David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  “If you were my brother or cousin,” she explained to Douglas, “how freely I could say I love you dearly. That kind of love I give absolutely. . .”

  In time Elliott joined with Theodore and Douglas, Poultney Bigelow, and Cleveland Dodge (the son of William, Jr.) to start a New York Reform Club, the first meeting being held in the library at 57th Street. (”The respectable, educated, refined young men of this city should have more weight in public matters,” Theodore told a reporter somewhat pompously.) Elliott also joined Douglas and Archibald Russell in the real-estate business downtown at 106 Broadway. The firm was renamed Robinson, Russell, and Roosevelt, new stationery printed. So at twenty-two, Elliott appeared to be on his way in the world of serious affairs, his adventuring over.

  He lived at home, meantime. Indeed, having faced the beasts of the jungle, having seen and doubtless experienced more of the “big world” than any at home—or that they could have even imagined, one expects—he now found himself quartered at Mittie’s insistence in a small room just off hers, exactly as though he were a small boy in need of watching and mothering.

  She called him her “comfort child.” He was the son who had given her greatest solace and who, until his travels, had stayed closest to her. She adored him, openly, happily. She spoiled him. And he as openly welcomed her love and attention. “My special charge,” he called her, since his father sometime in his final agony had charged him to look after her.

  “Ah! Dear one, if you love me, your son, does he not love you?” he had written her from Madras. “I tell you yes, little Motherling, and so tenderly.” She was never to worry over a thing. “Tell me all, I have broad shoulders and am amply strong. When I come back, dear, I come to see you alone. Not to leave you again . . .” And another time: “Remember Father left me particularly to care for you and at any time you want me no other mortal thing shall keep me from being with you. Trust Nell.”

  Among the reasons he liked Douglas Robinson as much as he did was Robinson’s fondness for Mittie, who of late, Elliott conceded privately, was showing a “slight unevenness.” A few of her long-standing peculiarities—her chronic tardiness, her need for order and cleanliness—had become considerably more pronounced. To judge by some accounts she was becoming really quite odd. In an exchange that took place many years later, a recorded conversation between a daughter of Corinne’s, Mrs. Joseph Alsop, Jr., and Bamie’s son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., the situation was portrayed as follows:

  MRS. ALSOP: Then, she [Mittie] had an absolute passion for cleanliness. Well, it was a phobia.... Mother would, with peals of laughter, tell me things she would do, and it would sound to me exactly as though she were talking about a crazy person. Not to be able ever to be on time.... Then she had a library closet where she tied and untied bundles of different kinds. She and the maid worked all the time in the library closet. . . . She had a white chenille net that she wore on her hair to keep the dust out. She always took two baths—one for the soap, and then she got out and it was run again by the maid and she got in again, so as to wash the soap off. Then when anybody came to see her if she was in bed a large sheet was put down, particularly if the doctor came. And when she said her prayers a sheet was put down so that she wouldn’t touch the floor.

  MR. COWLES: She was crazy!

  MRS. ALSOP: Oh, yes, of course, she was; but crazy, according to my mother, in a perfectly delightful, charming and companionable way. . . . The whole thing is very fascinating.

  But what makes it still more “fascinating” is the very contrary impression Mittie made on so many others at the time who found her anything but odd or laughable. Most notably there was Sara Roosevelt, Cousin Sally, a woman of strong mind and will who was never known to suffer fools. She thought the world of Mittie, invited Mittie to visit her at Hyde Park, where Mittie sometimes stayed for as long as a week, Cousin Sally obviously preferring her company to that of almost anyone else of that generation. “I was very proud when she came and stayed with me,” Cousin Sally would recall. (Her diary entry from the time reads, “I love having her. We have read together, admired Baby, driven with James, tea’d at Mother’s.”)

