The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  Martha Bulloch, Teddy’s mother, in her early twenties. Martha grew up in Bulloch Hall near Atlanta. Some speculate that Martha and her mansion were Scarlett and Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s book Gone With the Wind.

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  TEDDY’S MOTHER, MARTHA BULLOCH Roosevelt, a Southern belle whose family owned an enormous plantation, further defined the future president’s worldview. Roswell, Georgia, from where she hailed, was founded in 1839 on land that had been seized from the Cherokee nation, which was uprooted by U.S. Army troops and marched forcibly to Oklahoma in the brutal journey now infamous as the “Trail of Tears.” Unable to adjust to chilly northern climes, her stern husband’s ways, and New York society, Martha was usually ill and required constant care. From her sickbed she captured young Teddy’s imagination by telling him stories of the thickheaded Bulloch slaves and the military exploits of her Bulloch relatives.

  In story after story, the young boy heard about Martha’s forebears and their courage under fire, their fearlessness, and their willingness to kill if need be. In Martha’s accounts, two things became clear: first, that Teddy was part of a superior race; and second, that the most masculine men didn’t need barbells to prove their manliness—they had rifles.

  His mother’s tales excited young Teddy, but her own fragility also reinforced the danger posed by weakness: Martha herself seemed a clear example within the Roosevelt home of the overcivilized woman. Unfortunately, young Teddy appeared to be a prime example of an overcivilized boy: a scrawny, sickly specimen who needed eyeglasses to see his own hands and who suffered from terrifying asthma attacks that at times left him an invalid. After one particularly severe attack, Theodore Sr. gathered up his sickly son, ran down the stairs and into the Roosevelt rig, then sped through the dark Manhattan streets, forcing a rush of air into Teddy’s tiny lungs.

  Theodore Sr. installed gymnastic equipment on the back piazza of the Roosevelt mansion, but Teddy’s health was too fragile for a full regimen. Theodore Sr. even discussed sending his son west to Denver to cure his asthma. When Teddy was eight, his father dressed him in a velvet coat and sent him and his brother to an outside tutor. While Elliott flourished, sickly and nervous Teddy couldn’t undertake even this minor effort and had to be schooled from home. With his mother, he visited such fashionable health resorts as New Lebanon, Saratoga, Old Sweet Springs, and White Sulphur Springs. But many saw these elite watering holes as places where the effete became even more overcivilized.

  Teddy was so frail that the Roosevelt family physician, Dr. John Metcalfe, recommended that he see the famous neurologist Dr. George Beard. (Beard would go on to write the best-selling book American Nervousness, which warned that overcivilization threatened the country’s future.) After examining the sickly lad, Beard gave Teddy to his partner, Dr. Alphonso Rockwell, who was known for treating high-strung, refined young aristocrats. Rockwell said Teddy suffered from “the handicap of riches” and told Beard that the youngster “ought to make his mark in the world; but the difficulty is, he has a rich father.”70

  Teddy was ten years old by now and must have been alarmed to hear doctors and his parents speak of him this way. And he must have been even more alarmed when Rockwell attached electrical equipment to his head, feet, and stomach and sent a jolt through his body to restore the boy’s “vital force” and cure his overcivilization.

  Isolated, homebound, and often bedridden, young Teddy read widely and began to dream that he could fight and explore side by side with his literary heroes. The dime novels Teddy devoured were full of racial stereotypes: The Blacks were dim-witted, subservient, and comical. The Indians were treacherous, immoral creatures. The heroes were inevitably blond, blue-eyed frontiersmen who stood for righteousness. In his autobiography, Theodore Roosevelt mentioned the author Mayne Reid’s books five times, writing that he had “so dearly loved” them as a child. Reid’s works—among them The Scalp Hunters, The Boy Hunters, The War Trail, and The Headless Horseman—were tales of gruesome combat to the death. In one, a mother helplessly watches an alligator kill her daughter, then uses her body as bait in order to take revenge on the reptile who murdered her child.

