The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Apart from such lapses, Teedie’s “ofserv-a-tion” is amazingly keen. A paragraph on the tree-spider, for example, notes that it is “grey spoted with black,” and lives “in communitys of about 20” under patches of loosened bark; its web “looks exactly like some cotten on the top but if you take that off you will see several small little webs, all in a ‘gumble’ as we children yoused to call it, each having several little occupants.” Even more remarkable, for a nine-year-old boy, is the methodical arrangement of classifications, and the patient indexing.

  Teedie’s interest in all “curiosities and living things” became something of a trial to his elders. Meeting Mrs. Hamilton Fish on a streetcar, he absentmindedly lifted his hat, whereupon several frogs leaped out of it, to the dismay of fellow passengers. Houseguests at No. 28 learned to sit on sofas warily, and to check their water-pitchers for snakes before pouring. When Mittie, in great disgust, threw out a litter of field-mice, her son loudly bemoaned “the loss to Science—the loss to Science.”63

  From time to time, members of the domestic staff threatened to give notice. A protest by a chambermaid forced Teedie to move the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History out of his bedroom and into the back hall upstairs. “How can I do the laundry,” complained the washerwoman, “with a snapping turtle tied to the legs of the sink?” Finally, when a noxious odor permeated the entire house, even the good-natured cook issued her ultimatum: “Either I leave or the woodchuck does.” Teedie had killed a fine specimen for anatomical study and ordered her to boil the animal, fur and all, for twenty-four hours.64

  ON 28 APRIL 1868, Teedie wrote a letter to Mittie, who was paying a visit to Savannah along with Theodore Senior and Corinne. It is the earliest of his 150,000 letters to survive, yet there glitters, in virtually every sentence, a facet of his mature personality.

  My Dear Mamma I have just received your letter! What an excitement. What long letters you do write. I don’t see how you can write them. My mouth opened wide with astonish when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you. I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mocking-bird, get some of its feathers if you can. Thank Johnny for the feathers of the soldier’s cap, give him my love also. We cried when you wrote about Grand-Mamma. Give my love to the good-natured (to use your own expresion) handsome lion, Conie, Johnny, Maud and Aunt Lucy. I am sorry the trees have been cut down. Aunt Annie, Edith, and Ellie send their love to you and all I sent mine to … In the letter you write me tell me how many curiosities and living things you have got for me. I miss Conie very much. I wish I were with you and Johnny for I could hunt for myself … Yours loveingly.

  THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  P.S. I liked your peas so much that I ate half of them.65

  Promptness, excitability, warmth, histrionics, love of plants and animals, physical vitality, “dee-light,” sensitivity to birdsong, fascination with military display, humor, family closeness, the conservationist, the natural historian, the hunter—all are here. Teedie mentions, passim, the name of his future wife, and there is a hint of the two-hundred-pound President in the embarrassed postscript. Even the large, childish handwriting is touchingly similar to that of the dying Colonel Roosevelt, scrawling his last memorandum half a century later.

  DURING THE SUMMER of 1868, about the same time he was completing his “Natural History on Insects,” Teedie began to keep a diary.66 The Roosevelts were then living in their new country place at Barrytown-on-Hudson, New York, and the little volume is full of the joys of bird-nesting, swimming, hiking, and long rides through grass “up to the ponys head.” Apart from one reference to “an attack of the Asmer” on 10 August, the diary reads like that of any normal nine-year-old. Yet Teedie’s health was as bad as ever: he was never well for more than ten days at a time. So accustomed was he, by now, to recurrences of illness that he rarely bothered to record them.

  Theodore Senior grew seriously worried as the summer went by, and Teedie, for all his hyperactivity, remained pasty-faced and skeletal. The other children were blooming in comparison—but only with their brother. Bamie’s crippled spine, Elliott’s tendency to rushes of blood in the head, and little Corinne’s own asthma tormented all his protective feelings. Yet another cause for alarm was the strange decline of Mittie Roosevelt.

