David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  In later years, among later-day Roosevelts, it would be said Elliott suffered some form of epilepsy. There was no record of epilepsy in the family but then neither was there a record of asthma. The family physician attending him appears to have been baffled and diagnosed the trouble only as a nervous condition or “congestion of the brain.” The word “epilepsy” does not appear in the multitude of family papers dating from the time.

  Descriptions of what exactly went on during these seizures are also fragmentary and inconclusive. But the chance that the problem was in fact epilepsy seems remote. More likely the trouble stemmed from some intense inner turmoil. That the boy was chagrined by his failure to keep pace with Teedie academically, that he worried excessively over his future, his ability to live up to his fathers expectations, are all quite evident and particularly in the confidences he shared with his father. Even before the return from Europe he had written of the extreme difficulty he was having with German, and a letter he mailed from Liverpool just before sailing for home could not have but touched Theodore deeply.

  “What will I become when I am a man?” he had asked his father. “Are there not a very large number of partners in the store . . . I think Teedie would be the boy to put in the store if you wanted to be sure of it, because he is much quicker and [a] more sure kind of boy, though I will try my best and try to be as good as you if [it] is in me, but it is hard. But I can tell you that better when I get home and it does not look nice to read.”

  In the fall of 1874, following the first summer at Oyster Bay, his condition was such that another sea voyage was arranged—still one more therapeutic “change of scene.” Theodore took him back to England on a business trip. But Ellie had a relapse at Liverpool. When Theodore left him behind with the Bullochs while he went on to Paris, a serious attack followed and Theodore had to be summoned at once.

  The attack [Theodore wrote Mittie] has been decidedly the worst he has had and very difficult in character. It came from overexcitement but of so natural a kind that I foresee it will be very difficult to guard him from it. A pillow fight was perhaps the principal exciting cause; it was Harriott’s children. It produced congestion of the brain with all its attendant horrors of delirium, etc. The doctor says that there is no cause for anxiety as it is only necessary to avoid all excitements for two or three years and he will entirely outgrow it. He is perfectly well again now, but of course weak and confined to his bed. . . . Ellie’s sweetness entirely won the heart of the doctor as it has that of all the servants here. The doctor says . . . that the boy should lead a quiet life in the country and I have vainly puzzled my brain to think how this can be accomplished.

  There were signs of improvement in another week. The one problem now, Theodore wrote, was nighttime. “He evidently still has a fear of being left alone at night (i.e., is nervous) although he stoutly denies it. He sleeps in my bed. I think it would be very wise for Theodore and himself to occupy the large bed in [the] back third-story room for while together. I should be afraid to leave him alone.”

  A little later, in an affectionate letter to the son at home, Theodore said that, things being what they were, he, Teedie, would have to start acting more like the older brother. In some ways it may have been as important a directive as the one to make his body.

  It is a pleasure to receive your letters and gives Ellie so much enjoyment to hear them read. His first inquiry is if there is anything from Teedie when a bundle of letters is brought in. You will have to assume more of the responsibilities of elder brother when we return. Ellie is anticipating all sorts of pleasures with you that he will not be able to realize, and it will require much tact on your part not to let him feel his deprivations too much.... His sickness at night, although worse, often reminds me of your old asthma, both of you showed so much patience and seemed more sorry on account of those about you than for yourselves. Aunt Ella is singing to him upstairs now; music often seems to soothe him when he is nervous.

  “It is so funny, my illness,” Ellie himself wrote to his brother, “it comes from the nerves and therefore is not at all serious, but my body is getting so thin I can get a handful of plain skin right off my stomach, and my arms as well as my legs look like I have the strength of a baby. I jump involuntarily at the smallest sound and have a perpetual headache (and: nearly always in low spirits). . .”

  The doctor came again and said the attacks were “hysteria.” “I scarce know how I will come back to active life again,” Theodore wrote Mittie.

