The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  This is the time of the day he loves best. “Reading with me is a disease.”116 He succumbs to it so totally—on the heaving deck of the Presidential yacht in the middle of a cyclone, between whistle-stops on a campaign trip, even while waiting for his carriage at the front door—that he cannot hear his own name being spoken. Nothing short of a thump on the back will regain his attention. Asked to summarize the book he has been leafing through with such apparent haste, he will do so in minute detail, often quoting the actual text.117

  The President manages to get through at least one book a day even when he is busy. Owen Wister has lent him a book shortly before a full evening’s entertainment at the White House, and been astonished to hear a complete review of it over breakfast. “Somewhere between six one evening and eight-thirty next morning, beside his dressing and his dinner and his guests and his sleep, he had read a volume of three-hundred-and-odd pages, and missed nothing of significance that it contained.”118

  On evenings like this, when he has no official entertaining to do, Roosevelt will read two or three books entire.119 His appetite for titles is omnivorous and insatiable, ranging from the the Histories of Thucydides to the Tales of Uncle Remus. Reading, as he has explained to Trevelyan, is for him the purest imaginative therapy. In the past year alone, Roosevelt has devoured all the novels of Trollope, the complete works of De Quincey, a Life of Saint Patrick, the prose works of Milton and Tacitus (“until I could stand them no longer”), Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, the seafaring yarns of Jacobs, the poetry of Scott, Poe, and Longfellow, a German novel called Jörn Uhl, “a most satisfactorily lurid Man-eating Lion story,” and Foulke’s Life of Oliver P. Morton, not to mention at least five hundred other volumes, on subjects ranging from tropical flora to Italian naval history.120

  The richness of Roosevelt’s knowledge causes a continuous process of cross-fertilization to go on in his mind. Standing with candle in hand at a baptismal service in Santa Fe, he reflects that his ancestors, and those of the child’s Mexican father, “doubtless fought in the Netherlands in the days of Alva and Parma.” Watching a group of American sailors joke about bedbugs in the Navy, he is reminded of the freedom of comment traditionally allowed to Roman legionnaires after battle. Trying to persuade Congress to adopt a system of simplified spelling in Government documents, he unself-consciously cites a treatise on the subject published in the time of Cromwell.121

  Tonight the President will bury himself, perhaps, in two volumes Mrs. Lodge has just sent him for review: Gissing’s Charles Dickens, A Critical Study, and The Greek View of Life, by Lowes Dickinson. He will be struck, as he peruses the latter, by interesting parallels between the Periclean attitude toward women and that of presentday Japan, and will make a mental note to write to Mrs. Lodge about it.122 He may also read, with alternate approval and disapproval, two articles on Mormonism in the latest issue of Outlook. A five-thousand-word essay on “The Ancient Irish Sagas” in this month’s Century magazine will not detain him long, since he is himself the author.123 His method of reading periodicals is somewhat unusual: each page, as he comes to the end of it, is torn out and thrown onto the floor.124 When both magazines have been thus reduced to a pile of crumpled paper, Roosevelt will leap from his rocking-chair and march down the corridor. Slowing his pace at the door of the presidential suite, he will tiptoe in, brush the famous teeth with only a moderate amount of noise, and pull on his blue-striped pajamas. Beside his pillow he will deposit a large, precautionary revolver.125 His last act, after turning down the lamp and climbing into bed, will be to unclip his pince-nez and rub the reddened bridge of his nose. Then, there being nothing further to do, Theodore Roosevelt will energetically fall asleep.

  “Such loveliness of line and tinting … such sweet courtesy of manner.”

  Martha Bulloch Roosevelt at twenty-two.(Illustration p1.1)

  CHAPTER 1

  The Very Small Person

  Then King Olaf entered,

  Beautiful as morning,

  Like the sun at Easter

  Shone his happy face.