  A certain wistfulness, combined with increasing fragility and indolence, had begun to affect this exquisite woman since the end of the Civil War. It was as if Sherman’s looting of her ancestral home, and the simultaneous death of her mother, not to mention the banishment overseas of her two Secessionist brothers,67 had cut the Southern lifelines that hitherto sustained her. Gradually she sank into a kind of gentle invalidism which was something not unlike a second childhood. Always helpless and fluttery, she grew incapable of running the house, and was treated by her children as one of its prettier ornaments—a doll in the parlor, whom they could pet when they chose. “Sweet little china Dresden mother,” Elliott used to call her affectionately. Coaches summoned to take her for her three o’clock drive would creak up and down Twentieth Street for hours while Mittie made flustered attempts to get ready. Often as not she would never emerge at all.68 Although she remained beautiful, charming, and witty, Theodore Senior was saddened to see yet another blossom wilt upon his boughs.

  When Mittie herself suggested in the winter of 1868–69 that a trip to Europe might do the whole family good, he welcomed the idea. His business was prospering, and after the hard grind of his war work, a Grand Tour of Europe sounded like a welcome diversion. It would be of immense educational value to the children, none of whom had yet received outside schooling. With characteristic enthusiasm, Theodore Senior sat down and drafted an itinerary that must have given his wife pause, for it covered nine countries and a whole year of traveling time. The children reacted with even more dismay. They had been hoping to return to the Hudson Valley that summer. Theodore Senior turned a deaf ear to their pleas, and went ahead with the bookings. On 12 May 1869, he escorted his tearful brood aboard the paddle-steamer Scotia, bound for Liverpool.69

  Although Teedie later declared that he “cordially hated” the Roosevelt Grand Tour, he recorded it at great length in his diaries. During all the 377 days he was away from home, he did not miss a single entry, with the exception of one stormy week on the return crossing. The spelling, in these cheap, battered notebooks, is that of a child, but the density of remembered detail would be extraordinary even in an adult. Some entries read like miniature museum catalogs. Evidently the cornucopia of Europe awakened his faculty of near-total recall.

  The diaries begin on an enigmatic note. “It was verry hard parting from our friend,” Teedie writes, confessing that he “cried a great deal.” This mysterious person was almost certainly a seven-year-old girl named Edith Carow. For as far back as he could remember, quiet, steady-eyed little “Edie” had been his most intimate acquaintance outside the family circle. Indeed, it seemed at times that she lived within it, for her father’s house was on Union Square, only a few blocks away from 28 East Twentieth Street, and she had come to regard the latter as her second home. Edith and Corinne had been born within weeks of each other, and were wheeled side by side in their baby carriages. When Aunt Annie began giving lessons to the younger Roosevelts, it was natural that Edith should be included. Although she was, in these early years, more attached to Corinne than anyone else, it was plain that a special relationship was developing between herself and Teedie. He was permitted to play “house” with her, whereas Elliott was not. They shared a passionate interest in books, and their characters complemented each other. Where he was ardent and impulsive, feverish in his enthusiasms, she was sensitive and cautious, a cooling breeze across his sometimes overheated landscape.70

  Seasickness and homesickness were added to Teedie’s normal quota of ills, as the Scotia thrashed her way slowly across the Atlantic. He remained aloof from the deck-games of other children on board, burying himself in books, or else gazing vaguely at gulls and passing ships, �
��a tall, thin lad,” someone remembered, “with bright eyes and legs like pipe-stems.”71 During the latter part of the voyage he made friends with a learned gentleman from the West Indies, and had long conversations with him on the subject of natural history. Late on the evening of 21 May the ship docked at Liverpool, and Teedie set foot in “Briten” for the first time.72

