The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  52. TR Sr. to Mittie, July 11, 1873 (TRC). Cutler was a brilliant young Harvard graduate who had left the wool business in order to prepare the children of wealthy families for college. Other Cutler pupils included J. P. Morgan, Harry Payne Whitney, and John D. Rockefeller (Igl.59–60).

  53. TR Sr. to Mittie, Oct. 5, 1873. Cornelius van Schaak Roosevelt, who died in 1871, left his four sons, including TR Sr., $10 million in equal shares. (Las. 4.) TR Sr.’s glass business continued to prosper until he sold it in January 1876 (PRI. n.). See Rob.5 for TR Sr.’s founding of the Orthopaedic Hospital.

  54. COW; photographs in TRB; fragmentary letter from TR Sr. to Mittie, c. August 1873; another dated Sep. 21.

  55. COW; memorandum by Arthur H. Cutler in TRC.

  56. TR. Sr. to MBR, Oct. 2, 1874 (TRC).

  57. Put.117; Rob.89. Harper’s Weekly, Sep. 1907, describes Tranquillity as “a fine old house under great trees close to the village.” Now demolished.

  58. COW; Par. passim; Put.119; Rob.95.

  59. Qu. Las.3. For TR’s bookishness, see Fanny Smith to C, July 1876: “If I were writing to Theodore I would have to say something of this kind, ‘I have enjoyed Plutarch’s last essay on the philosophy of Diogenes excessively.’ ” (qu.Rob.96.) Fanny’s Perchance Some Day (see Par. in Bibl.) is the most charming and the least cloying of Roosevelt family memoirs. Copy in TRC.

  60. Par. 31 ff.

  61. Cutler memorandum. Walt McDougall, in This Is the Life (Knopf, 1926, 129–30), remembers TR as the village boys saw him, “undersized, nervous, studious … and somewhat supercilious besides.” Inevitably known as “Four Eyes,” he was game to fight but was forbidden to, on account of his spectacles.

  62. Mor.13; Cutler memo.

  63. TR to M, Aug. 6, 1896, TRC.

  64. TR.DBY.356.

  65. Donald Wilhelm, qu. Put. 125.

  66. Par.28, 140, 29.

  67. Ibid.

  68. TR to B, Sep. 20, 1886; Cutler memo. TR passed his second round of Harvard entrance exams in the spring of 1876.

  69. Rob.90.

  70. The phrase is Putnam’s, reflecting a conversation he had with Mrs. Joseph Alsop Sr. (Put.170 fn.)

  3: THE MAN WITH THE MORNING IN HIS FACE

  Important sources not in Bibliography: 1. Wilhelm, Donald, TR as an Undergraduate (Boston, 1910). Copy in New York Public Library has the added value of irascible marginalia by another classmate, Richard W. Welling.

  1. Boston Daily Advertiser, Oct. 27, 1876; Pri.31.

  2. Wilhelm, Undergraduate, 19. Hag. Boy.51–2 confirms this anecdote. See also Woo.1–2.

  3. Hag.Boy.15; Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart, TR’s classmate, at final Harvard History Lecture (un. clip, 1926, TRB).

  4. King, Moses, Harvard and its Surroundings (Cambridge, 1880) passim; Put. 129.

  5. Put. 131; Grant, Robert, “Harvard College in the Seventies,” Scribner’s May 1897; Thayer, William Roscoe, TR: An Intimate Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 16; Wis.19; Put.130. The majority of the students were Republicans (note in TRB).

  6. Qu. Pri.32.

  7. Pri.33–4. Put.135–6.

  8. Put.136.

  9. Mor.42; TR to B, Oct. 15, 1876.

  10. Pri.32; qu. Put.131.

  11. Wis.12: “he stood out.” Montage from Wilhelm, Undergraduate, 31, 35, 41, 54, 63; Pri.33; Welling, Richard, “My Classmate TR,” American Legion Monthly, Jan. 1929; Richard Saltonstall, qu. Put.138; Gilman, Bradley, Roosevelt the Happy Warrior (Little, Brown, 1921) 1–2.

