The time was approximately 10:30. Mittie, the doctor said, was dying of typhoid fever; Alice, of Bright’s disease. Theodore did not arrive for another hour.
By the time he reached her bedside and took her in his arms, Alice barely knew who he was. He stayed there, holding her, until some time just before three in the morning when he was told that if he wished to see his mother again, he must come at once.
Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside. Alice lingered on another eleven hours. Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.
The first man to rise when the Assembly convened the next day said he had never in his years at Albany stood in the presence of such sorrow. Six others spoke, including three of Theodore’s most hostile opponents, all visibly shaken. In an unprecedented gesture of respect, the Assembly voted to adjourn until the following Monday.
Saturday in New York, the morning of the double funeral service, skies were clear, the temperature back down in the twenties. Theodore, his face a mask, sat in the front pew with Elliott, Bamie, Corinne, and Alice’s father. Again, as six years before, the enormous church was full; except that now two rosewood coffins stood at the altar. The familiar faces scattered among the more than two thousand who had gathered included Astors, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, but also Speaker Titus Sheard, Johnny O’Brien, and Mayor Seth Low. They sang “Rock of Ages”; Dr. John Hall prayed for the bereaved and for the four-day-old baby, weeping openly as he spoke. Then two hearses clattered off down Fifth Avenue, followed by carriages carrying the immediate family. Burial was at Greenwood, beside Grandmamma Bulloch and Theodore.
Again disease had struck and destroyed and changed everything. The life of the family had seemed an unending, tragic struggle against one cursed disease after another—Pott’s disease, asthma, cancer, whatever nameless disorder plagued Elliott—and now came typhoid and nephritis, or Bright’s disease, chronic inflammation of the kidneys. Mittie, whose precautions against dirt and contamination had seemed silly and obsessive, died of contaminated food or water, of the acutely infectious bacteria Salmonella typhosa. Typhoid fever, an ordeal of usually several weeks, had killed her in five days. It had appeared at first as though she had only a cold, because that is how typhoid begins. Little that mattered was done for her, because there was little anyone could do, given what was known, what was available. And it had been the same for Alice. Two summers before, the country had learned about Bright’s disease when the Associated Press carried a story saying President Arthur was ill with it. The story was denied, on authority of the President, but the feeling remained that Arthur was a dying man, since Bright’s disease in adults was almost inevitably fatal. That it had gone undiagnosed in Alice all that winter seems odd. Plainly neither she nor any of the family had any idea there was something the matter with her. And though none of the family was to challenge or investigate the part played by her doctor, some of her friends would later contend that the doctor had been guilty of criminal negligence.
No one knew how possibly to justify or explain such tragedy. There were no answers save “God’s will” or fate, “strange and terrible fate,” Theodore said. The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life, the sense that the precipice awaited not just somewhere off down the road, but at any moment. An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back, and all Papa’s admonitions to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all. Father had died at forty-six; Mittie had been only forty-eight; Alice, all of twenty-two, her life barely begun. Nothing lasts. Winter waits.
3
“He does not know what he does or says,” wrote his old tutor, Arthur Cutler, the day of the funeral. Yet three days later Theodore was back in Albany, and the day following, at ten in the morning, he was in his seat as usual and that afternoon he took up where he had left off, arguing for his Reform Charter Bill. In one of the speeches given in sympathy the week before, an old Republican named Lucas Van Allen, a man who had opposed Theodore time and again, prayed Theodore be given the strength “to work bravely in the darkness.”
Now week after week, on into March and April, he did little but work, shunting back and forth from Albany to his hearings by night trains. He reported a flood of bills out of his City Affairs Committee—seven, nine, fourteen a day. His outpouring of work, of words printed and spoken, of speeches delivered, of witnesses grilled, of interviews, of inspection tours (of conditions at New York’s infamous Ludlow Street jail), of headlong, concentrated energy was utterly phenomenal, surpassing anything he had ever done before and causing those close at hand to wonder how much longer he could maintain a hold on himself. One day in March he reported fifteen bills out of committee, then six more at a night session; and even then his work for the day had only begun. Dissatisfied with a report on his hearings that had been drafted by counsel for the committee, he wrote an entirely new version at a single sitting, working through until morning.
