by Timothy Egan
5. With the President
1904
THE VIEW FROM the study of the Roosevelt home at Sagamore Hill looked out on a sheltered slice of Long Island Sound, and it was quieter there on the second floor, though stuffy when the wind was down and the air heavy with summer heat. Edward Curtis and Teddy Roosevelt were talking about the West, a favorite subject of this polymath president. It was not easy to carry on a prolonged conversation without some interruption from the younger residents. This was as the family wanted it—the house had few boundaries for age or class. Children were to be seen and to be heard. Adults were to play, when they weren’t giving the president some insight into a pressing global issue. Pets had free range of most rooms, and for a visitor a door could open to the surprise of something four-legged or feathered. At the dinner table each child was required to ask at least one question of a guest. In Curtis, the westerner who had spent the past seven years in places that Roosevelt considered as iconic to the young nation as cathedrals were to old Europe, the children had a source of stories about faraway people who could not seem more exotic to students of a New England private school. What were the Apache like? Why does a Sioux warrior eat the heart of a grizzly bear? How does a Hopi priest handle all those rattlesnakes? Are most Indians polygamous? What were Chief Joseph’s last words?
Curtis had many questions of his own. He had learned why a Piegan man would spend three days fasting before praying to the sun, but he knew very little about which fork a gentleman was supposed to use for salad at a formal dinner. The East Coast took some getting used to. Not just the humidity, which made a resident of the Pacific Northwest sweat through a shirt before breakfast, but the customs and cultures. He would have to find his way without a translator—more difficult, in some respects, than trying to crack the puzzle of the Apaches’ eternal secrets. How did one dress for lunch? Was it proper to swim with a woman, alone? Could he feign interest in the Harvard debating club? He was lucky to have the Roosevelt family of eight—Edith, Teddy and their six children—as his guides to the affairs of Long Island. For the only rule of the summer White House that Roosevelt cared for was that guests not be slothful or boring. The youngest president in the nation’s history and the thirty-six-year-old photographer had much in common. Curtis was one of the few guests who knew, firsthand, all about those wondrous scraps of original America beyond the 100th meridian that Roosevelt was so passionate about, places he felt were in peril at this moment in the country’s aggressive adolescence. They took to each other in no time.
“I had found a listener who not only gave his undivided attention to my expression of thoughts and desire,” said Curtis, “but he concurred as well in my beliefs.” Curtis lit up as Roosevelt told of his ranching days in the Dakotas, a refuge for a grief-stricken young man who had lost his wife and mother on the same day. He beamed when Roosevelt talked about riding an Appaloosa at dusk in Montana, or his more recent journey to the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt guided him through the rooms of the three-story, seven-bedroom Queen Anne–style house just outside Oyster Bay. The library was decorated with bearskin rugs on the floor and trophy antelope on the walls. “I soon learned of his special gift,” Curtis said. Roosevelt “could read a page of a book at a glance, not a line at a time like most of us mortals.”
The dining room was informal for such a big house, seating twelve at best; heads of bighorn sheep and Rocky Mountain elk stared glassy-eyed under a beamed ceiling. The table, Roosevelt explained, had come from Florence, bought while Edith and Teddy were honeymooning in Italy. Had Curtis ever been abroad? No, sir. Curtis discussed Indians, and on this subject he could always hold a room. But did he know that the Roosevelt compound was on land named for Sagamore Mohannis, the Indian chief who had used it as a meeting ground in the 1660s? That would not surprise Curtis: every corner of the country had a native name that predated the new one. Two of the nation’s biggest cities—Chicago, from an Algonquin word for “garlic field,” and Manhattan, from another Algonquin term, “isolated thing in the water”—had Indian origins.