  Another trip was arranged for the boy that winter, almost from the time his father brought him home. He was sent south with the family physician, John Metcalfe, for several months of shooting and outdoor life and it did him wonders. “I have not had a respectable suit on since I left home, or a white shirt,” he wrote proudly, “and as I have to clean all the guns on our return from shooting you may imagine the state of my hands. I am very well and happy.” The one problem he acknowledged was homesickness, “sometimes.”

  Curiously, Theodore then wrote to say that in the future he must always stand by Teedie, who was a “noble boy,” a charge Ellie took greatly to heart. Why Theodore did this, having so recently said almost the same thing to the other boy, is open to question. Possibly he felt that in Ellie’s case the best medicine might be a feeling of importance, the assurance from his father that he qualified for so manly a mission no less than ever and had his fathers confidence. Something of this same psychology may also, of course, have been behind what he wrote to Teedie from Liverpool, though in that instance, one senses that he did in truth need the boys help and was counting on him.

  Whatever his reasons, the directive evoked a heartrending response from his distant and obviously very heartsick second son.

  Dear Old Governor—for I will call you that not in public but in private for it does seem to suit you, you splendid man, just my ideal. . . My darling Father you have made me a companion and a very happy one. I don’t believe there is any boy that has had as happy and free of care life as I have had.

  Oh, Father, will you ever think me a “noble boy”? You are right about Teedie, he is one and no mistake, a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. If you ever see me not stand by Thee you may know I am entirely changed. No, Father, I am not likely to desert a fellow I love as I do my brother, even you don’t know what a good noble boy he is and what a splendid man he is going to be as I do. No, I love him, love him very very dearly and will never desert him and if I know him he will never desert me.

  Father, my own dear Father, God bless you and help me to be a good boy and worthy of you, goodbye.

  Your Son.

  [P.S.] This sounds foolish on looking over it, but you touched me when you said always to stand by Thee in your letter.

  Elliot’s closest friend by now was a cousin once removed, Archibald Gracie, and from the time Cousin Archie had been sent off to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, Elliott had been begging that he be allowed to go also. The following summer (1875) Theodore consented. But only weeks after arriving, the boy was stricken, first by nearly paralyzing homesicknesses, then by the most severe attacks to date.

  “Yesterday, during my Latin lesson, without the slightest warning, I had a bad rush of blood to my head,” he wrote his father in a letter marked Private; “it hurt me so [much] that I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out . . .

  “Don’t forget me please and write often,” he added.

  By December he was in no condition to remain. “Poor Ellie Roosevelt has had to leave on account of his health,” Archie Gracie wrote. “He has ’ever been subject to a rush of blood to his head’ and while up here exerted himself too much both physically and mentally. He studied hard and late. One day he fainted just after leaving the table and fell down. . . . His brother came up to take him home.”

  That Theodore chose to respond as he did should come as no surprise. He had been warned to keep the boy from excitement, a quiet life in the country was what the doctor
in England had advised, but he did exactly the opposite. Ellie was packed off to the wilds of central Texas, to “rough it” on an army post, Fort McKavett, where the officer staff included several friends of Theodore’s from the war years. The decision was made at once and Ellie was on his way, accompanied yet again by Dr. Metcalfe, who appears to have gone more for the promise of sport and adventure than out of any great concern for his patient.

  “Do you know, Father, it strikes me it’s just a sell my being down here,” the boy wrote during a stop at Houston: “it’s a very pleasant one but a sell nevertheless, for I feel well enough to study and instead here am I spending all your money down here as if I was ill, I don’t believe I will ever be ‘weller’ than I am; it’s rather late to think of this but the Dr. evidently don’t think I’m sick and I am not, and altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying.”

  So it was Ellie, not his brother, who went first to try the great elixir of life in the West, who became the true-life Mayne Reid kind of boy-hunter on the prairie. The letters he wrote of his adventures were quite amazing—long, spirited, and wonderfully well written, disclosing his own full-hearted love of the hunt and the great outdoors (not to mention his own obvious appreciation for the Mayne Reid style). His brother was held spellbound. And it is hard to imagine Mittie and Theodore being anything but pleased and proud.

