She wanted him to return to politics. She was certain it was where he belonged and she both encouraged whatever she thought beneficial to his career and discouraged anything she thought potentially detrimental. She strongly encouraged his friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, and included Lodge now in her correspondence as though he were one of the family. (“Theodore would not be happy out of public affairs,” Lodge concurred early in what was to be a lifelong correspondence with Bamie.) When Theodore gave her his account of capturing the thieves, she (with Lodge) strongly advised against his doing it as an article for Century, sure that such heroics might strike an eastern audience as a bit extravagant and self-aggrandizing. (”I shall take good care,” he promised her, “that the pronoun ‘I’ does not appear once in the whole piece.”)
She felt she was closer to him than anyone. She knew what he was spending on his cattle venture, and like James Alfred, she worried about it; she knew what the Oyster Bay place had cost, having overseen its construction from the start; she knew what was in his checking account, what his bills were, because in his absences she paid them. “Can you send me at once three or four blank checks from my checkbook?” he writes at one point from the West. “I need them immediately. Darling old Bysie, as usual I am bothering you with my affairs.”
Politics fascinated her and she had followed every step of his career with intense interest. Moreover, she knew how much that interest meant to him, how few people mattered to him in the way she did and how much he needed her approval of all his exploits. In some letters, such as the one describing his battle on the convention floor at Chicago or the one about the bear hunt, it is as if he carries with him his own proscenium arch and is performing for her alone, his audience of one. “Look how well I am doing,” he seems to be saying to her again and again, just as he had done at Harvard when writing to her or to their father.
Possibly more than anyone in the family, she knew how much of himself he withheld from view—the tenderness in him, the overriding attachment to home, to family, how much of the “great little home-boy” he remained at heart.
Women, she knew, did not greatly interest him and this made her role in his life all the more exceptional. He did not enjoy the company of women the way their father had, or as Elliott obviously did. Until that summer, and the mention of a Mrs. Selmes at Mandan, there had been nothing since Alice’s death to suggest the slightest interest in any woman beyond the Roosevelt circle. Tilden Selmes was a young lawyer, a Yale man and neophyte rancher; his wife, Martha Flandrau Selmes, was the daughter of a distinguished Minnesota jurist and historian, Charles Eugene Flandrau. Theodore had been a guest at their Mandan home on several occasions in August and September and “the singularly attractive” Mrs. Selmes was somebody he wanted Bamie to know about. “She is, I think, very handsome,” he wrote; “... she is very well read, has a delicious sense of humor and is extremely fond of poetry—including that of my favorite, Browning, as well as my old one, Swinburne.” Other accounts of Mrs. Selmes and several surviving photographs bear him out—she was indeed a vivacious and strikingly beautiful young woman—and unquestionably she impressed him as few women ever had or ever would (he was to refer to her, as time went on, as “the wonderful Mrs. Selmes”), but the fact that there was also a Mr. Selmes would, for Theodore—and doubtless for Bamie also—have precluded any thought of a romantic involvement. The contribution Mrs. Selmes makes to what can be pieced together of the larger story is a recollection, offered years later, of Theodore pacing the floor during one of his visits, muttering audibly that he had no “constancy.”
2
In the last days of August 1886 The New York Times carried a small social item reporting the engagement of ex-Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt to Miss Carow of New York and then, on September 5, a retraction, which was doubtless placed in the Times by Bamie:
The announcement of the engagement of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, made last week, and which came from a supposedly authoritative source, proves to have been erroneous. Nothing is more common in society than to hear positive assertions constantly made regarding the engagement of persons who have been at all in each other’s company, and no practice is more reprehensible.
Theodore was notified as to what had happened and Bamie waited for his answer. It came by return mail in a letter from Medora dated September 20. What the Times had reported was true, he told her. “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean to marry her.” How anyone had found out was a mystery to him. “You are the first person to whom I have breathed one word on the subject.” He had hoped to be able to tell her before this, but that had been impossible. He would explain everything when he saw her.
I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages [his remarkable letter continued]; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one-half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead. No matter what your judgment about myself I shall assuredly enter no plea against it. But I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith. It is certainly not her fault; the entire blame rests on my shoulders.
Bamie could keep Baby Lee, she was told. Nor should she feel obligated to inform the others; he would take care of that himself by letter. Meantime, he wanted nothing said to anyone beyond the immediate family.
Bamie and Corinne were both taken totally unawares by this news. Nor were they at all pleased.
Edith Carow was, of course, a very known and admired quantity, as close to the family as anyone could be, very like “family,” no less than ever. She was someone they had both continued to see on a regular basis, until just that previous spring when Edith’s widowed mother, due to straitened circumstances, sold her house and departed with Edith and another daughter for an indefinite stay in Europe. “It makes me quite blue,” Corinne had written at the time.
