Theodore, his cousin Maud Elliott had once observed, “always thought that he could do things better than anyone else.” But the impression is more of somebody who wants to prove, who must prove, he could do things better than anyone else.
Of course, one had to maintain a certain perspective. All rivals were not equal. Writing Bamie about his academic record the fall of his senior year, he put the matter succinctly and, apparently, in total seriousness.
“I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows,” he said. “Only one gentleman stands ahead of me.”
The memory of his father could still leave him “desolate and heartsore.” Those lone spells of brooding, however, the painful diary entries, were far fewer now, confined almost exclusively to special or commemorative calendar days—the eve of departure for Christmas vacation, an anniversary of his father’s death, or his own birthday.
“Oh, how little worthy I am of such a father,” reads the most anguished of such passages in the diary from his junior year. “I feel such a hopeless sense of inferiority to him; I loved him so.... But with the help of God I shall try to lead such a life as he would have wished, and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very . . .”
The next page, consisting of seven lines, has been carefully blotted out in heavy black ink. Apparently, he had gotten drunk again, or was still sorely distraught over what had happened the night of the Porcellian initiation. For under laboratory conditions, by back-lighting the page, it has been possible to determine two and a half lines of the seven he chose to censor: “angry with myself for having gotten tight when . . .”
“May God help me to live as he would have wished,” he repeats one more time, this in his senior year, as he turns twenty-one.
Morally, he had tied himself to the mast. He did not smoke—and never would—and he remained preeminently “pure,” as he said. He abhorred foul language, and humor smacking of what he called smut. One expression of righteous indignation to be found in the diary, this on the news that Cousin Cornelius had married a French actress, might be a line from an English drawing-room farce: “He is a disgrace to the family—the vulgar brute.”
The Sunday-school classes at Christ Church continued regularly each week for a total of three and a half years. He quit only in January of his senior year when it was discovered that he was a Presbyterian, not an Episcopalian. He must either join the church, he was informed by the rector, or go.
“I told the clergyman I thought him rather narrow-minded,” he wrote Mittie. He then started teaching a mission class in the poorest section of Cambridge.
His health was superb, better even than during the first two years. Apparently he had but one bout with asthma all his junior year and none his senior year.
The attack during his junior year had again coincided with a trip to Maine, another arduous hunting expedition like the one before, again under the guidance of Bill Sewall, only this time in the dead of a Maine winter. “The first two or three days I had asthma,” he reported to his mother, “but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into [the logging] camp.” Beyond that he said no more on the subject. It was his joy in the wilds that he wanted to share with her. He had never beheld anything so beautiful as the Maine woods in winter. He had killed a buck and trapped a lynx, he also told her proudly.
He was a steadfast correspondent, certainly, however busy he was, and as he liked to remind those at home, writing was slow work for him. The words never came easily, a letter always took more time than they would ever suppose. His longest letters were to his “own sweet Motherling” and he signed himself now as his father had, as Thee.
Of the world at large, of events in the daily papers, he apparently thought no more than in previous years. The one odd note was a passing remark in an eight-page letter to Mittie written early in his junior year. He was enjoying especially Dunbar’s lectures in political economy, as well as Palmer’s course in metaphysics. These, he wrote, were even more interesting than his natural-history courses.
3
Long afterward, looking back, he would say he had left Harvard little prepared for “the big world.” He thought what he had learned at Harvard of considerably less value than what he had learned at home. Further, he blamed Harvard for killing the old boyhood dream of a career in science. The emphasis, he said, had been entirely wrong for him, almost exclusively on laboratory work and the minutiae of biology, none of which appealed. (”I had no more desire or ability to be a microscopist and section-cutter than to be a mathematician.”) Had Harvard encouraged the active life of a field naturalist, a career like those of his boyhood heroes—Audubon, Baird—things might have gone differently, he implied.
On the surface this would seem a sad and ironic commentary and especially if, as appears, Harvard had been chosen in the first place for its strength in the natural sciences. But there is little reason to believe that the young man at Harvard would have given anything like the same explanation, had he been asked. To judge again by what he said in the diary, he enjoyed particularly the time in the laboratory; and if grades are a fair index, it was in the sciences that he did his very best work at Harvard, scoring in the 90s in three of his four science courses in his junior and senior years, and an 89 in the fourth.
His boyhood dream, he later charged, had been the victim of a “total failure” on the part of the science department “to understand the great variety of kinds of work that could be done by naturalists, including what could be done by outdoor naturalists.” Yet a more outgoing outdoor naturalist, a more inspirational teacher than Nathaniel Southgate Shaler would have been extremely difficult to find. Shaler was the antithesis of the laboratory recluse and Shaler was the dominant spirit of the Natural History Department, which had all of three professors. His geology field trips were famous. (”If he hears you call him old man,” said a student, “he’ll walk your damned legs off.”) Reporters sometimes went along to describe the experience—the huge love of nature he exuded, his humor and unending intellectual enthusiasm. In the Agassiz tradition Shaler was “thoroughly human”; he wrote, he traveled, he was refreshingly outspoken. “He was much like what Roosevelt later became,” remembered President Eliot, “very energetic and large hearted.”
