Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Summarizing, Sherman felt that Roosevelt had been more of an autocrat than a democrat, a warrior, not a peacemaker, a man of action who scoffed at philosophical scruples. His end had been tragic, Yet there was something undeniably epic about him:

  Mr. Roosevelt has attained satisfactions which he thought should console fallen empires: he has left heirs and a glorious memory. How much more glorious it might have been if in his great personality there had been planted a spark of magnanimity. If, after he had drunk of personal glory like a Scandinavian giant, he had lent his giant strength to a cause of the plain people not of his contriving nor under his leadership. If in addition to helping win the war he had identified himself with the attainment of its one grand popular object. From performing this supreme service he was prevented by defects of temper which he condemned in Cromwell, a hero who he admired and in some respects strikingly resembled.

  THESE EXCHANGES BETWEEN the wholeheartedly adoring and the ambivalently disparaging set the tone for seventy years of retrospective controversy. But for the postwar decade and beyond, it was Roosevelt the hero, “Theodore Rex” the masterful president, “Teddy” the lovable who loomed in popular perception. A powerful stimulant to nostalgia for him was the publication in late 1919 of Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children, the book of all his books he had most wanted to see in print. An instant bestseller, it revealed the Colonel to have been, behind his often grim public face, the most delightful of private correspondents, able to express adult feelings in language (and hilarious pictograms) that enchanted the young.

  By the end of that year, as Roosevelt’s historical stock surged, that of Woodrow Wilson—outmaneuvered by Clemenceau and Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference, thwarted by Henry Cabot Lodge and other senatorial opponents of his cherished League of Nations treaty—fell precipitously. He collapsed of a stroke and became a peevish recluse for the rest of his presidency. Scholars wondered whether any head of state since Napoleon had ever suffered such a loss of power. The concurrent rise of Warren Gamaliel Harding as the Republican Party’s challenge to everything Wilson had ever stood for led to a rout of Democratic candidates in the presidential election of 1920. Most of the sixteen million men and women who voted for Harding, in a landslide victory, did so to honor the memory of the candidate they would unquestionably have preferred, had Roosevelt lived to run again.

  Joseph Bucklin Bishop’s official life of the Colonel came out that fall: two dignified volumes entitled Theodore Roosevelt and His Time: Shown in His Own Letters. There were the requisite iconic frontispieces, protected with flaps of tissue paper. The scholarship was dogged, the coverage ample (if selective), and the index beyond reproach. But the overall tone was so reverential that only the occasional “scoop” document, such as Roosevelt’s mammoth 1911 letter describing his European tour, infused the dryasdust pages with the breath of life.

  Even more monumental, in its clothbound, gold-stamped breadth and bulk, was Hermann Hagedorn’s Memorial Edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, issued between 1923 and 1926 in twenty-four volumes. Merely to divide that number into the years of Roosevelt’s adult life, allowing for the fact that he had spent nearly eight years as president, was to be persuaded by William Allen White’s remark: “The man was gigantic.”

  A Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association was formed to reconstruct the Colonel’s vanished birthplace, at 28 East Twentieth Street in Manhattan, as a museum and educational center. Designed by a Lusitania survivor, Theodate Pope Riddle, in consultation with the two surviving Roosevelt sisters, it was dedicated to the public as “Roosevelt House” in 1923. Four female trumpeters in Grecian robes blew a voluntary over the entryway where Teedie Roosevelt and Edie Carow had sat reading over half a century before.

  Simultaneously, a rival, masculine Roosevelt Memorial Association launched a campaign to create shrines in Washington, D.C., and downtown Oyster Bay, Long Island. (Sagamore Hill was obviously destined to become another such site one day, but for as long as Edith survived, it would remain her private property.) The group, dominated by Hermann Hagedorn as executive director and backed by such dignitaries as Elihu Root and Leonard Wood, took advantage of Roosevelt’s posthumous reputation to accumulate an impressive fund for the Washington memorial. In 1925, Hagedorn unveiled a design for it, by John Russell Pope, which was so grandiloquent—a two-hundred-foot ejaculation of Potomac water from a white granite island in Tidal Bay, triangulated between the Lincoln and Washington monuments—that even President Coolidge wondered if more time should not pass before Theodore Roosevelt was accorded his proper place in history. Southern lobbyists planning a Jefferson memorial for the site successfully held the RMA off.