  ON THE LATE afternoon of 27 October 1858, a flurry of activity disturbed the genteel quietness of East Twentieth Street, New York City.1 Liveried servants flew out of the basement of No. 28, the Roosevelt brownstone, and hurried off in search of doctors, midwives, and stray members of the family—a difficult task, for it was now the fashionable visiting hour. Meanwhile Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt lay tossing in her satinwood bed, awaiting the arrival of her second child and first son.

  Gaslight was flaring on the cobbles by the time a doctor arrived. The child was born at a quarter to eight, emerging so easily that neither chloroform nor instruments were needed. “Consequently,” reported his grandmother, “the dear little thing has no cuts nor bruises about it.” Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, was “as sweet and pretty a young baby as I have ever seen.”

  Mittie Roosevelt, inspecting her son the following morning, disagreed. She said, with Southern frankness, that he looked like a terrapin.2

  Apart from these two contradictory images, there are no further visual descriptions of the newborn baby. He weighed eight and a half pounds, and was more than usually noisy.3 When he reappears in the family chronicles ten months later, he has acquired a milk-crust and a nickname, “Teedie.” At eighteen months the milk-crust has gone, but the nickname has not. He is now “almost a little beauty.”4

  Scattered references in other letters indicate a bright, hyperactive infant. Yet already the first of a succession of congenital ailments was beginning to weaken him. Asthma crowded his lungs, depriving him of sleep. “One of my memories,” the ex-President wrote in his Autobiography, “is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.”5 Even more nightmarish was the recollection of those same strong arms holding him, as the Roosevelt rig sped through darkened city streets, forcing a rush of air into the tiny lungs.6

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT, SENIOR, was no stranger to childhood suffering. Gifted himself with magnificent health and strength—“I never seem to get tired”—he overflowed with sympathy for the small, the weak, the lame, and the poor. Even in that age when a certain amount of charitable work was expected of well-born citizens, he was remarkable for his passionate efforts on behalf of the waifs of New York. He had what he called “a troublesome conscience.”7

  Every seventh day of his life was dedicated to teaching in mission schools, distributing tracts, and interviewing wayward children. Long after dark he would come home after dinner at some such institution as the Newsboys’ Lodging-House, or Mrs. Sattery’s Night School for Little Italians. One of his prime concerns, as a founder of the Children’s Aid Society, was to send street urchins to work on farms in the West. His charity extended as far as sick kittens, which could be seen peeking from his pockets as he drove down Broadway.8

  At the time of Teedie’s birth, Theodore Senior was twenty-seven years old, a partner in the old importing firm of Roosevelt and Son, and already one of the most influential men in New York. Handsome, wealthy, and gregarious, he was at ease with millionaires and paupers, never showing a trace of snobbery, real or inverse, in his relations with either class. “I can see him now,” remembered a society matron years later, “in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging-House, and later dashing off to an evening party on Fifth Avenue.”9

  A photograph taken in 1862 shows deep eyes, leonine features, a glossy beard, and big, sloping shoulders. “He was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man,” said his nephew Emlen Roosevelt, “… deep through, with a sense of abundant strength and power.” The word “power” runs like a leitmotif through other descriptions of Theodore Senior: he was a person of inexorable drive. “A certain expression” on his face, as he strode breezily into the offices of business acquaintances, was enough to flip pocketbooks open. “How much this time, Theodore?”10<
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  For all his compulsive philanthropy, he was neither sanctimonious nor ascetic. He took an exuberant, masculine joy in life, riding his horse through Central Park “as though born in the saddle,” exercising with the energy of a teenager, waltzing all night long at society balls. Driving his four-in-hand back home in the small hours of the morning, he rattled through the streets at such a rate that his grooms allegedly “fell out at the corners.”11

  Such a combination of physical vitality and genuine love of humanity was rare indeed. His son called Theodore Senior “the best man I ever knew,” adding, “… but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”12

