The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  There is evidence that this obsession with feathered creatures was something of a trial to the more “normal” members of the family. “When he does come into the room, you always hear the words ‘bird’ and ‘skin,’ ” little Corinne complained. “It certainly is great fun for him.”20 Even the sweet-tempered Elliott revolted against having to share a hotel room with a brother who stored entrails in the basin. Theodore Senior, while sympathetic, was too wise a father to discourage his son’s scientific tendencies. The career of natural historian, to which Teedie was obviously headed, was a respectable one, if not as profitable as a partnership in Roosevelt and Son.21

  No doubt his businessman’s eye had already discerned that this absentminded and unorthodox youth would be a disaster in the world of commerce, while questions of health and physical frailty would disqualify him from the Army and Navy. He could see, too, that Teedie, for all his scholarly single-mindedness, had not retreated from life. The boy still exercised regularly, read a wide variety of books and poetry, and showed a healthy interest in people and places. Watching while he eagerly surveyed the Sahara from the summit of the Great Pyramid, or timed the contortions of a group of howling dervishes, or stared at a beautiful houri in a Cairo window, Theodore Senior could relax, knowing that his son was educating himself.

  On 12 December 1872, the Roosevelts moved out of Cairo on the first stage of their cruise up the Nile. Their home for the next two months was to be a privately chartered dababeab. “It is the nicest, cosiest, pleasantest little place you ever saw,” Teedie wrote in delight. There were—to Elliott’s relief—individual staterooms for each member of the family, plus a spacious dining salon and a panoramic, shaded deck. For all its modern trimmings, the vessel was little different from those that, four thousand years before, had carried Pharaohs from one palace to another.22

  The dahabeah’s progress, as they pushed south against the current, was almost hypnotically slow. Often, when the weak wind died, the crew was obliged to wade ashore with tackle and haul the houseboat along. None of the Roosevelts seems to have minded this Oriental form of locomotion. They watched the bronzed backs of the fellaheen curving against the tow-rope, listened to their “curious crooning songs,” and luxuriated in the brilliant sunshine, “with never a moment’s rain.” Mittie in particular enjoyed herself. Traveling at speeds of two to three miles an hour exactly suited her temperament; she was also flattered by the attentions of four young Harvard men, who had chartered another dahabeah and were sailing upriver in convoy. Frequent stops enabled the children to explore riverside ruins and native villages.23

  THE FIRST DAY ON THE NILE was a momentous one for Teedie. He coordinated the lenses of his crooked spectacles, and the sights of his battered rifle, well enough to bag a small warbler. It was “the first bird I ever shot and I was proportionately delighted.” Throughout the twelve-hundred-mile trip to Aswân and back, Teedie ecstatically watched and listened to birds on the wing, and then as ecstatically killed them—a total, according to his own vague estimate, of “between one and two hundred.”24

  On Christmas Day his father presented him with a double-barreled breech-loading shotgun, and the boy’s delight knew no bounds. “He is a most enthusiastic sportsman,” wrote Theodore Senior, “and has infused some of his spirit into me. Yesterday I walked the bogs with him at the risk of sinking hopelessly and helplessly, for hours … but I felt that I must keep up with Teedie.”25

  No matter how sluggish the pace of the dahabeah, he managed to keep busy all day long. After breakfast he joined his younger brother and sister for two hours of lessons with Bamie. She discovered that Teedie knew a great deal more than she did on most subjects. Later, “he would put on a large pair of spectacles and swing his gun over his shoulder and start on whatever small donkey was provided at the place we had stopped, and ruthlessly lope after whatever object he had in view, the donkey almost invariably crowding between any other two who might be riding together.” His habit, during these lopes, of allowing the loaded gun to bump and bounce about freely aroused considerable nervousness among his fellow hunters. Throughout the broiling afternoons, Corinne recalled, he would sit under the canopy on deck “surrounded by the brown-faced and curious sailors … and skin and stuff the products of his sport.”26 At sunset, when breezes cooled the desert, he would join the family in tours of the stupendous ruins that regularly drifted into view.

  One such expedition, early in the New Year of 1873, shattered him.

