While the ambition of the hallowed framers had been “inseparably linked” with building up a constitutional government allowing the people to govern themselves, he feared that in the chaos of moblike behavior, men of the likes of “an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” would likely seek distinction by boldly setting themselves “to the task of pulling down.” Such men of “towering” egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people’s best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots.
To counter the troublesome ambition of such men, Lincoln called upon his fellow Americans to renew the framers’ values and to embrace the Constitution and its laws. “Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother,” taught in every school, preached in every pulpit. The great bulwark against a potential dictator is an informed people “attached to the government and laws.” This argument takes Lincoln back to his first statement to the people of Sangamon County when he spoke of education as the cornerstone of democracy. Why is education so central? Because, as he said then, every citizen must be able to read history to “appreciate the value of our free institutions.” And reading about the Revolution and the making of the Constitution was more urgent, for time had passed and remembered scenes of the Revolution were fading. Indeed, Lincoln declared that the story of America’s birth should “be read of, and recounted, so long as the bible shall be read.” The founding fathers’ noble experiment—their ambition to show the world that ordinary people could govern themselves—had succeeded, and now, Lincoln concluded, it was up to his generation to preserve this “proud fabric of freedom.”
Still in his twenties, Abraham Lincoln had already developed a conception of leadership based upon the leader’s shared understanding of his followers’ needs for liberty, equality, and opportunity. In less than half a dozen years, seemingly from nothing and from nowhere, he had risen to become a respected leader in the state legislature, a central figure in the fight for internal improvements, an instrumental force behind the planting of the new capital, and a practicing lawyer. Given his beginnings, he had traveled an immense distance; yet, given the inordinate nature of his ambition to render himself worthy of his fellow men, he had hardly begun.
TWO
THEODORE
“I rose like a rocket”
Theodore Roosevelt, like Abraham Lincoln, was twenty-three years old when he made his first foray into the political world—but there the similarities end. In Lincoln’s rural environment, anyone who wanted to be a candidate could step up and nominate himself, “run on his own hook,” and speak on his own behalf. Since voters came to encounter candidates firsthand in general stores and village squares, personal impressions mattered more than party affiliation. Lincoln’s two-thousand-word statement announcing his aspiration for a seat in the state legislature revealed his deepest personal ambitions as well as his stand on local issues. In contrast, Roosevelt’s thirty-three-word statement—devoid of promises, pledges, and personality—was a simple acknowledgment of a nomination already secured: “Having been nominated as a candidate for member of Assembly for this District, I would esteem it a compliment if you would honor me with your vote and personal influence on Election Day.”
In the half-century span between Lincoln’s and Roosevelt’s beginnings in public life, the means of entry into politics had radically changed. While Lincoln had stepped forward on his own, young Roosevelt was chosen to run by the local boss, Joe Murray, a burly red-haired Irish immigrant. The 21st Assembly District where Roosevelt dwelled embraced both the elegant brownstones along Madison Avenue and the crowded tenements on the West Side of Manhattan. Known as the Silk Stocking District, it was one of the few reliably Republican districts in the city. Young Roosevelt was not widely known. The boss “picked me as the candidate with whom he would be most likely to win,” Roosevelt later granted. “I had at that time neither the reputation nor the ability to have won the nomination for myself.”
In selecting Roosevelt, a second-year law student at Columbia, the Irish boss recognized the allure of the Roosevelt name. Theodore’s father, the late Theodore Roosevelt Sr., had been a highly respected philanthropist who had worked to improve the lives of poor children through his work with the Children’s Aid Society, Miss Sattery’s Night School for Little Italians, and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. Indeed, when the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt was announced, the New York Daily Tribune suggested that in voting for the son of “one of the most loved and respected” figures in the history of New York, voters would have the opportunity “to show their regard for an honored name.” The boss also understood that Roosevelt had the means to contribute to his own campaign. So while Lincoln, as he conceded in his opening statement, had “no wealthy or popular relations” to recommend him, it was precisely those relations and that wealth that brought young Roosevelt to the attention of the Republican boss.
Looking back, Roosevelt credited “the element of chance”—the demographics of the assembly district and the power of his family name—as the chief instrument behind his first opportunity. He also understood, however, that when an opportunity comes, a person has “to take advantage” of that opportunity. “I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.” Indeed, it was young Roosevelt himself who had taken the initiative to become a member of the local Republican Association, which held its meetings at Morton Hall at the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. Morton Hall was a large smoke-filled room over a saloon with shabby benches, cuspidors, and poker tables. To join the party then was “no simple thing,” Roosevelt later recalled. “The party was still treated as a private corporation, and in each district the organization formed a kind of social and political club. A man had to be regularly proposed for and elected into this club, just as into any other club.”
