The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Island Falls, where Sewall had his headquarters, was so remote from New York City that Theodore took two full days to get there, completing the last thirty-six miles in a buckboard. Two cousins, Emlen and West Roosevelt, and a Doctor W. Thompson accompanied him. The strain of the journey, coming on top of his frenetic summer, caused him to suffer a bad attack of asthma, and when he arrived at Sewall’s homestead, late on the evening of 7 September, he was wheezing. Sewall’s first impression of him was “a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart.”

  Doctor Thompson took the backwoodsman aside. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.” Sewall agreed that Theodore looked “mighty pindlin’,” but soon found out that his appearance was deceptive.66

  We traveled twenty-five miles afoot one day on that first visit of his, which I maintain was a good fair walk for any common man. We hitched well, somehow or other, from the start. He was different from anybody that I had ever met; especially, he was fair-minded.… Besides, he was always good-natured and full of fun. I do not think I ever remember him being “out of sorts.” He did not feel well sometimes, but he never would admit it.

  I could see not a single thing that wasn’t fine in Theodore, no qualities that I didn’t like. Some folks said that he was headstrong and aggressive, but I never found him so except when necessary; and I’ve always thought being headstrong and aggressive, on occasion, was a pretty good thing. He wasn’t a bit cocky as far as I could see, though others thought so. I will say that he was not remarkably cautious about expressing his opinion.67

  Theodore, for his part, found Sewall to be a figure straight out of The Saga of King Olaf. The backwoodsman agreed. “I don’t know but what my ancestors were vikings.”68

  Tramping through the woods together, they were an oddly matched yet complementary pair: Sewall slow and purposeful, advancing with bearlike tread; Theodore wiry and nervous, cocking his gun at any hint of movement in the trees, stopping every now and again to pick up bugs. Since both men loved epic poetry, and could recite it by the yard, the squirrels of Aroostook County were entertained to many ringing declamations, including Sewall’s favorite lines:

  Who are the nobles of the earth,

  The true aristocrats,

  Who need not bow their heads to kings

  Nor doff to lords their hats?

  Who are they but the men of toil

  Who cleave the forest down

  And plant amid the wilderness

  The forest and the town?69

  The words may have been familiar to Theodore, yet falling from the lips of a man whose father had been a carpenter and whose mother a seamstress, they took on new, defiantly democratic overtones, which were not lost on the scion of the Roosevelts.70

  ON 27 SEPTEMBER 1878, Theodore was welcomed back to Cambridge by his classmates, and to his surprise “was offered the Porcellian.” Membership in this club was the highest social honor Harvard could bestow, and he was acutely embarrassed to refuse it. His scruples had nothing to do with the possible disapproval of a Bill Sewall. It was just that he had already been offered the A.D., and had accepted that instead.71 Greatly regretting his hastiness, for he wished very much to be “a Porc man,” he turned to the more important business of choosing a schedule for his junior year.

  It proved to be an ambitious one, covering nine subjects and at least twenty hours a week of classroom and laboratory work. His electives were once again German and two natural history courses (zoology and geology), plus Italian and philosophy. Those prescribed were themes, forensics, logic, and metaphysics. In this formidable curriculum he was to score the best marks of his academic career, averaging 87 and standing thirteenth in a class of 166.72 In two of his electives—philosophy and natural history—he stood first.73

  No sooner had Theodore settled down to his familiar routine of recitations, study, exercise, and “sprees” than the Porcellian once more opened its doors to him. Early in October there happened to be a drunken quarrel in the Yard, during which a Porc man told an A.D. man that Teddy Roosevelt, given the chance, would have chosen his club first. When the taunt became public, the A.D. announced that as its new member had not yet signed in, he was free to reconsider his acceptance. “Of course by this arrangement I have to hurt somebody’s feelings,” Theodore wrote agitatedly in his diary. “… I have rarely felt as badly as I have during the last 24 hours; it is terribly hard to know what the honorable thing is to do.” He decided that honor lay in the direction of the more prestigious club, and accepted the Porc’s offer on 6 October. “I am delighted to be in,” he told Bamie. “… There is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch-room &c, and my best friends are in it.”74