The year had been especially busy for the twenty-sixth president, who took office after an assassin killed William McKinley in 1901. At home, Roosevelt fought the major trusts, making enemies of the richest men in the country. And when the Supreme Court ruled in 1904 that the president had the constitutional right to break up concentrations of great wealth that restricted competition, Roosevelt anticipated that J. P. Morgan and E. H. Harriman (the Alaska expedition sponsor) would use their power to deprive him of a second term. Abroad, Russia and Japan were in violent conflict over disputed territory; Roosevelt the warrior had been called upon to act as a peace broker. He was also guiding a treaty through Congress that would give the United States control of the Panama Canal Zone, a right-of-way to dig a fifty-mile-long ditch through a malarial isthmus. He had introduced a term into everyday public life—conservation—and was trying to get fellow Americans to see that the continent they now straddled was a fragile one, losing much of its physical character in the clamorous tumble into the new century. Though he was considered the most popular man in the country, Roosevelt had yet to face the voters. He was up for a full four-year term in mere months. But just now he had other concerns. Could Mr. Curtis do the family a favor? Yes, Mr. President—anything. Curtis had made a blue-cheese salad dressing earlier, and Mrs. Roosevelt loved it. She was, Teddy said in a characteristic word, deeelighted! Could he share the secret of the recipe? For lunch.
Earlier that year, Ladies’ Home Journal had named the winners of its Prettiest Children in America contest; the picture that Clara Curtis had submitted of a Seattle girl was one of the chosen few, selected from eighteen thousand entries. And just as the rescue of two distinguished easterners on Mount Rainier had opened a much bigger world to Curtis, this contest proved again that he had a knack for fortuitous serendipity. Walter Russell, who was to paint the prettiest children, had been fascinated by the Curtis portrait of the little girl; he had passed on the name of the Seattle photographer to the president. And so in June of that year, as Curtis was packing for another long season in Indian country, came an invitation to visit Oyster Bay, to photograph the Roosevelt children.
He traveled the length of the country, four full days by train, and then took a short boat ride from New York City to Long Island. In barely a decade’s time, Curtis had gone from a homesteader’s shack on Puget Sound to the summer White House on Long Island Sound. He and Roosevelt had friends in common: Gifford Pinchot, for one, whom the photographer had met on the Harriman expedition and kept in touch with. A patrician bachelor with a self-righteous streak, Pinchot was a top domestic adviser to the president and the nation’s chief forester. Bird Grinnell was a longtime hunting buddy of the president’s. The naturalist John Burroughs—one of the Two Johnnies on the Alaska trip—was so close to Teddy that the president would dedicate his next book to him. Good men all around, they agreed.
Curtis was instructed that his only duty, at first, was to get to know the children: to play with them, to make fires with them, to race with them, to dig clams with them, to tell them stories of the West. They were a kinetic bunch, riding horses around the grounds, whooping and hollering up the stairs, playing hide-and-seek around the orchard, the barn, the icehouse, the windmill, the pet cemetery. They buried each other—and the dog—in beach sand up to their chins, and the kids rode camelback-style on Curtis’s shoulders. The biggest child, Teddy Roosevelt himself, was a believer in vigorous exercise. “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease,” he said, but “the doctrine of the strenuous life.” But that didn’t mean he couldn’t make it a game. At Sagamore Hill, the Roosevelt Obstacle Walk was led by the president, followed by Curtis and the children. It left everyone breathless on the veranda at sunset.
“I found them the most energetic, vital family,” said Curtis. “They made me feel at home, in fact like one of the family.” During the day, he foraged along the shore with Quentin, who was six years old, or rode ponies with Arch
ibald, who was ten. The teenagers, Theodore Junior and Kermit, spent much of the time with cousins and people their age. And now and then twenty-year-old Alice would drop by. “Princess Alice,” her family nickname, was a heartthrob for men of many ages, a high-spirited beauty. “I can be president of the United States, or I can control Alice,” said Roosevelt. “I cannot possibly do both.”