  In the evening we visited Harnak [sic] by moonlight. It was not beautiful only, it was grand, magnificent, and awe-inspiring. It seemed to take me back thousands of years, to the time of the Pharohs and to inspire thought which can never be spoken, a glimpse of the ineffable, of the unutterable.…27

  With adolescent determination not to waste good purple prose, he repeated this entire passage, complete with ineffables and unutterables, in a letter to Aunt Annie two weeks later. Rather more characteristic of his mature humor is a postscript on Egyptian rural fashions: “I may as well mention that the dress of the inhabitants up to ten years of age is—nothing. After that they put on a shirt descended from some remote ancestor and never take it off until the day of their death.”28

  The Roosevelts enjoyed their southward cruise so much that they were tempted, upon reaching the First Aswân Cataract, to continue on into the heartland of North Africa.29 But time was running out for Commissioner Roosevelt: he still had to escort his family through Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and Greece, before reporting for duty on 1 May at the Vienna Exposition. Reluctantly, he gave the order to turn downstream.

  SIX DAYS LATER, after one of those sudden changes of pace and scene in which Theodore Senior delighted, the Roosevelts found themselves cantering on hired horses across the green fields of Palestine. They were accompanied on this leg of their Grand Tour by Nathaniel Thayer and August Jay, two of the young Harvard men they had met on the Nile. A pleased sense of adventure hung over the little party. Ahead of them lay a month’s exploration of the Levant, most of it on horseback. Tonight would be spent in a monastery, and most of the next few days in a Jerusalem hotel; but after that they planned to live like nomads, camping out in the wilderness.30

  Toward sunset the party arrived at its destination, the Convent of Ramle, about fifteen miles inland from Jaffa. Theodore Senior had made reservations here, but the monks took one look at his women and curtly announced there was “no room.” This was not the sort of Biblical parallel he was looking for in the Holy Land, and he reacted with his usual aggressiveness. “A long talk ensued,” Teedie reported. “At last the monks said that they had rooms for the gentlemen but that ladies could not go inside the inner walls … this difficulty was also overcome in time.”31

  A minor incident, perhaps, yet it haunts the imagination. Six tired women and children, two bewildered students; a gate, a darkening landscape, scowling bearded faces, and—dominating the whole scene—one determined man. Time and again Teedie was convinced, by experiences like this, that his father was all-powerful and irresistible; that forceful talk, combined with personal charm, would vanquish any opposition.

  Riding on eastward the next day, Teedie began to get the feel of his horse. “He has some Arab blood in him, and is very swift, pretty, and spirited.” After so many summers spent on the placid back of an American pony, it was thrilling to crouch over this lean body as it drummed tirelessly across the plain. Mr. Jay was challenged to a race and beaten. In great good humor, Teedie galloped up to a ridge of hills, and was suddenly confronted with Jerusalem. “Just what I expected it to be,” he decided, “except that it was remarkably small.”32

  Apart from a single expression of “awe” on Calvary, Teedie’s account of his travels through Palestine and Syria is free of conventional piety. He bathed irreverently in the Jordan (“what we should call a small creek in America”), noted that bribery alone gained access to the birthplace of Christ, and “killed two very pretty little finches” in the vicinity of Abraham’s Oak. His pan
theistic soul seems to have been stirred more by the bird-haunted glades around Jericho, the desolate grandeur of the Moab escarpment, and the ruins of Baalbek. “They gave me the same feeling as to contemplate the mighty temples of Thebes.” Other, more primitive emotions surged when he came across a pair of jackals outside Damascus:

  I had just given the gun to Bootross [the under-dragoman], while I arranged my bridle when the jackals came in sight and he was off like a flash while I followed, shouting for my gun. He did not hear me and kept on. Bootross was on bad ground and could not get near the beasts. They separated, and I went after the largest, thinking to ride over him and then kill him with a club. On we went over hills, and through gulleys, where none but a Syrian horse could go. I gained rapidly on him and was within a few yards of him when he leaped over a cliff some fifteen feet high, and while I made a detour around he got in among some rocky hills where I could not get at him. I killed a large vulture afterwards.33

  Apart from a cat he had shot near Jaffa “in mistake for a rabbit,” this was his first attempt to hunt animals for sport, rather than science.

