And reconquer realm and reign
Came the youthful Olaf home.
“IT WAS THE DEAREST little wedding,” Fanny Smith reported in her diary of 27 October 1880. “Alice looked perfectly lovely and Theodore so happy and responded in the most determined and Theodorelike tones.” Bride and groom had emerged from the Unitarian Church, Brookline, into the splendor of a perfect fall afternoon. Indian summer warmed the air and cast a mild glow over the surrounding countryside. Coats and hats were dispensed with on the short drive to Chestnut Hill, and the agreeable holiday mood of a Wednesday wedding spread from carriage to carriage. At the reception in the Lee mansion, sunshine and champagne generated such euphoria that even Edith Carow, who of all the guests had the least reason to celebrate, “danced the soles off her shoes.”1
The young couple took their departure around four o’clock, and traveled to Springfield, where Theodore had reserved a suite of rooms at the old Massasoit House. Later that evening he noted tersely in his diary: “Our intense happiness is too sacred to be written about.”2
They journeyed on to New York the next day. There was to be no official honeymoon, only a quiet fortnight together at Oyster Bay. Since Theodore was already registered for the fall and winter terms at Columbia Law School, he could not afford to cut too many classes. Alice was consoled with the promise of a five-month vacation in Europe the following spring.3
Mittie Roosevelt had placed Tranquillity at the disposal of the newlyweds. When they arrived, late on Thursday afternoon, they found the house empty save for two maids, an old black groom, and one “melancholy cat.” Theodore’s rowboat rocked at the jetty. The other houses around the bay were shuttered up, their piazzas strewn with fallen leaves. Wooded hills—flaming red and rusty gold as the setting sun caught them—sealed the little community off from the rest of Long Island. Supper had already been ordered by the thoughtful Bamie. Theodore and Alice had nothing to do but luxuriate in each other’s company. For the next two weeks they would spend “hardly an hour of the twenty-four apart.”4
A SENSE OF DELICIOUS PRIVACY, of port after stormy seas, possessed Theodore as he settled into the domestic routine which he would always consider the height of human bliss. “I am living in dreamland,” he told himself.5 At breakfast Alice prettily presided over the tea-things, “in the daintiest little pink and gray morning dress, while I, in my silk jacket and slippers, sit at the other end of the table.” Later she proved herself his equal on the tennis court, and kept pace with him on “long fast walks” through the countryside. There were many excursions, no doubt, up the slopes of Theodore’s favorite hill. Alice was persuaded to approve the purchase, for $10,000, of an initial sixty acres overlooking the bay. Together they devoured the newspapers (“Our only intercourse with the outside world”) and endlessly discussed “everything … from Politics to Poetry.” They took afternoon buggy rides over the hills, evening rows across the bay, and feasted on woodcock and partridge. After dinner Alice would curl up in front of a roaring wood fire while Theodore read aloud from the novels of Scott and Dickens. All through the night her long soft body lay beside his. “How I wish it could last forever!”6
MR. AND MRS. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, JR., took up formal residence at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, New York City, on Saturday, 13 November 1880. They were welcomed back with a “perfect ovation” by the rest of the Roosevelt clan, and Theodore lost no time in assuming the mantle of Elijah. On Sunday, after church, he presided over the traditional family lunch, was “at home” to a variety of relatives and friends in the afternoon, and that evening sat in his father’s seat at the Newsboys’ Lodging-House Dinner.7 Before the winter was out, he would inherit two more of Theodore Senior’s responsibilities, being elected a trustee of both the Orthopedic Dispensary and the New York Infant Asylum. But the charitable role did not suit him. Many years later he told a friend, “I tried faithfully to do what father had done, but I did it poorly … in the end I found out that we each have to work in his own way to do our best; and when I struck mine, though it differed from his, yet I was able to follow the same lines and do what he would have had me do.”8
Striking that “way” took Theodore a full year, although, as things turned out, it led a mere hundred yards east of his front door. Two other routes temporarily diverted him. The first led three miles south to the Columbia Law School.9