  Teddy also thrilled to “The Saga of King Olaf,” a poem in which Longfellow celebrated Teutonic White supremacy. As a young teenager Roosevelt read Nibelungenlied—the German Iliad—which extolled Teutonic virility. Roosevelt quoted the work for the rest of his life, and the author Edmund Morris thought the Nibelungenlied so central to Teddy’s life that he used phrases from it as aphorisms to begin each chapter of his first Roosevelt biography.

  In 1872, when Teddy was a scrawny boy of thirteen, his father’s patience wore out. He ordered Teddy to embrace manhood and thwart overcivilization with a rigorous bodybuilding program. Roosevelt later claimed that this cured his asthma. The truth was far different. After his death, his sister Corinne told a Teddy biographer: “I wish I could tell you something which really cured Theodore’s asthma, but he never did recover in a definite way—and indeed suffered from it all his life.”71 The confinement and dread had a major impact on his personality. As Roosevelt scholar Kathleen Dalton writes, “Theodore grew up encased in iron cages of Victorian thought about cultural evolution, overcivilization, race suicide, class, mob violence, manliness and womanliness. As a child and a teen he was incapable of bending open those iron cages.”72 Overcompensating, Teddy became increasingly aggressive. Family members noticed a righteous ruthlessness as he advocated his ideas of right and wrong.

  Cosseted in the family mansion with little contact with the outside world, Teddy never attended a grade school or high school—private tutors came to him. As a result, Harvard was the first school Roosevelt attended. When he made his way north from his Manhattan home in 1876 at the age of eighteen, some family members worried that he couldn’t endure winter in Cambridge.

  At Harvard, Teddy’s anatomy professor, William James, urged his students to regard manliness as their highest ideal. But for Teddy, that ideal was elusive. He was still hobbled by asthma and complained in letters about missing schoolwork due to persistent sickness. (His classmate Richard Weiling watched him grapple with weights in a gym and thought Roosevelt was a “humble-minded chap… to be willing to give such a lady-like exhibition in such a public place.”73)

  The young Manhattan aristocrat was very conscious of his status as a “gentleman,” cautious in his choice of friends, and quick to join socially prominent campus organizations. Roosevelt carefully researched the backgrounds of potential friends and considered only a few to be gentlemen. Writes Edmund Morris: “The truth is that Roosevelt from New York was much more at home with the languid fops of Harvard than his apologists would admit. He not only relished the company of rich young men, but moved immediately into the ranks of the very richest, and the most arrogantly fashionable.”74

  At Harvard, Roosevelt was in “an intellectual atmosphere pervasive with racially oriented topics and a campus dominated by intellectuals who subscribed to racially deterministic philosophies.”75 Warren Zimmermann, a former U.S. ambassador and author of First Great Triumph, writes, “Hierarchical racial theories helped shape the intellectual formation of virtually every American who reached adulthood during the second half of the century. Without even trying, well-educated American politicians carried into their careers large doses of Anglo-Saxonism administered to them in their universities.”76

  Francis Parkman graduated from Harvard in 1845 and taught there. His best-selling histories were translated into many languages and illustrated by famous artists. Theodore Roosevelt would dedicate his The Winning of the West book series to Parkman, who had once written, “The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine and therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason and has the judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question.”77

  Teddy’s favorite Harvard professor was Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Shaler founded Harvard’s Natural History Societ
y, of which Teddy was elected vice president. Professor Shaler, “one of the most respected professors on the faculty, taught white supremacy based on the racial heritage of England, [finding] non-Aryan peoples lacking in the correct ‘ancestral experience’ and impossible to Americanize.”78