He didn’t want to [Ike Hunt recalled], but he did it. He started in at night and he wrote all night long and he got his breakfast and still continued to write. The House opened and he came up to the House and he wrote that report, and as soon as he got a sheet of foolscap written in long hand the page was right there to take it down to the printer because the committee had got to report that morning. But Teddy would get up and say, “Mr. Speaker, that bill so-and-so with reference to so-and-so is all right,” and then he would sit down and commence to write again. Finally, he said, “There it is, I am finished.” I sat right in front of him. I said, “There won’t be any continuity to that report, I don’t believe.” He said, “Don’t you worry.” In a little while the printer came up with the report all printed and Teddy went out and read it to the committee and they signed it and that was the report that was handed in.
Of his personal tragedy, he would say nothing. “You could not talk to him about it,” Hunt remembered. “. . . He did not want anybody to sympathize with him.”
“I have taken up my work again; indeed, I think I should go mad if I were not employed,” he wrote in answer to a sympathy note from Carl Schurz, who a number of years before had survived the death of his own wife by pouring himself into his work in just such manic fashion.
“Teddy was as sweet and gentle as ever on Sunday,” wrote Corinne after one of his weekends in the city, “but he feels the awful loneliness more and more, and I fear he sleeps little for he walks a great deal in the night and his eyes have that strained red look.”
Within days after the funeral, it had been decided to sell 6 West 57th Street. It was put on the market and snapped up at once by an immensely wealthy old friend of the elder Theodore’s, a fellow director of the Museum of Natural History, John S. Kennedy, who, with his banking firm, J. S. Kennedy & Company, was closely involved with James Alfred in the financing of the Great Northern Railroad. The family had until May to be out of the house. Theodore left it to Bamie to handle the details and to sell his own place on West 45th Street. “That year seems a perfect nightmare,” she would recall, “parting with all the places we had cared for, dividing everything that had always meant home and deciding how to recommence life.”
Several hundred condolence letters had to be answered, and again it was Bamie who bore the major burden. There were letters from Bullochs in Savannah, recalling “the beautiful, angelic and active girl I knew and loved so well”; from friends made abroad (”It seems such a short time ago when we were together on the Nile ...”); and from people like Aunt Lucy Elliott, who must be answered at length. “If baby is living who will take it?” wrote a cousin from Charleston.
In the interval between her mother’s death and the hour when Alice died, Bamie had sent off a wire to Liverpool and in a strong, clear hand Uncle Jimmie Bulloch had written in reply, “The cable has never carried through the depths of the sea a sadder message than it has brought us today. . . . Our anxiety about dear
Alice adds to our unhappiness, but we will doubtless learn how it fares with her.”
I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking, her father had drummed into her. Faced with the decision of whether to proceed as planned with the house at Oyster Bay, whether to sign with the contractor, Theodore decided to go ahead with it, but wanted Bamie to supervise the job, to tend to all details. He wished no part of the project, only to have it finished.
Nor was he interested in his baby, Alice, as she had been christened the Sunday after the funeral, and so she too was entrusted to Bamie, who now bought a house of her own on Madison Avenue, “furnishing it with my share of the 57th Street things.” Theodore, for the house at Oyster Bay, was to have the furniture from the master bedroom.
“It seems,” wrote Conie, remembering her mother, “as if there were so few that one really cared for.” She longed for Mittie. Even her joy in her own child seemed changed somehow, depreciated with Mittie gone.
Baby is lying on the bed taking his lunch by me [she wrote Elliott]. Though he is my greatest comfort and delight, still so much of my pleasure in him is changed, for I never was so happy as when I saw her with him. She loved him so extravagantly . . .
On the day Alice died, Theodore had made a large X on the page for February 14 in an otherwise empty diary for the year 1884, and beneath he wrote only, “The light has gone out of my life.”