EMERGING FROM 6 West Fifty-seventh Street early on the morning of 17 November, Theodore sucked in a lungful of chill, crisp air (marriage had done wonders for his asthma), turned into Fifth Avenue, and marched briskly downtown to 8 Great Jones Street.10 It was a good forty-five-minute walk, even at the characteristic Rooseveltian gait: arms pumping, toe caps shooting out sideways, every heelfall biting like a pickax.11 Theodore’s first recitation was scheduled for 8:30, and he did not want to miss a word that fell from “the golden lips” of Professor T. W. Dwight, America’s most revered legal pedagogue.12
The Columbia College Law School, which Dwight had founded in 1858, was little more than a cavernous old house, its floors and walls blotched with tobacco-juice, its windows jammed shut against the traffic-noises of Lafayette Place. Within, an atmosphere of rowdy informality prevailed. Students threw their hats and coats over every available protuberance, argued boisterously in the library, and fought for places in a stuffy little lecture theater. Those who arrived late were obliged to squat around the platform, or wedge themselves onto dusty windowsills, until there was not an inch of standing or sitting space left.13
From the moment the white-haired, mildly smiling professor strolled into the room, a cathedral-like hush descended. Dwight was famous for the clarity and persuasiveness of his oratory, the profundity of the questions with which he would every now and again challenge his audience. No conundrum was too knotty for him to untangle, no statute too obscure to exhume and ponder. The thin blood of seven generations of Puritan clergymen, authors, and educators flowed in his veins; his logic was unpolluted by human emotion.14
Professor Dwight and his students now discovered that they had in their midst a young man who was impatient with logic, and who, instead of waiting for questions from on high, wished to ask his own. Theodore at Columbia proved to be as harshly persistent an interrupter, as irrepressible a jack-in-the-box, as he had been at Harvard. Time and again he would leap to his feet, glasses flashing, to argue “for justice and against legalism,” and express his contempt for the “repellent” doctrine of caveat emptor. Why, the young man wanted to know, did this side of the law preclude bargains “which are fair and of benefit to both sides”? He shrilly insisted that the accepted standards of corporation lawyers were incompatible with youthful idealism; they encouraged “sharp practice.”15
Theodore’s pertinacity in raising such subjects vastly irritated a fellow student, Poultney Bigelow. “Roosevelt was then what he was in the White House—an excellent example of the genus Americanus egotisticus.” Bigelow may have been a prejudiced witness—those who hated Theodore did so with passion—yet he early detected the future President’s lifelong compulsion for center stage. “He was predestined for politics … he could not escape the fate of being persistently in the public eye.”16
Professor Dwight, on the other hand, did not seem to mind Theodore’s interruptions. Most of the other students were impressed by the newcomer. He quickly became a favorite, and was accepted as a man with a future, although it was plain to all but himself that he had no future in law. As one classmate dryly put it, “The intricacies of the rule in Shelley’s case, the study of feudal tenures as exemplified in the great work of Blackstone, were not the things upon which that avid mind must feed.”17
All through the winter and spring of 1880–81 Theodore continued to march down Fifth Avenue, Blackstone’s Commentaries under his arm and a determined expression on his face. “I like the law school work very much,” he told himself.18
THE SECOND ROUTE that Theodore followed, at the close of his morning classes, led west from the Law School to the Astor
Library, on the other side of Lafayette Place. Here he proceeded mysteriously to bury himself in speckled tomes and ancient periodicals. He remained closemouthed about this scholarly activity, not even mentioning it to his diary until March 1881, and then with deliberate vagueness: “Am still working on … one or two unsuccessful literary projects.”19
Just when Theodore became aware of his potential as a writer is unclear. His juvenile letters and diaries had been no more remarkable than those of any intelligent boy; his adolescent notebooks and ornithological pamphlets were strictly scientific; his Harvard themes were laborious, unimaginative, and lacking in “style.” Even his eulogies for Theodore Senior and effusions over Alice Lee, while undoubtedly passionate, were expressed in Victorian clichés. Only rarely, as in the stories he used to improvise as a bedridden boy, the humorous letters from Dresden, and the descriptions of birdsong in the Adirondacks, had he shown any flashes of originality. These somehow seem to have convinced him that the name Theodore Roosevelt might one day ornament the spine of this or that leather-bound volume.
