The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  WITH INEXORABLE SLOWNESS, the train crawled down the Hudson Valley into thickening fog. Even in clear weather, the 145-mile journey took five hours; it was anybody’s guess how long it would take on this murky evening. There was nothing Roosevelt could do but read and reread his two telegrams, and summon up all his self-discipline against that unmanly emotion, panic. Six years ago last Saturday he had taken another such express to New York, in response to another urgent telegram, and arrived to find his father dead.… For hour after hour the locomotive bell tolled mournfully in the distance ahead of him.70 It was about 10:30 P.M. when the train finally pulled into Grand Central Station. Roosevelt had to search out West Fifty-seventh Street by the light of lamps that “looked as though gray curtains had been drawn around them.”71 When he reached home the house was dark, except for a glare of gas on the third floor.

  ALICE, DYING OF Bright’s disease, was already semicomatose as Roosevelt took her into his arms. She could scarcely recognize him, and for hours he sat holding her, in a vain effort to impart some of his own superabundant vitality. Meanwhile, on the floor below, Mittie was expiring with acute typhoid fever. The two women had become very close in recent years; now they were engaged in a grotesque race for death.

  Bells down Fifth Avenue chimed midnight—St. Valentine’s Day at last—then one, then two. A message came from downstairs: if Theodore wished to say good-bye to his mother he must do so now. At three o’clock, Mittie died. She looked as beautiful as ever, with her “moonlight” complexion and ebony-black hair untouched by gray.72 Gazing down at her, Roosevelt echoed his brother’s words: “There is a curse on this house.”73 In bewildered agony of soul, he climbed back upstairs and again took Alice Lee into his arms.

  Day dawned, but the fog outside grew ever thicker, and gaslight continued to burn in the Roosevelt mansion. About mid-morning, a sudden, violent rainfall miraculously cleared the air, and for five minutes the sun shone on muddy streets and streaming rooftops. The weather seemed about to break, but clouds closed over the city once more. By noon the temperature was 58 degrees, and the humidity grew intolerable. Then, slowly, the fog began to lift, and dry cold air blew in from the northeast. At two o’clock, Alice died.74

  ROOSEVELT DREW a large cross in his diary for 14 February, 1884, and wrote beneath: “The light has gone out of my life.”

  THAT EVENING, Cooper Union was packed with thousands of citizens supporting the “Roosevelt Bill,” whose passage through the Assembly had been postponed pending his return. Reporters noticed that the “more than usually intelligent audience” included, besides General Grant, ex-Mayor Grace, Professor Dwight, Elihu Root, Chauncey Depew, and two of Roosevelt’s uncles, James and Robert. The latter must have known about Theodore’s double tragedy, but they kept silent, for the news would not be announced until morning.

  Although the real hero of the evening was not there, the hall resounded with cheers at the mention of his name. “Whatever Theodore Roosevelt undertakes,” declared Douglass Campbell, the keynote speaker, “he does earnestly, honestly, and fearlessly.” The resolution in support of the bill was approved by a tremendous, air-shaking shout of “AYE!”75

  “SELDOM, IF EVER, has New York society received such a shock as yesterday in [these] sad and sudden deaths,” the World commented on 15 February. “The loss of his wife and mother in a single day is a terrible affliction,” agreed the Tribune, “—it is doubtful whether he will be able to return to his labors.” The Herald, while equally sympathetic to the bereaved Assemblyman, dwelt more on the qualities of the deceased. Mittie was praised for her “brilliant powers as leader of a salon,” and for her “high breeding and elegant conversation.” Alice, said the paper, “was famed for her beauty, as well as many graces of the heart and head.”76

  In Albany, the House of Assembly paid an unprecedented tribute to its stricken member by declaring unanimously for adjournment in sympathy. Seven speakers, some of them in tears, eulogized the dead women and paid tribute to Roosevelt. “Never in my many years here,” declared a senior Democrat, “have I stood in the presence of such a sorrow as this.” He said that Alice had been a woman so blessed by nature as to be “irresistible” to any man she chose to love. The House’s resolution, adopted by a rising vote, spoke of the “desolating blow” that had struck “our esteemed associate, Hon. Theodore Roosevelt,” and expressed the hope that its gesture would “serve to fortify him in this moment of his agony and weakness.”77