  Theodore, too, was proud to bring his political friends to the house, sure of the impression she and Alice both would make. To Elliott she remained “the beautiful center of our home worship.” If she babied him, he accepted that with good grace and with what Fanny Smith called a “caressing” kind of humor. Describing his new sleeping arrangement, he would say, “Now when my little mother feels cold at night, she comes in and puts an extra blanket on me, so that I wake up perfectly roasted, and when she is warm, she comes in and takes the covers off me so that I wake up frozen.”

  The great tiger-skin rug was stretched before the parlor fireplace, where it dominated the entire room. The front hall now was lined with the heads of other animals Elliott had shot. Once, as he was about to leave India, Mittie had written, “I am very jealous that you gave some of your trophies away in Bombay, when I value even a tail of a mouse that is my darling Elliott’s trophy!” Her interest in every detail of his letters describing the tiger hunt had been, as she said, quite as intense as that of Theodore.

  Those nights when he came in late from parties, or not at all, she left little penciled notes. “My darling son, I have missed you all evening. Sleep well, darling, and call Mother if you wish her.”

  2

  While Theodore went churning back and forth to Albany, making speeches, railing against corruption in high places, getting his name in the papers day after day, Elliott was preoccupied principally with becoming a man-about-town. He was drinking more than he should—but then so did many others of his set and there is nothing to suggest that anyone found him offensive.

  In appearance, he was a taller—by two inches—and only somewhat handsomer version of his brother, not the Apollo-like figure portrayed in some later accounts. He and Theodore had each grown a mustache by this time—Elliott’s being the thicker, more successful effort—both were parting their hair in the middle, or nearly so, and Elliott, too, now wore metal-rimmed spectacles. Seen from a distance, in riding attire, say, or waving from a sailboat out on the Sound, either could easily be taken for the other. Appearing at the Newsboys’ Lodging House for the first time, immediately after his honeymoon at Oyster Bay, Theodore had been amazed when the boys started stamping and cheering. “As soon as they saw me, they mistook me for you,” he had explained to Elliott. “I thought it pretty nice of them; they were evidently very fond of you.”

  It was Elliotts effortless charm, his generosity and humor, his way of talking to people—as if he had never found anything quite so fascinating as what the other person had to say—that made him so very attractive. He was glamorous in much the way his father had been—and as Theodore most obviously was not—and this, with the aura of his recent adventures, plus a certain bravura and suggestion of decadence, made him enormously appealing to women especially. He had none of the self-righteousness which in his brother put some people off; and little or none of Theodore’s combativeness or bombast. Isaac Hunt, a friend of Theodore’s in the legislature, described Elliott as “a smooth, quiet [compared to Theodore], nice fellow.” Unlike Theodore he had not an enemy in the world.

  Reading through surviving reminiscences, one senses that Elliott was very like some of his Bulloch forebears, that he would have been quite at home with the young bloods at the Savannah Club in days past. And it was not simply the women in the family who fawned and fussed over him, or melted before his attentions. “If he noticed me at all,” wrote Fanny Smith, “I had received an accolade and if on rare occasions he turned on all his charm, he seemed to me quite irresistible.”

  (“He drank like a fish and ran after the ladies” was Edith Carow’s less charitable summation, years later. “I mean ladies not in his own rank, which was much worse.”)

  As befitting a gentleman and a Roosevelt, he gave time to the Orthopedic Hospital, took an occasional turn Sunday evenings at the Newsboys’
Lodging House. He was also understood to be “working up” his travel notes, compiling his letters and journal entries, with the thought of doing a book on big-game hunting. Few Americans had been to India, or experienced all he had, and since he did write well, the possibilities in the idea were genuinely promising. But somehow nothing ever came of this. He seemed incapable of pulling things into focus, or of seeing a piece of work through to completion, as his brother could. To write his Naval War of 1812, Theodore had forced himself to master every nuance and technical term of seamanship—Theodore, who never particularly cared for sailing, who disliked long sea voyages. Theodore had plowed through everything in print on his subject, tracked down original documents to amass volumes of statistics on fighting ships, armaments, crews. He had started out knowing no more about his subject than anyone else and with no experience or training in historical research. At times he felt he had taken on more than he could handle. “I have plenty of information now, but I can’t get it into words; I am afraid it is too big a task for me,” he had written Bamie from The Hague, where, in the midst of his European honeymoon, he was still hammering away at the book. And had he not been able to spend several weeks soon after that soaking up “advice and sympathy” from the “blessed” Uncle Jimmie Bulloch in Liverpool, he might not have brought it off. But persist he would, and though the end result, his first published opus, was often dry and tedious in the extreme—much of it virtually unreadable to anyone without a prior interest in the subject or in the author (one can only sympathize with poor Alice or Mittie trying to make headway in such a book)—it was also scrupulously thorough, accurate, fair, and would remain a definitive study.