As thrilled as Curtis was to be allowed into the inner circle of the first family, and to be chosen to take pictures of the president’s children, he had something else he wished to accomplish. In 1903, the studio had hired Adolph Muhr, a midwesterner well known for his own Indian pictures and a brilliant technician. It was a coup for Edward and Clara to bring Muhr into the fold, for he was the talent behind many of the Indian photographs of Frank Rinehart, an artist and photographer of some renown. Once in Seattle, Muhr would never leave the Curtis dynamo. His influence on Curtis was immediate and lasting. It was his finishing hand that made so many of the Curtis portraits of the past year memorable. Muhr was the first step in hiring a crew that could construct the Curtis blueprint. Young Bill Phillips, Clara’s cousin, was already on the payroll, a full-time assistant. Soon, Curtis planned to add a field researcher, someone trained in ethnology, and a writer, someone who had practiced deadline journalism. He also needed an editor for the finished product, though he was still not sure exactly what form that would take—a book, several books, a permanent exhibition. He needed translators, dozens of them, in every part of the West. All of this would cost money that Curtis did not have. No matter how well his portrait business hummed along and how many individual Indian pictures he sold, the revenue could not begin to support the ever-growing undertaking. The Big Idea might sink him.
Looking for a benefactor, he had gone east for the first time in 1903, for an audience with experts at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. In recent years, they had launched several research projects into Indian country and were gathering all manner of cultural artifacts for permanent storage in the capital. But in 1903 the Smithsonian came under fire in Congress for spending federal dollars on patronage hacks and glorified junkets. When Curtis arrived for a meeting that included William Henry Holmes, chief of the Bureau of Ethnology, they were in retreat. Curtis had been courting the Smithsonian for months with letters hinting at his grand scheme. And just what made a dropout from a one-room schoolhouse think he could get the nation’s top ethnologists to back his project? Balls. Those who didn’t try for the highest peak were doomed to the foothills. In that sense, Curtis had something else in common with Roosevelt, whose most famous words were an encouragement to take risks: “to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”
Inside the red sandstone walls of the Smithsonian Castle, Curtis gave an exhaustive presentation to some of the nation’s leading authorities on American Indians. His way inside had been greased by favorable words from Grinnell and Merriam. Curtis planned to document eighty tribes, he explained: all the people in North America still living somewhat of a “primitive existence.” Eighty tribes? The figure made jaws drop; it amounted to one of the largest anthropological projects ever undertaken in the United States. He would make audio recordings of songs and languages so the words would never be lost, even if the tribes disappeared. He would write down their music so people could play it later. And finally, he planned to use a heavy, stand-up device that a few photographers were just starting to tinker with: a moving-picture camera. Moving pictures? The Great Train Robbery, the first narrative film, had recently been released. So lifelike. Curtis explained that he would use this camera to film the Yeibichai Dance of the Navajo. This last task struck the learned men at the Smithsonian as preposterous. Well-trained doctors of science had been trying for years to get close enough to the Navajo to obtain pictures and interpretations of the Yeibichai Dance. It was impossible. In closing, Curtis insisted that for all the other work he intended to do, in the main his great undertaking would be a picture record—using only the finest and costliest finishing process—of the daily lives of the first Americans. And, of course, it was art as well, a subjective look, by the very nature of how and where he pointed the camera.
Though Curtis had impressed Frederick Webb Hodge, the top official of Indian affairs at the Bureau of Ethnology and the editor of American Anthropologist, the other authorities at the Smithsonian were unmoved. They rejected him outright. He would get nothing from the nation’s foremost storehouse of its history and artifacts. They doubted that Curtis could ever pull off such an immense project, and they were wholly unimpressed with his credentials. For God’s sake, he’s uneducated! Curtis was clearly indignant at the setback, and it hurt.
More humiliation was to come. During the same trip, he went to New York in search of a book backer. Surely he would have no problem finding a major publisher. In Manhattan, Curtis outlined his plan to Walter Page at Doubleday. The editor gave Curtis a respectful listen. But Page was troubled, he told the upstart from Seattle, by how many Indian products were already on the market—books, portfolios, cards.
“Couldn’t give ’em away,” said Page.