  12. Welling, “Classmate,” 9.

  13. Anonymous reminiscence of TR Sr. in Philadelphia Press, April 7, 1903. The conversation took place at Moon’s Lake, N.Y., in Sept. 1876.

  14. Reminiscences of classmates William Hooper and Henry Jackson in HKB.

  15. Thomas Perry, qu. Put.140; Hag.Boy.54; Rii.27; Tha.21; PRI.n.

  16. Wilhelm, Undergraduate, 9.

  17. Mor. 16; Laughlin, J. Laurence, “Roosevelt at Harvard,” Review of Reviews, LXX (1924) 393 illus.; diagram by TR in letter to B, Oct. 6, 1876; TR to B, Sep. 30.

  18. TR to MBR, Oct. 29, 1876.

  19. Mor.23–4.

  20. Cut.10; Hag.Boy.54.

  21. Mor.26; ib., 23. TR also caused another disturbance this winter, according to Richard Welling: “Part of his initiation into a Harvard secret society was to sit in the gallery of a Boston theatre and applaud loudly during all the quiet moments throughout a performance of Medea, a task which he performed with such characteristic zeal that he was speedily invited to decamp.” Memo in PRI.n. See also Gilman, Warrior, 74.

  22. Not to mention a certain Annie Murray. See TR to B, Jan. 22, 1877.

  23. Memo by Martha Waldron Cowdin, future wife of Bob Bacon, in TRC. Elsewhere in PRI.n. Mrs. Bacon remembers TR as “a campus freak, with stuffed snakes and lizards in his room, with a peculiar, violent vehemence of speech and manner, and an overwhelming interest in every thing.” 24. TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 8, 1880; ib., Oct.

  24. 1878.

  25. See Wag.86–88.

  26. Put.141; TR.Pri.Di. Apr. 18, 1878.

  27. Mor.39; TR to B, Feb. 5, 1877; TR to MBR, Oct. 6, 1876; TR to B, Nov. 12, 1876.

  28. Wilhelm, Undergraduate, 31; Thayer, TR, Mor.25.

  29. Gov. Curtis Guild Jr., qu. Wilhelm, Undergraduate, 31; John Woodbury, qu. ib., 41.

  30. Mor.27.

  31. Laughlin, “Harvard,” 395–8.

  32. Put.139; Thomas Perry, qu. ib.

  33. German, 92; Physics, 78; Classical Literature, 77; Chemistry, 75; Advanced Mathematics, 75. His other grades were Latin, 73, and Greek, 58 (Mor.25).

  34. Put.169; Mor.28.

  35. Ib., 26.

  36. Extract from TR’s notebook qu. Cut.16-17 (see also Ch. 2, Note 14); TR.Auto.24.

  37. “By far the best of the recent lists,” wrote the great biologist C. Hart Merriam in Nuttall Ornithological Society Bulletin. “It bears prima facie evidence of … exact and thoroughly reliable information.” See Paul Russell Cutright, “Twin Literary Rarities of TR,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal 12 (1985) 2.

  38. Cut.3, 7, 8

  39. TR.Auto.25-6.

  40. TR.Pri.Di. May 20, 1878; Mor. 25–6; qu. Put.139.

  41. Rob.103.

  42. Put.135.

  43. Mor.29.

  44. Arthur was of course the future President of the United States. This account of the Collectorship crisis is based on Put.146–7 fn., supplemented by Mor.29, and family letters and diaries in TRC.

  45. Mor.31.

  46. Anna Bulloch Gracie, Diary 1877, TRC.

  47. TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 2, Dec. 11, 1878.

  48. Ib., Jan. 2, 1878; Put.148.

  49. Telegram of TR to A. S. Roosevelt, Feb. 9, 1878 (TRB); N.Y. World, Feb. 11, 1878; C to EKR, qu. Put.148; Elliott Roosevelt memorandum in TRC.

  50. Igl.39; Anna Bulloch Gracie, Diary Feb. 9, 1878. For tributes to TR Sr., see N.Y. Telegraph, Feb. 11; Nation, Feb. 14; Tribune, Feb. 18; Harper’s Weekly, Mar. 2, 1878.

  51. TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 12, 1878; qu. Put.149; TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 6, Apr. 25, Apr. 30, May 1.