  IN ALL RESPECTS except their intense love for each other, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt were striking opposites. Where he was big and disciplined and manly, “Mittie” was small, vague, and feminine to the point of caricature. He was the archetypal Northern burgher, she the Southern belle eternal, a lady about whom there always clung a hint of white columns and wisteria bowers. Born and raised in the luxury of a Georgia plantation, she remained, according to her son, “entirely unreconstructed until the day of her death.”13

  Of her beauty, especially in her youth (she was twenty-three when Teedie was born), contemporary accounts are unanimous in their praise. Her hair was fine and silky black, with a luster her French hairdresser called noir doré. Her skin was “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and in her cheeks there glowed a suggestion of coral.14 Every day she took two successive baths, “one for cleaning, one for rinsing,” and she dressed habitually in white muslin, summer and winter. “No dirt,” an admirer marveled, “ever stopped near her.”15

  On Mittie’s afternoons “at home” she would sit in her pale blue parlor, surrounded always by bunches of violets, while “neat little maids in lilac print gowns” escorted guests into her presence. Invariably they were enchanted. “Such loveliness of line and tinting … such sweet courtesy of manner!” gushed Mrs. Burton Harrison, a memoirist of the period. Of five or six gentlewomen whose “birth, breeding, and tact” established them as the flowers of New York society, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seemed to me easily the most beautiful.”16

  Her exquisite looks were balanced by exquisite taste. Not surprisingly, for someone who made such a delicate pastel picture of herself, she was a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. She filled her house with the finest furniture and porcelain, and her need for “everything that was beautiful” is said to have strained even the considerable Roosevelt resources. Theodore Senior acknowledged that her palate for wine was superior to his own, and never paid for a consignment until she had personally approved it.17

  Mittie was a woman of considerable wit. Her letters, written in a delicate Italian hand, show flashes of inventive humor.18 As a storyteller, especially when recounting what her enraptured children called “slave tales,” she revealed great gifts of mimicry. One evening, at a family party, she grimaced her way through a piece called “Old Bess in a Fit,” while Theodore Senior, who could not bear seeing her lovely face distorted, tried in vain to stop her. Eventually he was reduced to picking her up like a doll and carrying her out of the room on his shoulder.19

  FROM HIS FATHER, young Teedie inherited the sturdy Dutch character of Klaes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, one of the early settlers of New Amsterdam, who stepped ashore sometime in 1649. From that day on for the next two centuries, every generation of Roosevelts—Teedie being the seventh—was born on Manhattan Island.20

  Oom Klaes had been a farmer, but subsequent Roosevelts ascended rapidly in the social scale, becoming manufacturers, merchants, engineers, and bankers. A Roosevelt had served in the New York State Senate and helped ratify the Constitution with Alexander Hamilton. Another had received his bride from the hands of General Lafayette. Industrious and honest, the family amassed a comfortable fortune. Teedie’s grandfather Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt was worth half a million dollars at a time when the average daily wage was fifty to seventy-five cents.21

  The only non-Dutch infusion that Teedie received through his father was that of Grandmother Roosevelt, but it was a rich admixture of Welsh, English, Irish, Scotch-Irish, and German strains traceable back to immigrant Quakers. Strangely enough, she, and not old Cornelius, taught Teedie the only Dutch he ever knew, a nursery song:

  Trippel trippel toontjes,

  Kippen in de boontjes …

  Fifty years later, when he went hunting in Africa, he sang this song to Boer settlers and found that they recognized it. “It was interesting,” he wrote, “to meet these men whose ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America two and a half centuries previously, and to find that the descendants of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at least of the same nursery songs.”22

  From his mother, Teedie acquired several refined French traits. Although her forebears were predominantly Scots—James Bulloch of Glasgow emigrated to Charleston in 1729—they had early married into the Huguenot family of de Veaux.23 Mittie, with her rococo beauty and elegance of manner, could have been mistaken for a Frenchwoman, and she passed on to Teedie a certain Gallic volubility.

