The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Then, just three days after the funeral, he hurried back to Albany and the legislative struggle. “From that time on there was a sadness about his face that he never had before,” a fellow assemblyman recalled. “You could not talk to him about it. He did not want anybody to sympathize with him. It was a grief that he had in his soul.”

  He could only rarely bring himself to speak of Alice again, not even when speaking with the troubled daughter who would grow up bearing her name.

  In Theodore’s last letter to his wife, written from Albany a week before her death, he wanted her to know both how much he missed her and how well he’d done in his daily sparring match with the prizefighter he’d hired to teach him how to box.

  Credit 1.37

  Alice Roosevelt was just twenty-two years old when her husband marked her passing in his diary. “She was beautiful in face and form, and lovelier still in spirit,” he would write in a formal tribute a few weeks later. “As a flower she grew, and as a fair young flower she died.”

  Credit 1.38

  Two-year-old Alice Lee Roosevelt and Bamie Roosevelt, whom she called “Auntie Bye,” 1886. Bamie was “the single most important influence in my childhood,” Alice remembered, “the only one I really cared about when I was a child.”

  Credit 1.39

  The Party Is Most of All

  Roosevelt hurled himself back into committee work, reporting out as many as twenty-one bills on a single day. If he weren’t working so hard, he admitted to a friend, “I think I should go mad.” But he refused the nomination for a fourth assembly term. He needed to get away, he said, to the West, where he had spent a summer as a would-be rancher the year before.

  But first, he had one more duty to perform. The Republican Party was gathering in Chicago to pick its presidential nominee. Roosevelt was a member of the New York delegation. The front-runner was Senator James G. Blaine of Maine—handsome, magnetic, and so corrupt, one editor wrote, that “he wallows in spoils like a rhinoceros in an African pool.” To Theodore, it was a vivid echo of the situation that had lured his late father into politics eight years earlier, and he determined to act so far as possible as he believed his father would have acted.

  He helped lead a band of reform-minded delegates pledged to stop Blaine. One of his closest allies was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and fellow Porcellian, Henry Cabot Lodge. So elegant and aristocratic his enemies called him “La-de-da Lodge,” he was as high-minded as Roosevelt and even better read. They would be intimate friends and allies almost all their lives.

  Their candidate—George F. Edmunds, a clean but colorless senator from Vermont—never stood a chance. The best Roosevelt and his allies could manage to do was delay the vote, embarrass the eventual nominee—and anger party veterans, one of whom denounced Theodore as a “schoolboy” with an “inexhaustible supply of insufferable dudism and conceit.”

  The battle was so bitter that when it ended many of Roosevelt’s allies bolted the Republican Party and voted Democratic rather than support its nominee. They expected him to do the same.

  He did not. “The man is not everything,” he said; “the party is most of all.” Old friends accused him of abandoning principle, betraying the memory of his father. But Roosevelt had learned from his time in Albany. He’d chosen to go it alone at first, he remembered, and most of the bills he cared about had been blocked by resentful colleagues. “I suppose that my head was swelled,” he wrote. “That was my first lesson in real politics. It is just this: if you are cast on a desert island with only a screw-driver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So [it is] with men.” Unless he could find a better way to work with other politicians, he would never be able to do the things he wanted done or wield the power he already wished to wield; only by remaining a Republican, he now argued, would he ever have the chance to do good. Some old friends remained unconvinced. “The great good, of course,” one said, “was Teddy.”

  Theodore Roosevelt, New York delegate to the 1884 Republican convention. “I found Mr. Roosevelt to be a young man of rather peculiar qualities,” an Ohio delegate wrote. “He is a little bit young, and on that account has not quite so much discretion as he will have after a while.”

  Credit 1.40

  One of a series of savage Puck cartoons by Bernhard Gillam that depicted Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine indelibly tattooed with alleged sins and indiscretions that helped bring about a Democratic victory for Chester A. Arthur that November.

  Credit 1.41

  Black Care Rarely Sits Behind a Rider Whose Pace Is Fast Enough

  Back in 1883, Theodore Roosevelt had begun to build himself a ranch house at Chimney Butte on the Little Missouri in the badlands of North Dakota. It had been an investment at first, and he would eventually sink half his fortune in it. But now, in the summer of 1884, the badlands became a refuge, a place to rebuild his broken spirit.

  When he arrived he was brooding, uncharacteristically silent, unable to sleep. “Nowhere,” he wrote, “not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him.… Nowhere else does one seem so far off from all mankind.”

  Ranching, Roosevelt believed, was “the pleasantest and healthiest and most exciting phase of American existence.” He was not alone. Hundreds of easterners were flocking to the plains that summer, eager to cash in on what was being called the “beef bonanza.”

  Roosevelt was an exotic presence at first, once overheard urging his cowboys to “Hasten forward quickly there!” His men called him “Old Four-Eyes” behind his back; when one drunken cowboy dared say it to his face and threatened him with two revolvers, Roosevelt knocked him senseless.

