The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “We little suspected,” wrote Professor J. Laurence Laughlin many years later, “that we were being addressed by a future President of the United States and his Secretary of State.”17

  Thus, in February of 1879, Theodore Roosevelt revealed that the political animal within him was at last beginning to stir. About the same time he made his first public speech, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Crimson. It was an awkward effort, yet vividly remembered by William Roscoe Thayer:

  Since entering college I had met him casually many times and had heard of his oddities and exuberance; but throughout I came to feel that I knew him. On being called to speak he seemed very shy and made, what I think he said, was his maiden speech. He still had difficulty in enunciating clearly or even in running off his words smoothly. At times he could hardly get them out at all, and then he would rush on for a few sentences, as skaters redouble their pace over thin ice. He told the story of two old gentlemen who stammered, the point of which was, that one of them, after distressing contortions and stoppages, recommended the other to go to Dr. X, adding, “He cured me.”

  A trifling bit of thistledown for memory to have preserved after all these years; but still it is interesting to me to recall that this was the beginning of the public speaking of the man who later addressed more audiences than any other orator of his time and made a deeper impression by his spoken word.18

  Although Theodore continued to dream of being a natural historian when he left college, he confessed that the prospect of three extra years of overseas study—a necessary academic requirement—made him “perfectly blue.”19 Politics, on the other hand, was beginning to appeal to him so strongly that he asked Professor Laughlin if he should not perhaps make that his career instead. Laughlin replied that the halls of American government were much more in need of idealistic young men than were zoological laboratories.20 Still, Theodore clung to his imagined vocation, until a softer, more influential voice persuaded him to abandon the chimera forever.

  Whether it was the prospect of losing her beau to some foreign university for three years, or simply his distressing tendency to produce creepy-crawlies, Alice Lee did not relish the idea of Theodore becoming Professor or Doctor Roosevelt. Her disapproval of his collecting was probably the reason for a startling remark he made to Harry Minot at the end of his sophomore year: “As you know, I don’t approve of too much slaughter.” Much later Theodore himself admitted that courting Alice “brought about a change in my ideas as regards science.”21

  Their intimacy ripened slowly during the early weeks of 1879. There were polite teas with the Saltonstalls and dances at the Lees’, winter walks and coasting parties (Alice occasionally allowing him to share her toboggan) on the crisp slopes of Chestnut Hill. “I like the two girls more and more every day,” he told Bamie, “especially pretty Alice.”22 Determined to make himself as irresistible as possible, he nurtured his reddish whiskers to the size of powder puffs, and grew increasingly resplendent in his dress, with high glossy collars, silk cravats and cameo pins, fobbed watch chains, and coats rakishly cut away to show off the uncreased, cylindrical trousers of a man of fashion.23

  TOWARD THE END OF FEBRUARY, Theodore began to suffer from a surfeit of polite conversation. The drawing-rooms of Chestnut Hill suddenly became claustrophobic to him: he decided to clear his head, and his lungs, with another vacation in Maine.24 When he reached Mattawamkeag Station on 1 March, Bill Sewall was waiting in a sleigh to escort him to Island Falls, thirty-six miles away.

  For hour after hour, as they hissed north over a three-foot shroud of snow, Theodore marveled at a landscape wondrously changed from the one he had explored six months before. “I have never seen a grander or more beautiful sight than the northern woods in winter,” he told his mother afterward. “The evergreens laden with snow make the most beautiful contrast of green and white, and when it freezes after a rain all the trees look as though they were made of crystal.”25

  At Island Falls, he renewed his acquaintance with Sewall’s nephew and partner Wilmot Dow, whom he had met only briefly the previous September. Dow, just twenty-three, was as big a man as Sewall, and, by the latter’s admission, “a better guide … better hunter, better fisherman, and the best shot of any man in the country.” In time this impassive, smooth-faced youth would become as good a friend to Theodore as his uncle.26

  For the first few days in Aroostook County, the subzero temperatures troubled Theodore’s asthma, or “guffling,” as Sewall called it. But after a pung trip to a lumber camp at Oxbow, even deeper in the wilderness, he breathed clear again, and “enjoyed every minute” of his stay.27 The Aroostook lumbermen, many of whom were unlettered, and had spent all their lives in the woods, were the roughest human beings he had yet encountered. Sewall noted how he charmed them and held their interest.