  WHILE MITTIE PLUNGED INTO an ecstatic, ten-day reunion with her exiled brothers, the younger Roosevelts “jumped and romped” on the chilly English seashore. Theodore Senior, however, had not brought them abroad to play, and began to expose them to the bewildering variety of English history and architecture. Trips were made to the Duke of Devonshire’s country seat at Chatsworth, and “Haden hall an old feudeul castle of the 11th century,” where Teedie admired “the Leathern jacket in which a lord received his death wound.” In early June they proceeded north via “furnace abby” and the Lake District to “Edinbourg.” Despite the inevitable Scottish rain Teedie overcame an attack of asthma and greatly enjoyed visits to Walter Scott’s mansion at Abbotsford, “the tweed (quite a decent brook),” and “Loch Lomend … where the poem ‘Lady of the lake’ was lade.” The pace of sight-seeing intensified as the Roosevelts swung south via York to Oxford, by which time the young diarist had developed a formidable headache. “I have a tendency to headache,” he noted in London five days later, apparently still suffering. He was “a little disappointed” at the range of fauna in the Zoological Gardens, but had fun playing in “hide park” and visiting “Westnubster abby.” The “rare and beautiful specimens” in the British Museum fascinated him, as did the “christal palace” with its “imitations of egyptian, roman, greek etc. marbles,” and the ancient Tower of London, where “I put my head on the block where so many had been beheaded.” During this stay a doctor examined him and pronounced his lungs perfect. Teedie was immediately stricken with asthma so violent he had to be rushed to Hastings for three days of sea air.73

  On 13 July the Roosevelts sailed down the Thames, “a verry, verry small river or a large creek,” and crossed the English Channel to Antwerp. Teedie prided himself on being the last of his family to vomit, and “the first one that got on the continent.” From Antwerp they began a leisurely tour of the Netherlands and northern Germany. While traveling up the Rhine, Teedie began to wheeze and cough: a rainy visit to Strasbourg made him “verry sick” and he spent the next morning in bed. In Switzerland he suffered alternate attacks of gastroenteritis, toothache, and asthma, yet showed amazing bursts of energy in between. He climbed an eight-thousand-foot mountain at Chamonix, scorning mules, walked nineteen miles across “the tatenwar” (La Tête Noire), thirteen miles around Visp, twenty miles through the Grimsel Pass, and ascended alone the steep hill of Wallenstein. “It is 3—and 3 miles back, and I went and came in 1 hour.” Such incredible statistics might be dismissed as boyish exaggeration were it not for the fact that Theodore Senior frequently accompanied him and confirmed them. In his diaries, as in all his later writings, Teedie was a scrupulously accurate reporter.

  Despite recurring moments when the boy was “verry verry home sick,” he continued to stare seriously at everything around him, sketching the plan of a grotto in Geneva, comparing live Swiss chamois with the carved ones at home in East Twentieth Street, exploring the “gloomey dungeons” of Chillon Castle, researching everything he saw in guidebooks and geographies. In lighter moments he clowned raucously with Elliott and Corinne, gorged himself on fresh berries and cream, and waged war upon “several cross chambermaids.”

  On 9 September, Teedie and his father hiked over the crest of the Splügen Pass. The other Roosevelts followed in a carriage. “Soft balmy Italy of the poets,” Teedie noted sarcastically, “is cold dreary smelly.” However the “sceneerry” around “lake Coma” soon improved his attitude, and after a row across the lake “by the light of a golden moon” he himself began to wax poetical. “I strayed from the rest and now in the wood around the villa Colata … with no sound save the waterfall and the Italian breeze on my cheek, I all alone am writing my Journal.”

  The moon changed to “silver” over Lake Lugano, and Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore, was “the most beautiful creation of mans, with lemons cactuses camphor trees lemons bamboos sugar cane in sight of snow white alps.” Here a particularly vicious attack of asthma struck. “It came to a point,” wrote Mittie to her sister, “where he had to sit up in bed to breathe. After taking a strong cup of black coffee the spasmodic part of the attack ceased and he slept … Had the coffee not taken effect he would have gone on struggling through the night, and been a complete wreck the next morning, in which condition you have so often seen him.”74

  Teedie’s dormant literary talents were stimulated afresh by Venice. “We saw the moonlight on the water and I contrasted it with the black gondola’s darting about like water goblins.” Although the weather here was clear and dry, he became so “dreadfully ill” that on 20 September he collapsed in total exhaustion.