  THERE WAS A TRADITION among highborn, wealthy college graduates to take off on a thrilling adventure, like a sea voyage, and turn it into a book. Teddy had become a millionaire at age twelve when his grandfather C. W. S. Roosevelt had died, and more inheritance came his way when Theodore Sr. died in 1878.79 But Teddy had no personal history upon which to capitalize. He couldn’t write about his father, ashamed that he had bought his way out of the Civil War. His maternal Bulloch uncles had been Confederate secret agents, another unpromising angle; still, those uncles were the most compelling men in Theodore Roosevelt’s life, especially the older and more experienced Uncle Jimmie Bulloch. The U.S. Government considered Jimmie Bulloch to be a traitor to his country as a result of his anti-Union activities in the Civil War. He faced arrest in the United States and evaded American justice by living in England, where he is buried. He had served fourteen years in the U.S. Navy before the Civil War, a period when the War of 1812 stood alone as America’s biggest naval conflict. Uncle Jimmie’s tales about how the U.S. Navy bested England and the necessity of naval preparedness had made an indelible impression on Teddy. While still an undergraduate, Roosevelt began writing The Naval War of 1812, though he graduated from Harvard in 1880 with the manuscript incomplete.

  With college finished, wealthy and idle Teddy headed off on vacation. As a child, Roosevelt had shot animals in a number of eastern states, in Europe, and in Egypt. Recently engaged to Alice Lee, he now went on a luxury hunting excursion in the Dakota Territory with his brother, Elliott. The idea of investing in the Dakota Territory was on rich men’s minds everywhere, and with the Roosevelt family fortune at hand, getting in was easy. Teddy invested “ten thousand dollars in the Teschmaker and Debillier Cattle Company, then running a herd on the ranges north of Cheyenne.80

  Further travel soon followed. Roosevelt married Alice on his twenty-second birthday, October 27, 1880. Several months later, in May of 1881, the newlyweds left for a costly five-month honeymoon in Europe. Teddy brought his draft chapters with him, and The Naval War of 1812 was finally published in 1882.

  Roosevelt’s first book was a bold amalgam of a call for naval preparedness and Harvard’s follow-the-sun dogma. In its first chapter, Teddy made clear the “Racial Identity of the Contestants.”81 He noted differing levels of ability among combatants according to the purity of their Aryanized blood. Norsemen—very Teutonic—made “excellent sailors and fighters.” The non-Teutonic Portuguese and Italians “did not, as a rule, make the best kind of seamen [because] they were treacherous, fond of the knife, less ready with their hands, and likely to lose either their wits or their courage when in a tight place.”82 The finest sailors of all were the ones who had followed the sun farthest west: “the stern school in which the American was brought up forced him into habits of independent thought and action which it was impossible that the more protected Briton to possess…. He was shrewd, quiet and… rather moral…. There could not have been better material for a fighting crew.”83

  Alice Lee Roosevelt, Teddy’s first wife and Princess Alice’s mother. Father and daughter never discussed her. Roosevelt whitewashed his first wife’s memory from his life story, not even mentioning her in his autobiography. (Library of Congress)

  The Naval War of 1812 made Teddy a nationally recognized advocate of a muscular navy, but it was a navy book with a narrow readership. Greater fame was still to come.

  RETURNED FROM HIS EUROPEAN vacation, Roosevelt headed to Columbia University to study law under Professor John Burgess. Today Columbia University’s website informs us that “Burgess ranks not only as the ‘father’ of American political science, but among the truly great figures in history who will be remembered for his work in founding and building up the school of Political Science at Columbia University.”84 Professor Burgess’s political science course was Teddy’s favorite class at Columbia. Burgess remembered that Roosevelt “seemed to grasp everything instantly, [and] made notes rapidly and incessantly.”85 For his part, Roosevelt “had an immense admiration and respect for Burgess.”86

  Professor John Burgess of Columbia University, who taught that only White people could rule because the Teuton had created the idea of the state. In 1910, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt wrote Burgess: “Your teaching was one of the formative influences in my life. You impressed me more than you’ll ever know.”

  Burgess taught that “the United States Constitution… was the modern expression of Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic political genius—a genius which had originated in the black forests of Germany, spread through England and North America and expressed itself in the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution.”87 Burgess taught that it was the mission of the White man to spread democracy around the world, and that since the state was an invention of the Teuton, the organs of state should be controlled only by those with Teutonic blood—no dark Others need apply.