Edith was lovely-looking, with a mind of her own and wide-ranging interests. If somewhat reserved by Roosevelt standards and somewhat disapproving of fashionable society, she had a quiet kind of dignity and a will to match Bamie s, which was the problem. “They didn’t want it at all,” said Alice years afterward, “because they knew her too well and they knew they were going to have a difficult time with her, that she would come between them and Father.”
Doubtless they too wished Theodore had more “constancy.” Ideally, by the prevailing, romantic code, he would never remarry—as a testimony of his love for his beautiful dead wife, his first and only great love. Or, at the least, a decent interval of several more years would have been expected, during which the widower brother and the spinster sister could carry on just as they were and quite happily.
He was home by early October. He and Edith, Bamie learned, had been secretly engaged for nearly a year. It had been the previous September in Bamie’s front hall that they had met one day by chance, having until then seen little or nothing of each other since Alice’s death. Theodore had started calling on her in New York after that—quietly, discreetly, and though he even asked Edith to attend a hunt ball at Sagamore Hill in October, apparently no one imagined there could be anything between them. In November he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes, with the understanding that the engagement would be kept secret until a more propitious moment. He had returned to the Bad Lands in March; in April she sailed for Europe. “What day does Edith go abroad, and for how long does she intend staying?” he had inquired innocently, almost as an afterthought, in a letter to Corinne, the same letter with his observations on Anna Karenina, written at Dickinson the day after bringing in the thieves. “Could you not send her, when she goes, some flowers from me? I suppose fruit would be more useful, but I think flowers ‘more tenderer’ as Mr. Weller would say.”
Bamie, whatever misgivings or pain she felt, was ready to stand by him. In the face
of his overwhelming good health and high spirits it is hard to imagine her doing anything else. He was ready to embrace life again. He was also being asked by the Republicans to run for mayor of New York, almost from the moment he had his bags unpacked, an offer he at once accepted, to her great delight, even though, as they both appreciated, he had little chance of winning. . . . Get action! Seize the moment! It was to be a three-way race. His opponents were the Democrat Abram Hewitt and a Labor candidate, Henry George. Hewitt, distinguished in manner, admired as an “enlightened” businessman, had been a friend of their fathers and appeared the likely winner. Henry George was the author of Progress and Poverty, famous as the great exponent of the single-tax scheme, and a fiery speaker who drew huge street-corner crowds and gave newspaper editors and propertied people a bad case of the jitters. Theodore set up headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Bamie, by all signs, could not have been happier. The office of mayor, since the passage of Theodore’s Reform Charter Bill, was one of real consequence.
He was called “the Cowboy Candidate” and the Times at one point claimed he was in the lead. “We haven’t had campaign headquarters that looked so much like business in this county since ex-President Arthur was chairman of the county committee and carried things with a rush,” one party worker was quoted as saying. “It seems like old times and warms the cockles of an old-time Republican’s heart. This is just glorious . . .”
So convinced was Theodore that he had no serious chance of being elected that he bought two tickets under false names—Mr. and Miss Merrifield—on the Etrura, which was due to sail for England on Saturday, November 6, or four days after the election. Bamie had agreed to go with him to London, where he and Edith were to be married. The only thing she would not agree to was any talk of her keeping the child.
“It almost broke my heart to give her up,” Bamie was to recall years later. “Still I felt. . . it was for her good, and that unless she lived with her father she would never see much of him . . .” It was remembering what she had felt as a child for her own father, the knowledge of what his love had meant to her own life, she said, that made her decide as she did.
In a letter to Edith Carow dated October 23, Bamie wrote in a swift, strong, somewhat illegible hand:
MY DEAREST EDITH,
You will be astonished at another letter so soon, but though of course Theodore writes you of everything, still you wish to hear what I try to write; of the wonderful enthusiasm he certainly inspires; never mind what the results . . . it is astounding the hold that he has on the public. . . . Douglas has been as always a trump, having organized “the Roosevelt Campaign Club of businessmen” which brings in many active workers. Theodore breakfasts and sleeps at home where he is very comfortable . . . by half after nine he is in the Headquarters at the Fifth Avenue, never leaving except for lunch and dinner... even then he can but spare a short time; he is very bright and well considering the terrific strain which of course will be worse constantly until the second [of November] is past. It is such happiness to see him at his very best once more; ever since he has been out of politics in any active form, it has been a real heart sorrow to me, for while he always made more of his life than any other man I knew, still with his strong nature it was a permanent source of poignant regret that even at his early age he should lose these years without the possibility of doing his best and most telling work; in that there should be the least chance that he might find his hold over the public gone when he once more came before them and this is the first time since . . . [Albany] days that he has enough work to keep him exerting all his powers. Theodore is the only person who had the power, except Father, who possessed it in a different way, of making me almost worship him and now it is such a desperate feeling to realize that in all this excitement I cannot help him in the least except that he knows how interested I am. I would never say or write this except to you, but it is very restful to feel how you care for him and how happy he is in his devotion to you . . . I go back again tomorrow [to Sagamore Hill] to remain over the Hunt Ball. I wish you were to be there this year also as you were last. . . I send you the pieces from this morning’s Times, they are samples of what appear daily, of course, the favorable side, but those most against him can find nothing but his youth, supposed wealth, and being born a gentleman to say as detrimental. . . .