  As time passed he wrote of “fearfully cold” nights about the campfire, of long days in the saddle and keeping company with “rough-looking chaps.”

  I have not taken a drink or a smoke [he also reported to his father], but I do want to do the latter very much, I don’t care how much you laugh and I can see you do it just as plainly as you did that night in the study. It seemed rather hard at first to say “I never drink” or “I never smoke,” when asked about every five minutes of the day, for the young officers have unfortunately no way of spending their time but in one of the two of those employments, but it was a very difficult thing to do.

  He was enjoying Texas “just as much as anyone ever enjoyed anything.” He slept one night on the floor of a log hut, sharing a blanket with a real “cowboy from way out west” and using a dog for a pillow, “partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bedfellow.” It was all Teedie had ever dreamed of and the letters kept coming. Elliott’s health was perfectly fine and Theodore, who so recently wondered how he would ever get back to active life again, had embarked already on a new adventure of his own in politics.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Moral Effect

  1

  POLITICAL REFORM and the Roosevelt name had already been joined in the public mind well before Theodore took up the cause in 1876. Brother Robert had in fact become one of New York’s more celebrated champions of reform, albeit in a style quite his own and as one of “the other” party. Having happily accepted Tammany backing in his bid for Congress in 1870, Robert had turned on the notorious William Tweed in dramatic fashion less than a year later, in September 1871, the summer CVS died. He had denounced Tweed and Tammany electioneering tactics in a fiery speech at a mass meeting at Cooper Union, saying at one point that anyone caught tampering with a ballot box deserved to be shot on sight. Afterward, he served on the famous Committee of Seventy in its assault on Tweed, and once Tweed fell, Robert was looked upon as one of those distinguished few gentlemen-Democrats, figures of wealth and position, of whom New Yorkers could be most proud. He was commonly mentioned in the same breath with such reform Democrats as Abram Hewitt and the present governor, Samuel Tilden. He held no office any longer, but with his writing and after-dinner speaking, he kept himself in the forefront. While Theodore went about his philanthropy in his quiet way, Robert called for government action to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. In angry letters to the New York papers, he warned of uprisings unless something was done. People were starving, he said. “Let us try some plan and convince the poor that we have the blood of civilized men in our veins.” He called for the city to mount a program of public works, to give men jobs on the city payroll building docks and paving streets; and he was immediately denounced as a well-meaning fool. (”Absolutely the only protection which we can have against the dangerous tendency of laborers to crowd into large cities,” answered the Tribune, “is the sure punishment which nature brings, in want of work, suffering or starvation. If a workman is wise he will quit a city whenever he finds no employment, as he would quit a house infested with fatal disease.”)

  Robert, too, of late, like Theodore, had been living in style, in a country house on Long Island, but at Sayville, on the South Shore, well separated from the other Roosevelts at Oyster Bay.

  As it had taken Tweed to bestir the Democrat Robert into righteous wrath, so it took the scandalous Grant regime to inspire the Republican Theodore to join the great Republican reform crusade of 1876. The idea was to rescue the party from the hands of the professionals, which was no new idea in American politics certainly; nor did Theodore’s part call for any particular courage or personal sacrifice. Still, it was an experience of a kind he had not had before, and as with everything else he ever did, he entered wholeheartedly, certain the crusade was just, and thoroughly innocent, by all appearances, as to where it might be taking him. Brother Robert, from what may be seen in some of his private political correspondence, was seldom if ever innocent about anything, but now there were two Roosevelts having their say in their different ways. Theodore knew and admired the people leading the Republican reform movement; he enjoyed their company, enjoyed their obvious high regard for him. Mittie, it appears, thought little of such doings, but things seemed to follow very naturally, and before he knew it, Theodore was off to Cincinnati to his first convention.

