At first, Theodore had planned to leave his daughter with Bamie, where she had been all three years of her life. “If you wish to,” he had informed his older sister, “you shall keep Baby Lee, I of course paying the expense.” But Edith put her foot down, saying the child was now her daughter, too, and should live with them. And soon there were two children at Sagamore Hill.
Theodore, Edith, and their growing family at Sagamore Hill, 1894.
Edith gave birth September 13, 1887, to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., whom the family called Ted. “The boy is a fine little fellow about 8 1/2 pounds,” Theodore wrote. “I am very glad our house has an heir at last!” He enjoyed being a father. His daughter was “too sweet and good … as for Ted, he crawls everywhere … and is too merry and happy for anything. I go in to play with them every morning; they are certainly the dearest children imaginable.”
Theodore spent part of the summer with Elliott fox hunting and playing polo. His younger brother had rented an estate fifteen miles away in Hempstead. Three and a half years earlier, Elliott had married an attractive debutant named Anna Hall, in what a New York newspaper called “one of the most brilliant social events of the season.” The couple had one child, Eleanor. Theodore and his sisters, both of whom were living in Manhattan, had hoped the responsibilities of a family would make their brother settle down. But that didn’t happen. Years later Edith would bluntly describe Elliott as a man who “drank like a fish and ran after the ladies.”
With his inheritance practically gone, Theodore worked hard to earn a living as a “literary feller.” He appeared to be devoting himself to writing. “I shall probably never be in politics again,” he informed an old Republican friend. “My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it.”
His first book, The Naval War of 1812, had earned praise but not money. More successful was his second book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, and two companion books about his experiences in the Dakota Territory, which a reviewer praised as “tinglingly alive, masculine and vascular.”
Thanks to his Massachusetts friend Cabot Lodge, who also wrote books on American history, the Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin had given Theodore contracts to write biographies of two American statesmen. He had finished the first biography in 1886, and it was published in 1887. It was about Thomas Hart Benton. Theodore identified with Benton, a wealthy easterner who early in the nineteenth century moved to the Mississippi River Valley, which at the time was the American frontier. Benton later became a U.S. senator from Missouri. He was a combative politician who firmly believed in Manifest Destiny, the popular nineteenth-century idea that the United States should expand westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Shortly after settling into Sagamore Hill, Theodore began work on his second biography, about a lesser-known Founding Father with the unusual name of Gouverneur Morris. Again, as a Roosevelt biographer has noted, there were striking similarities between author and subject. They were well-born New Yorkers, literate and widely traveled. Both were aggressive moralists and passionate patriots who believed in a strong federal government.
Theodore complained that “writing is horribly hard work for me; and I make slow progress,” but using a steel nib pen that required frequent dipping into an ink well, he finished his 92,000-word manuscript on Morris (a typed, double-spaced manuscript of that length would be about 350 pages) in just three months.
After finishing that biography Theodore decided that he wanted to “write some book that would really take rank as in the very first class.” It was a dream the author planned to pursue by writing The Winning of the West, a multivolume history about the exploration and settlement of America. Theodore started work in early 1888, assuring his editor at Putnam that he would deliver the first two volumes within a year. But rather than getting to work immediately, as any writer who had to deliver two books in twelve months should have done, he decided to go west to hunt and check on his cattle herd.
The men who managed his ranch had already written that the previous winter had been the worst anyone could remember and many of his cattle had frozen or starved to death. Theodore found that he had lost two-thirds of his herd. It was a big financial blow. He had invested $85,000 in his cattle business, and there was no chance of earning any of that investment back.
Theodore was equally disturbed by what he saw, or didn’t see, while hunting; the once abundant wildlife had all but vanished. The growing number of white people moving into the region, “swinish butchers” he called them, had not only killed most of the buffalo, but they had also killed most of the elk, grizzly, and other wildlife. And overgrazing had stripped away so much grass that the prairie had begun to look like desert.
The destruction led Theodore to found one of the first organizations in the country devoted to conserving natural resources. Back in New York, he organized the Boone and Crockett Club, which was named for two of America’s most famous frontiersmen, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Theodore was the club’s first president, and he recruited other members who were prominent scientists, lawyers, and politicians. They persuaded the federal government to do more to protect Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the nation’s first national park, from destructive tourists. And they lobbied Congress to pass the Forest Reserve Act, a law giving the U.S. president the authority to remove large tracts of forests from the public domain and place them under federal supervision. This was the beginning of the National Forest Service.
That fall Theodore once again changed his mind about getting involved in politics and campaigned for Republican Benjamin Harrison, who was running against the incumbent Democratic president, Grover Cleveland. Harrison was a former Indiana senator and the grandson of the ninth president, William Henry Harrison, who, after serving only thirty-one days, had the distinction of being the first American president to die in office. Theodore campaigned in Illinois, Michigan, and Minnesota, where his fiery take-no-prisoners style established him as one of his party’s most popular speakers. Harrison won the presidency, and Republicans won majorities in both the House and the Senate.