  Perhaps the best of these “best friends,” now that Harry Minot had dropped out of Harvard to study law, was Dick Saltonstall, whose family mansion on Chestnut Hill became a second home to Theodore in the fall and winter of 1878. The first invitation to this bastion of Boston society came on Friday, 18 October. The two young men drove out of Cambridge in Saltonstall’s buggy, crossed the river, and headed west into a brilliant fall landscape.75

  Chestnut Hill lay six miles away. As the buggy creaked toward it, through increasingly luxuriant woods, Theodore could sense the waves of peace and security which flow around the enclaves of the very rich. A private lane curved up the hillside to where Leverett Saltonstall’s house lay, huge and rambling, backed by chestnut trees, and fronting on an immense sweep of lawn. The lawn was shared by another, equally imposing mansion, the home of George Cabot Lee; a mere twenty yards of grass, and a token garden gate, separated the one property from the other.76 Dick had doubtless already explained to Theodore that the Lees and Saltonstalls were more than mere neighbors. Mr. Lee was his uncle by marriage, and seventeen-year-old Alice Lee was the inseparable companion of his sister, Rose Saltonstall.77 Theodore met both girls that evening. In his diary he described them with his usual vague adjectives, “sweet,” “pretty,” and “pleasant”—the last being reserved for Rose, who was decidedly the more homely of the two.

  He greatly enjoyed himself that weekend, walking through the woods with Alice and Rose, attending church with both families on Sunday morning, and “chestnutting” alone with Alice in the afternoon.78 As always, his soul responded to people of his own class, conversation on his own level, manners whose every nuance was familiar to him. Only a month ago Bill Sewall had convinced him that “the nobles of the earth” were “men of toil”—and probably would convince him again, as he intended to return to Island Falls one day. But in the meantime, the Lees and Saltonstalls were aristocracy enough for Theodore Roosevelt.

  ON 27 OCTOBER, AS HIS second decade came to an end, the young man’s thoughts turned to the past, and his grief for his father surged up afresh. To distract himself he took a ramble through the woods with his gun. His diary entry for that night proves, with unconscious humor, that his heart had at last healed: “Oh Father, sometimes I feel as though I would give half my life to see you but for a moment! Oh, what loving memories I have of you! 2 grey squirrel.”

  ON 2 NOVEMBER 1878, Theodore was initiated into the Porcellian.79 It seems the honor rather went to his head. “Was ‘higher’ with wine than ever before—or will be again,” he wrote. “Still, I could wind up my watch.” Then, in a revealing afterword: “Wine makes me awfully fighty.”80 A throbbing hangover confirmed his lifelong resolve never to get drunk again, and the evidence is he never did. He continued to enjoy “sprees” at the Porc, including the traditional suppers of partridge and burgundy, and champagne breakfasts on Sundays; but he remained severely teetotal on most of these occasions, and abstemious on the others. As for smoking, he had promised his father to abstain from that manly practice until he was twenty-one, with the result that when the time came he had lost all interest in it. The third vice that appeals to most undergraduates was beneath his contemplation: he remained “perfectly pure” throughout his bachelor years.81

 
His second visit to Chestnut Hill occurred on 11 November, when he drove over to take tea with the Saltonstalls and their ubiquitous visitor from next door, who was “as sweet and pretty as ever.” So, of course, was practically every girl that Theodore met. But Alice Lee seems to have merited his praise rather more than any other. When he saw her again, he was a houseguest for Thanksgiving, and already so much a part of the Chestnut Hill circle that she allowed him to call her “Alice.”82 As her own first “Teddy” lingered softly in his ears, he vowed, with all the strength of his passionate nature, that he would marry her.83

  CHAPTER 4

  The Swell in the Dog-Cart

  A little bird in the air

  Is singing of Thyri the fair,

  The sister of Svend, the Dane;

  And the song of the garrulous bird

  In the streets of the town is heard,

  And repeated again and again.