  At the head of the crusade were Senator Carl Schurz and George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s Weekly, two lifelong battlers for liberal reform—women’s rights, civil service reform—and true Lincoln Republicans, which was what Theodore liked to call himself. Curtis was the one Theodore knew best, a tidy, erudite man much in the Emerson mold, silver-haired and priestly. In his youth he had helped build Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond, and a novel he wrote in the 1850s, a satire on New York society called The Potiphar Papers, was high among Theodore’s favorite books. Curtis, above all, was a moralist. He had made a career of preaching the public—political—duty of “the educated class.” (”While good men sit at home, not knowing that there is anything to be done, not caring to know; cultivating a feeling that politics are tiresome and dirty, and politicians vulgar bullies and bravoes; half persuaded that a republic is the contemptible rule of a mob, and secretly longing for a splendid and vigorous despotism—then remember it is not a government mastered by ignorance, it is a government betrayed by intelligence.”) He was totally sincere, highly influential, and not without political ambition of his own; he saw in Theodore, as he later said, the living example of what he preached. Theodore Roosevelt “walked these streets the image and figure of the citizen which every American should hope to be,” he would say. They were never close friends. They knew each other at the Union League and the Century, saw each other socially, on occasion. “I knew,” said Curtis, “that we thought alike in all the great interests of society.”

  The light had failed in Washington, in the second term of Ulysses S. Grant. A country in the grip of hard times was confronted with thievery and fraud in nearly every department of the federal government, including the Presidents own staff. Scandal had followed scandal. A Secretary of the Navy had somehow profited by $300,000 beyond his apparent income. A giant Whiskey Ring had robbed the Treasury of an estimated $4 million. From Boston, Charles Francis Adams warned that unless strong action was taken the entire political system could collapse, and he was deadly serious as only an Adams could be.

  When a Republican Reform Club was organized at the Union League at the start of the new year, Theodore joined at once and was soon looked to for leadership. In February, Adams’ son Professor Henry Adams of Harvard put out a call for a s
pecial conference of reformers, a very high-toned affair, he stressed, to be held in New York in advance of the national conventions. It was to be by invitation only, “for about 200 of the most weighty and reliable of our friends.” And when the conference got down to business at the Fifth Avenue Hotel the afternoon of May 15, Theodore was among those prominently mentioned to indicate how “weighty and reliable” a group it was. Others included Theodore Dwight Woolsey, former president of Yale, E. L. Godkin of The Nation, Frederick Law Olmsted, Brooks Adams, William Graham Sumner, Mark Hopkins, New York’s two most esteemed ancients, William Cullen Bryant and Peter Cooper, and the very young Henry Cabot Lodge of Boston, who, as secretary of the meeting, did most of the work. Nothing of consequence was accomplished—“Oh, they reenacted the moral law and the Ten Commandments for a platform, and have demanded an angel of light for President,” said a Tammany observer—nonetheless, it was as important a gathering of truly distinguished citizens as New York had seen in a long time, and if they took themselves a little too seriously as the “saving element” in politics, so too did many others. One out-of-town reporter, picking his way past the potted palms in the lobby of the hotel, observed for his readers, “Men whose names ring through the country and round the world were to be encountered at every step through the crowd, and upon every face not familiar was the plain stamp of intelligence and character.”

  General Grant was himself the issue no longer, since by this time he had declined to run again. He wanted a third term, Grant said, no more than he had wanted a first and no one doubted that he meant it. What loomed now was an even more worrisome prospect, the candidacy of Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, a man of Theodore’s own generation, who was among the most fascinating, outrageous men of the era and the one Republican against whom every reformer could gladly join ranks. Conkling, a Stalwart (one steadfastly loyal to Grant), was considerably larger than life—tall, beautiful, enormously talented in the art of politics—and in the eyes of the “saving element,” evil incarnate. From the moment he let his presidential aspirations be known, there seemed to be a smell of brimstone in the air. Schurz, addressing the Fifth Avenue Conference, declared unequivocally that no machine politician could ever be the Republican standard-bearer, however brilliant he might be. And by the time he departed for the Republican National Convention, at the head of a sixty-man reform delegation, Theodore had instructions to “fight Conkling at all events.”