David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  It was a chance at last to do battle, good against evil, in New York itself and in what he liked to call “the full light of the press,” light he very obviously loved. He relished the publicity and he relished the battle itself. He loved a fight, more even than his father had. It was possibly the chief reason he loved politics, needed politics. He was never more pleased with himself than when he had made a “stout fight.” The political allies he cared most for were those who were fighters, who were “fearless,” like Joe Murray. He loved the camaraderie of such men. Of Billy O’Neil, the “best friend,” he would write, “we stood shoulder to shoulder in every legislative fight.”

  Experience, moreover, had already taught him a grudging respect for the rogues who fought against him, who, too, were fearless and forthright in their fashion. Indeed, he preferred them to what he called the “parlor reformers,” “the timid good men” who stood on the sidelines. Unhappily, “blamelessness and the fighting edge are not always combined.” It was exactly because politics was a bear pit that he wanted in.

  “A man should never put on his best trousers when he goes out to battle for freedom and truth,” advised Henrik Ibsen in his 1882 play, An Enemy of the People. Theodore never wore anything but his best trousers; he was every inch the “dude” the newspapers portrayed; he made no pretense by word or dress at being anything other than wellborn, never resorted, as Boies Penrose did, to being “one of the boys” by talking or acting like one of the boys. But in a political fight he fought tooth and claw. As the journalist Mark Sullivan would observe, “Roosevelt did not regard politics as a gentleman’s sport, to be played in the spirit of a private duello, with a meticulous code about choice of time and place. Roosevelt had a trait of ruthless righteousness.’”

  Years later, writing about his father’s old friend John Hay, Theodore made an acutely revealing observation—revealing of his own nature. The problem with Hay, he said, was his unwillingness to “face the rather intimate association which is implied in a fight.”

  One must never shrink from what was “rough in life”; one must never recoil or flinch in the face of a Jay Gould or a Hubert O. Thompson. He had marked another verse in his Bible: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

  Also, as Charles Eliot once observed, a man in a fight had little chance to be lonely.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Strange and Terrible Fate

  1

  HE FELT FINE. He felt better, in fact—about his work, about himself, his future—than he had in a long while.

  At his worst, he got what he called his “caged wolf feeling.” To be confined, hemmed in, to have nothing to do, was unbearable. Boredom was something he had had to deal with so rarely in life that when he had to he hardly knew how to respond. The hotel at Richfield Springs the summer before had been torture. He complained of it more than the asthma that sent him there. “I have a bad headache, a general feeling of lassitude, and am bored out of my life by having nothing whatever to do,” he told Corinne, “and being placed in that quintessence of abomination, a large summer hotel at a watering place for underbred and overdressed girls, fat old female scandal mongers, and a select collection of assorted cripples and consumptives.”

  Of late in Albany he had even begun boxing again, taking sparring lessons for the first time in five years. “I felt much better for it,” he wrote Alice January 22,1884, “but am awfully out of training. I feel much more at ease in my mind and better able to enjoy things since we have gotten under way; I feel now as though I had the reins in my hand.”

  The winter of his first term she had come with him to “that dear, dull, old Dutch city,” but the year after, for his second term, she remained behind in New York, in the brownstone on West 45th Street, and more recently, because of her advancing pregnancy, she had moved back with Mittie once more. So now with the hearings in session at the Metropolitan Hotel, he was staying on at 57th Street three or four nights a week.

  In all regards the personal, domestic side of his life was wholly satisfactory. Uncle James Alfred worried that he was spendthrift, but appears also to have been the only one who did. His income was substantial, not quite $14,000 a year, or nearly twice what it had been before he was married. James Alfred had been looking after his “affairs” exceedingly well. The income from Roosevelt and Son alone had been nearly $8,000 the previous year. In addition there were returns from a variety of railroads in which James Alfred was himself actively involved (the Mobile and Ohio, the Rochester and Pittsburgh, the Shenango and Allegheny). There were dividends from Uncle Jimmie Gracie’s J. K. Gracie Company, from the Union Trust, and from his own Wyoming cattle investment. His salary as an assemblyman, his only earned income, was $1,200 a year.

  What Alice contributed, from money or investments of her own, was never spoken of, but considering her background it was probably a respectable sum; and in any event, they knew there was a great deal to fall back on, if need be, in both families. By the way he was spending—buying the 45th Street house, buying property at Oyster Bay, sinking no small amounts in this and that—he obviously felt there was plenty to spend, plenty more where that came from. At the time he decided to buy in as a partner with George Haven Putnam he handed Putnam a check for $20,000, which, as he did not seem to understand, was approximately twice what he had in his account. But the difficulty was smoothed over at once by James Alfred, who borrowed the difference out of Theodore’s “expectations.”

