David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  The great reformation of physique to which he had devoted so many hours would have been judged a flat failure by anybody unfamiliar with the circumstances. A classmate named Richard Welling, seeing him for the first time during a workout at the Harvard gym, could hardly believe his eyes. He confronted, Welling said, a “youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development” who was standing between two upright poles, gripping them with both hands and swaying forward and back, rising nicely on tiptoe at each forward thrust. “What a humble-minded chap this must be,” Welling thought, “to be willing to give such a ladylike exhibition in a public place.”

  In a “Sporting Calendar” that he had kept at Oyster Bay the summer of 1875, it is recorded that he could do the hundred-yard dash in 12.25 seconds, broad-jump 13 feet, and clear the bar in the pole vault at 5 feet 8.5 inches—in all nothing very special for a boy of his age, but apparently better than his cousins could do and attainments of much pride to him. His health, though unquestionably improved over what it had been earlier, was still a worry and a burden. He was no more a model of good health than he was a strapping physical specimen. His health, like his physique, was impressive only in contrast to what it had been. Some of his sieges of colic, his headaches, the vomiting and diarrhea (his dreaded cholera morbus), appear to have been quite serious. In March, preparing for the Harvard examinations, he worried that he “lost so much time in my studies through sickness.” And after he had been accepted at Harvard, it was decided that for reasons of health he could not possibly live among other students in one of the dormitories. He was to have private rooms of his own and no roommate. Bamie—Bamie “the Major Generaless,” as Ellie called her—was sent on in advance to Cambridge that summer to find suitable quarters off campus. She chose his furniture, had the rooms painted, papered, saw that there was coal for the fireplace.

  Except for the time in Dresden, he had never lived apart from the family, and even at Dresden he had Ellie and Conie with him, two cousins and an adoring aunt nearby, and lived with a German family. Harvard was to be his first solo venture into the world, as his father said, and the fact that his father had such faith in him probably counted for more than anything else. “As I saw the last of the train bearing you away,” Theodore wrote, “. . . I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I could place perfect trust and confidence . . .”

  His preparation for Harvard under Arthur Cutler had been rigorous. The hardest work had been in mathematics, which was Cutler’s specialty and the subject in which he himself was most obviously deficient. In two years he had accomplished what would normally have taken three and did well on the entrance exams, but like so much else in his life, his tutoring had all been custom-tailored for him and experienced in the privacy of his own home. He was in all things still—in all save his imagination—”a great little home-boy,” as Bamie called him. He had never faced a real professor. He knew little about academic competition, to say nothing of the unwritten rules by which classmates determine who the good fellows are. Most freshmen could count on a certain number of ready-made friends from previous schools, and those from the Boston area—the great majority of the class—were already soaked in Harvard custom and tradition. He came knowing one other boy and that one not very well—John Lamson, of the family that had helped Bamie get out of France the summer of 1870. He apparently had never seen Harvard, knew nothing of Cambridge until the night he found his way to Number 16 Winthrop Street and the rooms Bamie had arranged on the second floor.

  The picture we get from his summers at Oyster Bay is of a slight, tousled boy browned by the sun, clothes in disarray, who could barely keep still. As the tutor Cutler would write proudly in remembrance, “the young man never seemed to know what idleness was.” The collecting continued in earnest. (”At present I am writing in a rather smelly room,” he tells Bamie, “as the fresh skins of six night herons are reposing on the table beside me.”) He was busy with his field notes and scientific essays, including one remarkable composition titled “Blarina talpoides (Short-Tailed Shrew),” which appears to have been written sometime shortly before he left for Harvard. He had captured a male shrew and kept it in a wire cage for study, feeding it insects at first, then a live mouse, which the tiny shrew instantly attacked and killed. Fascinated by such ferocity in something so very small, the boy then put in a garter snake.

