The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  At Finale the Roosevelts amused themselves in jingoistic fashion with a crowd of Italian beggars:

  We hired one to keep off the rest. Then came some more fun. Papa bought two baskets of doughey cakes. A great crowd of boys girls and women. We tossed the cakes to them and we fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr Stevens [a fellow traveler] kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a “Coup de Grace” we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings … We made the crowds … give us three cheers for U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.76

  Unfazed by such alarming evidence of Italian poverty, Teedie once again rhapsodized over the beauties of the Mediterranean landscape. His diary entries double or triple in length, to as much as a thousand words a day.

  Moving leisurely down the Ligurian coast via Genoa and “Piza,” the Roosevelt family arrived in Rome in time for Christmas. “Hip! hip! hurrah!!!!” rejoiced Teedie. “The presents passed our upmost expectations.”77 Rome, on the other hand, did not: his first impression of it, through rainy windows, was a dirty jumble of old buildings. But when the weather improved he explored the city and its environs enthusiastically, from the depths of the Catacombs to the heights of “rockety papa” (Rocca di Papa).

  He showed similar conscientiousness on an excursion to Naples and Pompeii. The temptingly precipitous and icy slopes of Vesuvius enabled him to work off his superabundant energy on the last day of 1869. Reaching the summit long before other members of the family, Teedie happily inhaled sulfur fumes until his bronchii rebelled, and threw pebbles into the lava, careless of the turbulence that spewed them back into his face.

  New Year’s Day 1870 came and went, and, from the children’s point of view, the worst part of the Grand Tour was over. Although several months of winter in Europe yet remained, spring was on its way, and the longed-for recrossing of the Atlantic no longer wavered in the impossible distance, like a mirage. For six weeks in Rome, while the elder Roosevelts socialized with fashionable American expatriates, they became ball-playing regulars on Pincian Hill.

  Here, one glistening January day, “suddenly there came a stir—an unexpected excitement seemed everywhere.” Gorgeously robed sampetrini approached, carrying an august Personage in a sedan-chair. Teedie, conscious of his Dutch Reformed heritage, hissed frantically that “he didn’t believe in popes—that no real American would.” As Corinne later recalled:

  The Pope … his benign face framed in white hair and the close cap which he wore, caught sight of the group of eager little children craning their necks to see him pass; and he smiled and put out one fragile, delicate hand toward us, and, lo! the late scoffer who, in spite of the ardent Americanism that burned in his eleven-year-old soul, had as much reverence as militant patriotism in his nature, fell upon his knees and kissed the delicate hand, which for a brief moment was laid upon his fair curly hair.78

  Teedie, recording the incident in his diary that night, was much less sentimental. “We saw the Pope and we walked along and he extended his hand to me and I kissed it!! hem!! hem!!”

  The rest of his stay in Rome was happy, educational, and comparatively free from illness. So were two subsequent weeks spent touring the galleries of Florence, Bologna, and Turin. Teedie revealed a precocious sensitivity to art, commenting in his diary on as many as fifty-seven items in a single day.79 He was particularly moved by “the most beautiful of all beautiful pictures St. Cecelia listingning to the heavenly music.”

  On 10 March 1870, Theodore Senior took his family back to Paris for seven more weeks of sight-seeing. Damp and snowy weather aggravated Teedie’s asthma, necessitating quick excursions out of town to Fontainebleau. As spring came in, the air warmed and sweetened, and he enjoyed “the happiest Easter I ever spent.” At the end of April, Bamie, who was to stay in France for a year of finishing school, bade everybody a tearful good-bye.80

  Recrossing the Channel for a final fortnight in England, the Roosevelts embarked from Liverpool on 14 May in a calm shower of rain. As they drew near to America, a joyous escort of whales sprayed Teedie with water. Sandy Hook drifted into view; the spires of Manhattan grew tall against the sky, dipped, swayed, and came to rest. “New York!!! Hip! Hurrah! What a bustle we had geting off.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Mind, But Not the Body

  Then, with a smile of joy defiant

  On his beardless lip,

  Scaled he, light and self-reliant,

  Eric’s dragon-ship.

  TEEDIE’S FIRST ADOLESCENT STIRRINGS, stimulated by the overwhelming impact of Europe, relapsed into dormancy in the familiar surroundings of New York City and the Hudson Valley. He was once again, through the long summer and fall of 1870, a bookish, bug-loving boy. His diary entries dwindle to single portmanteau sentences:

  July 16 I hunted for birds nests and in the Afternoon went swimming and got caught in the rain.

  July 17 Went to Sunday school wrote a letter and played about.

  July 18 Hunted for birds nests and went over to the Harraymans for tea and had a nice time.1

  He does not even bother to record the arrival, one squally September evening, of a very important guest. “Mittie,” said Theodore Senior, as the family clustered around, “I want to present to you a young man who in the future, I believe, will make his name well-known in the United States. This is Mr. John Hay, and I wish the children to shake hands with him.”2 Teedie obeyed, and for a moment looked gravely into the eyes of his future Secretary of State.