  Meanwhile the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had been among the Progressive delegates nominating Roosevelt for president in 1912, conceived of a bas-relief in the Black Hills of South Dakota that would proclaim the Rough Rider unequivocally, and for all time, as the co-equal of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Not for him Pope’s fragile fountain, subject to winds, ice, and drought. He meant to carve his quartet out of imperishable rock, each face sixty feet high. Coolidge agreed to write an appropriate entablature, identifying them in English, Latin, and Sanskrit. In October 1927, the first contours of Washington’s face began to emerge from Mount Rushmore. The other three colossi would have to wait their turn.

  By the end of the decade, Theodore Roosevelt was commonly regarded as the third greatest American president, after Washington and Lincoln. Then, in 1931, Henry F. Pringle, a political journalist whose only previous book was a study of the government of Al Smith, published Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography. Soundly researched and brilliantly written, it coincided not only with the onset of the Great Depression—that apparent proof of the vanity of American ideals—but with a postwar revulsion against military values, and a consensus among those making policy never again to attempt the kind of democratic imperialism that Roosevelt (and for that matter Woodrow Wilson) had wished upon the world.

  Even more damaging was the fact that Pringle was the first major biographer who declined to take Roosevelt seriously. He mocked the Rough Rider’s fake humility and, with documentary evidence and authoritative anecdote, demolished many legends that Hagedorn and others had so long taken as gospel. He made full use of the Roosevelt presidential papers on deposit in the Library of Congress, and was clever enough to conceal the fact that he knew little about the final decade of his subject’s life. If he was often unfair, his prejudice was excusable as a reaction against too much myth. When the time came to award that year’s Pulitzer Prize for biography, Pringle was the obvious recipient.

  Undeterred in 1931, the Roosevelt Memorial Association purchased Analostan Island in the Potomac as a new site for their shrine. But by then, the Colonel had already become such a caricature in some circles that cynics predicted the island would never be more than a base for a bridge.

  THE FOLLOWING NOVEMBER, Roosevelt’s self-proclaimed “fifth cousin by blood and nephew by law” was elected President of the United States. For most of Franklin’s life, he had had to contend with the fact that his surname famously denoted someone else. Now the reverse began to apply.

  Franklin was generous enough, and sincere, in insisting that Cousin Theodore was “the greatest man I ever knew.” He had managed, despite the crippling misfortune of polio, to get where he was by emulating the Colonel’s career path: from Harvard via the New York legislature to the Navy Department, and then on to Albany as governor of New York. He had even run unsuccessfully for vice president. But it was clear from the moment of his inauguration in 1933 that the new “Roosevelt” would henceforth make his own imperious way.

  Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., had less luck in trying to emulate the late Colonel. Retiring from the army with a chestful of decorations—the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, and the Croix de Guerre—he entered politics and successively became a New York State assemblyman, assistant secretary of the navy, and Republican n
ominee for the governorship of New York in 1924. But innocent involvement in the Harding administration’s “Teapot Dome” oil-field-leasing scandal compromised his campaign against the incumbent governor, Al Smith. Ted’s diminutive stature, face-dividing grin, and harsh cries of “Bully” did not evoke enough memories of his father to beguile the electorate, and Cousin Eleanor made things worse by barnstorming the state in an automobile reconfigured as a teapot. He was badly defeated, in a presidential election year that otherwise went well for the GOP.

  President Hoover appointed Ted governor of Puerto Rico, and then of the Philippines. He was a popular and able administrator, but Franklin’s election ended his political career, and he became an executive of the publishing house of Doubleday, Doran & Co. In further imitation of his father, he built a mansion on the grounds of Sagamore Hill, and became notoriously bookish, given to loud recitations of Kipling and Omar Khayyám. It was a question whether Ted or Alice—the sibling he felt closest to—was the more vituperative in criticizing the New Deal as a perversion of the Square.