  Of course he did not understand the woods, but on every other subject he was posted. The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people … Theodore enjoyed them immensely. He told me after he left the camp how glad he was that he had met them. He said that he could read about such things, but here he had got first hand accounts of backwoods life from the men who had lived it and knew what they were talking about. Even then he was quick to find the real man in very simple men.28

  No doubt the emerging politician got great satisfaction out of his ability to converse, on equal terms, with backwoodsmen as well as Boston Brahmins. He asked Bill Sewall, as he had Professor Laughlin, whether he should go into science or politics after he graduated. “You may laugh, but I have a presentiment that some time I may be President.”29

  More intent on the here and now, Theodore the hunter exulted in chasing a caribou for thirty-six hours through the snowy forest, with neither tent nor blankets to protect him. The naturalist collected specimens, while the sometime invalid worked up “enough health to last me till next summer.”30 Last but not least, King Olaf trapped a lynx, and swore that its fur would soon warm the pretty feet of his beloved.

  In mid-March, Theodore was back at Harvard, “doing double work to make up for my holiday.”31 Within a week he had breezed through his semiannuals with an average of over 85, and could turn once more to the courtship of Alice Lee. Determined to reenter her life in dramatic fashion, he chose as his stage the floor of the college gymnasium.

  THE OCCASION WAS THE spring meeting of the Harvard Athletic Association on 22 March 1879. T. Roosevelt, Jr., weighing in at 135 pounds, was entered for the semifinal bout of the lightweight boxing championship, against W. W. Coolidge, at 133¼ pounds. The winner would presumably take on the defending champion, C. S. Hanks, entered at 133½ pounds.32 Theodore, who was known to possess a wicked right hand, had given Coolidge “a tremendous thrashing” the year before,33 no doubt hoped to repeat the performance now for the benefit of Alice Lee. She sat in the gallery with a party of other Boston girls, prettily wrapped in furs, for the gymnasium was freezing.34

  The first bout went well for Theodore. According to the Harvard Advocate, he “displayed more coolness and skill than his opponent,” and had no trouble in dispatching Coolidge. There was a ripple of delicate applause from the gallery, and he retired to sponge off for the final bout. When he came out, Hanks (who had duly won the other semifinal) was waiting for him. Again to quote the Advocate, “a spirited contest followed, in which Mr. Hanks succeeded in getting the best of his opponent by his quickness and power of endurance.”

  These terse words might have been the only record of the afternoon’s fighting, except that some students in the audience were so impressed by Theodore’s performance that they talked about it the rest of their lives. One of them was the future novelist Owen Wister, destined, like William Roscoe Thayer, to become a biographer of the skinny figure in the ring. His description of the bout has made it perhaps the most celebrated episode in Theodore’s Harvard career:

  We freshmen on the floor and those girls in the gallery witnessed more than a spirited contes
t; owing to an innocent mistake of Mr. Hanks, we saw that prophetic flash of the Roosevelt that was to come.

  Time was called on a round, Roosevelt dropped his guard, and Hanks landed a heavy blow on his nose, which spurted blood. Loud hoots and hisses from gallery and floor were set up, whereat Roosevelt’s arm was instantly flung out to command silence, while his alert and slender figure stood quiet.

  “It’s all right,” he assured us eagerly, his arm still in the air to hold the silence; then, pointing to the time-keeper, “he didn’t hear him,” he explained, in the same conversational but arresting tone. With bleeding nose he walked up to Hanks and shook hands with him.35

  According to another spectator, Hanks said good-naturedly, “Hadn’t we better stop?” Theodore shook his head like a terrier, bared his teeth, and began punching again. The rest of the bout was “distinctly gory.” It was plain that the smaller man was outclassed. Hanks had a much longer reach; his eyesight, moreover, was normal, whereas Theodore was obliged to box without spectacles. “It was no fight at all,” another student remembered. “… You should have seen that little fellow staggering about, banging the air. Hanks couldn’t put him out and Roosevelt wouldn’t give up. It wasn’t a fight, but, oh, he showed himself a fighter!”36