From his late teens on he had begun to write, consciously or unconsciously, to an audience. Even the diaries he ostensibly marked “Private” show signs of this urge to communicate. It is impossible to read them at any length without feeling that one is being addressed. Many entries are deliberately prosy and tell Theodore’s imagined readers things he does not need to tell himself. Even when he wishes to be genuinely private, he feels the stare of the public, and is obliged to erase paragraphs, tear out whole pages, and curtly announce that some things are “too sacred to be written about.”
That other instinct of the born author—the compulsion to write—was also strong in him. Theodore’s habit, in moments of joy or sorrow, had always been to reach for a pen, as others might reach for a rosary or a bottle. During the winter of 1879–80, when Alice was driving him to despair, he had begun to write a book, the most technically challenging one he could think of. Now, in the happy winter of 1880–81, he turned again to The Naval War of 1812.20
Although Theodore protested that the two introductory chapters he had already completed at Harvard “were so dry they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison,” he was entitled to be proud of them, for they were a formidable achievement.21 Before starting the book he had known little about academic research, and less about marine warfare. Merely to master the technicalities of naval strategy and tactics, along with a complex nautical vocabulary, was a task before which any professional historian might quail. To collect and analyze, in terms of comparative firepower, thousands of ballistic and logistic figures (correcting the inaccurate ones passim) required the brain of a mathematician—which Theodore did not have. So he had to double-check his calculations until every last discrepancy had worked itself out.
Yet somehow he had managed to do all that—whether successfully or not, the reviewers would have to decide. In the meantime, with his 42 “dry” pages behind him, he could move on to 450 more full of the spray and salt and smoke of real battle.
Despite the enthusiasm with which he took up this work, Theodore was determined not to let his imagination run away with him. He made full use of the research facilities of the Astor Library in an effort to document every sentence of his manuscript. He consulted naval histories published on both sides of the Atlantic, including several French works which he quoted in his own translation. He burrowed through the lives and memoirs of participating admirals. Determined to be scrupulously fair, he consulted such British sources as the Naval Records, Nile’s Register, and the London Naval Chronicle. He sent to Washington for carloads of official captains’ letters, logbooks, and shipyard contracts previously untouched by any scholar. He compiled his own construction plans, tactical diagrams, and “tables of comparative force and loss.”22 With these spread out around him, he could ponder such questions as the relationship between a ship armed with long 12s and another presenting 32-pound carronades. Which one would prevail in battle? “At long range the first, and at short range the second,” concluded Theodore, who dearly loved a balanced statement. But then the booming of guns in his ears would be interrupted by the library clock chiming three. It was time to march back uptown and take Alice out for her afternoon drive.23
Apart from his daily six-mile walk, sleigh-driving was Theodore’s only exercise that winter. He went about it with his usual energy, speeding around Manhattan in huge loops, up to thirty miles at a time, while the rest of society sedately circled Central Park. With his “sweet Baby” warmly wrapped in buffalo robes beside him, and Lightfoot’s hooves drumming up an exhilarating spray of snow, he would zigzag through the farms and shanties of the Upper West Side until the dark, ice-clogged waters of the Hudson opened out on their left. Spinning north along Riverside Drive, they would admire the snowy Palisades showing in fine relief against the gray winter skies, before curving east across the white fields of Harlem, and south past the great estates of the East River into the pine-forested freshness of Jones’ Woods.24 Emerging at Sixty-eighth Street, they would zigzag toward the mansions of midtown, massed like an interrupted avalanche along the southern fringe of Central Park.