  But he eventually won respect, helping to build a second ranch house, called Elkhorn, with his own hands, enduring a monthlong roundup that covered almost a thousand miles, hunting down three thieves who had stolen his boat and marching them forty-five miles to the nearest sheriff’s office—and then carefully staging the capture again for the camera.

  He spent weeks on the hunting trail, too, shooting 170 birds and animals on one camping trip through the Bighorns—including a grizzly bear felled at twenty paces, Roosevelt reported, with a bullet placed so “exactly between his eyes as if I had measured the distance with a carpenter’s rule.” All of it eased his burdens. “I have had … enough excitement and fatigue to prevent overmuch thought,” he wrote to Bamie, “and moreover I have been at last able to sleep well at night.”

  The eleven months or so that Theodore Roosevelt spent off and on in the West between 1883 and 1887 changed him. Everyone could see it. His voice grew deeper, less shrill. “He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds,” a friend remembered, “and was clear bone, muscle and grit.” He had also proved he could hold his own among men of every class, and he had demonstrated to himself once again that action enabled him to conquer the grief that had threatened to destroy him. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”

  “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first,” Theodore Roosevelt remembered, “ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid. Most men can have the same experience if they choose.”

  “If it had not been for my years in North Dakota,” he wrote, “I never would have become President of the United States.”

  Studio portrait of Theodore Roosevelt intended for the frontispiece of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, the first of two books he wrote about his time in the West. He had designed his own fringed buckskin costume; his silver-mounted Bowie knife came from Tiffany’s. “I now look like a regular cowboy dandy,” he wrote Bamie, “with all my equipment finished in the mo
st expensive style.”

  Credit 1.42

  Theodore Roosevelt’s cattle brands, depicted in the Stockgrowers’ Journal, published in Miles City, Montana. The Chimney Butte Ranch—also called the Maltese Cross—was forty miles from the Elkhorn; to get from one ranch to the other required a rider to cross the Little Missouri more than twenty times.

  Credit 1.43

  Roosevelt stands guard over his supposed captives on the bank of the Little Missouri. He really did hunt down and arrest three thieves, but the two men whose faces are mostly hidden here were actually employees who helped with the capture, while the identity of the third man is unknown.

  Credit 1.44

  A thicket of antlers marked the eight-room Elkhorn Ranch house. In the evenings, a friend remembered, Roosevelt liked to sit in one of the rockers on the porch, reading poetry.

  Credit 1.45

  Theodore and his favorite horse, Manitou. “Perfectly sure-footed … willing and spirited,” Manitou carried him for miles across the badlands—and away from his demons.

  Credit 1.46

  Edith

  On August 29, 1886, the New York Times reported, “The engagement was announced during the week of ex-Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt and Miss [Edith] Carow of New York. Mr. Roosevelt is a widower, his first wife, formerly Miss [Lee] of Boston, died [two] years ago.”

  When Bamie Roosevelt opened the paper and read of her brother’s supposed engagement, she demanded an immediate retraction. It was unthinkable that her brother, who had so recently lost his wife, would be planning to remarry so soon—and still more unthinkable that he could have become engaged to one of their closest childhood friends without her knowledge.

  She was wrong. A letter arrived from Theodore a day or two later, begging her forgiveness. He and Edith had been secretly engaged for a year, it said. He planned to marry her in London before Christmas. “You could not reproach me one-half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness,” he told his sister. “Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth.”

  He had believed so deeply that a second marriage would represent a betrayal of the departed that he had deliberately avoided coming in contact with Edith Carow for months after Alice’s death. But they had encountered one another by accident and began to see one another in secret, Theodore confining his diary entries to the single letter “E” to keep their courtship from prying eyes.

  To his surprise, the Republican Party asked him to run for mayor that fall. He made a spirited run but came in a poor third, behind the Democratic winner and a Labor candidate, Henry George.

  The next day, he boarded a ship bound for England using an assumed name to keep from drawing attention to the coming wedding. On December 2, 1886, a day when all of London was hung with fog, he and Edith were quietly married at St. George’s Church on Hanover Square.

  Etching of St. George’s Church by F. Hopkinson Smith

  Credit 1.47

  A page from the church register recording the marriage of Edith Kermit Carow, “Spinster,” to Theodore Roosevelt, “Ranchman”

  Credit 1.48

  Edith Carow, photographed shortly before her marriage. She was refined, self-assured, and disciplined—“born mature,” as her friends liked to say—and she had been devoted to Theodore since childhood. But she was proud, too, and never quite got over the fact that she had been his second choice.

  Credit 1.49

  Sagamore

  After the newlyweds returned to the United States in the spring of 1887, they moved into the newly completed house at Oyster Bay that Theodore and Alice Lee had planned together. It was no longer Leeholm; there was to be no reference made to Theodore’s first wife. Now it was Sagamore Hill—“Sagamore” being the Algonquin word for “chieftain.”

