The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  For all his joy, there came now and again, cold as ice in his stomach, a reminder that he had very nearly failed. “The little witch led me a dance before she surrendered, I can tell you,” he confided to his cousin John, “and the last six months have been perfect agony … Even now, it makes me shudder to think of some of the nights I have passed.”92 He remained insecure about Alice long after the Lees agreed, in early March, to a fall wedding.93 “Roosevelt seemed constantly afraid,” recalled Alice’s cousin, “that someone would run off with her, and threaten duels and everything else. On one occasion he actually sent abroad for a set of French duelling pistols.”94 Planning an Easter visit to New York with Alice, he was naively anxious to impress his local friends at a dinner in her honor: “I want to include everybody, so as to rub up their memories about the existence of a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who is going to bring a pretty Boston wife back to New York next winter.”95

  As the weather softened, and Alice remained faithful, Theodore learned to relax. By 1 April he was able to note smugly that “in spite of being engaged,” she was “certainly the belle of the Harvard Assembly.” In order to spend every available minute with her, he resigned many of his official positions, including the vice-presidency of the Natural History Society, neglected his editorship of the Advocate, and began to cut recitations freely. His study hours dwindled from thirty-six to fifteen a week. “My marks were so good the first three years that I can afford to be idle now.” Already he was bored with scholastic honors. The fact that he had scored 94 and 98 in two semiannuals, written in the same week he successfully proposed to Alice Lee, did not seem remarkable to him.96

  NOW THAT THEODORE’S romance was common knowledge on the Yard, he not unnaturally became something of a figure of fun. Professor A. S. (“Ass”) Hill, his instructor in forensics, was so amused by the “precocious sentimentality” of a Rooseveltian essay that he read it aloud to the class, keeping the name of the author secret. Afterward he waspishly asked Theodore to criticize it, and sat back to enjoy the young man’s blushes.97

  Theodore’s dog-cart and dandified appearance (he now sported a silk hat, regarded as the non plus ultra of college fashion)98 did not escape the satire of Owen Wister, who wrote the songs for the D.K.E. theatricals. During one burlesque production of Der Freischütz, the chorus launched into a serenade about

  The cove who drove

  His doggy Tilbury cart …

  Awful tart,

  And awful smart,

  With waxed mustache and hair in curls:

  Brand-new hat,

  Likewise cravat,

  To call upon the dear little girls!99

  Wister, gleefully pounding the piano, was unaware that the incensed “cove” himself happened to be in the audience. Next morning, rumors circulated that Teddy Roosevelt was “very angry,” and had muttered something about “bad taste.” Wister innocently claimed that since Roosevelt’s mustache was not waxed, his lyrics were not libelous.100 He might have added that Theodore had no mustache at all, only whiskers.

  But the latter was too much in love to stay angry for long, and looked puzzled when Wister apologized.101 They soon became fast friends. Theodore was attracted by the sophomore’s wit and intelligence, while Wister was one of the first to define the peculiar glow of the mature Rooseveltian personality. During the past few years, this glow had only flickered at sporadic intervals. Now it began to beam forth steadily, throwing Theodore into ever-greater prominence against the muted backdrop of Harvard. “He was his own limelight, and could not help it,” Wister wrote many years later. “A creature charged with such a voltage as his, became the central presence at once, whether he stepped on a platform or entered a room.”102

  THE VOLTAGE, OF COURSE, was stimulated by Alice. Its radiance suffuses almost all the diary entries in that spring of 1880.103 On the fresh April mornings, they played tennis together, she gracefully mobile in her long white dress, he awkward and jerky, clutching his racket halfway up the spine. Later, while Alice sewed, he read to her from Prescott’s Conquest of Peru. They took endless drives in the dog-cart, with Alice prettily perched beside him in his high seat, as Lightfoot (losing weight rapidly) bowled them along miles of blossom-strewn roads. In the evenings, they sat at whist and listened to the younger Lees practicing the piano. Before bedtime, Theodore generally managed to sneak Alice off for an hour alone in the moonlight. “How I love her! She seems like a star of heaven, she is so far above other girls; my pearl, my pure flower. When I hold her in my arms there is nothing on earth left to wish for; and how infinitely blessed is my lot … Oh, my darling, my own bestloved little Queen!”104

  THEODORE’S ENGAGEMENT seems to have removed the last vestiges of doubt concerning his future. “I shall study law next year, and must there do my best, and work hard for my little wife.”105 He had already made it clear that he considered law a stepping-stone to politics, and confirmed that larger ambition in a conversation with William Roscoe Thayer. The occasion was a meeting of Alpha Delta Phi in Holworthy, shortly before Commencement.

  Roosevelt and I sat in the window-seat overlooking the College Yard, and chatted together in the interval when business was slack. We discussed what we intended to do after graduation. “I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York City; I don’t know exactly how,” said Theodore.