  To return from the political battlefields to his “own sunny darling” was all he had dreamed marital bliss might be. He knew no greater happiness than to be with her in his own sitting room at 45th Street, playing backgammon “before a bright fire of soft coal, my books all around me.” The house, since rented to Elliott and his bride, had been the first and only home of their own, and for the benefit of the two maids who ran it, Aunt Anna Gracie had drawn up a detailed program for cleaning, cooking, and so forth, a manuscript of several pages that included one directive Theodore thought memorable. “’Every morning the cook should meet the ashman with a pail of boiling water,’” he would read aloud to friends, then question what the ashman might have done to deserve a scalding.

  Seeing old friends on the street, he would insist they come home with him to see Alice. He was sure she was a great asset to him in his political career and told her so. Now, when the hearings broke up at week’s end, he would bring two or three others from the committee home to 57th Street. “All of the men were perfectly enchanted with their visit to our house . . .” he wrote her from Albany January 28, after one such occasion. “They could hardly believe that Mother was really our mother; and above all they praised my sweet little wife.” One man, Tom Welch, a Niagara Falls Democrat whom he liked particularly, told him he had never seen anyone look prettier than Alice, a remark Theodore thought she would enjoy since she was then a little more than eight months pregnant.

  Her confinement precluded any social life of the kind that had once occupied so much of their time, and this suited him perfectly. Such a life led to nothing, he had decided.

  He had shaved off his side-whiskers, given up keeping a diary. The Newsboys’ Lodging House and the other good works of his father’s no longer interested him and he gradually gave them up also. He had gone into such activities, he would explain, in the same spirit as the Sunday-school classes at Harvard, because of his father, but it had not worked. He had no patience with simple, unsung altruism. “I tried faithfully to do what Father had done,” he later told the author Jacob Riis, “but I did it poorly . . . in the end I found out that we have each to work in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do.”

  He had also abandoned the law. It was not just that his political life was growing larger, crowding out other things, but that other things seemed to be falling away as in some very natural process. Part of the previous summer had been spent in U
ncle Robert’s office, but Theodore was not to return there again and he had not been back to the Columbia Law School in more than a year. He had become, he later said, sadly disillusioned by the law. In the careers of the corporation lawyers one was supposed to admire and emulate he saw little that was “compatible” with his own ideals. Lawyers, it appeared to him, were trained to serve clients, not justice. “The caveat emptor side of the law, like the caveat emptor side of business, seemed to me repellent; it did not make for social fair dealings,” he wrote long afterward in his memoirs.

  There is the possibility, of course, that he simply found the law dull and had too much else he would rather be doing. The philosophical conclusions may have been those of the older man, a career’s-end distillation of accumulative disrespect for certain kinds of legal giants, and thus as open to question as his subsequent views on the teaching of natural history at Harvard. The few specific references he made to his law work at the time are actually quite positive. Still, the thesis offered by the old family friend at lunch, the unnamed member of the prominent law firm who appeared in the midst of the Westbrook Scandal, was more than just “incompatible” with his idealism; it revolted him. And if that were not sufficient, the spectacle soon after of the vaunted William Evarts mouthing nonsense about the sanctity of the home as cause for perpetuating the cigar sweatshops must have made very clear the priority of client over “social fair dealing.” Theodore then, as later, equated a law career with moneymaking, not with social service, and as he also said then, as later, his inheritance had liberated him from moneymaking.

  Oddly, for all his quick success in politics, the passion and energy he exuded, he was still unable, or unwilling, to accept politics as his life-work. He never spoke of it as a career or calling. To have announced he was a professional politician, or openly aspired to that, would have been awkward, to be sure, since “professional” was considered synonymous with “corrupt.” It was only as a gentleman doing his part in the public interest—as a temporary volunteer, so to speak—that he could maintain a reputation for independence and integrity. A degree of disinterest in a political future had obvious political value; it was part of what made him “different,” less vulnerable to the ways by which the obviously ambitious are bought or held in check. But even among the few with whom he was most candid, he admitted to no clear vision of a lifework. In the parlance of later-day psychologists he had still to find an occupational identity, and it troubled him. His plight was nothing like that of his brother, but, by the same token, he was by no means as resolved and focused as implied by his soaring performance.

  It was only within the last six months, for example, that he and Alice resolved to build on the land he had bought at Oyster Bay. At one point, earlier, he thought seriously of settling upstate at Herkimer, in the Mohawk Valley, where Douglas Robinson’s family had a large estate. “I hardly know what to do about taking a place up here,” he wrote Bamie in the fall of 1882, she being the one to whom he still invariably turned for serious counsel on serious questions; “it would be lovely to have a farm, and fortunately Alice seemed enchanted with the country. The only, or at least the chief, drawback, is the distance from New York. Still, if I were perfectly certain that I would go on in politics and literature I should buy the farm without hesitation; but I consider the chances to be strongly favorable to my getting out of both . . .”