When he began inquiring about the local Republican organization, he was warned by his privileged circle, “men of cultivated taste and easy life,” that district politics were “low,” the province of “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors and the like,” men who “would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with.” Their disdain did not dissuade Roosevelt, who turned their condescension on its head: “I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class; that if they proved too hard-bit for me I supposed I would have to quit, but that I certainly would not quit until I had made the effort and found out whether I really was too weak to hold my own in the rough and tumble.”
So, once again, questions emerge: What attracted this abundantly privileged, sheltered young man to the alien and contemptible world of local politics? Where did his ambition come from?
* * *
When Roosevelt sat down at the age of fifty-three to trace the narrative that led from this first run for office to the White House, he provided his own useful, albeit sometimes misleading, answers to some of these questions. In order to frame the discussion, he methodically distinguishes two types of success—whether in the arts, in battle, or in politics.
The first success, he argues, belongs to the man “who has in him the natural power to do what no one else can do, and what no amount of training, no perseverance or will power, will enable an ordinary man to do.” He cites the poet who could write the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the president who could “deliver the Gettysburg Address,” and Lord Nelson at Trafalgar as manifestations of genius, examples of men assigned extraordinary gifts at birth.
The second and more common type of success, he maintains, is not dependent on such unique inborn attributes, but on a man’s ability to develop ordinary qualities to an extraordinary degree through ambition and the application of hard, sustained work. Unlike genius, which can inspire, but not educate, self-made success is democratic, “open to the average man of sound body and fair mind, who has no remarkable mental or physical attributes,” but who enlarges each of those attributes to the maximum degree. He su
ggests that it is “more useful to study this second type,” for with determination, anyone “can, if he chooses, find out how to win a similar success himself.”
It is clear from the start of Roosevelt’s story of his leadership journey that he unequivocally aligns himself with this second type of success. His story is the tale of a sickly boy with a timid temperament who, believing in “the gospel of will,” transforms his body and emboldens his spirit. Through great effort and discipline, his weak body becomes strong; through visualization and practice, he confronts fear and becomes brave. “I like to believe that, by what I have accomplished without great gifts, I may be a source of encouragement to Americans.”
This picture of a young boy building his character, brick by brick, until he develops a moral concept of leadership based upon that character, is simplistic and incomplete; yet, remarkably, however, it contains large elements of truth. “Teedie” Roosevelt was, indeed, a nervous, unhealthy, fragile child, whose boyhood was shaped by terrifying attacks of bronchial asthma. Generally stealing on him in the middle of the night, these attacks created the sensation of suffocating or drowning. Hearing his son coughing, wheezing, and struggling for breath, Theodore Senior, known as Thee, would rush into the bedroom. Taking his son into his arms, he would carry him around the house for hours until he could breathe and fall asleep. If this ritual proved inadequate, he would call for the servants to bring the horse and carriage round. Wrapping the gasping child in a blanket, he would drive the horse at a good clip through the gas-lit streets, believing that the bracing night winds would stir the child’s lungs. “Nobody seemed to think I would live,” Roosevelt later recalled. “My father—he got me breath, he got me lungs, strength—life.”
While asthma weakened young Roosevelt’s body, it indirectly spurred the development of an already precocious mind. “From the very fact that he was not able originally to enter into the most vigorous activities,” his younger sister, Corinne, noted, “he was always reading or writing” with a most unusual “power of concentration.” There was nothing ordinary about his intellectual vitality, his curiosity, or his ambitious dream life. Under the guiding eye of his father, who ceaselessly encouraged his son’s intellectual and spiritual development, Teedie became a ferocious reader, transporting himself into the lives of the adventurous heroes he most admired—men with extraordinary bodily strength, who were fearless in battle, explorers in Africa, deerslayers living on the edge of the wilderness. When asked years later whether he knew the characters in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, he laughed: “Do I know them? I have bunked with them and eaten with them, and I know their strengths and weaknesses.”
Few young children read as broadly or had such access to books as young Roosevelt. He had only to pick a volume from the shelves of the vast library in his family’s home or express interest in a particular book and it would magically materialize. During one family vacation, Teedie proudly reported that he and his younger brother and sister, Elliott and Corinne, had devoured fifty novels! Thee read aloud to his children in the evenings after dinner. He spiced learning with family games and competitions. He organized amateur plays for them, urged them to recite poetry, and encouraged each of them to follow their particular interests. Above all, he sought to impart didactic principles of duty, ethics, and morality through stories, fables, and maxims.
Leaders in every field, Roosevelt later wrote, “need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.” The effortless way Teedie secured hundreds of books provides stark contrast with the six-mile trek of Abraham to borrow Kirkham’s English Grammar, a comparison made brutal by superimposing Thee’s constant endeavors to feed Teedie’s reading with the image of Thomas Lincoln tearing books from Abraham’s grasp. Yet, however dissimilar their upbringings, books became for both Lincoln and Roosevelt “the greatest of companions.” Every day for the rest of their lives, both men set aside time for reading, snatching moments while waiting for meals, between visitors, or lying in bed before sleep.
