The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Lincoln’s private secretary, a round-headed, slant-eyed youth named John Hay, proved a willing conduit to the President, and Theodore Senior made the most of his assistance. “It is a great luxury to feel I am at last doing something tangible for the country,” he wrote Mittie. Homesickness nevertheless tugged at him. “I cannot,” he confessed, “get Bammie’s and Tedee’s [sic] faces, as they bid me goodbye at the door, out of my mind.”32

  It is significant that Theodore Junior, when he came to write his own autobiography, made no mention whatsoever of his father’s role in the Civil War—his invariable practice being to leave painful memories unspoken, “until they are too dead to throb.”33 To serve in mufti was, in his opinion, something less than manly, and his tacit disapproval of the episode is the only indication that Theodore Senior was ever less than a god to him. Many biographers, including his own sister, have suggested that guilt over that substitute soldier explains the future Rough Rider’s almost desperate desire to wage war. He himself, at the age of three, made no bones about his wish to be at the front. “Teedie was really excited,” wrote Annie Bulloch, “when I said to him, ‘Darling, I must fit this zouave suit …’ his little face flushed up and he said, ‘Are me a soldier laddie?’ I immediately took his own suggestion and told him he was and that I was the Captain.”34

  His liveliness, abnormal even for a small boy, was something of a trial to the languid Mittie. Six weeks after Theodore Senior’s departure she complained: “Teedie is the most affectionate and endearing little creature in his ways, but begins to require Papa’s discipline rather sadly. He is brimming full of mischief and has to be watched all the time.”35

  Yet the child was simultaneously sinking into what seemed like chronic invalidism. From the moment his father left home, the catalog of Teedie’s ailments became continuous. He suffered from coughs, colds, nausea, fevers, and a congenital form of nervous diarrhea which the family euphemized as cholera morbus.36 “I feel badly,” he told his mother one morning, “—I have toothache in my stomach.” On top of all this, his asthma was worsening. “Rarely, even at his best, could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair,” remembered Corinne. Lack of appetite brought about symptoms of malnutrition. At one stage his whiteness and fragility were such that Annie Bulloch compared him to a very pale azalea. It seemed that he would not live to see his fourth birthday.37

  The other children were not much healthier. Bamie, who had been dropped as a baby, suffered from a spinal defect that obliged her to wear a harness; Elliott was prone to colds and rushes of blood to the head; even little Corinne was ailing, and would soon fall victim to asthma as well.38

  To Theodore Senior, sloughing tirelessly through the freezing mud of military camps, Mittie’s letters made depressing reading. He was plainly bewildered by the fact that two such beautiful physical specimens had produced such a sickly brood of children. “I cannot help feeling,” he wrote early in 1862, “that there must be something about the furnace or something that prevents them all from being healthy.” With characteristic optimism he hoped for improvements in the summer, when he would be home for a visit, and exhorted his wife: “Remember to enjoy yourself just as much as you can.”39

  How much Teedie’s asthma was aggravated by the absence of his father may be inferred from some remarks he made thirty-seven years later to Lincoln Steffens, after a steeplechase which left the reporter breathless:

  Handsome dandy that he was, the thought of him now and always has been a sense of comfort. I could breathe, I could sleep, when he had me in his arms. My father—he got me breath, he got me lungs, strength—life.40

  WHEN THEODORE SENIOR FINALLY came home, on leave of absence from Washington, the garden behind 28 East Twentieth Street was lush with summer, the children were better, and his own mood had improved. He was able to tell stories of rides with President and Mrs. Lincoln, who had apparently fallen victim—as everybody did sooner or later—to his charm. The First Lady even took him shopping and asked him to choose bonnets for her.41

  The effect of his lusty reappearance in the household was like a tonic to his women and children. The latter especially worshiped him “as though he were a sort of benevolent Norse god.”42 During morning prayers they would compete for the privilege of sitting in the “cubby-hole”—a favored stretch of sofa between his body and the mahogany arm. Later in the day, when he was away at work, they would wait for him on the piazza behind the house, until his key rattled in the latch and he burst upon them, laden with ice cream and peaches. He would feed the fruit to them as they lay spread-eagled on the edge of the piazza, letting the juice drip down into the garden. Afterward they would troop into his room to look on while he undressed, eagerly watching his pockets for the “treasures”—heavy male trinkets which he would solemnly deposit in the box on his dressing-table, or, on occasion, present to a lucky child.43 This ritual would one day be faithfully reproduced by the President of the United States before his own children.

  Despite the joy Theodore Senior felt at being at home again, he lost no time in restoring paternal discipline. It was during this summer that naughty Teedie felt for the first time the weight of his father’s hand.