Indeed, every sign is that the boyhood vision of a lifework in natural history faded for Theodore in spite of the way science was taught at Harvard, rather than as a consequence. Not even Shaler could hold him. The fact that he had no praise for Shaler in later years, no Shaler stories of the kind so many of his contemporaries told, may not mean much, since he was often to be silent on people who had mattered in his life, and particularly, it would seem, if he felt they had somehow abandoned him, or he had abandoned them. The only Harvard professor he was to remember fondly, A. S. Hill, in the English Department, was also the only one he was known to have openly disliked as an undergraduate.
The fairest judgment seems to be that he had found other interests—such as the Dunbar lectures and Alice Lee. If Harvard failed him, or let him down, it was in other ways.
He never found any real intellectual excitement there, for all his good grades. He was never inspired to reach or push himself academically. At no point did he churn with intellectual curiosity or excitement. He was conscientious about his work and could give it all his concentration when need be. Like his father, he had the power of being “focused,” and because of this—and because he very carefully organized his time—he gave the impression of working relatively little. Richard Saltonstall, for one, was under the impression that he was pretty much coasting.
When President Eliot was asked long afterward if there was anything he could say as to the influence of Harvard on Theodore, he responded “No.” Eliot’s recollection of Theodore as an undergraduate was vague. He could recall only a “feeble” youth with prominent teeth, a boy who probably read a good deal but never got “to the bottom of things.”
He had had no real contact with Eliot, as almost n
o one did. William James, from whom he had taken anatomy in his sophomore year, made no apparent impression. The names of Emerson or Dana or Parkman fail to appear anywhere in his letters and diaries. Also, for someone supposedly enthralled by the works of Longfellow—someone so deeply moved by the heroic theme of King Olaf— it seems odd that he never reports sighting the Great Man himself, or makes any effort to go see him.
Nor, as time would tell, did Harvard provide him with any lasting male friendships. He was never anything but proud of his Harvard affiliations. He liked being known as a Harvard man. He would return for reunions. He would report dutifully on his career for class biographies and recall with conspicuous pride—and, on occasion, with something less than strict regard for the truth—his various undergraduate accomplishments. He would claim, for example, to have held Harvard’s lightweight boxing crown; and in describing his academic record, he would remember finishing in the top ten percent of his class, which was also inaccurate, since at graduation he stood number 21 out of 171.
Of his Porcellian connection he was proudest of all. The day would come when, in a letter from Washington, he would inform Kaiser Wilhelm II of the engagement of his daughter Alice, his own firstborn, and include the wonderful news that it was to be a match with a Porcellian man.
But his Harvard friendships were to become peripheral very rapidly. Except for Henry Minot, the departed friend from his freshman year, he had found no one with whom he shared common interests, beyond the social or athletic. Years later, having interviewed a number of those who had known him best, another Harvard man, the writer Hermann Hagedorn, would conclude that Theodore must have been lonely as an undergraduate. Several said they thought he had had few real friends. “I have discovered no one who was intimate with him and few who were sympathetic,” Hagedorn noted privately. “Most of his classmates simply did not like him,” he was told by Mrs. Robert Bacon.
It is certain, however, that Theodore had an extremely good time at Harvard, just as he remembered. When, midway through his junior year, he writes, “Truly these are the golden years of my life,” he means every word. He “can’t conceive of a fellow possibly enjoying himself more.” “I doubt I shall ever enjoy myself as much again” is the emphatic declaration as his junior year ends. If he knew others thought him peculiar or “bumptious,” as one professor said, he never let on.
For Mittie, in the fall of his senior year, he provided this memorable social log:
Cambridge, October 20, 1879
DARLING MOTHERLING,
I have just returned from spending Sunday with the Guilds, cousins of Harry Shaw, who live out at Forest Hills near the Minots. I drove over there in my cart, and the ride home this morning was delicious. Yesterday (Sunday) Harry Guild and I drove over to the Whitneys’ to take tea.
Last Monday I drove Jack Tebbets over to call on the Miss Bacons, who are very nice girls. Wednesday I dined at the Lees’, and spent the loveliest kind of an evening with Rosy, Alice, and Rose. The two girls [Bamie and Corinne] must come on to Boston next month if only to see Chestnut Hill; and, by Jove, I shall be awfully disappointed if they don’t like it. Mamie Saltonstall’s birthday was on Friday; I gave her a small silver fan chain. Saturday I spent all the morning playing tennis with the two Miss Lanes; I forgot to say that on Thursday they took Dick and myself to call on the Chinese professor. We had a most absurd visit.
This afternoon I am going to drive Van Rensselaer over to Chestnut Hill; tomorrow he and I take tea and spend the evening at the Lanes’. Wednesday Harry Shaw and I give a small opera party to Mr. and Mrs. Saltonstall, Rose, and Alice. Thursday six of us—Harry Shaw, Jack Tebbets, Minot Weld, Dick Saltonstall, Harry Chapin, and myself—are going to take a four-in-hand and drive up to Frank Codman’s farm, where we will spend the day, shooting glass balls, etc.
He did have fun, time after time. And he did fall in love, head over heels.