  52. Ib., June 9, 1878.

  53. Ib., June 19, 1878.

  54. Rob.104; TR.Pri.Di. July 11, 14, 1878.

  55. Qu. Put.151.

  56. Rob.106.

  57. TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 23, 1878 (No student, according to Grant, “Seventies,” spent more than $2,000 a year in the 70s; most got by on $1,000 or $1,300); TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 28, May 15, 1878; TR to MBR, Mar. 24.

  58. TR.Pri.Di. May 23, June 17, 1878.

  59. Rob.106.

  60. Qu. Put.145; TR.Pri.Di. June 28, 1878.

  61. Rob.102; TR.Pri.Di. Aug. 10, 1878.

  62. Ib., Aug. 9, 22, 1878.

  63. Ib., Aug. 24, 1878. TR justified his cruelty, not very convincingly, by saying that the dog’s owner had been warned.

  64. Ib., Aug. 26, 1878.

  65. Ib., Sep. 1, 1878.

  66. Hag.Boy.59; “Bill Sewall Remembers TR” (interview with Alfred Gordon Munro, TRB—un. clip, c. 1901). S
ewall told this story rather more confusingly in Sew.2–3 (1919). Putnam accepts the later version, while admitting it to be inconsistent. The earlier tallies with all available supporting evidence, and may be accepted as more reliable.

  67. Sew.63.

  68. Hag.Boy.60.

  69. Qu. Hag.Boy.62.

  70. See Morr.140.

  71. Put.155; TR.Pri.Di. Sep. 27, June 17, 18, 1878.

  72. Mor.25; Put.175–6 fn.

  73. Put.175; TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 4, 1878; Mor.25.

  74. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 5, 1878; Mor.35.

  75. Put. 167.

  76. Ib., 166–7.

  77. PRI. n.

  78. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 19, 20, 1878.

  79. Ib., Nov. 2, 1878; TR.Har.Scr. The menu of ten courses that evening included oysters, turbot, “Mongrel Goose / Young Pig,” croustade of venison, canvasback duck / larded quails, Charlotte Russe, Roquefort and olives, sherbet. (Ib.)

  80. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 2, 1878 sic. Some of his classmates corroborate this. “Very little upset him … he had the sense to realize his limitations.” (James Giddes in PRI. n.) Drinking at Harvard generally was so heavy in the late seventies that two or three students out of every class were expected to die of alcoholism a year or so after graduation. (Ib.)

  81. TR.Pri.Di. passim; ib. Oct. 2, 1878. A classmate remembered him angrily reprimanding the singer of a risqué song at the Hasty Pudding Club. Edward Wagenknecht remarks: “It is impossible that there can ever have been a more clean-living man than Theodore Roosevelt.” (Hagedorn memo, TRB; Wag.87.)

  82. Ib., Nov. 28, 1878.

  83. Ib., Jan. 25, 1880.

  4: THE SWELL IN THE DOG-CART

  1. TR to John Roosevelt, Feb. 25, 1880 (privately owned).

  2. COW; Par; Mrs. Bacon’s statements in TRC; newspaper tributes to Alice, Feb. 1884; letters to B (1884) in TRC.

  3. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 7, 1880.

  4. Pri.41–3; Mrs. Bacon’s statements; Put. 167–8; photographs in TRC; a sample of Alice’s hair preserved by TR in Sagamore Hill vaults; TR to John Roosevelt, Feb. 25, 1880.

  5. Mor.36.

  6. TR to Harry Minot, July 5, 1880, qu. Put.193–4.

  7. Rose Lee to Carleton Putnam, qu. Put.166; Pri.42–3; Rob.63.

  8. TR to John Roosevelt, Feb. 25, 1880.

  9. Mor.36.

  10. See Put.178.

  11. TR to John Roosevelt, Feb. 25, 1880; Put.173.

  12. TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 11, 1879.

  13. Ib., Dec. 21, 1878.

  14. Mor.34.

  15. Wis.12.

  16. Cut. 23–25; TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 18, 1879.

  17. Laughlin, J. Laurence, “Roosevelt at Harvard,” Review of Reviews, LXX (1924) 397. Robert Bacon was U.S. Secretary of State, Jan. 27-Mar. 5, 1909.