  During the next two weeks his attacks of diarrhea and asthma were incessant. One night on the Austrian border, “I sat up for 4 successive hours and Papa made me smoke a cigar.” This unorthodox remedy seems to have had temporary effect, for the following day he climbed the Adelsberg for two hours “in the broiling sun.” But the long train trip to Vienna laid him low yet again. Theodore Senior, whose compassion for his son was tempered by an aggressive attitude to illness, refused to mollycoddle him. After only a day in bed Teedie was whisked off to the Treasury to see “the crowns of Charlamang and Roudolph the 2d rudly carved jewels and pearls yellow with age contrasting strangly with the polished pearls and sparkling gems of moddern times. Then Father and I went to a Natural history museum. It is a most interesting place, but I was hurried.”

  Throughout Teedie’s diaries the masterful, all-capable figure of Theodore Senior strides with giant steps, tirelessly encouraging, comforting, supervising, and protecting his family. Handsome and resplendent in evening dress, he escorts Mittie and Bamie to the Vienna Opera. He leaps like a tiger upon a monk who shoves Teedie aside, and hurls him bodily into the crowd. Determined to picnic in an attractive orange grove, he overcomes the hostility of peasants and proprietor, and ends up gaily entertaining all comers to chicken, champagne, and honey. Only once, in the entire twelvemonth tour, does he lose patience with his children, and angrily call them “bothers.” Even this mild imprecation is enough to make Teedie miserable for a whole evening.

  As autumn settled over the Alps, the frequency of Teedie’s asthma attacks increased until they were rarely more than three days apart.75 His diaries become poignant reading. In Salzburg, “I had a nightmare dreaming that the devil was carrying me away and have collerer morbos.” In Munich, “I was verry sick … Mama was so kind telling me storrys and rubing me with her delicate fingers.” In Dresden somebody more vigorous massaged his chest until “the blood came out.” Yet the touring and sightseeing relentlessly continued. Teedie calculated that the Roosevelt Grand Tour was not yet half over, and he was overcome by a paroxysm of homesickness.

  October 17th Sunday [Dresden] I am by the fire with not another light but it … It is now after 5. All was dark excep the fire. I lay by it and listened to the wind and thought of the times at home in the country when I lay by the fire with some hickory nuts until like the slave who

  Again he is king by the banks of the niger

  Again he can hear the wild roar of the tiger

  Again I was lying by the roaring fire (with the cold October wind shrieking outside) in the cheerful lighted room and I turned around half expecting to see it all again and stern reality forced itself upon me and I thought of the time that would come never, never, never.

  His misery lasted through visits to Berlin and Cologne, where he noted gloomily that 27 October was “the first of my birthdays that it snowed on.” However, the Roosevelts celebrated the occasion with their customary blend of warmth and formality, donning full evening dress for dinner and showering him with such splendid gifts
that his mood noticeably improved.

  Five days into his twelfth year, the child gives the first of several indications that the man is beginning to develop within him: “We went to a shoe makers [in Brussels] and I saw a girl … the most beautiful but ferocious girl I have ever seen in my life.” Another, more emotional entry, written three weeks later in Paris, records that “Mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth Carow and her face stired up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”

  TEEDIE REMAINED DEPRESSED and ill in Paris. A doctor was summoned to his bedside three times, and three times changed his medicine; but neither this nor frequent “russian baths” had any effect. When at the end of November the Roosevelts started south to winter on the Riviera, his melancholy spilled out in tears: “I cried for homesickness and a wish to get out of the land where friends (or as I think them enemies) who can not speak my language are forced on me.”

  But the inexorable Theodore Senior pressed on down the Route Napoléon. On 6 December, Teedie was cheered by his first “decent” hill-climb in months, but his health was still a cause for concern: “I read till mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and nearly cried because they were feverish.” As they proceeded east along the Riviera, his powers of observation revived. The diaries have vignettes of cruelty to animals, the military might of Monaco (“a few gendarmes and some dismounted cannon”), primitive house paintings, and a “verry romantic” sunset on the Italian border.