  Brother and sister were both “American Firsters” in the early days of World War II. But Ted’s Plattsburg conscience soon prompted him to switch from isolationism to principled support of the administration’s preparedness program. A week after Pearl Harbor, he was appointed a brigadier general on active duty, and from June 1942 through 1943 fought with wild courage in North Africa and Italy. Although he was fifty-six on the countdown to D-Day, and wizened and lame with arthritis, he persuaded General Omar Bradley that his presence in Normandy would be inspirational to the assaulting forces. On 6 June 1944, Ted hobbled ashore from the first boat to hit Utah beach, and at once took command of a landing operation that threatened to degenerate into bloody chaos. His all-day heroism under constant fire won him the Medal of Honor. General Roosevelt was chosen to lead the Ninetieth Division into further battle, but on the eve of his appointment on 12 July, he died of a heart attack. He was buried in Normandy two days later, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of Quentin’s death. General George Patton, an honorary pallbearer at the funeral, described Ted as “one of the bravest men I have ever known.”

  Kermit Roosevelt never recovered from the sensation, on hearing of the death of his father, that he had nothing left to stand on. A proficient but not a natural soldier, he wrote a book about his service in Mesopotamia, War in the Garden of Eden, and spent the immediate postwar years building up a mercantile business, the Roosevelt Steamship Company. He remained a shipping executive with various lines throughout the 1930s. Commerce satisfied Kermit no more than banking. His nomadic nature and marvelous talent for languages fought against the confinements of marriage and work. Depression steadily claimed him. He became a philanderer and insatiable drinker and, as his body thickened, developed a startling resemblance to his father. Dour and bloated, he rejoined the British army as soon as Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. He drove himself to fight well at the Battle of Narvik, but the condition of his heart—that vulnerable organ of so many Roosevelts—alarmed regimental medics, and he was declared unfit for further service. Returning stateside in 1941, he drank himself to the point of collapse and had to be institutionalized. The President, who had a soft spot for Kermit as a Democrat malgré lui, heard about his dereliction and appointed him a major in the U.S. Army in Alaska, far from the fleshpots of New York. There, on 4 June 1943, Kermit killed himself with a bullet to his head.

  Archie went to work in 1920 for the oil company that was to embarrass his eldest brother. He resigned with belated outrage when the Teapot Dome scandal broke. Never one to dissemble his moral opinions, Archie testified against Sinclair Oil before a Senate investigative committee in 1924. After that he went into investment banking and spent the rest of his civilian career as a municipal bond salesman. He prospered enough to survive the Great Depression, living a quiet family life with his beloved “Gracie.” Like Ted, Archie was an isolationist at the beginning of World War II. But the waters of Pearl Harbor had hardly resettled in December 1941 before he was back in uniform as a lieutenant colonel. Fighting on Biak Island, New Guinea, in May 1944 he was wounded in the same arm and leg that had been so severely shattered a quarter-century before. In a further replay of the events of 1918, he was awarded another Purple Heart and Silver Star and sent home to convalesce. On VJ-Day, he was the last of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons still alive.

  He did not age well, turning to Scotch and Communist-bashing as antidotes to the constant pain of his war wounds. During the McCarthy era, his conservatism deteriorated into political paranoia. His only attempt at a book, apart from an unfinished, conspiracist memoir, was a selection of some of his father’s worst speeches, published in 1968 as Theodore Roosevelt on Race, Riots, Reds, Crime. According to Archie, President Roosevelt had railed in 1903 against the civic threat posed by “Beatniks.” Family members hurriedly bought up as much of the print run as could be found in bookstores and let the old warrior go into retirement. As he lay dying in 1979, a confused recluse in Florida, he kept repeating, “I’m going to Sagamore Hill.”

  Each of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons except Quentin fathered four children. Ethel and Richard Derby also contributed four, although little Richard died prematurely at age eight. Ethel survived until 1977, outliving Dr. Derby by fourteen years. In most respects private and shy, a Republican supporter of the civil rights movement, she retained in old age a startling ability to bellow the word “Americanism” at dinner parties.

