie, most likely, would not. Teedie’s efforts under Cutler were directed exclusively to passing the entrance examination at Harvard, this choice having possibly been influenced by the four young men on the Nile, or, more likely, by Harvard’s preeminence in the field of natural science. Yale or Princeton would have been closer to home, Columbia closer still and there were family ties to Columbia. Harvard, however, produced men like Albert Bickmore, head of the Museum of Natural History. The whole approach to teaching the natural sciences had been transformed at Harvard by the late Louis Agassiz, whose son was curator of the new Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Harvard had broken all precedent and made a man of science its president, Charles Eliot, and included on its faculty such figures as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the geologist, and William James, both of whom, like Bickmore, had been star pupils of the great Agassiz.
To his charitable efforts Theodore gave more and more of himself all the while, as the depression worsened and increasing misery was to be found everywhere. A decade earlier his money had enabled him to miss the war and now, like most of the very rich, he and his sailed high above the panic, quite untouched by it in any material way. But as in the earlier national tragedy, he was incapable of detachment or of withholding his compassion. “All that gives me most pleasure in the retrospect,” he preached to his older son, “is connected with others, an evidence that we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.” He visited hospital wards, talked with the inmates of prisons, went into the slums to console and moralize. He urged the establishment of workhouses for vagrants. He toured the city’s dreadful asylums for the insane on Ward’s and Blackwell’s islands and was so sickened by what he saw that he led a delegation of city officials back to both places. In an insane time the plight of the insane especially became uppermost for him. He lobbied for better conditions and human care, for altogether different kinds of asylums, “where the patients could work out of doors, and gain strength and mental and physical health in useful occupations.”
He gave money, wrote letters, often working at his desk until two in the morning. Friends remarked at his energy and “industry.” Corinne, remembering all he managed to squeeze into a day, said he had the “power of being . . . focused.”
“Without his power of concentration and great physical endurance such a life would have been impossible,” said Louisa Schuyler. He made everything look easy, she said.
Together with Louisa Schuyler he tried to bring some system and order to the welter of charitable efforts going on in the city. They launched a new Bureau of Charities, the first of its kind, with Theodore as chairman, and enlisted the support of Charles Loring Brace, Abram Hewitt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and others. They decided to compile a list of all those on welfare in the city, something that had never been tried before, and in less than a month had ten thousand names. He was particularly alarmed, Theodore told reporters, by the hordes of begging children in the streets whose numbers were increasing daily.
But if the plight of the homeless and downtrodden was tugging him one way, the pleasures of his own extremely good fortune were certainly not going awasting. He embraced his heightened circumstances with open arms, living in style, living as never before, and apparently seeing nothing ambivalent or contradictory about that.
In the spring of 1874, a cornerstone ceremony was being planned for the Museum of Natural History. President Grant was to come on from Washington to do the honors and it was suggested that a silver trowel be specially made up by Tiffany. “My dear Mr. Haines,” wrote Theodore to a fellow member of the museum board, “by all means order the trowel, one must certainly have it and the President is entitled to a good one.”
And he seems to have taken much the same view concerning his own affairs—that he and his were also entitled to a good one, of most anything they wished. It was in these years of dreadful want that Theodore became a thoroughgoing sport, to borrow the word used by his older son in a later-day reminiscence. He was “the first American to drive four horses handsomely through New York—in style, in the good English style, with everything that belonged.” He enjoyed himself to the full—fine clothes, “meals with courses”—and a little more conspicuously every year. That “rich power of enjoyment of everything human” remembered by Charles Loring Brace now included his money as well.
One could be a moralist without being gloomy, one could work for the welfare of others without being an ascetic, his behavior seemed to say. He was “no ascetic,” declared Louisa Schuyler categorically and approvingly. To her, as to others, there was something wonderfully glamorous about him and this, in her eyes, made him an even stronger force for good. She had been observing him for years, from the time she first went to work as a teacher for the Children’s Aid Society, and of course she knew him socially (Miss Schuyler was a descendant of both General Philip John Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton). “I can see him now, in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging House, and later dashing off to an evening party in Fifth Avenue.”
To build support for the Orthopedic Hospital, he and Mittie gave a reception at 57th Street for their wealthiest friends, and with the occasion in full swing he signaled for attention, then dramatically threw back the doors to the dining room. On top of the great round dining table, against a background of heavy paneled walls with inlaid designs of lobsters, fish, and other such symbols of plenty, he had placed several pathetically cripple children, some sitting, some lying on their backs, all in various braces of the kind only large donations could provide. Conie stood beside the children to help show how the braces were fitted and how they worked. The effect was stunning. Mrs. John Jacob Astor III is said to have announced at once that “of course” Theodore must have help in his work.