  Edith asked to be allowed to raise Theodore’s daughter, Alice, as if she were her own. “It almost broke my heart to give her up,” Bamie remembered, and nothing Alice’s father or her stepmother could do ever made her feel wholly part of the family.

  At Sagamore in September of 1887, Edith gave birth to a child of her own, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. Five more children would follow.

  For the next thirty-two years, no matter what official role Theodore Roosevelt was called upon to play, no matter where his duties took him, his real home and headquarters would always be Sagamore Hill. “At Sagamore Hill,” he wrote, “we love a great many beautiful things—birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life. We have great fireplaces and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings. The big piazza is for the hot-still afternoons of summer.… There could be no healthier and pleasanter place in which to bring up children than in that nook of old-time America around Sagamore Hill.”

  The house in winter, surrounded by the snowy slopes on which Roosevelt and his children skied and tobogganed

  Credit 1.50

  A family snapshot of Sagamore’s proud builder, in front of the dining-room fireplace, taken in 1894

  Credit 1.51

  Alice sits at the center of this 1899 photograph, encircled by family pets and all her half siblings. Clockwise from left: Ted Jr., Ethel, Quentin, Kermit, and Archie

  Credit 1.51

  Edith leads Ethel down the driveway.

  Credit 1.53

  Alice and Ted Jr. watch their father teach football to an exuberant scrum of Roosevelt cousins.

  Credit 1.54

  Theodore Roosevelt times a footrace between young Roosevelts in front of the barn at Sagamore Hill. “I love all these children and have great fun with them,” he told his sister-in-law, “and I am touched by the way they feel I am their special friend, champion and companion.” Both young Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt would prize every chance they had to join their cousins at Sagamore Hill.

  Credit 1.55

  Edith and Alice frolic with three family dogs on the lawn.

  Credit 1.56

  A Thorn in Our Side

  Roosevelt’s ranching adventure had ended in financial disaster. The coldest winter in recorded history swept across the plains in the winter of 1886–1887. Hundreds of thousands of cattle froze to death—including most of Theodore’s herd. “The losses are crippling,” he admitted to Bamie, and in the coming years he would often have to fall back on his writing simply to meet expenses. Before he was through he would publish some thirty-five volumes, on everything from bear hunting to Oliver Cromwell to what he believed to be the principles of Americanism.

  In early 1888, he was hard at work on the first volume of what would become a best-selling four-volume history, The Winning of the West. “I’m a literary feller, not a politician these days,” he told a friend.

  But he didn’t mean it. He was still only thirty, too young to abandon the political field, too eager for action to settle for life behind a desk. He campaigned hard that fall for General Benjamin Harrison, the successful Republican candidate for president, even though he privately thought him just “a genial little runt,” and was rewarded with appointment as one of three federal civil service commissioners in Washington. He made the most of it, battling publicly with the postmaster general, who had dismissed thousands of workers merely because they were Democrats. “That young man,” Harrison muttered, “wants to put the whole world right between sunrise and sunset.”

  He also conducted probes of political appointees who tried to get around the law that made it illegal to demand campaign funds from federal employees.

  “How do you do your cheating?” he asked one.

  “Well,” the man answered, “we do our cheating honorably.”

  “I have made this Commission a living force,” Roosevelt boasted, “and in consequence the outcry among the spoilsmen has become furious.” He proved so evenhanded that Grover Cleveland, Harrison’s Democratic successor, eventually asked him to stay on.
“Well, my boy,” said a departing member of Harrison’s cabinet, “you have been a thorn in our side during four years. I earnestly hope that you will remain to be a thorn in the side of the next administration.”

  Roosevelt learned the ways of Washington during his six years in the nation’s capital and he made friends who would prove useful to him later in his career. “There was a vital radiance about the man,” one Washingtonian remembered, “a glowing unfeigned cordiality toward those he liked that was irresistible.” But rooting out unqualified postmasters did not command the sustained national attention he craved. “I used to walk past the White House,” he remembered, “and my heart would beat a little faster as the thought came to me that possibly—possibly—I would some day occupy it as President.”

  An 1889 Puck cartoon by Louis Dalrymple suggests that President Benjamin Harrison—wearing the too-large hat of his grandfather, President William Henry Harrison—will keep the impetuous Roosevelt from doing any real damage to the spoils system. But Roosevelt was soon “battling with everybody,” he wrote, “the little gray man in the White House looking on with cold and hesitating disapproval.”

  Credit 1.57

  TR’s friend Henry Cabot Lodge, now a Massachusetts congressman, was instrumental in persuading Harrison to offer Roosevelt a job in his administration, even though the president “was by no means eager” to do so.

  Credit 1.58

  The Moral Maniac and Little Nell