“I have certainly lived like a prince for my last two years in college,” he begins one of the most candid and heartfelt entries in the diary, a summing up written shortly after graduation.
I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home; I have had but little work, only enough to give me an occupation, and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together, I have won the sweetest of girls for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.
He counted himself a success, and that too was an altogether new feeling.
CHAPTER TEN
Especially Pretty Alice
1
THEY MET THE FIRST TIME on October 18,1878, which is to say they met early that same heady autumn of Theodore’s junior year when suddenly everything seemed to be going so right for him. He had his “burst of popularity” and found the girl of his dreams, his “‘rare and radiant maiden,’” all within about ten days.
The eighteenth was a Friday. Classes were over for the week and in the afternoon Dick Saltonstall had driven him out to Chestnut Hill in a buggy to meet his family and spend the weekend. It was a ride of only six miles, but through open country most of the way, hills brilliant with fall color, and Theodore’s first impression, almost from the hour they arrived, was of coming home.
The two great neighboring homesteads of the Saltonstalls and the Lees might have been Oyster Bay mansions and the two large, active families into which he was at once gathered might have been Roosevelts.
The houses were within calling distance of each other, about fifty yards distant, with hayfields and orchards and woodland falling away down the hillside. A connecting path ran from the Saltonstall back door on a gradual uphill slope to the Lee place, past the Saltonstall barn. The Saltonstalls faced east, the Lees south; but the houses were of the same vintage and much the same in scale and appearance—huge and Victorian, with clapboard siding and an endless number of windows, high porches, high, peaked gables, tremendous red-brick chimneys, and long kitchen wings. The kitchen alone at the Saltonstalls’ was as big as a barn (quite large enough to serve as an additional Saltonstall dwelling, years later, when it was cut off and removed from the main house). And the Lee house was larger even than the Saltonstalls’.
Leverett Saltonstall, Dick’s father, and George Cabot Lee, the father of Theodore’s heart’s desire, were two wealthy, important, middle-aged Bostonians, dignified, good friends, brothers-in-law, and as steeped in Harvard as one could possibly be. (Leverett had been in the Class of 1848; George, in the Class of 1850.) Leverett, an attorney, had given up his regular practice to dabble in one thing and another, including politics; George was a Lee of Lee, Higginson and Company, the Boston banking and investment firm. Indeed, there was no more exemplary figure of good, old, Boston financial stability than George Lee, he being the keeper of the famous vaults at Lee, Higginson. Another of the firm, Colonel Henry Lee, some fifteen years before had hit upon the idea of a safe-deposit vault beneath the State Street headquarters, the first such vault in the country, but George had become its manager. A small, compact man with a high forehead, high color, and a white mustache, he was known to be “prudent, assiduous, a lover of detail,” a little gruff in manner but kindly withal, and totally reliable. To have your money securely invested, in the Boston vernacular of that day, was to be “as safe as Lee’s vaults.”
They were men certainly of whom the elder Theodore would have approved. The one notable difference in their outlook and his was political, since both were Democrats, and Saltonstall, in particular, harbored bitter enmity toward almost all Republicans as a consequence of the 1876 election. Sent by the National Democratic Committee to witness the tally of disputed votes in Florida, he had seen the presidency being stolen before his eyes and refused ever to forget it.
Saltonstall’s wife was George Lee’s sister, Harriett Rose, which made the Saltonstall and
Lee children first cousins. Dick was the oldest of five Saltonstall children, followed by Rose, Mary, Phillip, and eight-year-old Endicott. Alice—Alice Hathaway—was the second of six Lee children, five girls and one boy. Rose, or Rosy, Lee was her older sister. Then followed Harriett, Caroline, Isabella, and George, who was nine. Their mother was Caroline Haskell Lee.
So together the two households comprised what amounted to one very large family of fifteen, and with five or six full-time servants for each house, with horses to ride, surrounding countryside to explore, fireplaces in every room for chill October nights, this was everything Theodore could have wished for, the whole atmosphere being “so homelike,” as he said.
Alice was seventeen. Theodore was nineteen, the same age his father had been when he first reached Roswell and found his Princess from Afar in another large country house on a hill. What Alice was wearing when he first saw her, whether they were at the Saltonstalls’ or the Lees’ house, or somewhere along the path between, we do not know; but as he told her later, she affected him in a way he had never experienced before. The feeling was instantaneous. He loved her, he later wrote, as soon as he saw her. And she was “my first love, too.”
She was, by every surviving account, extraordinarily attractive, slender, graceful in her movements, and “rather tall” for a girl of that era, five feet seven, which meant that with shoes on she was as tall as he. Her hair was a honey-blond and done in fashionable “water-curls” about her temples, in “the Josephine look.” Her eyes were extremely blue, her nose just slightly tilted. She is described repeatedly as “radiant,” “bright,” “cheerful,” “sunny,” “high-spirited,” “enchanting,” “full of life,” the same words one finds in descriptions of Mittie Bulloch at that age. She loved games, as Mittie did; she wore white; she was full of humor and flirtatious (”bewitching,” Theodore said); her birthday was in July, as Mittie’s was.
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