He was, it was said, “neither spoiled by good fortune, nor soured by zeal.” He was interested in “every good thing,” to quote Louisa Schuyler one more time. To another friend, D. Willis James, “He seemed to be able to control the strongest affections of the heart, and to reach men who were not easily drawn into affection . . .”
Indeed, it is only in the private family correspondence and reminiscences that one finds even an occasional hint that life with such a person may not always have been easy. Mittie, in a letter from Europe to her “dearest old Greatheart Darling,” remarks out of the blue, “I wish you were not so good, it makes me sad.” And later:
I love you and wish to please you more than anyone else in the whole world and will do everything I can to please you . . . I think you have been perfectly lovely to me in your care of me always, and so good and indulgent and thoughtful, and I am so proud of you, and honor and respect you, so don’t be too hard upon me.
Then she adds, “I have decided that your dear letters are just a little plaintive and it rather comforts me to receive the ’Private’ letter to see that you have one little scrap of the devil in you yet.” (The “private letter” has not survived.)
Bamie, recalling her debut and the parties at which he was her escort, writes of “mingled feelings of pleasure and disappointment.” Knowing so few of her contemporaries
had made that winter difficult; “and Father himself was so very young. . . and he was so popular that I felt like a wall flower.”
Sunday mornings he led them two blocks south to the new Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which opened its doors the spring of 1875.
There they prayed among Auchinclosses and Blisses, Livingstons and Wolcotts, “the most influential congregation” in the city, and listened to the word as preached by John Hall, the Irishman of golden tongue, as Beecher called him.
Mittie organized a dancing class for the youngest three—rounding up some forty children altogether—and encouraged Bamie in a new friendship with tall, graceful Sara Delano, who came down from her family’s estate on the Hudson to spend some of each winter season at 6 West 57th Street.
Mittie’s portrait was painted, a first for any of the family, and it must have pleased Theodore greatly. The face that looks out from the canvas is radiant, poised, quite as beautiful as she is described in so many contemporary accounts. Dressed for one of those society occasions he so enjoyed, she must have been something to see. Bamie described later how she looked as she left for a wedding at the Jay estate.
She had on an enormous crinoline and a perfectly exquisite white muslin dress over a pink silk lining, with all the little ruffles at the bottom edged with real lace, and the cloak, which was a very long sort of cape, matched the dress, and the bonnet tied under her chin with great pink ribbons and . . . on the brim of the bonnet was a great big pink rose with perfectly realistic little green dragonflies. She also had a parasol with a real ivory handle and the lining of pink covered with muslin and trimmed with real lace. She was considered one of the beauties at the wedding . . .
It was only at “the store” that things were not going so well any longer. The depression had produced not only business stagnation, but knife-edge competition of a kind that Theodore and James Alfred were unaccustomed to, and from domestic manufacturers of glass in particular. So rather than attempting to save their sagging import trade, the two brothers spent their time looking for new outlets for their money. They became financiers, James Alfred being the “guiding genius.”
City real estate still comprised a large part of the family fortune, and no one, even in these worst of times, had lost faith in the future of New York. The Chemical Bank, true to tradition, was also surviving the depression with flying colors.
Yet rich as these Roosevelts had become, they might have become richer still. (All things are relative, including the disappointment of missed opportunities.) Some years earlier the brothers had backed a copper-mining venture in Montana, the National Mining and Exploring Company, of which James Alfred was president. (Brother Rob, who had the least business sense supposedly, was the only one who bothered to go out to see the site.) The copper found did not amount to much. It was only with the discovery of gold that the venture proved “not without profit” to the family. The mines, however, were in the vicinity of Butte, in the heart, that is, of what would become one of the richest copper regions of all. Had deep mining been possible at the time, the Roosevelts might have become some of the richest men of their day.
It is said also that among those who came looking for Roosevelt backing was Alexander Graham Bell, who hooked up his newly invented telephone so that Theodore could talk from his desk to a room down the hall. While agreeing that it was an interesting device, with potential as a toy perhaps, Theodore thought it had no real future and refused to put money into it.
He was made a Supervisor of the Census, a director of the Bank of Commerce and of the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company. The glass import business was eventually sold to a British firm in 1876, after which Roosevelt and Son switched over entirely to private banking and investment. It was no longer to Maiden Lane that Theodore went each morning, but to new offices on Pine Street.
“What business I shall enter . . . I do not know,” his older son wrote, “for we have been forced to give up the glass business on account of the ‘panic.’” But were it not for this and one or two other chance remarks, one might conclude that such workaday concerns as business, or so disturbing a word as “panic,” never actually penetrated the charmed circle of family life, at the center of which, like some elegant patron saint, stood Theodore.