When President Harrison took office in March 1889, Theodore asked his friend Lodge, who was now a congressman, and his wife, Nannie, to try to get him appointed assistant secretary of state. The best jobs went to the party’s biggest donors, so Theodore didn’t expect a major appointment. He was probably overreaching by asking for the job of assistant secretary.
The new secretary of state, James G. Blaine, told Nannie Lodge, only half jokingly, that having Roosevelt in command of the nation’s foreign policy would ruin his vacations. “I do fear somehow that my sleep would not be quite as easy and refreshing if so brilliant and aggressive a man had hold of the helm. Matters are constantly occurring which require the most thoughtful concentration and the most stubborn inaction. Do you think that Mr. T.R.’s temperament would give guaranty of that course?” Anyone who knew Theodore knew the answer to that question. The president ended up offering him a different job.
TR in his Sagamore Hill library, 1895.
6
PRESIDENT HARRISON HAD been wary of giving Roosevelt any job—and for good reason it would turn out—but he decided to appoint him civil service commissioner.
The bipartisan Civil Service Commission was in charge of enforcing the Pendleton Act, which had been passed only six years earlier in 1883. Each time the White House changed parties the new president’s political appointees fired thousands of federal workers and replaced them with people who often had no qualifications other than having voted for the winner. Harrison’s attorney general described the qualifications needed by federal job seekers. He must be “first a good man, second a good Republican.” The Pendleton Act protected about one-fifth of the 159,356 federal jobs in 1889 from political meddling. It also established the civil service exam, which employees had to pass to qualify for the protected jobs. And it prohibited the common practice of forcing government employees to contribute money to specific
candidates.
Being civil service commissioner would mean fights with Old Guard Republicans, and Theodore’s friends were afraid it would ruin his political future, but he seemed unconcerned. “I am a great believer in practical politics,” the new commissioner insisted, “but when my duty is to enforce a law, that law is surely going to be enforced, without fear or favor … while I’m in I mean business.”
In May, Commissioner Roosevelt left his family at Sagamore Hill and went to Washington to begin his first federal job. There were two other commissioners, a Democrat and a Republican. They both were older, but they let the younger man have the largest office and take the lead.
Soon after settling into his new position Theodore saw trouble ahead. John Wanamaker, a rich department-store owner from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had helped raise the then-incredible sum of $4 million to elect Harrison. As a reward, the new president appointed him postmaster general, the official in charge of every post office in all thirty-eight states in the Union. The U.S. Postal Service was the largest federal agency and employed over half of all federal employees. In only six weeks on the job, Wanamaker had turned the service upside down by replacing nearly one-third of all postal workers—some thirty thousand people.
There was a lot of wrongdoing to investigate, but Commissioner Roosevelt wanted cases that would make newspaper headlines and promote the commission’s work, as well as his own career. He first traveled to Indianapolis, Indiana, President Harrison’s hometown, to investigate postal service hiring practices there. People in that city had complained that the president’s close friend, Postmaster William Wallace, had violated civil service laws by hiring three men who had been fired from previous postal jobs for taking bribes. In the Indiana capital, Theodore held a hearing on the allegations and determined they were true. The postmaster had no choice but to obey the law and dismiss the three men. The incident attracted newspaper attention to Roosevelt’s efforts to enforce civil service laws and, as he expected, drew howls of protest from Old Guard Republicans.
Back in Washington, in early October 1889 Theodore received a telegram that his second son had been born several weeks prematurely. He took a train to New York City, but missed the last scheduled train to Long Island. Heedless of the expense, Theodore chartered a train to rush him to Oyster Bay. Arriving at Sagamore Hill at four A.M. he found Edith and the new baby, who was named Kermit for one of Edith’s relatives, doing well under Bamie’s care.
More good news that year, including the publication of the first two volumes of Winning the West, which Theodore had completed on schedule. The books received good reviews, and he planned on writing two more volumes of Winning the West as well as a history of New York City.
Just before Christmas that year, Edith decided that she and the children should move to Washington. “Alice needs someone to laugh and romp with her instead of a sober and staid person like me,” she told her husband. The family rented a row house one-tenth the size of their Sagamore Hill home. With three children and two homes to support, money was a bigger problem than ever. Edith, as always, handled the finances. Just paying the rent, the servants, and the grocery bills took all of her husband’s annual $3,500 salary. Edith, cutting back as much as possible, saved money by grinding up fish bones to make tooth powder and giving her husband an allowance, which he always seemed to spend without knowing where.
While Edith spent much of 1890 worried about paying the bills and Theodore wondered how long he’d keep his job as commissioner, they faced another, larger problem. TR called it a “nightmare of horror.” In December, Anna Roosevelt telegrammed from Vienna, Austria, that she was pregnant and that Theodore’s younger brother Elliott was drinking heavily. She was afraid he would harm her or their five-year-old daughter Eleanor or one-year-old Elliott Jr. Anna wanted Bamie to come to Vienna to get Elliott to stop drinking. Bamie agreed, but before her scheduled trip in February there was more trouble.