Roosevelt’s insistence that he had no great gifts is contradicted not only by his remarkable mental vitality but also by his prodigious memory. When talking about books he had read years before, the pages would appear before him, as if he were able to read anew with his mind’s eye. In contrast to Lincoln’s mind, which he himself likened to “a piece of steel—hard to scratch anything on it,” though “almost impossible thereafter to rub it out”—Roosevelt’s mind, one friend observed, was “wax to receive and marble to retain.” It seemed as if he could “remember everything he read,” the friend marveled; he had only to read something once and it was his to retrieve forever, allowing him to summon not only whole passages, but the feelings evoked in him when he first encountered them.
Young Roosevelt, unlike Lincoln, did not identify himself early on as a leader. Nor was he identified as such by those around him. Teedie’s precarious health kept him from public school and from natural relationships with boys his own age. He and his siblings (his older sister, Bamie; younger sister, Corinne; and younger brother, Elliott, all suffered from a range of serious physical ailments) were taught the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic by tutors at home. Their only playmates were members of their extended family, all from the same patrician class.
Within this small circle of children, however, Teedie occupied the center, organizing their play, directing their games, entertaining them with his talent for telling stories. Corinne treasured the episodic narratives her eight-year-old brother would spin, stories drawn from both his imagination and the books he had read. Storytelling played an integral role in the Roosevelt family life. Teedie’s mother, Martha Bulloch (Mittie), an “unreconstructed” southerner, who had grown up in a stately mansion in Georgia, regaled her son with romantic, chivalric tales of life in the antebellum South.
The precocious Teedie, one biographer noted, displayed not only “a purposeful, determined personality” but also “an almost ruthless single-mindedness where his interests were concerned.” By the age of ten, he had developed a passionate interest in nature and the ambition to become a famous ornithologist like J. J. Audubon. As he roamed the woodland trails surrounding his family’s summer retreats, searching for freedom to clear his lungs, he began to observe birds, listening to their songs, discerning their various shapes and plumage. He collected bugs, insects, and reptiles, which he kept in his bureau drawers. Noting his son’s absorption in birds and mammals, Thee bought him a collection of volumes on natural history and provided private taxidermy lessons with one of Audubon’s assistants. The same aggressive focus Teedie had given to his reading, he now directed toward skinning, dissecting, and mounting hundreds of meticulously labeled specimens which he assembled in what he proudly called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.” Oblivious to the mess he created in the bedroom—fetid containers filled with dissected creatures stood in every corner—he drove Elliott to beg for a separate room.
The uniquely extensive education Thee provided his children, so different from the intensive education Lincoln crafted for himself, stretched far beyond the boundaries of their winter and summer homes to include two separate yearlong journeys abroad—the first to Europe, the second to the Middle East, the Holy Land, and Africa. They stayed in exclusive hotels and inns, in tents, and private homes. They spent two months in Rome, three weeks in Greece, two weeks in Lebanon, three weeks in Palestine, and an entire winter in Egypt. And always at night, Thee—solicitous father, mentor, minister, and tour guide—would read aloud the poetry, history, and literature of the region they were visiting. In Dresden they lived for two months with a German family. Thee had made arrangements to hire the host’s daughter to immerse the children in the German language, literature, music, and art. Teedie was so intrigued with his lessons, which lasted six hours of the day, that he pleaded to extend
them further. “And of course,” Elliott complained, “I could not be left behind so we are working harder than ever in our lives.”
While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body. By the age of ten, his chronic asthma required more and more days of bed rest. Thee feared that his son was becoming too familiar with illness, timidity, and frailness, following in the footsteps of his mother, who had become increasingly fragile after the destruction of her family’s Georgia home during the Civil War. Plagued by palpitations, intestinal pain, debilitating headaches, and depression, she regularly withdrew to her room. Worried that Teedie, like Mittie, was becoming an invalid, Thee took his son aside: “Theodore, you have the mind but not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” Teedie responded enthusiastically, promising his father: “I’ll make my body.”
With the help of his father, who hired the owner of a nearby gym to build a fully equipped gymnasium on the back porch, Teedie lifted weights and hoisted himself on horizontal bars, slowly, ever so slowly, expanding his physical capabilities and refashioning his body. That his bodily self-esteem remained vulnerable was apparent the following summer when he encountered two bullies while traveling alone on a stagecoach to Moosehead Lake in the north woods of Maine. “They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim,” he remembered years later, “and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me.” Finding he was unable to fight back, he resolved that he would “not again be put in such a helpless position.” When he told his father he wanted to learn how to box, Thee hired the services of an ex-prizefighter to train his son.
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