  Toward the end of the Roosevelts’ Levantine wanderings, Teedie recorded his first “bad attack of Asthma and Cholera Morbus” since leaving America five months previously. It was brought on by a freezing night in the mountains of Lebanon, and no doubt served to remind him that his battle for health was still not won. The clear dry air of the desert, and a diet of yogurt and salads, had given him a period of easy breathing and untroubled digestion; but now, as the prospect of “returning to civilization” loomed nearer, he knew he would have to take up the fight again.

  He was “very seasick” during a short cruise to Greece (whose ruins did not impress him), “very sick” with colic in Constantinople, “very seasick” in the Black Sea, and “had the asthma” again while sailing up the Danube. By the time the Roosevelts arrived in Vienna on 19 April 1873, he was plainly depressed. Boredom weighed down heavily as his father plunged into preparations for the opening of the exposition, and his mother fussed over Bamie’s European debut. “I bought a black cock and used up all my arsenic on him,” wrote Teedie on 28 April, and on 11 May: “the last few weeks have been spent in the most dreary monotony. If I stayed here much longer I should spend all my money on books and birds pour passer le temps.”

  But his parents had arranged a better way for him to pass his time. “At 10 P.M. on the 14th we two boys (with Father) left for Dresden, where we are to stay in a German Family for the summer.”

  It was Theodore Senior’s typically bold intention to scatter the Roosevelts across Europe while he himself completed his duties in Vienna and returned to America ahead of them. Perhaps he sensed that a period of mutual independence was necessary. Years of close-knit domesticity, and the enforced claustrophobia of travel, had brought them rather too much under his wing. The boys in particular would benefit. A certain coziness, verging on effeminacy, was discernible in their relations with their sisters and “little Motherling,” and it was high time they were off on their own. He had accordingly arranged, through the American consul in Dresden, that they would study German and French there privately for five months. Mittie and Bamie would take the cures at Carlsbad and Frankensbad, and shop in London and Paris. Eleven-year-old Corinne was told that she, too, was going to Dresden, but would live apart from Teedie and Elliott, “so that the brothers and sister would not speak too much English together.” Theodore Senior soon came to regret this unconsciously cruel decision, and allowed the heart-stricken little girl to move in with the boys.34

  DRESDEN WAS, in that peaceful heyday of the German Empire, one of the loveliest cities in the world. Its domes and spires and bridges, tremblingly reflected in the River Elbe, gave way on the one hand to mellow clusters of medieval housing, and on the other to the spacious estates of the rich. Beyond lay hills striped with vines and crowned with lush forests. The city’s museums and libraries were full of masterpieces by Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, and Goethe; its Court Opera had known the batons of Weber and Wagner; its zoological and mineralogical collections were unsurpassed in Europe. A general atmosphere of elegance and culture justly earned it the title of “Florence on the Elbe.”35

  Here, “in the finer part” of town (Mittie was pleased to note), lived a genteel family named Minkwitz, who agreed to accommodate and instruct the young Roosevelts through the summer. Theodore Senior could not have found a more typically Teutonic household. Herr Hofsrath Minkwitz was a member of the German Reichstag, imperious and stiffly formal. His wife was pink, plump, and hearty, a fount of cream teas and cakes. Their three daughters were “gay, well-educated, and very temperamental,” and their two sons were fierce-looking university students, much slashed about the face. Teedie was predictably fascinated by this macabre pair. “One, a famous swordsman, was called Der Rothe Herzog (the Red Duke), and the other was nicknamed Herr Nasehorn (Sir Rhinoceros) because the tip of his nose had been cut off in a duel and sewn on again.”36

  The Minkwitz family proved to be both hospitable and conscientious. No sooner had Theodore Senior left town than they plunged the boys into a rigorous teaching schedule. “The plan of the day is this,” wrote Teedie at the end of the first month. “Halfpast six, up and breakfast which is through at halfpast seven, when we study till nine; repeat till half past twelve, have lunch, and study till three, when we take coffee and have till tea (at seven) free. After tea we study till ten, when we go to bed. It is harder than I have ever studied before in my life, but I like it for I really feel that I am making considerable progress.”37