  “My father was the best man I ever knew.”

  Theodore Roosevelt Senior, aged about forty-five. (Illustration 2.1)

  The boy’s only sign of physical development, as his twelfth birthday approached, was a rapid increase in height unaccompanied by any muscular filling out. His resemblance to a stork was accentuated by a habit of reading on one leg, while supporting a book on the jibbed thigh of the other. His health was, if anything, worse than ever: at least three times during the summer Theodore Senior had to take him across state for changes of air.3 When the Roosevelts returned to East Twentieth Street in late September, Teedie was subjected to a thorough medical examination.

  Dr. A. D. Rockwell found him “a bright, precocious boy … by no means robust,” and recommended “plenty of fresh air and exercise.”4 This advice seemed superfluous (for Teedie was, on his good days, almost frenziedly active out-of-doors) but it related in particular to the development of his chest. The lungs crammed into that narrow cavity were themselves crammed with asthma, and the mere act of breathing placed a strain on his heart. Theodore Senior pondered Rockwell’s diagnosis, and decided the time had come to present a major challenge to his son. Accordingly he sent for him.

  “THEODORE,” THE BIG MAN SAID, eschewing boyish nicknames, “you have the mind but you have 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.”

  Mittie, who was an eyewitness, reported that the boy’s reaction was the half-grin, half-snarl which later became world-famous. Jerking his head back, he replied through clenched teeth: “I’ll make my body.”5

  The promise, once made, was adhered to with bulldog tenacity. Teedie began to make daily visits to Wood’s Gymnasium, where he swung chest-weights with such energy that his mother wondered aloud “how many horse-power he was expending.” At home, Theodore Senior fitted out the second-floor piazza with an arsenal of athletic equipment, and encouraged Teedie to spend all his spare time out there exercising.6

  The piazza was a pleasant place for a city boy to work out. It faced south across the enormous Goelet garden, whence floated a constant supply of plant-purified air. Since the row of houses opposite, on the far side of Nineteenth Street, was low, sunshine poured down all day, all year round. Here, to the caw of peacocks and magpies, and the occasional moo of a cow, Teedi
e pushed and pulled and stretched and swung, working himself into the rhythmic trance of the true body-builder. “For many years,” wrote Corinne afterward, “one of my most vivid recollections is seeing him between horizontal bars, widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed.”7

  Drudgery it may have seemed to the little girl, but to a boy of such hyperactive temperament as Teedie, the work was both a release and a pleasure. He exercised throughout the winter and spring of 1870–71. Fiber by fiber, his muscles tautened, while the skinny chest expanded by degrees perceptible only to himself. But the overall results were dramatic.8 There is not a single mention of illness in his diary throughout August of 1871—his longest spell of health in years.

  Glorying in his newfound strength, he plunges into the depths of icy rapids, and clambers to the heights of seven mountains (one of them twice on the same day). Along with this physical exuberance, he develops a more studious interest in nature. Observed species are now identified by their full zoological names. Paddling across Lake Regis, Teedie discovers flocks of Aythya americana and Colymbus torquatus. A beryle alcyon dives for fish and a Putorious vison swims across his path, while coveys of Orytx virginianus and Bonasa umbellus rise from the banks on either side. Riding behind a stagecoach to Au Sable Forks, he jumps off whenever he sees “a particularly beautiful lichen or moss,” and collects several hundred specimens for preservation in the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.9

  TEEDIE’S THIRTEENTH WINTER and spring were much the same as his twelfth, except that the weights on the chest machine were heavier and his hours on the piazza longer. Meanwhile he continued to read voraciously. A friend of the period remembered him as “the most studious little brute I ever knew in my life.”10 Private tutors coached him in English, French, German, and Latin (there were rumors of another “terrible trip” to Europe), and a white-haired old gentleman who had been an associate of the great Audubon gave him lessons in taxidermy.11 This smelly subject quickly became his major passion, restrained only by the supply of available carcasses. Then, in the summer of 1872, Teedie acquired his first gun.

  It was, in his later description, “a breech-loading, pin-fire double-hyphen barrel of French manufacture … an excellent gun for a clumsy and often absent-minded boy. There was no spring to open it, and if the mechanism became rusty it could be opened with a brick without serious damage. When the cartridges stuck they could be removed in the same fashion. If they were loaded, however, the result was not always happy, and I tattooed myself with partially unburned grains of powder more than once.”12

  Although Teedie blazed away determinedly at the fauna of the Lower Hudson Valley (the Roosevelts had taken a summer house at Dobbs Ferry), he found, to his bewilderment, that he could not hit anything. Even more puzzling was the fact that his friends, using the same gun, seemed to be able to bag the invisible: they fired into the blue blur of the sky, or the green blur of the trees, whereupon specimens mysteriously dropped out of nowhere. The truth was slow to dawn on him:

  One day they read aloud an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard, and I then realized that something was the matter, for not only was I unable to read the sign, but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles … while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see, and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.13

  It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this event on the boy’s maturing sensibilities. Through the miraculous little windows that now gripped his nose, the world leaped into pristine focus, disclosing an infinity of detail, of color, of nuance, and of movement just when the screen of his mind was at its most receptive. One of the best features of his adult descriptive writing—an unsurpassed joy in things seen—dates back to this moment; while another—his abnormal sensitivity to sound—is surely the legacy of the myopic years that came before.14

  Another revelatory experience occurred later that summer, and it was considerably less pleasant.