  I recall, still, looking at him with an eager, inquisitive look and saying to myself, “I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears.”106

  Theodore was, however, in dead earnest. For his senior thesis he chose the most controversial political subject of the day: it was entitled “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights.”107 The very first sentence struck the keynote of his career as a politician. “In advocating any measure we must consider not only its justice but its practicability.” Some of his less realistic classmates were shocked by this frank admission that a principle could be both just and impracticable. Yet Theodore made no bones about his real feelings later in the document:

  A cripple or a consumptive in the eye of the law is equal to the strongest athlete or the deepest thinker, and the same justice should be shown to a woman whether she is or is not the equal of man.… As regards the laws relating to marriage, there should be the most absolute equality preserved between the two sexes. I do not think the woman should assume the man’s name … I would have the word ‘obey’ used not more by the wife than the husband.108

  By these remarks Theodore laid himself open to charges of effeminacy, and at least one instructor suggested he was too much influenced by “feeling” to be entirely masculine.109 For the rest of his life he would remain acutely aware of the needs and sensibilities of women. Few things disgusted him more than “male sexual viciousness,” or the Victorian conceit that a wife is the servant of her husband’s lusts. Although a woman’s place was in the home, he believed that the home was superior to the state, and that its mistress was therefore the superior of the public servant. The question of suffrage, as his dissertation made plain, was not so much controversial as unimportant. If women wished to vote, then they should be allowed to do so. Yet he could not resist adding, “Men can fight in defense of their rights, while women cannot. This certainly makes a powerful argument against putting the ballot into hands unable to defend it.”110

  ON 30 JUNE 1880, Theodore Roosevelt graduated from Harvard College as a B.A. magna cum laude, twenty-first in a class of 177.111 His family was present in force, and so was a large contingent from Chestnut Hill. President Eliot placed an embellished diploma in his hand, and murmured the special congratulations due a Phi Beta Kappa. Marching back to his seat in the bright sunlight, with his gown swirling triumphantly and a battery of adoring eyes upon him, Theodore could be excused a moment of self-satisfaction. His academic record was excellent; he was already, at twenty-one, a prominent member of society in Cambridge, Boston, and New York; he had been runner-up in the Harvard lightweight boxing championshi
p; he was rich, pleasant-looking, and, within a limited but growing circle, popular; he was the author of two scholarly pamphlets, a notable thesis, and two chapters of what promised to be a definitive naval history. To crown it all, he was engaged to a beautiful young woman. “Only four months before we get married,” he told himself. “My cup of happiness is almost too full.”112

  Yet there was wormwood in his cup, unknown to anybody but the graduate and Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant, college physician. On 26 March, after announcing his engagement, Theodore had undergone a complete physical examination, and had been told to his satisfaction that he had gained twelve pounds since coming to Harvard. But the doctor had other, less satisfactory news. Theodore’s heart, strained by years of asthmatic heavings and over-exercise, was in trouble. Far from climbing mountains in Maine, he must in future refrain even from running upstairs. He must live quietly, and choose a sedentary occupation, otherwise, Sargeant warned, he would not live long.113

  “Doctor,” came the reply, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.”

  Having spat the wormwood out, Theodore refused to acknowledge that he had ever tasted it. His diary for that night does not even mention the interview, although it is confirmed by Harvard records. Not even Alice Lee, to whom he had promised to tell “everything,”114 was permitted to know what ailed her future husband. Right through Commencement, Theodore continued to protest his health, happiness, and good fortune. On the following day he could write, with such conviction that every word was heavily underscored, “My career at college has been happier and more successful than that of any man I have ever known.”115

  ALICE JOINED THEODORE at Oyster Bay for the first ten days of July. As he proudly escorted her through the landscapes of his boyhood, he vowed “she shall always be mistress over all that I have.”116 Perhaps this was when the idea of building her a great house overlooking the bay first entered his head. One hill in particular—King Olaf would have called it a holm, with its sandy bottom, wooded slopes, and grass-covered crown—he loved above all others. As a teenage ornithologist, he had spent countless hours crouched in its coverts, notating the songs of birds in his own peculiar phonetics—cheech-ir’r’r’, fl’p-fl’p-trkeee, prrrrll-ch’k ch’k … As a Longfellow addict, he had no doubt spent as much time sitting in that hot grass, and seen sails of silk creep over the horizon. Soon he would build a manor on that hill, and live, as Olaf had done, surrounded by his own fields and looking down upon his own ships—well, a rowboat at least. The house would be called Leeholm, after his Queen; and there they would live out their days.117

  Theodore could indulge such fantasies, in this final summer of boyish irresponsibility, without worrying about such trivia as proprietary rights, mortgages, and deeds of sale. Time enough for them when he took up the duties of a husband and taxpayer. In the meantime, he wished to have fun, and fun meant violent exercise. He would spend three months of such frenetic activity that his heart would simply have to correct itself—or give out in the attempt.