Later in the year, working at a small table in a cabin in the Dakota Bad Lands, he wrote a memorial for private publication.
She was born at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, on July 29,1861; I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face; we were betrothed on January 25, 1880, and married on October 27th, of the same year; we spent three years of happiness such as rarely comes to man or woman; on February 12, 1884, her baby girl was born; she kissed it, and seemed perfectly well; some hours afterward she, not knowing that she was in the slightest danger, but thinking only that she was falling into a sleep, became insensible, and died at two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, February 14, 1884, at 6 West 57th Street, in New York; she was buried two days afterward, in Greenwood Cemetery.
She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit; as a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine; and there had never come to her a single great sorrow; and none ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright, sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden; loving, tender, and happy as a young wife; when she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be but just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her—then, by a strange and terrible fate, death came to her.
And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went out from my life for ever.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Chicago
1
May 31, Chicago—Fast and thick the delegates to the convention are flocking into this city. . . a canvass of the members of the convention here shows Blaine to be in the lead. . . .
IN THE GILDED, MIRRORED COMFORT of the Palmer House barbershop, where, as every visitor to Chicago learned soon enough, the floor was inlaid with silver dollars, they sat waiting for a morning shave, smoking their first cigars of the day, or, if not that, spitting tobacco juice with amazing accuracy, some among the Californians—those newly arrived by the “Blaine Train”—looking, as one man said, as if they had walked in from the Pacific Coast. They talked of Blaine’s strength in the West, of the send-off they had had at San Francisco, of stops the day before, Memorial Day, at places like Marshalltown, Iowa, where several thousand people were waiting at the depot to cheer them on. They studied the plan of the convention floor published in the morning Tribune or read aloud a quote from Tom Platt that “for every kicker who does bolt, Blaine will get two Irish votes in exchange.” Such observations as “It’s Blaine’s turn now” and “Arthur can’t carry New York” were also exchanged as the long line of barbers went about their business. Then shaved, combed, made fragrant with a splash of bay rum, their bright red-and-white BLAINE badges in place, they went out to join the fun.
In the marble lobby of the hotel there were still more of them, talking, reaching for outstretched hands, huddled in threes and fours. At the Grand Pacific Hotel, four blocks away, they were even more numerous. At Blaine headquarters upstairs Titus Sheard of New York was already claiming 341 Blaine votes on the first ballot, a mere 70 shy of what was needed to nominate, and by midday in the bar and the main dining room, they were clinking green glasses in toasts to the next President of the United States, James Gillespie Blaine.
Reporters were struck by their exuberance, their confidence, and the contrast with the Arthur people, who were so plainly downcast and uninspired. “Whenever you meet a Blaine man,” complained the correspondent for The New York Times, “he seizes you and pours into your ear the same old story. ’Everybody wants him. The great West cries for him. The Middle States yearn for him.’” “All were filled with enthusiasm,” noted another reporter, “and the most enthusiastic were filled with whiskey.” Some ambitious orators like to climb up on the lobby furniture in order to make known their theories for the salvation of the country.
They were the rank and file of the party, as they were fond of saying, from city and country alike, as Tom Platt stressed. Theodore, in a letter to Bamie, would describe them as mainly “good, ordinary men, who do not do very much thinking, who are pretty honest themselves, but who are callous to any but very flagrant wrongdoing in others, unless it is brought home to them most forcibly, who ’don’t think Blaine any worse than the rest of them’. . .”
It was their feelings for Blaine that made them such a force to reckon with. Blaine’s only power was the devotion he inspired through force of personality (demagoguery, Theodore and his friends called it). Blaine controlled no patronage, no machine, held no keys to the Customhouse or the Treasury. His home state of Maine had no political importance nationally. And though in recent years he had served quite ably as Garfield’s Secretary of State, and could be thus fairly described as a “statesman,” he did not even hold public office any longer. Blaine was adored for being Blaine—for his very real human warmth and love of people, his brains and loyalty, and “that gorgeous surplus of personal grace called magnetism.” He remained, since the Ingersoll speech at Cincinnati eight years before, the “Plumed Knight” of the party, the Republican’s Republican whose mere presence on a platform could work magic wherever Republican fortunes were in trouble. At the last national convention, also held in Chicago, his forces had carried their fight through thirty-six ballots before Garfield was named. It had been Blaine who handed his friend Garfield the nomination at the last and it had been Conkling who kept the nomination from Blaine; and now with Conkling out of the picture, Blaine’s people were bound to let nothing stand in the way.