  18. Thayer, William Roscoe, TR: An Intimate Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1919) 20. TR’s classmate Frederick Almy recalls TR leading a deputation of students to Harvard President Charles W. Eliot and stammering for some time in the great man’s presence. Eventually he forced it out: “Mr. Eliot, I am President Roosevelt.” PRI.n. Washburn, Charles G., TR: The Logic of His Career (Houghton Mifflin, 1916) says that “at the Pudding we often incited a discussion for the purpose of rousing ‘Teddy.’ In his excitement he would sometimes lose altogether the power of articulation, much to our delight. He then had almost a defect in his speech which made his utterance deliberate and even halting.” (p.5) References to this impediment are frequent in TR’s late teens and early twenties, non-existent thereafter.

  19. Put.177.

  20. Ib.

  21. Put.178. These two remarks, and the fact that TR abandoned his habit of taking field-notes in 1879, suggest that Alice Lee was instrumental in changing TR’s vocation to something other than natural history. While admittedly slender, the speculation is borne out by anecdotes indicating that Alice’s own interest in the world of animals was minimal. On one occasion she innocently asked Theodore “who had shaved the lions” at a zoo, “being otherwise unable to account for their manes.” (Mor.48) John Gable suggests that economic scruples may have caused TR to forego an academic career—but he was after all worth $8,000 p.a. and Alice came of an equally wealthy family.

  22. TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 11, 31, 1879; Mor.38.

  23. Pors. in TRC; Mor.38. TR’s record of expenditures for the years 1877–79 show that dress was always the major item of his budget, exceeding what he spent on board, lodging, education, travel, and sport. Whereas the average Harvard student’s total expenditures in the late 1870s was $650 to $850 (even the wealthiest rarely exceeded $1,500) Theodore spent $1,742 in his first year, $2,049 in his second, and $4,113 in his third. See King, Moses, Harvard and its Surroundings (Cambridge, 1878); Grant, Robert, “Harvard College in the Seventies,” Scribner’s, May 1897, and TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 31, 1879.

  24. The following account of TR’s vacation in Maine is drawn from Sew.5–6, Put.159–61.

  25. Mor.37.

  26. Sew.5.

  27. Hag.Boy.59; Mor.37.

  28. Sew. 6.

  29. Sewall to TR, reminding him of their conversation, June 1902, TRP.

  30. TR to Mittie, qu. Put.161.

  31. TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 15, 1879.

  32. TR to B, Mar. 23, 1879; Wis.33.

  33. Har.13; Put.144.

  34. Wis.4–5.

  35. Cut.3, 7, 8.

  36. H. E. Armstrong in The Independent, Sept. [?], 1902, Presidential Scrapbook, TRP; Richard Welling, “TR at Harvard,” Outlook clip, n.d., in TRB; Tha.23; Hag.Boy.57–8.

  37. TR.Pri.Di. Apr. 2, 1879.

  38. Mor.39.

  39. TR.Pri.Di. May 8, 1879.

  40. Put.174; TR.Pri.Di. May 13, 1879.

  41. Put.175.

  42. Mor.40.

  43. See TR.Pri.Di., Jan. 25, 1880.

  44. Ib., June 19, 1879. The following account of Class Day, 1879, owes much to Putnam’s treatment in Put. 180–2, as well as TR.Pri.Di. June 20.

  45. Memo by E in TRC.

  46. Put.183.

  47. TR.Pri.Di. July 5, 9, 1879.

  48. Ib., July 30, 1879.

  49. Las. 3–9.

  50. Fanny Parsons, note in TRB.

  51. TR.Pri.Di. Aug. 16, 1879.

  52. Ib., Aug. 18, 1879. TR, dictating his Autobiography in 1913, mused for several pages on the reasons behind this decision. See TR. Auto. 25–7.

  53. TR to B, Aug. 22, 1879 (TRB); TR.Pri.Di., same date. For an unforgettable photograph of Alice and TR with tennis rackets, evocative of both the bewitcher and the bewitched, see Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth (New York, 1981). See also Michael Teague, “Theodore Roosevelt and Alice Lee: A New Perspective,” Harvard Library Bulletin 33 (1985) 3.