  “‘It’s dogged as does it,’” Theodore liked to say, quoting a line from Trollope. He admired “staying power” in anyone. It was a hunter’s virtue, he said. Yet the most celebrated hunter of the moment seemed not to have it, as he himself recognized. He was lacking, said Elliott, “that foolish grit of Theodore’s.”

  Long afterward, when Elliott did at last try his hand at serious writing, it was in fiction, a well-handled, revealing short story that was never published. It is about a New York society figure living abroad—a woman he calls Sophie Vedder—who is described as having “so many friends, so many good and lovable qualities,” but who is also plainly bound for a tragic end. “Live and let live” is her motto. “Never miss an opportunity of enjoying life, no matter at what cost, and when the end comes, well, take it cheerfully.” There will be no dirges played at her funeral, she boasts, only Strauss. “My life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it.... I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through. It was the hope of a gambler.” “Poor Sophie, what a frivolous, useless thing you are,” he has her say to herself at the last, as she is about to pull the trigger in front of her mirror. “Still, you never did anyone any harm but yourself. . .”

  When Elliott began spending time with a society belle named Anna Hall, the whole family took heart. The Halls were Hudson River gentry, with Ludlows and Livingstons in their background. Anna, the oldest of four Hall sisters, had been raised at Tivoli-on-the-Hudson, twenty miles above Hyde Park, where she was schooled by a painfully pious, self-absorbed father who never worked and who for years, before an early death, required that she walk up and down the lawn with a stick pressed against the small of her back to instill the “carriage” of a lady. She was tall, golden-haired, like Alice Lee, but unlike Alice, prim and cool, and where Alice was lovely-looking, fresh, radiant, Anna was something more. She was stunning, regal, with a magnificent figure and large, haunting blue eyes. She was “made for an atmosphere of approval,” as a friend said. In London a few years later, the poet Robert Browning became so infatuated with her beauty that he asked if he might just sit and gaze while she had her portrait painted.

  Elliott was dazzled. A courtship proceeded. Letters were exchanged, his addressed to “My dear Miss Hall,” hers to “My dear Mr. Roosevelt.” He sent flowers, took her driving in the park.

  They were seen at parties. They knew the same people; their families, of course, knew one another and all about one another. One Sunday evening she went with him to meet his newsboys, and according to Fanny Smith, it was at a house party at Algonac, the Delano estate on the Hudson, over Memorial Day in 1883, that he asked her to marry him. Apparently she accepted, though no one was told for another several weeks.

  “I am honestly delighted,” wrote Theodore to Corinne from Richfield Springs, where he was convalescing, taking the waters as he had as a child. Alice had announced she was pregnant and Theodore had been hit by an attack of asthma as bad as any in years, in addition to a siege of cholera morbus worse even than that of the summer before their marriage. But Ellie’s news was something they could all be glad about. It would do “the dear old boy” great good, said Theodore, “to have something to work for,” “to marry and settle down with a definite purpose in life.” In measured brotherly fashion, Elliott was told it was “no light thing to take the irrevocable step,” while Aunt Annie reminded him, “You must be very pure and very true now that you have secured the right to guard, love and cherish so sweet a girl as Anna.”