  I bit my elder sister’s arm. I do not remember biting her arm, but I do remember running down to the yard, perfectly conscious that I had committed a crime. From the yard I went into the kitchen, got some dough from the cook, and crawled under the kitchen table. In a minute or two my father entered from the yard and asked where I was. The warm-hearted Irish cook had a characteristic contempt for “informers,” but although she said nothing she compromised between informing and her conscience by casting a look under the table. My father immediately dropped on all fours and darted at me. I feebly heaved the dough at him, and, having the advantage of him because I could stand up under the table, got a fair start for the stairs, but was caught halfway up them. The punishment that ensued fitted the crime, and I hope—and believe—that it did me good.44

  THEODORE SENIOR never chastised his son again. It was not necessary. There hung about his big, relaxed body an ever-present threat of violence, like that of a lion who, dozing, will suddenly flick out a lethal paw. His reaction to any form of wrong—in particular “selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness”—was so quick, and so certain, that nobody, child or adult, crossed him more than once. “Be sure to make the children obey your first order,” he told Mittie.45 Although her success was indifferent, they nevertheless came to understand “that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.”46

  ABOUT THE TIME Teedie turned four in October 1862, he began dimly to realize that his parents were not one in their views about the Civil War. These differences had been for the most part diplomatically concealed from the children during the summer, although Bamie recalled nights when Mittie would dine alone in her room rather than be exposed to the brutal Unionism of male conversation downstairs. “She must have been homesick for her own people until her heart bled in those early days … it was out of the very fulness of her heart that she used to tell us of home.”47

  Mittie, however, was not entirely alone. The flames of Southern patriotism burned as high in the breasts of her sister and mother, who, fond as they were of Theodore Senior, felt some embarrassment at having to live under the roof of a Lincoln Republican. As soon as their host left home these scruples vanished, and the three women busied themselves in support of the Confederacy. There were “days of hushed and thrilling excitement” when little Teedie helped the ladies of the house pack mysterious boxes, “to run the blockade.”48

  As Teedie became aware of the intensity of their feelings, he learned to play upon them, with some cruelty. “Once, when I felt I had been wronged by maternal discipline during the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor for the success of Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers before my mother in the evening.” Mitt
ie’s sense of humor neutralized this moment of truculence, so Teedie tried the same trick on Aunt Annie, who was much less amused. She said she would never forget “the fury in the childish voice when he would plead with Divine Providence to ‘grind the Southern troops to powder.’ ”49

  Annie Bulloch had volunteered to pay for her bed and board by giving all the Roosevelt children their first lessons, an offer her lethargic sister was only too happy to accept. Perhaps with some trepidation, she now undertook the education of Teedie. It was on her knee that he learned the three Rs, and showed a decided preference for the first two at the expense of the third. Aunt Annie was a born teacher: energetic, practical, and kindly, with a dramatic flair that enlivened the dullest fact. Often as not—for she was an even better storyteller than her sister—the lessons would drift into reminiscences of the Old South. A mood of spinsterish melancholy colored Aunt Annie’s tales of life on the Georgia plantations: of minuets under the mistletoe, and coach lamps drowned in warm darkness, as lovesick young men drove away—forever; of cock-fights and turkey-wrestling; of horses that had been named after, or (to a child who had only recently confused God with a fox) perhaps were Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett; of the famous fighting Bullochs and their exploits during the American Revolution; of Bre’r Rabbit, the Tar Baby, and “queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.”50

  Teedie thus, at a very early age, acquired a love for legend and anecdote, and inherited a nostalgia for a way of life he had never known. The key to his imagination had been unlocked by a woman to whom the past was more real than the present. As an adult reader of history, and as a professional writer of it, he always showed a tendency to “live” his subject; he always looked for narrative which was “instinct with the truth that both charms and teaches.”51

  Since Aunt Annie had three other children to take care of, she could not spend all her time satisfying Teedie’s lust for information, which rapidly became insatiable. Confined indoors by ill health and winter weather, he wheezed restlessly from room to room in search of further entertainment. For a while he amused himself with objets d’art in the parlor: a Russian moujik pulling a tin sledge across a snowfield of malachite; a carved Swiss hunter chasing chamois goats around an improbably small mountain; and floor-to-ceiling mirrors in which he could exchange stares with a small, blond, stern-faced boy. Dominating his little universe, like some remote yet brilliant galaxy, was a gas chandelier coruscating with cut-glass prisms. “These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar magnificence,” he wrote in later life. “One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of larceny.”52

  The splendors of the parlor soon palled. There was little to detain him in the dining room, except at mealtimes; besides, its black haircloth furniture scratched his bare legs. The kitchen was terra non grata to pesky children. Eventually he was forced to explore the most forbidding room in the house: a windowless library, with tables, chairs, and gloomy bookcases.53 Chancing upon a ponderous edition of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa, Teedie opened it, and found within a world he could happily inhabit the rest of his days.