  Hoist up your sails of silk,

  And flee away from each other.

  ALICE HATHAWAY LEE was just seventeen when Theodore first saw her on 18 October 1878. “As long as I live,” he wrote afterward, “I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me.”1 With his photographic memory, he no doubt carried that first vision of her pristine to the grave. Alice blushing must indeed have been an unforgettable sight, and not only to eyes as worshipful as Theodore’s. Contemporary testimonials to her beauty are as unanimous as those in praise of her charm. She was “an enchanting creature” of “singular loveliness”; of “quick intelligence,” “endearing character,” and “unfailing sunny temperament”; she was “gay,” “exceptionally bright,” and “the life of the party.”2 Images of sunshine and light recur so often in descriptions of her that one can understand how quickly she bedazzled Theodore, as indeed she bedazzled everybody.

  “She seems like a star of heaven … my pearl, my pure flower.”

  Alice Hathaway Lee when Theodore Roosevelt first met her. (Illustration 4.1)

  The imagination, stimulated by such universal praise, delights to picture Alice Lee coming through that garden gate more than a century ago: an exquisite, willowy blonde, smiling shyly, moving with the “long, firm step” of a natural athlete. She wears a dress of white brocade that glows in the late-afternoon light.3 Through Theodore’s spectacles, as it were, we see, as she draws nearer, that she is tall—five foot seven, only two inches shorter than he—yet holds herself proudly erect. Her hair, drawn up to expose a graceful neck, is honey-colored, but when the sun strikes the water-curls that cling to her temples, or the thick ropes piled high on her head, unexpected highlights of gold shimmer in it. Her eyes are similarly chromatic: at times they seem a very pale blue, at others a pearly gray. Heavy lashes, when she glances down demurely, brush cheeks whose pinkness, blending into a soft pocket of shadow in the corner of her mouth, make her irresistibly kissable. She is, in short, as ravishing a beauty as ever walked across a Boston lawn, or through the pages of any Victorian novel. Theodore, drinking her in at every pore, fell in love with her there and then. Just two more meetings were enough to convince him “that win her I would, if it were possible,” and to affirm that “I had never before cared … a snap of my finger for any girl.”4

  So much for Edith Carow. Theodore, when he wrote those words, was in such rapture over Alice that he probably exaggerated his indifference to other women. But whatever spark Edith had kindled in his heart was obliterated by the firestorm of passion which now consumed him. After only one weekend at Chestnut Hill he could afford to be sarcastic about his childhood sweetheart: “… give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humour; otherwise my respectful regards.” The suspicion grows that his last interview with that strong-willed young lady, in the summer-house at Oyster Bay, had been a stormy one. “If she seems particularly good-tempered,” Theodore went on, “tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”5 With that he cast her from his mind, and dedicated himself to the “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”6

  GIVEN HER EXTREME YOUTH, and the protective aura of wealth and privilege that had always surrounded her, Alice not surprisingly proved to be as elusive a prize as Theodore had ever hunted. His ardor was so violent—in courtship as in everything else—that he periodically frightened her away, like a nervous doe; then he would have to restrain himself, and with soft words and soothing gestures coax her near again. She found him by no means a romantic attraction. The slight stench of arsenic that emanated from his clothes; the tickly whiskers and glittering glasses; the manic bursts of energy which left him white and sick with exhaustion; his geyser-like garrulousness, choked by stammers which would inevitably explode under the pressure of more words boiling up inside him; his exuberant hopping on the dance-floor, so perilous to lace pantaloons; the bloodcurdling stories of wolves and bears; the black eyes from boxing, the nervous diarrhea, the alarming hiss of asthma in his lungs—these were not the things a girl of polite background dreamed about, except perhaps in nightmares. Yet Alice could not help being intrigued by him, and flattered by his adoration. How different he was from those boring young Boston Brahmins—and, so far as she knew, from everybody else in the human race. How sidesplitting he could be, when he told jokes in that curious falsetto of his! Her quick mind rejoiced in his intelligence, and her body, when they skated together, to the masculine hardness of his arms. Even as she sprang away from him, she took care not to spring too far; not that there was any risk of him abandoning the chase. Theodore, like his father before him, “almost always got what he wanted.”7