  One wonders if Alice Lee, shuddering into her furs, admired the bloody Theodore as much as his classmates, however. At any rate, he succeeded in drawing himself to her attention again. As soon as his cuts and bruises healed she accepted an invitation to “a little lunch party” in his rooms. Five other girls and college boys were present, under the benign chaperonage of Mrs. Saltonstall. The lynx rug was presented with great ceremony. Alice announced that she would make Teddy a pair of slippers.37 Their relationship was moving into an intimate, more serious phase, and Mrs. Saltonstall surely reported this fact back to Chestnut Hill. But the Lees did not seem to fear losing a daughter who, at the tender age of seventeen, had yet to make her debut.

  With spring sweetening the air, and Alice growing increasingly receptive to his advances, Theodore decided to pay court to her on horseback, in the style of a true gallant. Lightfoot was accordingly shipped to Cambridge. All at once Chestnut Hill seemed so much closer that Theodore took to galloping over the river almost daily, looking (in his own words) “very swell, with hunting crop and beaver.”38 He took long walks with Alice, taught Alice the five-step waltz, played whist with Alice, told Alice ghost stories, wrote endlessly in his diaries about Alice, Alice, Alice. The very shape of the word, as it uncurled from his pen, seemed to give him pleasure. All through April and May, he overflowed with happiness as intense as his grief of the previous year. “What a royally good time I am having … I can’t conceive of a fellow possibly enjoying himself more.”39

  BY RISING EARLY and working before breakfast, Theodore was able to pack six to eight hours of study into the first half of the day, leaving his afternoons and evenings free for romance. Although he defined this as “a life of most luxurious ease,” poor Lightfoot cannot have agreed. The animal was not only thundering constantly along the hard road to Chestnut Hill, but had to help Theodore work off his exuberance afterward with marathon gallops through the countryside. When, on 13 May, Theodore was invited to dinner at the Lees’, he whipped Lightfoot up to such a pace that he nearly killed both horse and himself. “I rode like Jehu, both coming and going, and as it was pitch dark when I returned (about 10:15) we fell, while galloping downhill—a misadventure which I thoroughly deserve for being a fool.” For weeks it seemed that the crippled horse might not recover, and Theodore was obliged to visit his beloved on foot—a twelve-mile tramp every time.40

  By early June, however, he was once again in the saddle. Pausing only to register a preoccupied 87 percent in his annual examinations,41 Theodore braced himself for the final phase of his courtship of Alice Lee. It was now or never. Only two weeks remained until Harvard shut its doors for the summer. Then, for almost three months, he would be hundreds of miles away from her—while other suitors, perhaps, strolled the lawns of Chestnut Hill. Alice had already given disturbing hints that she liked to flirt. If he did not secure her by Class Day, she might be wooed away.

  It comes as a surprise to flick through Theodore’s diary for these momentous final weeks of his junior year and find no hint of crisis in its bland pages. Since ripping out his written vow to marry Alice, he had begun what was to become a lifelong habit, that of simply not recording what was ominous, unresolved, or disgraceful. Triumph was worth the ink; tragedy was not. Until Alice was his, he would continue merely to list the trivial details of their relationship, so that if he failed, posterity would not know it, and even he, in time, might forget his aching desire for her.

  His letters home are just as guarded, although one cannot help but admire how subtly, since the New Year, Theodore has made the Roosevelts aware of Alice Lee, and prepared them, subconsciously as it were, for his possible engagement. Casually he suggests the entire family might like to come up to Harvard for Class Day, 20 June. “I want you particularly to know some of my girlfriends now.”42 How convenient to have both them and the Lees at hand, should he wish to make an announcement—at the conclusion of his junior year, at the blossoming climax of spring!