A lawyer for one of Anna and Elliott’s former maids, a young woman named Katy Mann, sent Commissioner Roosevelt a letter advising him that she was pregnant with Elliott’s baby and that she expected financial assistance. Elliott denied being the father in his letters, but asked his brother to give Katy money anyway. Theodore insisted she was lying and vowed never to pay her a dime. Despite this resolve, he worried about the scandal. “It is horrible, awful; it is like a brooding nightmare. If it was mere death one could stand it; it is the shame that is so fearful.”
After Bamie arrived in Europe, she reported that Elliott had taken his family to Paris, where he was constantly drunk and going about the city with a mistress. Plus, Elliott was being abusive toward Anna and threatened to cut off all support if she left him.
As Theodore waited for more news from Bamie through the spring of 1891, the showdown with John Wanamaker began to unfold. A lawyer informed Theodore that the postmaster in Baltimore, Maryland, had violated civil service law. The postmaster was a Harrison appointee, and had been collecting $5 to $10 “contributions” from his employees to support pro-Harrison candidates in an upcoming Republican primary. Commissioner Roosevelt forwarded the lawyer’s accusations to Wanamaker, suggesting that he investigate. But the postmaster general did nothing.
On primary day, Theodore went to Baltimore and witnessed post office employees buying votes and bribing election officials. He talked to these employees, who made no effort to hide what they were doing. An office holder’s duty, Commissioner Roosevelt later admonished, “is to do the work of the Government for the whole people, and not to pervert his office for the use of any party or any faction.”
The commissioner recommended firing twenty-five Baltimore postal employees, but when the story appeared in the newspaper, Old Guard Republicans insisted it was the commissioner who should be fired. President Harrison, mindful that a growing number of progressive voters favored civil service reform, said he wouldn’t do anything until he saw a report. Theodore waited until the following summer, when much of official Washington was on vacation, before sending copies of his 146-page report to the postmaster general’s office and the president.
Meanwhile, it was a summer for new Roosevelts. Anna gave birth to her second son, Gracie Hall Roosevelt; Edith gave birth to her first daughter, Ethel Roosevelt; and Katy Mann gave birth to Elliott Roosevelt Mann.
Soon afterward Katy offered to drop her lawsuit for $10,000, but Theodore felt that the sum—more than three times his annual salary—was outrageous. Even though a “likeness expert” said the boy definitely looked like a Roosevelt, Theodore prepared to fight her claim in court and warned his uncles and cousins to brace themselves for unpleasant publicity. But by autumn the scandal had faded, suggesting that somebody did pay Katy, but the details remain a family secret.
Meanwhile, Theodore and Bamie asked the court to declare Elliot legally insane to prevent him from squandering his inheritance. The press got wind of the story and made it front-page news: “Elliott Roosevelt Insane: His Brother Theodore Applies for a Writ in Lunacy.” Theodore knew the court would take several months to reach a decision, and he was afraid details about the case would become public. “What a hideous tale of his life we should have to testify to if put on the stand,” he told Bamie. Taking time off from work to “settle the thing once for all,” Theodore traveled to Paris in January 1892, where, much to his surprise and relief, Elliot readily agreed to return home and be treated for his alcoholism. Anna and the children would move to New York.
Back in Washington, Theodore learned that Wanamaker’s staff had conducted its own investigation of the Baltimore post office. But the postmaster general refused to let anyone see the nine-hundred-plus-page report. There was little Commissioner Roosevelt could do but complain about the “hypocritical haberdasher!”
Nearly a year after the Maryland primary, Theodore took his report on the Baltimore post office to the Congressional Civil Service Reform Committee, which was chaired by a Democrat who was happy to hold a hearing. Wanamaker told the committee that his i
nvestigation found that Commissioner Roosevelt had frightened and badgered the postal employees into confessing things they weren’t doing. And that the workers had been soliciting funds only to buy a pool table to use on breaks.
The committee asked to see the postmaster general’s report, and it turned out that Wanamaker’s investigators had found as much wrongdoing as Theodore had. But Wanamaker had ignored civil service laws and then lied about it. “The exposure he has suffered from Mr. Roosevelt is merciless and humiliating,” commented The New York Times,“but it is clearly deserved.” Nothing happened to Wanamaker other than a stain on his reputation as a public-service-minded, church-going citizen. And he went on to be involved in several other scandals during his four-year term.
The Wanamaker scandals, high tariffs on imports, and the growing anger in the Midwest at the government’s failure to regulate big business contributed to President Harrison’s defeat in the 1892 election. Voters reelected Democrat Grover Cleveland, the incumbent who had been ousted four years earlier. Cleveland is the only president to have served two separate terms.
Theodore wanted to stay in Washington and he urged his friends to persuade the new president to reappoint him as civil service commissioner. Cleveland knew that Theodore, despite his small staff and budget, had achieved a lot in four years. He had made civil service more democratic by opening more government jobs for women. And he changed civil service exams to make sure applicants were tested for skills needed in their jobs. For example, the commissioner didn’t think border patrolmen necessarily needed to know how to read or write. It was more important that they were able to ride a horse and shoot a gun. So part of the new test took place on a firing range. (This change prompted a friend to suggest that the commissioner could find the best border guards by having candidates shoot at each other and then hiring the survivors.)
Michael L. Cooper Page 4