  Flora Whitney died in 1986, inevitably wikipeded as “a wealthy socialite.” Having become, at age twenty-one, almost a widow and almost a daughter to Quentin’s parents, she spent a year trying to recover from his death—not to mention the Colonel’s. A statue of Flora carved by her mother early in 1919 shows her hollow-eyed beneath a bandeau, trying to force herself into the depths of a small armchair. In 1920 she married one of Quentin’s Harvard friends, but found him an inadequate substitute. Her second marriage, to the artist George Macculloch Miller III, was successful. Flora fulfilled herself further by becoming the rescuer, dominant executive, and lifetime patron of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

  The last person anyone would have expected to add to the number of Roosevelt grandchildren was Alice, who in 1925 scandalized le tout Georgetown by producing an unmistakable, female miniature of Senator Borah. Alice was then forty-one years old, and delighted at her achievement. “Hell, yes, isn’t it wonderful?” She never confirmed or denied Paulina Longworth’s paternity. Nick loved Paulina on sight and never treated her as anything other than his legitimate daughter. He became Speaker of the House of Representatives that same year, and remained in that office until a few weeks before his death in 1931.

  Alice, first of Theodore Roosevelt’s children to be born, was the final one to die, in 1980. By then she had been for at least six decades the acidulous, eccentric doyenne of Washington society, fawned over by presidents of every political stamp. Invitations to her famous dinners, at which she would convulse guests with imitations of Cousin Eleanor, were as prized as passes to the White House. Her attempts at writing—a family memoir and an aborted newspaper column—had nothing of the charm of her talk, which made something like poetry out of the non sequitur. Some of it was captured and distilled by an Englishman, Michael Teague, whose Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth was published in 1981. It amounted to a transcribed recording of the kind of erudite wit that used to be prized in the days when the well-born were also, by definition, the well-read.

  Edith Kermit Roosevelt died in 1948 at the age of eighty-seven, still living in Sagamore Hill and surrounded with the Colonel’s books, guns, hides, horns, and glittering prizes, as if he were still liable to burst through the door with reporters in tow. By then she had adjusted, if not to bereavement of him, to the deaths in war of Quentin, Kermit, and Ted, comforting herself with grandchildren and her lifelong passion for reading. Her memories in her final, bedridden days extended back from the present, disagreeably dominated by Harry Truman, thro
ugh seventeen administrations to that of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps the earliest of these impressions (confirmed to her amazement by a visitor with a photograph) was of standing with six-year-old “Teedie” Roosevelt in a window overlooking Broadway, on the day that the Emancipator’s funeral procession came uptown, to a thump of drums.

  AFTER THE OLD WOMAN had been buried beside her husband in Youngs Cemetery, the Roosevelt Memorial Association moved to execute its long-postponed plan to buy and restore Sagamore Hill as a museum. The purchase was announced in 1949, with a certain amount of weariness on the part of Hermann Hagedorn, who had yet to see his idol’s image recover from the desecration inflicted on it by Henry Pringle. Indeed, the RMA would soon have to rename itself the Theodore Roosevelt Association, to make clear to donors which president it wished to celebrate.

  The enduring influence of Pringle’s book, however, was salutary, in that it compelled scholars to assess the Colonel as a man, and not a god or monster. Between 1951 and 1954, Harvard University published The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt in eight massive volumes. Edited and annotated with impeccable scholarship by Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, and others, the series effectively filled a lacuna left by the Memorial Edition of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt thirty years before. It was perhaps even more impressive in its totality than the Hagedorn set—and not just because Morison admitted that his team had eliminated ten letters for every one of the fifteen thousand he printed. Excepting those frankly addressed to “posterity,” most were written only to be read by the recipients, and revealed a more personal Roosevelt than books and speeches he had meant for print. And the Colonel in his revelation proved to be, in Julian Street’s updatable phrase, arguably “the most interesting American” who ever lived.