  It did not attack at once as with the mouse [he observed] but cautiously smelt his foe . . . then with a jump the shrew seized it, low down quite near the tail. The snake at once twisted itself right across the shrews head and under one paw, upsetting him; but he recovered himself at once and before the snake could escape flung himself on it again and this time seized it by the back of the neck, placing one paw against the head and the other on the neck, and pushing the body from him while he tore it with his sharp teeth. The snake writhed and twisted, but it was of no use, for his neck was very soon more than half eaten through and during the next twenty-four hours he was entirely devoured.

  “Certainly a more bloodthirsty animal of its size I never saw,” he wrote in wonder.

  Socially he was generally ill at ease. With girls of his own age he could act theatrically superior—Fanny Smith would recall how he tapped her lightly on the top of her head with his riding crop—or become painfully shy and self-deprecating. At such times he would talk pointedly of Ellie’s superior attainments. Yet he rarely missed a chance to show off, with his shotgun or his memory for things he had read. As Fanny Smith observed, the summer before he left for Harvard, “If I were writing to Theodore I would have to say something of this kind, ‘I have enjoyed Plutarch’s last essay on the philosophy of Diogenes excessively.’”

  To family and servants he was young lord of the manor, father’s “noble boy,” and in spirit he hungered for visions of noble quests and high valor. The Saga of King Olaf, the Longfellow epic, had been discovered and devoured by now. He adored The Song of Roland, read and reread the whole of the Nibelungenlied, taking it all very much to heart.

  Another Oyster Bay youngster, Walt McDougall, later a well-known political cartoonist, remembered him as studious, nervous, and “somewhat supercilious besides.” But Fanny Smith confided to her diary that he was “such fun, the most original boy I ever knew,” and a lifetime later she would remember how, at formal dinners, she dreaded being seated next to him for fear he would get her laughing so uncontrollably she would have to leave the table.

  The limits of his social world had been defined by Oyster Bay summers and the Monday dancing classes in New York under a dancing master named Dodsworth. The “ladies” at these sessions were only those of whom Mittie approved, naturally, and if anything, his own concern over decorum seems to have been greater than hers. Besides Fanny Smith his “great favorites” were Annie Murray, whom he judged both pretty and “singularly sweet,” and Edith Carow, for whom he had lately named his rowboat. When Edith “dresses well,” he observed, “and don’t frizzle her hair, [she] is a very pretty girl.” Fanny, he judged pure, religious, bright, well read, “and I think a true friend.” “The dancing class went off very well,” he noted one evening, “and was very orderly except that Mr. Dodsworth once had to stop the ladies from talking.”

  Any expressions of endearment, however, were reserved for his “Darling Motherling,” as he and Ellie had begun calling her, and for Conie, now fifteen and flirtatious, who adored parties and to moon with him over “serious” poetry. Her health, like his, remained “delicate.” She was “Baby Conie” or “Little Pet Pussie,” a nickname in fashion among their “set” (Edith Jones, the future Edith Wharton, was another Pussie). They shared eager “intimacies” and in private correspondence with her, as with his mother, he could slip into a cloying baby-love-talk that no one in that pre-Freudian household thought a thing of. “Little Pet Pussie,” he would write from Harvard, “I want to pet you again awfully! You cunning, pretty, little, foolish Puss. My easy chair would just hold myself and Pussie.”

  In the first lett
er he wrote to Mittie from Harvard, he told her how he had put her picture on his mantelpiece, “where I can always see Motherling.” He emphasized how “cosy” everything was, with a bright coal fire burning in the grate. “The table is almost too handsome, and I do not know whether to admire most the curtains, the paper or the carpet.”

  His tone with her was very different from what it was with his father. With Father he must measure up, show the progress he was making along approved paths. But with Mittie, or with Conie, he could relax, ramble, even be “frivolous,” sounding at times very much the mama’s boy, or somebody’s parody of a preposterous little Harvard snob. He had been “down to New Haven” to see the Harvard football team play Yale; Harvard had lost, he explained to his mother, “principally because our opponents played very foul.” Yale was not at all to his taste. “The fellows too seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours.”