  Although it is not certain that Theodore asked Alice to marry him on Class Day, he afterward confirmed that he proposed to her sometime in June, and his unerring sense of place and time would seem to make the evening of the twentieth inevitable.43 He had been tense as a wire the night before, at the D.K.E. Strawberry festivities: “I got into a row with a mucker and knocked him down, cutting my knuckles pretty badly against his teeth.”44 But now his mood was tranquil. Never had he spent such a pleasant day; never had Alice looked “sweeter or prettier.” He had ushered at Saunders Hall in the morning, lunched at the Porc, ushered again at the Flower Rush, then escorted Alice to two tea-parties in succession. No doubt much of the student body had admired the tall, honey-haired girl strolling around with “that fellow with whiskers and glasses.”45 Now, in the twilight, they sat together watching the sway of tinted lamps in the Yard, and listening to the songs of the Glee Club.

  Words, whispered perhaps, passed between Alice and Theodore. At ten o’clock, when the singing ended, they walked over to Memorial Hall and danced till nearly midnight. Then it was time for Alice to go home. Theodore decided, as her carriage-wheels clattered away, that the night was too young for him to go to bed. Accordingly he went to the Porc, and spent a couple of contemplative hours over the billiard-table. He had much to ponder. Alice had rejected him—but in such a way he could not be wholly despondent. She would, he knew, remember him fondly at least through summer, and he had a tacit invitation to resume his suit in the fall.

  IF LIGHTFOOT, LIMPING DOWN the gangplank of the Boston–New York freighter, looked forward to a lazy summer on Long Island, he was soon disillusioned. No sooner had Theodore arrived back in Oyster Bay than the horse was put into harness, and trained to trot and go.46 Mittie Roosevelt, used to her son’s sudden enthusiasms, assumed he was merely having fun; it did not occur to her that deadly serious motives lay behind this interest in elegant locomotion. Even his purchase, in August, of a “dog-cart,” or tilbury—whose seat was just large enough for two slim people—failed to arouse her suspicions. After all, his twenty-first birthday was approaching, and it was time he learned to drive.

  Theodore spent much of the summer trying to imitate his father’s prowess with reins and whip—not altogether successfully, for graceful, balanced movements never came easily to him. But he was not discouraged. “I am leading the most delightful life a fellow well could,” he wrote, exulting in his “magnificent health and spirits.”47 As usual he passed every spare minute in the open air, rowing, swimming, sailing, shooting (mostly at inanimate targets, out of deference to Alice), and constantly challenging Elliott to physical contests. “As athletes we are about equal; he rows best; I run best; he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling or boxing; I am best with the rifle
, he with the shotgun, &c, &c.”48

  Theodore’s diaries do not dwell on the nineteen-year-old Elliott’s more obvious superiorities, such as good looks, charm, and sexual attractiveness. That fatally flawed Apollo was still, in the summer of 1879, unaware of the demon that would one day destroy him. An adolescent tendency toward epilepsy had been cured—seemingly—by the Rooseveltian remedy for all ills, travel. After a trip to Europe and two long stays in Texas he had returned, vigorous and healthy, to take his place as a young banker in New York society.49 Instantly friends of both sexes flocked to him, as others had done, years before, to Theodore Senior. “Nell” had all of Bamie’s poise and none of her severity. He was untouched by Theodore’s aggressive egotism. Like Corinne he tended to gush, but his warmth was more genuine. Kindly, open, decent, generous, he indeed was his father’s son—were it not for a helpless inability to concentrate on anything but pleasure.

  As far as girls were concerned, these faults merely added to his appeal. Even Fanny Smith, a lifelong worshiper of his brother, had to admit that “Elliott as a young man was a much more fascinating person than Theodore Roosevelt.”50

  ON 16 AUGUST THEODORE’S EXCELLENT results arrived from Harvard. He was pleased to note that “in zoology and political economy I lead everybody.”51 This double achievement, in two such diametrically opposed subjects, was enough to reawaken his career dilemma of the previous winter. He had rejected Professor Laughlin’s advice to make government, not science, his career. But now, perhaps because Alice had included the effluvia of the laboratory among her reasons for rejecting him, he began to wonder if Laughlin had not been right. Actually he had already, as he later confirmed, “abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist.”52 From now on politics, not zoology, would preoccupy those parts of his mind not given over to Alice Lee.