  Fräulein Anna, the Minkwitzes’ eldest daughter, was placed in charge of Teedie and Elliott, teaching them German grammar and arithmetic with “unwearied patience.” The rest of the family made a point of speaking German at all times, whether their young guests could understand them or not. Teedie, it soon transpired, understood better than they realized. He caught several personal observations about the elder Roosevelts, and gleefully retailed them by mail.38 Although he developed a fair measure of spoken fluency, he never was as easy with German prose as he was with French. However, he grew to love and enjoy German poetry almost as much as he did English. It was during this summer that he discovered the Nibelungenlied, whose Sturm und Drang evoked vague folk-memories of his own Germanic ancestors.39

  At first, Teedie did not make a very agreeable impression upon his hosts. They looked askance at his long, wavy hair, his ink-spattered hands, and ill-fitting clothes, from whose greasy recesses he was at any moment likely to produce a dead bat.40 “My scientific pursuits cause the family a good deal of consternation,” he reported sadly. “My arsenic was confiscated and my mice thrown (with the tongs) out of the window.”41 Undeterred, he continued to flay, pickle, and stuff a variety of local fauna. Whenever he could get out in the country he “collected specimens industriously and enlivened the household with hedgehogs and other small beasts and reptiles which persisted in escaping from partially closed bureau drawers.”42 The skins of these unfortunate animals were allowed to festoon the exterior of the house, with fine disregard for aesthetic effect. One night, during a thunderstorm so violent the Minkwitzes hid between their mattresses, Teedie was heard to murmur in his sleep: “Oh, it is raining and my hedgehog will be all spoiled.”43

  During their free evenings and weekends, the young Roosevelts happily explored the parks and shops of Dresden, and attended frequent performances of Shakespeare at the German Theater. By coincidence, their cousins John and Maud Elliott were also living in the city,44 and the five little Americans soon became a gang, meeting every Sunday afternoon. Lest Theodore Senior frown upon this socializing in English, they affected a cultural veneer, calling themselves the Dresden Literary American Club. Corinne spelled out their various creative roles: “I … keep up the poetry part, Elliott and Johnny the tragical, and Teedie the funny.” Evidently the last was beginning to fancy himself as a wit: his contributions to the club’s copybooks, which have been preserved, strive mightily to
imitate Dickens and Lewis Carroll, but the best that can be said of them is that they are long.45

  His letters of the same period, written with the promptness and regularity that would always characterize him as a correspondent, are full of adolescent drollery, and since they are more spontaneous than his formal efforts, can still be read with pleasure. One of them, addressed to his mother, describes himself suffering from a familiar boyhood ailment:

  Picture to yourself an antiquated woodchuck with his cheeks filled with nuts, his face well-oiled, his voice hoarse from gargling and a cloth resembling in texture and cleanliness a second-hand dustman’s castoff stocking around his head; picture to yourself that, I say, and you will have a good like likeness of your hopeful offspring while suffering from an attack of the mumps.46

  Mittie may have been amused by that, but references in the same letter to recurring asthma and violent headaches were not so funny. She informed her husband that she would visit Dresden in August, and “if I find Teedie still with asthmatic feelings, I think I shall take him with me to Salzburg.”47 Theodore Senior was reluctant to interrupt the boy’s studies, but he had just received a “humorous” letter himself, and it made poignant reading.

  I am at present suffering under a very slight attack of Asthma; however it is but a small attack and except for the fact that I cannot speak, without blowing up like an abridged edition of a hippopotamus, it does not inconvenience me much. We are now studying hard … (Excuse my writing; the asthma has made my hand tremble awfully).48

  When Mittie arrived in Dresden she found he was sitting up to sleep again, just as he had as a child; his wheeze was perpetual and his color was not good.49 She promptly bundled him off to a resort in the Swiss mountains, where his breathing cleared, only to be replaced by an ugly cough. It took three weeks in the pine-scented air of the Alps before he was well enough to return to his studies.