  He tells her he is wearing her slippers, “which remind me of you all the time.”

  In pursuing his new social career, he wished all at home to know, he was choosing his acquaintances exclusively from the “gentleman sort” and it was slow going, since he knew so little of anyone’s “antecedents.” “On this very account, I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”

  Then, to his amazement, he discovered that numbers of his classmates had come to Harvard with no intention of getting an education. John Lamson, he reported indignantly, was there only to enjoy himself.

  “Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies,” the elder Theodore wrote.

  They all wrote to him, the letters going off at a rate of two, three, sometimes four a week. One from Liverpool from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch touched him so that it was all he could do to keep from weeping. Like his father, he reserved Sundays for correspondence. “Sundays I have all to myself, as most of the fellows are in Boston on that day. . . . Our ideas as to how it should be spent . . . are decidedly different ...” They must understand that he was not in the least homesick. Ignoring the countless nights he had suffered from asthma, forgetting the fears and loneliness and terrible feelings of inferiority he had lived with for as long as he could remember, he told his Beloved Motherling: “It seems perfectly wonderful, in looking back over my eighteen years of existence to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault! When I think of this, and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am), I feel that I have an immense amount to be thankful for.” To Theodore he wrote, “I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am sure that there is no one who has a father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine.... I do not find it nearly so hard as I expected not to drink and smoke . . .”

  He was signing himself Thee, Jr., or Theodore, or, as time passed, Ted or Teddy or Tedo. He seemed not to know what he should be called.

  On October 27, from Philadelphia, where he had gone to see the Centennial Exposition, his father wrote as follows, addressing him as Theodore:

  I must write a few lines to my oldest boy on his eighteenth birthday. I cannot realize that you really are so old, and still it is a great comfort to find that you are approaching mans estate. I have worked pretty hard all my life and anticipate passing over to you many of my responsibilities as soon as your shoulders are broad enough to bear them. It has always seemed to me as if there was something peculiarly pleasant in the relations between a father and a son, the enjoyment of the father is so great as he cares for the boy and sees him gradually become a reasoning being, his mind and his physique both developing under his care and training, and above all his religious views becoming more fixed. As he approaches manhood the boy enjoys relieving the father of first the responsibilities which he has borne until that time, and those cares prepare the boy to take the fathers place in the great battle of life.

  We have both been fortunate so far and have much cause for thankfulness to that one who has guarded and made our lives so much more happy than those of the many by whom we are surrounded. Indeed, it seems strange how few great sorrows I have been called upon to bear and you scarce one.

  He wanted the boy to send him a complete description of his daily routine. How much exercise was he getting and of what sort? Did he find he was keeping up his health as well as at home?

  The wonder was his health had never been better. It was quite the most remarkable development since leaving home. He was “in beautiful health,” he exclaimed to Mittie after having been away nearly two months; and he added confidently, “I do not think I shall have any difficulty at all on that score ...” His eyes had bothered him a little, but it was nothing to worry about. Most amazing of all, his asthma had disappeared. There had not been a sign of it since leaving home. Nor would there be that entire freshman fall, other than a brief flare-up in November, on the eve of his return for Thanksgiving, but it was so slight an attack that he never bothered to mention it until weeks afterward. To Bamie, at the time, he said it would be mistaken to picture him in anything other than perfect health, “entirely free of asthma,” and without a worry. His real troubles, he said, were math and “my rug, which will curl up at the edges, although I devote a half hour every day to stamping it back into shape.”

  Not even a typically miserable, raw Cambridge winter set him back. Cambridge in January and February might have been a health resort, to judge by the state of his health. He wanted the name of a doctor, “in case of accidents,” and through Professor Henry Adams was put in touch with a local man, Dr. Morrill Wyman—an interesting choice, since Dr. Wyman happened to be a leading specialist in pulmonary ailments—but all he was ever treated for was a mild case of measles, a condition he found amusing.