  When, at summer’s end, Theodore picked up and went west again for his health and some shooting, to Dakota Territory this time, for two weeks in the “real West,” he went alone, Elliott being preoccupied. Anna, not Mittie, now wore the tiger-claw necklace. Elliott was riding to hounds at Hempstead, on Long Island, playing polo at Meadow Brook. At Tivoli one weekend he suffered some kind of relapse or seizure—”My old Indian trouble,” he explained to Anna—and had a difficult time getting back to New York on the train. He was injured at polo several times. He played extremely well, but with an ardor bordering on recklessness. Some nights, nursing a sprain or a “beastly leg,” he would sit alone brooding and smoking in his room at 57th Street, and Anna worried that he was keeping something from her. “I know I am blue and disagreeable often,” he wrote, “but please, darling, bear with me and I will come out all right in the end, and it really is an honest effort to do the right that makes me so often quiet and thoughtful about it all.”

  Theodore and Alice had moved into a house of their own, on West 45th Street, next door to Corinne and Douglas, who in April had become the parents of a son, Theodore Douglas Robinson, the first of the new generation. Theodore by now had also purchased more than a hundred acres of prime land at Oyster Bay, on Cooper’s Bluff, then sold parcels to Bamie and Aunt Annie, so they could build beside him. His stable was already going up on the ninety-five acres he had kept for himself.

  Theodore had any number of irons in the fire. He had taken a flier in cattle in Wyoming, investing $10,000 in a ranch run by a Harvard classmate. Theodore had put another $20,000 into G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the publisher of his Naval War, in order to make himself a limited partner. And though he had gone to the Dakota Bad Lands ostensibly to shoot a buffalo while there were still a few left to shoot, he returned to announce he had launched a cattle venture of his own. He talked proudly now of “my ranch in Dakota.”

  As a politician, Theodore was already seen as a phenomenon, often abused or made a laughingstock by the opposition papers, but a somebody nonetheless and a bright, rising star in the eyes of the men his father had set such store by. Theodore, as everyone said, was on his way, his life had taken hold, while Elliott had only Anna Hall.

  Their wedding, “one of the most brilliant social events of the season,” took place at Calvary Church downtown, in the neighborhood of the old house on East 20th Street, on December 1, 1883. Theodore was best man and it was the last such occasion at which the whole family was present.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Politics

  1

  It was, as would be said, no ordinary thing for a young man of wealth and social position, a son of the “solid, old quiet element,” to go of his own accord down into the great bear pit of politics—thrash it out,
survive or fall, in “the rough hurly-burly of the caucus, the primary, and the political meeting.” But the impression that Theodore was virtually the only such young man of his day, or that he did what he did against the wishes of family and friends, is mistaken—as mistaken as was the doctrine so earnestly espoused then that any such young man would automatically raise the level of political morality and serve as inspiration for more of his kind to join the good work. New York already had a sterling example of such high ambition in Seth Low, the young reform mayor of Brooklyn, who was a Columbia College graduate and heir to the Low shipping fortune; nor should it be forgotten that another recent Harvard graduate was Boies Penrose of Philadelphia, who had been in the class behind Theodore’s. Penrose too was descended from a wealthy, distinguished line. He was a “lover of vigorous outdoor sports,” an aspiring author, and he too started off exactly as Theodore, by running for the state (Pennsylvania) legislature as a gentleman champion of reform. But Penrose was to become another of the era’s flagrant political bosses, overbearing, power obsessed, the antithesis of the reform spirit. Penrose was a perfect, Harvard-cultivated, Harvard-sounding aristocrat—and when among his political cronies, to quote one biographical sketch, “capable of conduct and utterances which caused the judicious to grieve and moved the pious to indignation.”

  Theodore said later it was a combination of curiosity and “plain duty” that led him into politics, and that “I intended to be one of the governing class,” which may be taken as another way of saying he wanted power. In the novel The Bostonians (1886), Henry James would portray a leading character as “full of purpose to live . . . and with high success; to become great, in order not to be obscure, and powerful not to be useless.” The description would apply perfectly to Theodore. Obscurity, one imagines, would have snuffed him out like a candle.