The famous visage—the long, pale face with its luminous dark eyes and silvery beard—was to be seen everywhere about the hotels and in store windows, but the idol himself, like President Arthur, remained in Washington. Ironically, with the prize closer to his reach than at any time before, Blaine no longer craved it as he once had.
Also, in April, only weeks before the convention, the old burden of the Mulligan letters had been resurrected in brilliant, vicious fashion by a famous full-color cartoon that the opposition was busily passing out in Chicago, just in case there was anyone left who had not seen it. It had appeared in Puck. Blaine was displayed as “The Tattooed Man,” stripped to his undershorts before a tribunal of his Republican peers. The tattoos were all his old sins—”Mulligan Letters,” “Little Rock RR Bonds,” “N Pacific Bonds,” “Corruption”—and his famed personal magnetism was revealed to be nothing more than a cheap “magnetic pad” worn about the neck.
Nor was the old “saving element” of the party any less adamant in its opposition to Blaine than in times past. Virtually everyo
ne from the Fifth Avenue Conference who was still active in politics was lined up against him—Schurz, Curtis, Godkin, Lodge—and some, like Schurz, talked openly of bolting the party if Blaine was the nominee. They saw him as morally obtuse and the most “venal” of apologists for the spoils system. He had been too close all his career to “the wealthy criminal class,” and to Jay Gould in particular. About the only thing they would not do to stop him was support Chester Arthur. Theodore, writing to Lodge shortly before leaving for Chicago, described the choice as between the Blaine devil and the Arthur deep sea, though of the two, Blaine was “the most dangerous man.”
The puzzling thing about Arthur was that he had turned out to be quite a respectable President. Since Garfield’s murder in 1881, he had been a surprise to almost everybody. His record was a good one. He had conducted himself with great dignity, denied old cronies special license. (“He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur any more,” Johnny O’Brien observed wistfully, “he’s the President.”) He had supported the Pendleton Act, the national indebtedness had been cut, the cost of domestic postage reduced. At his urging a decrepit wooden navy was being phased out, new steel cruisers built. The country was prospering. Times were so good that when General Grant’s Wall Street firm of Grant and Ward failed that spring, it “created only a temporary disturbance” in the overall business picture.
With his height and elegant tailoring, Arthur also looked more like a President than any of his Republican predecessors. He had insisted that the somewhat dowdy old Executive Mansion be brought up to standards (according to the taste of the day), and that official hospitality be raised from the depths of the Hayes years. Modern plumbing was installed in the White House, and the first elevator. Louis Tiffany of New York had done over the Red, Blue, and East rooms, and the showpiece of the new look was a jeweled Tiffany glass screen, fifty feet in length, that now divided the main corridor from the public north vestibule. At Arthur’s invitation, Madame Christine Nilsson and other opera singers performed at state dinners, where, customarily, there were flowers in abundance, as well as small bouquets of roses at every lady’s place, boutonnieres for the men, and gilt-edged place cards embossed with the national coat of arms in gold. There could be as many as fourteen courses with seven or eight wines, each with its proper glass. It was said that Arthur had brought more tact and culture to the White House than anyone in memory, and if such influential figures as Schurz and Curtis thought little better of him than in days gone by, Mark Twain and Henry Ward Beecher thoroughly approved. “I can hardly imagine how he could have done better,” Beecher was quoted as saying. More important for the moment, he was liked by businessmen and could count on strong support from those on the federal payroll and from black politicians and party workers from the South. Of the 820 accredited delegates converging on Chicago, something over 100 were government employees.
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