  His health was good, his outlook was good. There was too much going on to leave time even to be homesick, he wrote in February. “I have been very much astonished at this, and also at my good health. Excepting a little asthma in November, I have not been sick at all.”

  The picture that emerges, sketchy as it may be, is of an almost miraculous transformation, an improvement of the kind often seen among present-day asthmatic children who are treated by removing them temporarily from their home lives and environments. Away from his family for the first time, he had a year of health like none he had ever known. He was “astonished.”

  There was to be a misconception in later years that he conquered his childhood infirmities mainly through will power and body building, that he rid himself of asthma by making himself a strong man. But that is not quite the way it happened. First of all, he never would be rid of asthma entirely, and if there was a point at which he clearly found reprieve from suffering of the kind he had known, it came well before he attained anything like rugged manhood. It came when he went to Harvard, when he left home and was on his own in ways he had never been.

  Returning to New York for the Christmas holidays, he sported a new beaver hat, a cane, and “English” side-whiskers. Several classmates came on for the New York parties—the first guests of his own choosing to be brought into the house. Mittie and Theodore put on a party in his honor. “We all like his friends so much,” reported Aunt Annie to Elliott, who was back in Texas for more Wild West therapy. “They seem to be such manly gentlemen. . . . Teedie is a lovely boy . . .”

  His last day home he spent sleighing in the park with his father. The snow and the day were perfect, the horses in peak condition. “He went off most cheerfully to Cambridge again,” Theodore wrote. “He has had a glorious time . . .”

  At Cambridge, he came suddenly to life socially. He was being asked to friends’ homes for dinner. He wrote now of an assembly dance at Brookline, of a sleighing party with “forty girls and fellows, and two matrons in one huge sleigh. . . . dragged by our eight horses rapidly through a great many of the pretty little towns which form the suburbs of Boston.” Another dance at Dorchester was “quite a sw
ell affair.” He was playing cards, drinking coffee, taking dancing lessons. A Miss Wheelright, a Miss Richardson, a Miss Andrews, and a Miss Fisk began to appear in his letters. He was having a “pretty gay time” and happened also to be needing some money. A hundred dollars ought to do, he thought, though “by rights” it should be more. (A year at Harvard then could cost anywhere from about $500 to $1,500, depending on the style in which the student chose to live. The average was about $800. But for this first year the elder Theodore would pay $1,600—or roughly $17,000 in present-day money—and it was to be the boys most economical year of the four.)

  He and another boy, Henry Minot, were already planning a collecting trip to the Adirondacks once classes ended in June. Henry Minot was his one close friend, the son of a prominent Boston family (the “antecedents” were quite acceptable), who, at seventeen, had already published a book on New England birds. He would bring Henry home one day, he wrote in a long letter to Mittie and Theodore; he was sure they would approve.

  By the way, as the time when birds are beginning to come back is approaching, I wish you would send on my gun, with all the cartridges you can find and my various apparatus for cleaning, loading it, etc. Also send on a dozen glass jars, with their rubbers and stoppers (which you will find in my museum), and a German dictionary, if you have one.

  He was in a world of his own, absorbed, bookish, happy. He had a manservant to black his boots and light his fire in the morning. A large black woman looked after his laundry. To please his father he began teaching Sunday school at Christ Church, opposite the town common, just outside Harvard Yard. Of Cambridge life in general, however, he cared nothing. Of the whole workaday world, or those happenings that filled the newspapers, he appears to have been oblivious. That fall, just before the national elections—if we are to believe the reminiscences of one or two classmates—he had marched in a demonstration for Rutherford B. Hayes. It was supposedly his first show of political interest and he is described responding with characteristic, theatrical anger, fists thrashing in the air, when a potato came flying from an upstairs window. But his own letters from that freshman year contain no mention of such an event, no mention of politics or of the election and its bizarre outcome—which is odd mainly in view of how greatly such events filled the thoughts of his beloved father.