  Having an attack of asthma, I was sent off by myself to Moosehead Lake. On the stage-coach ride thither, I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age, but very much more competent and also much mischievous … They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.15

  The humiliation forced him to realize that his two years of bodybuilding had achieved only token results. No matter how remarkable his progress might seem to himself, by the harsh standards of the world he was still a weakling. There and then he decided to join what he would later call “the fellowship of the doers.” If he had exercised hard before, he must do so twice as hard now. He must also learn how to give and take punishment. “Accordingly, with my father’s hearty approval, I started to learn to box.”16

  ON 16 OCTOBER 1872, the Roosevelts sailed to Liverpool on the first stage of another foreign tour—this time featuring Egypt and the Holy Land—with varied degrees of enthusiasm. Theodore Senior was as usual full of cheery optimism. Having been appointed American commissioner to the Vienna Exposition the following spring, he looked forward to an enjoyable winter cruising the Nile and the Mediterranean. His lazy wife was quite content to recline on deck-chairs, as on sofas at home, or hammocks in the country. Bamie, already at seventeen the family’s surrogate mother, clumped about arranging everything with a certain grim enjoyment. The two youngest Roosevelts dreaded another year away from their friends, but for a while the excitement of an ocean voyage muted their complaints. Teedie, for his part, took a serious, almost professorial view of the trip. As proprietor of the Roosevelt Museum, he was determined to treat his visit to the Nile as a scientific expedition and had already printed a quantity of pink labels for the identification of specimens. His new spectacles had focused his general interest in animals to an almost total obsession with birds. Hitherto his near sight had forced him to confine his observations to large, slow creatures that inhabited terra firma. Now he was able to record the ascent of hawks to ecstatic heights and sit for hours watching flocks of ibises settling on a distant island, until “the tops of trees would be whitened with immense multitudes perching on them.”17

  As Teedie turned fourteen, he blossomed into a grotesque flower of adolescence, offensive alike to eye, ear, and nostril. Mittie Roosevelt, fresh and crackling in her perpetual white silks and muslin, could hardly have contemplated him without despair. Apart from the owlish spectacles and snarling teeth, there was the over-long hair, its childish yellow darkening now to dirty blond; the bony wrists and ankles, which protruded every day a little farther from his carefully tailored suit; the fingers stained with ink and chemicals, the clumsy movements and too-quick reflexes. His voice had not so much broken as taken on a new undertone of harshness, while its shrill upper frequencies remained. Mittie described his laugh as a “sharp, ungreased squeak” which almost crushed her eardrums.18 For much of the time he reeked of the laboratory: on days when he had been disemboweling as well as skinning his specimens, it was best to stand upwind of him.

  Teedie alone seemed to be unaware of his eccentric appearance. “Pestered fearfully” by street-boys in Liverpool, he assumed it was because he was a Yankee, and was puzzled by a shopkeeper’s refusal to sell him, on sight, a full pound of arsenic. “I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove that I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such dreadfull thing, before I could have it!” he wrote in his new travel diary.19 Presumably a witness was found, for within a couple of days he was skinning some snipe and partridge. All the way sout
h, through England and Europe, Teedie continued his scientific labors.

  Although he had a few words of praise for Continental scenery—the mossy roofs and distant windmills of Belgium, the “wild and picturesque” hills of Switzerland—his viewpoint was on the whole chauvinistic. Railroads, museums, even sanitation systems were unfavorably compared with those of America. Not until Egypt hove over the Mediterranean horizon, on 28 November 1872, did Teedie respond emotionally to his surroundings.

  How I gazed upon it! It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries! A land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts, and it did.

  His diary entries immediately become lengthy and enthusiastic. The descriptions of street life in Alexandria are as dense with visual detail and sound effects as film scenarios. Only in front of Pompey’s Pillar did words fail him. “On seeing this stately remain of former glory, I felt a great deal but I said nothing. You can not express yourself on such an occasion.”

  Passing through the Nile Delta en route to Cairo, Teedie munched sugarcane and gazed in rapture at a multitude of exotic species: humped, long-haired zebus, delicate waders, great flapping, shrieking zic-zacs, kites and vultures floating on spirals of hot air, water buffaloes wallowing in the chocolate mud. As soon as he arrived in the capital he bought an ornithological directory and began to study Egyptian birds, “whose habits I was able to watch quite well through my spectacles.” From now on the pages of his diary seem to come alive with squawks and fluttering wings. Even when going the rounds of historic buildings, he searched every nook and cranny for birds, discovering swallows under the dome of Mahommet Ali’s mosque, and “perfectly distinguishable” species of geese in an ancient mosaic at Boulag.