That is, unless Curtis wanted to do something along the lines of Karl May’s depictions of that hardy perennial, the Noble Savage. May was a German author who sold millions of books about Indians well before he ever saw one, or set foot in America. No, no, no—Curtis wanted realism, albeit with a humane touch, and he insisted that his published works be produced in a costly finishing and printing process. If that was the case, Page informed him, this collection would have to sell for a much higher price than normal picture books. How much higher? A typical hardback might cost $1.50. The multivolume Curtis books would have to fetch several hundred dollars, maybe $1,000 or more, just to break even. A thousand dollars: that’s what the average American earned in a year. Only the very rich, and the largest cultural institutions and universities, could afford them. And even that high-end market might not be enough to support the publication. But see here, Curtis countered, his Indian pictures were unique—look at them! These portraits were not dime-store savages or cartoon maidens or Karl May fantasies. He intended to make publishing history. Sorry, Page said, there’s just no audience for fine Indian pictures. With the rejections, Curtis could not build his team beyond Phillips and Muhr. Until he could find a deep funding source, all other hiring was on hold.
At Sagamore Hill, Curtis was unsure how the president would feel about his fascination with Indians. In his early writing, Roosevelt had been none too sympathetic. He called them “filthy” and “lecherous” and “faithless” in his volume of western history published in 1896. What he had seen of Indians during his ranching days, tribes decimated by disease and war, “were but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.” A decade earlier, he had been even more cruelly glib. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” In almost every respect—personal hygiene, sexual relations, the worship of multiple spirits, the tribal approach to battle, preferring to ambush and raid instead of lining up in formation for a formal fight—the Indian way was appalling to the settled customs and manners that had produced the Roosevelts of New York City. But later, as a warrior colonel, with Indians among his Rough Riders who charged up San Juan Hill in 1898, Roosevelt for the first time saw natives who were heroic. He was moved by how fearless they were, riding into a blizzard of enemy fire on behalf of the American flag. As president, his views continued to evolve. Like everything else on American soil, Indians were in his care now, a tenuous trust relationship.
Still, Roosevelt was not a likely ally for Curtis. The photographer faced a tough dilemma: could a man whose dream was to
humanize Indians persuade a man who was so dismissive of them to back his work? The question roiled Curtis while spending long days and intellectually stimulating evenings with the Roosevelts and their circle. Should he dare to ask the president to intervene? Was there something he could do to get the Smithsonian experts to change their minds? Or could he set Curtis up with one of his friends, a patron with deep pockets?
But first he had to humanize the first family. He shot pictures of the boys in a variety of settings: outside, in the library, at play, in serious thought. Quentin, the youngest son, looks pleading in his close-up, no easy smile, his eyes holding his emotion. After finishing with the children, Curtis persuaded the president to pose for him—a formal portrait. In it, Roosevelt is seen from the chest up, in dark suit, knotted tie, gray-speckled mustache, his pince-nez in front of his eyes as usual. But two things stand out: the light, showing one half of Roosevelt’s face as if it were a waning moon, and the jawbone, which is stern but not forced or clenched in fighter mode. Those ferocious teeth, a favorite of cartoonists, are hidden behind a closed mouth. The president looks bookish, studious, pensive. Curtis loved the effect, and believed he had captured a Roosevelt seldom seen. When he developed the picture, he used a process reserved for less than one percent of his pictures: orotone. “The ordinary photographic print lacks depth and transparency,” said Curtis in one of his brochures explaining the technique. But with orotone, even dull stones “are as full of life and sparkle as an opal.” The image is printed directly onto glass and then backed with gold spray: a difficult and very expensive way to finish a photograph in 1904.
“My picture of the President is great,” Curtis wrote Gifford Pinchot. “It is quite different from anything before taken and, I believe, will be considered by all who know him, a splendid likeness. I made no effort to re-touch up the face and make him a smooth-visaged individual without a line or anything to show character.” Well! Pinchot could have popped a vest button at the brazen, breathless self-regard coming from the man the Indians called the Shadow Catcher, a name he had been given in Arizona. But it wasn’t just self-praise. The social reformer and journalist Jacob Riis, a Roosevelt intimate, was equally impressed after he saw the print. “It is more than a picture,” he said. “It is the man himself.”