“Theodore is radiantly happy and we sail on Saturday for England,” she wrote on Election Day to Lodge’s wife, Nannie.
Edith will be in London and they are to be married there early in December. . . . Edith we have known intimately always. She is very bright and attractive and I believe absolutely devoted to Theodore so I think their future looks most promising. . . . Today is of course politically one of intense excitement to me personally and apparently to New York generally. Theodore, Douglas and a number of men have been in to lunch and tonight I shall simply haunt the streets. . . .
Abram Hewitt was swept into office as expected, and as Bamie later observed, he “made an admirable mayor.” Henry George ran second and Theodore, for all the excitement he had generated, finished third. Large numbers of Republicans, fearful that a vote for Theodore might increase George’s chances of winning, had voted instead for Hewitt. Historically, it would stand as one of the most interesting campaigns the city had ever seen and at the age of twenty-eight Theodore was the youngest man who had ever been a candidate for mayor. “At least I have a better party standing than ever before,” he wrote to Lodge, who had just been elected to Congress.
Friday night, after the horse show, their last night before sailing, Bamie and he worked together until nearly daybreak addressing the last of the engagement announcements.
Afterword
ANNA
In the summer of 1895, to the astonishment of all the Roosevelt tribe, Bamie announced her engagement to Navy Commander (later Admiral) William Sheffield Cowles, a large, dignified, placid man from Connecticut. She was forty, he nearly fifty, and at age forty-three, she gave birth to a son, William Sheffield Cowles, Jr. In the years Theodore was President she established a home on N Street that became known as “the little White House.” As Eleanor was to recall, “There was never a serious subject that came up while he was President that he didn’t go to her at her home on N Street and discuss it with her before making his decision. He talked things over with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decision, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.”
In her middle years Bamie became almost totally deaf, yet few people ever knew since she learned to read lips, and later still, living in Connecticut, she suffered intensely from arthritis, a condition she refused to discuss. Recalling an evening at her Connecticut home, when she sat in a wheelchair talking and laughing with Cousin Sally’s son, Franklin, who by then was also in a wheelchair, a family friend remarked, “You felt such gallantry in all of them, you know, such humor, such complete elimination of any problem about bodies.”
Though devoted to her husband, her own dear “Mr. Bearo,” she refused to let him call her Bamie or Bye, only Anna, and her feelings for him were never what they were for her brother Theodore, who remained the center of her universe for as long as he lived.
Bamie died in August 1931, at the age of seventy-six.
THEODORE
With the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore became at forty-two the youngest President in history and possibly the best prepared. He had by then served six years as a reform Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland), two years as Police Commissioner of New York City, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on the eve of the Spanish-American War, as a colonel in the Rough Riders—and “hero of San Juan Hill”—as Governor of New York, and as Vice President. He was also the first President born and raised in a big city, and the first rich man’s son to occupy the White House since William Henry Harrison. He was a well-to-do, aristocratic, big-city, Harvard-educated Republican with ancestral roots in the Deep South and a pass
ionate following in the West, which taken all together made him something quite new under the sun.
As President he was picturesque, noisy, colorful in ways that amused and absorbed the press, worried the elders of his party, and delighted the country. To his admirers he was “the outstanding, incomparable symbol of virility in his time” (Mark Sullivan), “a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital” (Harry Thurston Peck), “the most striking figure in American life” (Thomas Edison); while to others, some of whom had once been his friends, he was “that damned cowboy” (Mark Hanna), a man “drunk with himself” (Henry Adams), “an excellent specimen of the genus Americanus egotisticus” (Poultney Bigelow). The cartoonists had a field day. But he was also a President with a phenomenal grasp of history, who spoke German and French (in a style entirely his own) and knew something of the world from having traveled abroad from the time he was a child. More important, he was as able an executive as ever occupied the office. He loved being President, loved the power, for what he could accomplish with it.
He settled the great anthracite coal strike of 1902 by entering the mediation as no President had done before. He initiated the first successful antitrust suit against a corporate monopoly, the giant Northern Securities Company (and when his fathers old friend J. P. Morgan came to Washington to demand an explanation, such action served only to harden his resolve). He “took the Isthmus” and built the Panama Canal, and served as peacemaker in the Russo-Japanese War, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. And he was openly proud of all his achievements.
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