  NO SOONER HAD the lovesick junior returned to Winthrop Street after Thanksgiving than he formally entered in his diary the vow that he would marry Alice Lee.8 To make it doubly formal, he arranged a “tintype spree,” or trip to the photographer’s, so that he might pose beside his beloved at the very onset of their courtship. Clearly it would be improper to suggest that Alice come to the studio alone, so Rose Saltonstall was roped in as a convenient third party. There is more than a hint of nervousness in Theodore’s first letter to Alice, reminding her of their rendezvous. Even at this stage he seems afraid that his doe might wander.

  “Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls.”

  Alice Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and Rose Saltonstall, 1878. (Illustration 4.2)

  PORCELLIAN CLUB

  December 6, 1878

  Dear Alice, I have been anxiously expecting a letter from you and Rose for the last two or three days; but none has come. You must not forget our tintype spree; I have been dextrously avoiding forming any engagements for Saturday … Tell Rose that I never passed a pleasanter Thanksgiving than at her house.

  Judging from the accounts I have received the new dress for the party at New Bedford must have been a complete success.

  YOUR FELLOW-CONSPIRATOR9

  Alice did not forget, and the group portrait, so momentous to Theodore, survives. Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls, carefully clutching his hat and cane. Alice, seated lower, leans toward him, almost touching his right thigh. Her skirts droop sexily over his shoe. She wears a lace-fronted dress and high feathered hat. Her gray eyes gaze dreamily into the camera: she seems unaware of the giant resolve looming next to her.10

  By now Alice Lee was occupying Theodore’s thoughts through every waking hour, and would continue to do so, according to his own testimony, for the next year and a quarter. At times her girlish waywardness would drive him to despair; in one particular moment of frustration he ripped the pages containing the Thanksgiving vow bodily out of his diary.11 There is a suggestion of sexual torment in Theodore’s entry for 11 December 1878, when he asks God’s help in staying virtuous, as his father would have wished, “and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very …” Here the eager researcher turns the page, only to find a huge blot of ink. Somehow its very blackness and monstrous shape convey more of Theodore�
��s misery than whatever words he had scribbled beneath it.12

  Such fits of depression were, however, rare in the early days of his courtship. “Teddy” continued to be welcome at Chestnut Hill, and Alice was quick to atone, with a soft word or look, for any bruise she may have inflicted upon him. At any such sign of favor he positively radiated with joy, and would exult, when alone with his diary, in his youth, his social and academic success, and the luck which had led him to Chestnut Hill. “Truly,” he wrote, as 1878 passed into 1879, “these are the golden years of my life.”13

  IT MUST NOT BE SUPPOSED that Theodore’s obsession with Alice Lee caused him to neglect his studies, or that he ceased to partake of the clubby delights of Harvard. “I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he boasted in a letter home, “having been elected into several different clubs.”14 Apart from the Porc and its partridge suppers, he attended regular meetings of the Institute of 1770, and its secret caucus, “the old merry brutal ribald orgiastic natural wholesome Dickey.”15 He presented papers to the Harvard Natural History Society on such subjects as “The Gills of Crustaceans” and “Coloration of Birds.” He lectured learnedly on sparrows at the Nuttall Ornithological Club (whose middle-aged members, discomfited by his knowledge, accused him of being vain and “cocksure”). He was put up for the Hasty Pudding early in the New Year, and won election as fifth man in the first nine.16 When his instructor in political economy asked him to form a Finance Club, he not only did so immediately, but wrote a joint paper, with Bob Bacon, on “Municipal Taxation,” and presented it at the club’s inaugural meeting.