  Although the book’s pages of print meant nothing to him, its illustrations were copious, explicit, and strangely thrilling. Here were rampant hippopotami with canoes on their backs, horizon-filling herds of zebra, a magnified tsetse fly, as big as his hand, and an elephant so spiked with assegais as to resemble an enormous porcupine. For weeks Teedie dragged the volume, which was almost as big as he was, around the library, and begged his elders to fit stories to the pictures.54

  Among the first books Teedie learned to decipher for himself were an unscientific study of mammals by Mayne Reid, and two natural histories by the English biologist J. G. Wood.55 He pored endlessly over these in the library, curled up in a tiny chair which became his favorite article of furniture. Softly upholstered in red velvet, and fringed with long tassels, it seemed designed to comfort the scrawny angles of his body. For years the boy and his “tassel chair” were so inseparable it even accompanied him to the photographer’s studio for his formal birthday portraits.

  The library’s gloom vanished at night, when gas lamps began to hiss, and the coal fire made its rugs and tapestries glow a rich, romantic red. Teedie was given free access to all the books on the shelves, save only a racy novel by Ouida, Under Two Flags. “I did read it, nevertheless, with greedy and fierce hope of coming on something unhealthy; but as a matter of fact all the parts that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression on me.… I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general adventures.”56

  As his reading abilities developed, and his ill-health continued, he turned more and more to stories of outdoor action, in which he could identify with heroes larger than life: the novels of Ballantyne, the sea-yarns of Captain Marryat, Cooper’s tales of the American frontier. Epic poetry, too, inspired him—above all Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf, with its wild warlocks, blaring horns, and shields shining like suns.

  I was nervous and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired,—ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan’s riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite stories—and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them.57

  IN THE SPRING of 1863 Theodore Senior, whose voluntary war services were now more and more concentrated in New York State, transported his ailing family to Loantaka, a country place in Madison, New Jersey. The children reacted to their rural surroundings with such delight, and with such general improvement to their health, that Loantaka remained the Roosevelt summer home for four consecutive seasons.

  Here the bookish Teedie became aware of the “enthralling pleasures” of building wigwams in the woods, gathering hickory nuts and apples, hunting frogs, haying and harvesting, and scampering barefoot down long, leafy lanes. Despite his frail physique and asthma, he seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of nervous energy. This, combined with the ability to improvise countless stories about his environment, caused him to be accepted as an unquestioned leader by Corinne and Elliott, and such family friends as came to stay. (Bamie’s four-year seniority, along with a certain adult seriousness of manner, disqualified her from membership in his gang.) Even on days when illness confined him to bed, the other children would forsake the fields in order to be entertained by the prodigal Teedie. His stories, remembered by Corinne into old age, were “about jungles and bold, mighty and imaginary fights with strange beasts … there was always a small boy in the stories … who understood the language of animals and would translate their opinions to us.”58

  Even in these early years, his knowledge of natural history was abnormal. No doubt much of it was acquired during his winters in the “tassel chair,” but it was supplemented, every summer, by long hours of observation of the flora and fauna around him. The other children noticed that their leader “also led a life apart from us, seriously studying birds, their habits and their notes.”59 At first this study was haphazard, and Teedie made no attempt to document his observations, beyond filing them in his retentive memory. Not until he was seven years old, and back in New York City, did his formal career as a zoologist begin.

  I was walking up Broadway, and as I passed the market to which I used sometimes to be sent before breakfast to get strawberries, I suddenly saw a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure. I asked where it was killed, and was informed in the harbor … As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of th
e utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal. This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get the seal’s skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started what we ambitiously called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.”60

  His next major thesis was entitled “The Foregoing Ant.” According to Corinne, it was inspired by a passing reference in Wood’s Natural History. Teedie assumed that the adjective was physiological, perhaps referring to the ant’s gait, and his subsequent essay on the subject was read aloud to a circle of mystified adults.61

  Unfortunately for posterity, neither the Broadway Seal nor the Foregoing Ant appear in surviving records of Teedie’s museum. There exists, however, a rather more learned opus, entitled “Natural History on Insects,” which dates from his ninth year. “All the insects that I write about in this book,” the author declares, “inhabbit North America. Now and then a friend has told me something about them but mostly I have gained their habbits from ofserv-a-tion.” He discusses and illustrates various species of ants, spiders, lady-bugs, fireflies, horned “beetlles,” and dragonflies. Then, with a fine disregard for the limitations of his title, he moves on to the study of hawks, minnows, and crayfish. The latter rather defeats his childish powers of description: “Look at a lobster,” he suggests, “and you have its form.”62