2
The best of times for him—for all of them—were at Oyster Bay. The years of random summer houses in New Jersey or along the Hudson were also behind now. In conjunction with the move uptown, he had decided to join the Roosevelt colony at the quiet little watering spot on Long Islands North Shore, beginning the summer of 1874. Oyster Bay itself was a mere hamlet of modest white clapboard houses built around the time of the Revolutionary War or earlier, many occupied by old local families with ties going back to the days of earliest settlement. The summer houses—the Beekmans’, the Tiffanys’, the Swan “place” —were of a different order and set on low wooded hills or bluffs beyond town and in view of the water.
The one Theodore “hired” was out Cove Road a short way from the village, a roomy, old white frame ark with long windows and a columned front porch reminiscent of Bulloch Hall. The requisite porch rockers faced the bay and the best air; the bathing beach was only a short walk across the road.
Now the customary family summer extended nearly four months, beginning as early in June as possible and lasting until late September or early October, the fashionable time to “return to town.”
Theodore took the same house year after year. He longed for a country place of his own, he told Mittie, and anticipated the day when he might own one. The children always assumed the house was theirs, that naturally he owned it. To them it was “home,” “dear home.”
“I had a very delightful visit at Oyster Bay at the Roosevelts’ and wish you could see their pleasant way of life there,” Theodore’s friend Joseph Choate wrote his wife. “They are only twenty-seven miles from New York, and in the midst of a country which doesn’t correspond in the least to your ideas of Long Island. Instead of the dreary sandy wastes of the South Shore, it is pleasant and well-wooded rolling country and apparently filled with quiet good people.”
The full complement of servants was in residence. As would be said, no Russians of the ruling class tucked away in a dacha were better tended or more safely removed from the unpleasantness of the world. The hard years of the depression, summers of breadlines and bloody labor violence, were times of “every special delight” at Oyster Bay, “the happiest summers of our lives.”
There were lovely mornings on horseback, with Father leading the cavalcade, long sparkling afternoons on the water. Everyone had his own horse or pony. There were rowboats, a sailboat, other large Roosevelt houses for children to charge in and out of, miles of shoreline to explore, woods and fields to tramp and shoot in. To the noisy troop of Roosevelt cousins were added the Elliott cousins, who came as guests, and two other “regulars,” Conie’s friends Edie Carow and Fanny Smith, whose well-to-do fathers, both old friends of Theodore’s, were experiencing “temporary reverses” due to the panic and could ill afford such vacations for their families.
Theodore had them put on theatrical productions and spent hours rehearsing them in their lines. (”But, Uncle, I am not a passionate man!” protested Johnny Elliott, upon being cast as the lover in something called To Oblige Benson.) At the dinner table, as the plates were being cleared, he would ask this child or that to get up and give an impromptu speech, an experience some of his young guests would remember until their dying day. “These Roosevelts were without inhibitions to an unusual degree,” wrote Fanny Smith. She loved them for their vitality, their kindnesses, their “explosions of fun.” To her they were “a family so rarely gifted as to seem . . . touched by the flame of the ’divine fire.’” Their gaiety was “unquenchable.” They were lovers of books and poetry. They invested everything they did with their own “extraordinary vitality.” Of Theodore Senior she remembered mainly the enthusiasm with which he entered into every activity, the inspiration he was. (It
was she he picked for the female lead in To Oblige Benson—her first chance ever to put on makeup and play a part.) That he insisted on calling the house Tranquillity struck her as wonderfully inappropriate.
“How I will enjoy my holiday,” he wrote at the start of the second summer at Oyster Bay. When he was absent everyone felt let down. Teedie, who had begun calling himself Thee or even Theodore on occasion, wrote of the tonic it was just to be in his presence.
He will be with us now . . . enjoying his holiday with a vim. I wish he would not sit down on something black whenever he has on white trousers. At the close of the day he always has a curiously mottled aspect. Seriously, it is a perfect pleasure to see him, he is so happy and in such good health and spirits. We become quite stagnant when he is away.
3
There was, however, one rather serious problem casting a shadow on all these perfect summers and the winters between, a peculiar turn of events about which as little as possible would ever be said outside the immediate family. Ellie had started having strange seizures—fainting spells, a rush of blood to the head as it was described, even fits of delirium.
The trouble had begun the very first summer at Oyster Bay, when the boy was fourteen, and it was for this reason that Theodore ruled out college for him. Almost overnight his hitherto robust, confident second son, “the strong one,” the boy for whom there seemed to be no obstacles, had become the family’s chief concern, a victim of spells, a child afraid of the dark, afraid to sleep alone.
The policy seems to have been the less said the better. Not even Fanny Smith appears to have known there was anything wrong with Elliott, close as she was; or, if she did, she also chose to delete that part of the story. In her account, as in others, he remains only the perennial family charmer. To judge by what she, Conie, and others said of those summers, there were no problems, no bad days, no bad nights. Teedie, in one letter, observes that Ellie has been at times “very ill,” but then goes no further.
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