  At Columbia, as at Harvard, Teddy absorbed a scholarly, reasoned case for American world domination based upon the color of his skin and thus had acquired the prism through which he would judge people, events, and nations. As Thomas Dyer writes in Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race:

  [Theodore Roosevelt] viewed the entire breadth of the American past through a racial lens. With constant, almost compulsive attention to underlying racial themes, he researched, analyzed, and synthesized the raw materials of history. The force of race in history occupied a singularly important place in Roosevelt’s broad intellectual outlook. In fact, race provided him with a window on the past through which he could examine the grand principles of historical development. None of human history really meant much, Roosevelt believed, if racial history were not thoroughly understood first.88

  In May of 1883, Alice told her twenty-five-year-old husband she was pregnant. Rich, restless, anxious to invest money, and worried about what fatherhood would mean, Teddy went to the Dakota Territory in September for a second time. Almost as soon as he arrived, he wrote Alice, “There was a chance to make a great deal of money, very safely, in the cattle business.”89 Already having invested in a cattle company, he now bought a ranch as a business venture. The investment in this case was with public image in mind; Roosevelt told one of his ranch hands that his goal was to “try to keep in a position from which I may be able at some future time to again go into public life, or literary life.”90

  New York assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt. Other politicians mocked him as effeminate when he appeared on the New York assembly floor dressed in a purple satin suit and speaking in a high-pitched voice. To change that image, Roosevelt galloped west.

  With his golden name and backed by family money, Teddy ran for New York State assemblyman from Manhattan County. He was elected in 1883 when he was twenty-three years old, the youngest person still to this day to be elected assemblyman in New York State. Roosevelt’s constituents were well-to-do Manhattanites, and Teddy allied himself with rich Protestants who looked down upon Catholics, Germans, and Irish and thought the Chinese were a dangerous contagion.

  Teddy was an oddity in nineteenth-century Albany. Politics at that time was a game played by beer- and whiskey-drinking men, not aristocrats. To New York’s political press and players, Teddy was a shrimp-size dandy, dressed in tight-fitting, tailor-made suits, a rich daddy’s boy who read books and collected butterflies. Teddy made a bad first impression when he appeared on the assembly floor dressed in a purple satin suit, speaking in a high-pitched, Harvard-tinged voice. The other assemblymen took one look at the rich kid and laughed.

  In 1880s Albany, it would have been acceptable to be wanting in areas of intelligence or legislative ability. But being seen as effeminate was a death sentence for an aspiring politician. This was, after all, forty years before A
merican women were even allowed to vote. Roosevelt’s assembly colleagues hung the demeaning nickname “Oscar Wilde” on him, a mocking reference to the disgraced British homosexual. One newspaper went further, speculating whether Theodore was “given to sucking the knob of an ivory cane.”91

  During the years 1884 to 1901—from the time young Teddy thought of how to reform his effeminate image to when he became a manly man president—William Cody’s extravaganza Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was the leading cultural sensation in the United States. At twenty-six years of age, William Cody had left the West, headed east, and “was the subject of a vast literature: fictionalized biographies by the score, dime novels, dramatic criticism, puff pieces extolling the heroism of Buffalo Bill [and he was] starring as himself in New York theatrical dramas about his life.”92 Drawing millions of spectators in America and Europe, Cody’s spectacle (three trains were required to transport the cast, staff, props, and livestock; the staging required almost twenty-three thousand yards of canvas and twenty miles of rope) helped create a lasting myth of the American frontier. The impact was global—Pope Leo XIII had personally blessed Cody’s entourage, and in England a grieving Queen Victoria made her first public appearance in twenty-five years to witness Cody’s magic.

  The full title of Cody’s show was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: A History of American Civilization. Buffalo Bill was the embodiment of the blond Aryan who sowed civilization as he race-cleansed his way west. The show’s program touted “the rifle as an aid to Civilization [without which] we of America would not be today in possession of a free land and united country.”93 The rifle’s bullet was “the pioneer of civilization [which] has gone hand in hand with the axe that cleared the forest and with the family bible and the schoolbook.”94