SHOULD THEY PASS Mrs. William Astor’s carriage in Grand Army Plaza, Theodore could touch the brim of his beaver with his whip, and know that the gesture would be acknowledged, for the Roosevelt family was eminent enough to be included among the few hundred that majestic lady deigned to recognize. Mrs. Astor’s dominance over New York’s drawing-rooms was so complete that her word was social law. She was a guest, along with Vanderbilts, Dodges, Harrimans, and Iselins, at Corinne Roosevelt’s coming-out party on 8 December.25 Although the grande dame was so stiff with diamonds she could barely turn from one guest to another, she liked what she saw of Theodore and Alice, and invited them to dinner at her austere brownstone on Thirty-fourth Street, whose boards the nouveaux riches Vanderbilts were not permitted to tread. As a double seal of her approval, she asked the young couple to her January Ball, the traditional climax of the social season.26 At this event, and at the scarcely less glittering Patriarch’s Ball, and at banquets with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, and parties at Delmonico’s, and Monday nights at the opera, and at dozens of other receptions, teas, and “jolly little dinners” up and down Fifth Avenue, Theodore and Alice conducted themselves with the grace of natural aristocrats. “Alice is universally and greatly admired,” wrote her proud husband, “and she seems to grow more beautiful day by day.”27
An old friend, separated from the Roosevelts by lesser means, caught sight of them emerging from an opera at the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. Theodore had manifestly arrived at the social heights: “I remember thinking what an enormous start he had over youths like myself, whose daily bread depended on their daily effort.”28
New York at the dawn of the eighties stood poised between the sedate elegance of its past and the fabulous vulgarity of its future. This was at once the age of slippery horsehair furniture and Tiffany glass; of dignified quadrilles and the scandalously sexy waltz; of prephylloxera Burgundies and the harsh, but interesting new Cabernets from California; of copperplate invitations on silver trays and the first crackly telephone messages; of beaux arts filigree decorating old, blocky town houses. Millionaires’ Row was not without its vacant lots, and Alva Vanderbilt’s vast château at Fifty-second Street—designed to humble Mrs. Astor—was still a skeleton of limestone and marble dust. Not until its last turret was in place, and its doors thrown open to the “splendor seekers,” could New York’s Golden Age fairly be said to have begun.29
Yet already the pace of society was accelerating. For the young Roosevelts, hardly a night passed without some brilliant affair. Since the opera did not end until 11:30, and balls often continued through dawn, one wonders when Theodore ever found time to sleep. Early in the New Year, after a full day in the law school and the library, a meeting with some old college friends to organize a Free Trade Club, and an evening spent at the Astors’, he noted delightedly in h
is diary, “Every moment of my time occupied.”30 Should a spare moment occasionally present itself, he filled it not with rest but work. Owen Wister has left an anecdote of this period which reads like the opening scene of a Victorian drawing-room comedy. It is the pre-dinner hour; Theodore, standing on one leg at the bookcases in his New York house, is sketching a diagram for The Naval War of 1812. In rushes Alice, exclaiming in a plaintive drawl, “We’re dining out in twenty minutes, and Teddy’s drawing little ships!”31
But increasingly, as the season wore on, Theodore used the pre-dinner hour for another, more private activity, of which Mrs. Astor would definitely not have approved. Resplendent in evening dress, he would dash across Fifth Avenue, round the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, and up a shabby flight of stairs.32
MORTON HALL, AS THE headquarters of the Twenty-first District Republican Association was grandly called, was a barn-sized chamber over a store.33 It was furnished with rough benches and spittoons, a raised table and a chair. Two gloomy political portraits completed the decor. Here the cheap lawyers, saloonkeepers, and horsecar conductors who ran Theodore’s district—Irishmen, mostly—met together for political meetings once or twice a month. On other nights Morton Hall served as a sort of clubroom where the same clientele could chat informally. During these “bull sessions” Celtic eloquence, punctuated by regular squirts of plug-juice, tended to veer from politics to dirty stories. Theodore, whose distaste for tobacco matched his prudishness, must have winced many times during his first visits in the fall of 1880. He had been by no means welcome, for his side-whiskers and evening clothes made the “heelers” uncomfortable.34 But he came back again and again, until he was eventually accepted for membership in the association.35
When the news of Theodore’s unseemly activities leaked out, his family reacted with almost uniform horror. “We thought he was, to put it frankly, pretty fresh,” wrote Emlen Roosevelt. “We felt that his own father would not have liked it, and would have been fearful of the outcome. The Roosevelt circle as a whole had a profound distrust of public life.”36 So, too, did his father’s friends—bankers, lawyers, businessmen, clubmen. Politics, they assured him from the depths of their leather armchairs, was “low.” A gentleman of his upbringing might subscribe to campaign funds—without inquiring too closely as to how the money was spent—might even attend a primary or two, and of course he had a duty to cast his vote on Election Day, providing the weather was fine. But to traffic with men who were “rough and brutal and unpleasant” was decidedly infra dig. He should not soil his kid gloves on the levers of political machinery.37
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt Page 16