  54. Put.183; Mor.40.

  55. Put.161.

  56. The following account is based on ib., 161–3.

  57. TR to B. n.d. (Sep. 4?) TRB.

  58. TR.Pri.Di.

  59. TR to B, Sep. 14, 1879 (TRB).

  60. Put. 163.

  61. See the impressive analysis of TR’s physical feats in Maine in Put. 163. The author shows that in a total of 61 days with Sewall, TR marched, paddled, and rode over 1,000 miles through near-virgin wilderness (540 miles on foot), averaging more than 50 miles a day.

  62. Mor.41; TR.Pri.Di. May 16, 1879; Put.174, 184 fn.; McCausland, Hugh, The English Carriage (London, 1948) passim; TR to B (telegram), n.d. but probably early Sep. 1879. (TRB)

  63. Mor.41.

  64. Pri.43.

  65. Welling, Richard, “My Classmate TR,” American Legion Monthly, Jan. 1929.

  66. TR.Pri.Di. Sep. 26, 1879; Put. 184–6; TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 10, 23, 1879.

  67. Put. 184–5.

  68. Mor.41–2.

  69. Ib.

  70. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 27, 1879.

  71. TR to B, n.d. (Nov. 11, 1879?) TRB.

  72. TR to John Roosevelt, Feb. 25, 1880.

  73. Mor.41.

  74. Qu. Put.178 fn. TR’s choice of this subject, at this time of great personal stress,
is symbolic. It had been the machine in politics that destroyed his father, whose troubles with it had begun almost exactly two years before; it was the machine in politics that, almost exactly two years later, would launch his own legislative career. (Cf. 238–9).

  75. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 22, 1879.

  76. TR to B, n.d. (Nov. 11, 1879?) TRB; TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 22, 1879; Put. 187; Thomas Lee, Alice’s cousin, to Henry F. Pringle, PRI.n.; TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 2, 1879.

  77. Pri.42; see his source, Mrs. Robert Bacon, in PRI.n.

  78. Wis.13; Pri.36. The book, which will be discussed later in the text, was prompted by certain inaccuracies in William James’s (British) history of the war, which TR found in the Porcellian Library.

  79. In 1910, TR recalled reciting “that glorious chorus from Atalanta in Calydon” and the despairing lines from Dolores beginning “Time turns the old days to derision.” “What young man has not, when suffering the pangs of despised love, given vent to his feelings in those words?” George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia (Boston, 1923), vol. 1, 88–89.

  80. Put.171; Pri.43–4; Corinne Roosevelt Robinson in PRI.n.

  81. Put.187; TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 24, 1879; ib., Nov. 16.

  82. Put.187.

  83. TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 1, 1880.

  84. Ib., Jan. 25, 1880. “I have not mentioned a word of it to my diary,” TR adds with satisfaction, apropos of his recent torment. “No outsider has suspected it.”

  85. Ib.; also Feb. 23, 1880.

  86. Ib., Jan. 31, 1880; Pri.43; TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 2, 1880.

  87. Alice Lee to MBR, Feb. 3, 1880 (typed copy in TRB).

  88. TR to B, Mar. 1, 1880 (TRB). The choice of date shows TR’s love for parallels and anniversaries in the family. On Oct. 27 he would turn twenty-two, the same age his father had been when he was married; Alice would be nineteen, the same as Mittie had been.

  89. Mor.43.

  90. TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 11, 1880.

  91. Qu. Put.189; qu. ib., 190; ib., 189.

  92. TR to John Roosevelt, Feb. 25, 1880.

  93. Mor.44. They had been reassured by Mittie’s offer to accommodate the young couple at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, at least through the winter of 1880–81.

  94. Thomas Lee to Henry F. Pringle, PRI.n. See also Pri.44.

  95. Mor.44.

  96. TR.Pri.Di. Apr. 1, 1880; Cut.27; Pri.43; TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 25, 1880; Put.185; ib., fn.; Mor.43.

  97. Pri.43–4.