  The Oyster Bay house, once decided on, was his first commitment to the future. And certainly there was nothing equivocal or tentative about the plans that evolved—once he, Alice, Mittie, Bamie, Aunt Anna Gracie, and architects Lamb and Rich had hiked over the site, savored the view, and picked the spot. He knew too little of architecture, he said, to say what ought to be done on the outside, but on “inside matters” he was “perfectly definite.” As he later told an editor for the magazine Country Life in America, “I wished a big piazza . . . where we could sit in rocking chairs and look at the sunset; a library with a shallow bay window looking south, the parlor or drawing room occupying all the western end of the lower floor . . . big fireplaces for logs . . . I had to live inside and not outside . . .”

  The house was to be enormous, suggesting a future for Alice, at least, of unending pregnancies. Along with his other wishes, the plans called for ten bedrooms, excluding maids’ rooms.

  Everything bespoke solidity, permanence, comfort, security, family. The foundations were to be nearly two feet thick. There were eight fireplaces, four on the first floor, four above, twenty-two rooms in all. The materials, interestingly, were to be of the most ordinary kind. No fine paneling or costly plasterwork was called for. Doors, windows, doorframes, and the like were all of the common, inexpensive variety. Frills were dispensed with. Size, command of the hill, were what seemed to matter. It was the way he liked his food, simple but plentiful, heavy on the plate.

  The “outside cover” supplied by the architects was Queen Anne—brick on the ground floor, then shingles and a slate roof. The final cost was to be something just under $17,000.

  It should be called Leeholm, he decided. From the front piazza they would be able to see a whole, long sweep of Long Island Sound and, on clear days, Connecticut beyond. Now, in winter, the trees bare, the water dominated the panorama and was a deep vivid blue, different from summer. In summer, after dark, they would be able to see the lights of the Fall River steamers as they passed in the distance.

  Albany, February 6, 1884

  DARLING WIFIE,

  How I did hate to leave my bright, sunny little love yesterday afternoon! I love you and long for you all the time, and oh so tenderly; doubly tenderly now, my sweetest little wife. I just long for Friday evening when I shall be with you again.

  Today I sparred as usual; my teacher is a small man and in the set-to today I bloodied his nose by an uppercut, and knocked him out of time.

  In the House we had a most exciting debate on my Reform Charter Bill, and I won a victory, having it ordered to a third reading. Tomorrow evening I am to dine at the Rathbones’, at half past seven; it was very kind to ask me, but I do not anticipate much fun.

  Goodbye, sweetheart.

  Her pregnancy appears to have been without incident. Mittie had once remarked how “very large” she looked, but no one seems to have been concerned about her, and with the baby expected any time, he apparently had no misgivings about being away from her. Albany was five hours by train.

  In another letter also written February 6, he told her he had given one of his “best speeches” the day before, and if she was looking in the papers that day, she saw that others agreed. “Mr. Roosevelt’s argument... was conclusive and unanswerable,” said the Times. “Mr. Roosevelt,” according to the Evening Post, had made “a speech admirable both in clearness and force.” A headline in the Herald spoke of “MR. ROOSEVELT’S BRILLIANT ASSAULT ON CORRUPTION.”

  “I propose to put the power in the hands of the men the people elect,” he had said. “At present the power is in the hands of one or two men whom the people did not elect.” It was being called the Roosevelt Bill now. A rally in its support was to be held at Cooper Union the next week.

  2

  On Friday, when he returned to 57th Street, he found that Mittie was “quite sick” with what appeared to be a cold, and that Corinne and Douglas had left their infant son in Bamie’s charge while they went off to Baltimore for a long weekend.

  The weather was miserable, chill and damp. There had been no sign of the sun for days. Monday, Mrs. Lee arrived on a morning train. Theodore put in another day at the hearings downtown, then left for Albany first thing Tuesday morning.

  Later that day, Tuesday, the twelfth, Alice went into labor and some time that night a baby girl was born. Telegrams went off the next morning announcing the news that mother and child were doing well. Ike Hunt would remember Theodore, “full of life and happiness,” accepting the congratulations of his friends. But then a few hours later a second telegram arrived and Theodore, looking suddenly “worn,” rushed for the
next train.

  The Times that morning called it suicide weather. It covered most of the Northeast—rain, unending fog, rivers over their banks. In New York, traffic barely moved on the rivers, so thick was the fog. Trains were hours behind schedule. Corinne and Douglas, who had received a telegram at Baltimore and started for New York, would remember crossing through thick fog by ferry from New Jersey, then taking the elevated train uptown, everything moving at a crawl.

  They were the first to reach the house. Corinne would remember walking from the elevated station to 57th Street and seeing a single light through the fog in a third-story window. She went up the front steps a little ahead of Douglas. The door was thrown open and Elliott stood in the doorway, the light from the hall behind him, a terrible look on his face. If she wished to see her baby, he said, she should do so before coming in. The baby was at Aunt Annie’s. “There is a curse on this house! Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.”