  Although Theodore did not state this alarming ambition in so many words, his list of activities for the period makes it quite plain that he intended to keep his promise to Dr. Sargeant. I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. For the first few weeks at Oyster Bay he swam, rowed, hiked, and played tennis. On 20 July he accompanied Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall to Bar Harbor, Maine, and promptly began to scale mountains, play tennis, bowl, and go for long hikes through the “perfectly magnificent scenery.”118

  Within three days his body began to give off signals of distress, and he fell victim to an attack of cholera morbus. “Very embarrassing for a lover, isn’t it?” he complained to Corinne. “So unromantic, you know; suggestive of too much unripe fruit.”119 But he was up again next morning, and added dancing to his exercise schedule. Alice’s nineteenth birthday, on 29 July, worked him into such a paroxysm of adoration that he collapsed afterward, and the cholera morbus struck again. This time Theodore was unable to get up for two days, but Alice nursed him so tenderly he decided he rather liked being sick.120

  ONE MORE ADVENTURE remained to him as a bachelor: a marathon hunting trip in the West, which he had long been planning with Elliott. “I think it will build me up,” he told Mittie, in tacit admission his health was not what it might be.121 The two young men left New York for Chicago on the night train of 16 August.

  Within twenty-four hours, Theodore was gazing through the windows at a horizon wider, and a sky loftier, than any he had ever seen. Lakes as big as seas passed by on his right, farms as big as European countries unrolled to his left. The sheer immensity of America stirred something in him. For the rest of his life, “big” was to be one of his favorite words. Chicago, which they reached early on the nineteenth, was anticlimactic. “It certainly is a marvellous city,” Theodore wrote Bamie, “of enormous size and rich, but I should say not yet crystallized. There are a great many very fine houses; but I should rather doubt the quality of the society.”122

  Anyway it was prairies, not parlors, that he and Elliott had come to see. For the next six weeks they hunted in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota with an assortment of guides, not finding very much game, but reveling in the informality of frontier life. “We are dressed about as badly as mortals could be,” Theodore boasted, “with our cropped heads, unshaven faces, dirty gray shirts, still dirtier yellow trowsers and cowhide boots.”123 He assured Bamie that his slovenliness was temporary. “We expect to return in three weeks or so. Will you send to 6 W. 57th St. my long travelling bag, with my afternoon suit, 2 changes of underflannels, 6 shirts, 6 pr. silk socks, handkerchiefs, neckties and pin, 2 pairs of low shoes, brushes, razors, and my beaver and my top hat? Also a pair of pajammers …” Less than halfway through the trip, the young dandy’s thoughts were clearly racing eastward.124

  Theodore was still too much a New Yorker, and too preoccupied with thoughts of marriage, to enjoy fully this first exposure to the West. His initial excitement dwindled as the weeks dragged by and illness continued to plague him. Although he protested “superb health” in letters home, his diaries record “continual attacks of colic” that made it difficult for him to walk, and asthma so severe he had to sleep sitting up. Other misfortunes combined to aggravate his homesickness and longing for Alice Lee. Both his guns broke, he was bitten by a snake, thrown headfirst out of a wagon, soaked in torrential rainstorms, and half-frozen in a northwesterly gale.125 Elliott, who had already spent a year in the West, seemed much more at home. Yet beneath the jolly exterior Theodore saw signs of a discontent much deeper than his own. Using as light a touch as possible, he warned the family about it.

  As soon as we got here [Chicago] he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milkpunch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, maccaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening shandigaff. I confined myself to roast beef and potatoes; when I took a second help he marvelled at my appetite—and at bed time wondered why in thunder he felt “stuffy” and I didn’t.126

  On 24 September the brothers compared their respective game bags. Theodore had shot 203 “items,” Elliott, 201.127 Allowing for seniority, they could call it quits. By now the wind coming off the Great Lakes was bitingly cold, and it was time to go home.

  Early on 29 September they arrived in New York. Theodore stopped only long enough to pick up his suitcase of finery before speeding on to Boston. Alice was waiting for him, lovelier than he had ever seen her. She had “a certain added charm that I do not know how to describe; I cannot take my eyes off her; she is so pure and holy that it seems almost a profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly; and yet when we are alone I cannot
bear her to be a minute out of my arms.”128

  THE LAST FEW WEEKS before the wedding were a predictable blur of activity.129 From Chestnut Hill, Theodore hurried back to New York, and lavished $2,500 on jewelry for his beloved (“I have been spending money like water for these last two years, but shall economize after I am married”). He managed a couple of quick weekends at Oyster Bay, and promised Mittie that he would remain a good son. The enigmatic Edith Carow entertained him at dinner; another old flame, Fanny Smith, was present, and found him “as funny and delicious as ever and wild with happiness and excitement.” Then he was again off to Boston, and spent his final weekend as a bachelor on an estate near Salem, “having larks” and chopping down trees in a vain effort to stay calm.

  On 26 October, the eve of his wedding, he checked into the Brunswick Hotel, along with a large party of New York friends, and “in wild spirits” tipped Fanny’s chair back, until she feared she would do a reverse somersault. Later he went up alone to his room. At midnight he would be twenty-two, and twelve hours later he would be married. Tomorrow there would be another person in his bed. “My happiness is so great it makes me almost afraid.”130

  “I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities.”

  Theodore Roosevelt at the time of his assault on the Matterhorn, 1881. (Illustration 4.3)

  CHAPTER 5

  The Political Hack

  To avenge his father slain