  The Bullochs also contributed aristocratic qualities, not shared by the Roosevelts. Whereas Oom Klaes had been a man of the soil, ranking far below Governor Pieter Stuyvesant, James Bulloch was a learned planter who could entertain Governor James Edward Oglethorpe on equal terms.24 Unlike the Roosevelts, who with two or three exceptions preferred the security of commerce to the glamor of politics,25 the Bullochs stepped naturally into positions of power. Among his direct maternal ancestors Teedie could count six distinguished politicians, including Archibald Bulloch, the first President of Revolutionary Georgia.26

  Few Americans, surely, have been born into such a perfectly balanced home environment as the son of Theodore and Mittie Roosevelt. There was a harmony of Southern refinement and Northern vigor, feminine humor and masculine seriousness, and—later on—the rewards of privilege and the responsibilities of charity. Through the front window of the house Teedie looked down on carriages and cobblestones, and heard coming from Broadway and Fifth Avenue the rumble and throb of a great city. Through the rear window he gazed out into another world, an enormous, block-wide garden full of trees and flowers, roamed by ornamental peacocks.27 Were it not for the weight of asthma in his lungs, he might consider himself a child of Paradise.

  But then, five months after his second birthday, Southern cannons fired upon Fort Sumter, and the harmonies of 28 East Twentieth Street were jarred into discord.

  WHEN WAR WAS DECLARED, on 12 April 1861, Teedie and his six-year-old sister Anna (“Bamie”) had been joined by a fourteen-month-old brother, Elliott (“Ellie”), and Mittie Roosevelt was already pregnant with her final child, Corinne (“Conie”), who arrived in the fall. No sooner had the last been born than Theodore Senior left home, and sadness filled the house.28

  He had spent most of the summer agonizing, to the tramp of mustering regiments, over what role he should play in the war. Although he was not yet thirty, and in prime physical shape, his domestic situation was such that he could not contemplate taking up arms. Under his roof lived three women—Grandmother Bulloch, Mittie, and her sister Annie—who owned slaves and a plantation and were passionate in their support of the Confederacy. (Mittie allegedly once hung out the Stars and Bars after a Southern victory.) Two of Mrs. Bulloch’s sons were fighting for the South. Could he fire upon, or receive the bullets of, his brothers-in-law? In anguish Theodore Senior did what many of his wealthy friends were doing. He hired a substitute soldier.29

  Yet as a strong Lincoln Republican, his “troublesome conscience” would not let him rest. A certain strain developed between himself and his wife, although their mutual love never wavered. “I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country,” he told her gently. “I know you cannot understand my feelings and of course do not expect it.”30 Eventually he announced that he had decided to aid the war effort in a civ
ilian capacity, and, true to his nature, soon found a charitable cause.

  Already, in these early days of war, millions of government dollars were flowing through the pockets of Union soldiers and into the hands of sutlers, who infested military camps, hawking bottles of liquor hidden in loaves of bread. The sutlers charged such exorbitant prices that their customers soon had no money left to send home to their families. It was to right this wrong that Theodore Senior set off to Washington, and, conquering his natural distaste for politics, began to lobby for remedial legislation.

  With two colleagues, he drafted a bill for the appointment of unpaid Allotment Commissioners, who would visit all military camps and persuade soldiers to set aside voluntary pay deductions for family support. This proposal, which eventually became standard military practice, seemed eccentric, if not downright suspect, in 1861, as a family friend recalled many years later:

  For three months they worked in Washington to secure the passage of this act—delayed by the utter inability of Congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage. When this was passed he was appointed by President Lincoln one of the three Commissioners from this State. For long, weary months, in the depth of a hard winter, he went from camp to camp, urging the men to take advantage of this plan; on the saddle often six to eight hours a day, standing in the cold and mud as long, addressing the men and entering their names. This resulted in sending many millions of dollars to homes where it was greatly needed, kept the memory of wives and children fresh in the minds of the soldiers, and greatly improved their morale. Other States followed, and the economical results were very great.31