  MORE TEARS WERE SHED at the funeral on Saturday, 16 February, in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. The sight of two hearses outside the door, and two rosewood coffins standing side by side at the altar, was too much for many members of the large and distinguished congregation.78 Sobs could be heard throughout the simple service. The minister, Dr. Hall, could hardly control his voice as he compared the sad but unsurprising death of a fifty-year-old widow with the “strange and terrible” fate that had snatched away a twenty-two-year-old mother. He cried openly as he prayed for “him of whose life she has been so great a part.”79

  Through all these tears, Roosevelt sat white-faced and expressionless. He had to be handled like a child at the burial ceremony in Greenwood Cemetery.80 “Theodore is in a dazed, stunned state,” wrote Arthur Cutler, his ex-tutor, to Bill Sewall in Maine. “He does not know what he does or says.”81

  THE SHOCK UPON Roosevelt of Alice’s wholly unexpected death, coming at a time when he had been “full of life and happiness,” was so violent that it threatened to destroy him. Mittie’s death served only to increase his bewilderment. He seemed unable to understand the condolences of friends, showed no interest in his baby, and took to pacing endlessly up and down his room. The family were afraid he would lose his reason.82

  Actually he was in a state of cataleptic concentration on a task which now preoccupied him above all else. Like a lion obsessively trying to drag a spear from its flank, Roosevelt set about dislodging Alice Lee from his soul. Nostalgia, a weakness to which he was abnormally vulnerable, could be indulged if it was pleasant, but if painful it must be suppressed, “until the memory is too dead to throb.”83

  With the exception of two brief, written valedictories to Alice—one private, one for limited circulation among family and friends—there is no record of Roosevelt ever mentioning her name again.84 The first of these memorials was entered into his diary a day or two after the funeral:

  Alice Hathaway Lee. Born at Chestnut Hill, July 29th 1861. I saw her first on October 18th 1878; I wooed her for over a year before I won her; we were betrothed on January 25th 1880, and it was announced on Feb. 16th;85 on Oct. 27th of the same year we were married; we spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others; on Feb 12th 1884 her baby was born, and on Feb. 14th she died in my arms; my mother had died in the same house, on the same day, but a few hours previously. On Feb 16th they were buried together in Greenwood … For joy or sorrow, my life has now been lived out.86

  There were one or two oblique, involuntary references to Alice in conversation during the months immediately following her death, but before the year was out his silence was total. Ironically, the name of another Alice Lee—his daughter—was sometimes forced through his lips, but even this was quickly euphemized to “Baby Lee.” Although the girl grew to womanhood, and remained close to him always, he never once spoke to her of her mother.87 When, as ex-President, he came to write his Autobiography, he wrote movingly of the joys of family life, the ardor of youth, and the love of men and women; but he would not acknowledge that the first Alice ever existed.

  Others close to Roosevelt naturally took on the same attitude. After his death, their hands went methodically through his correspondence, and all love-letters between himself and Alice—with four trivial exceptions—were destroyed. Whole pages of his Harvard scrapbook, presumably containing souvenirs of their courtship and marriage, were snipped out. Photographs of Alice were torn out of their paper frames. Here and there, handwritten cap
tions that doubtless referred to her are erased so fiercely the page is worn into holes.88 Only by some miracle did five private diaries, and a handful of letters written to friends, survive to testify to his love for the yellow-haired girl from Chestnut Hill.

  IT IS NOW WELL OVER A CENTURY since Alice Hathaway Lee married Theodore Roosevelt, gave birth to his child, and died. Little more than the few facts recorded in this volume will likely ever be known of her. She was, after all, only twenty-two and a half years old at the end. The Roosevelt family, on first meeting her, had found her “attractive but without great depth.”89 She seemed too simple for such a complex person as Theodore. After her death, however, they claimed to have noticed that “abilities lay beneath the surface.”90 Their first, unsentimental impression was surely the more trustworthy.

  Only one woman ventured to suggest, many years later, that Alice, had she lived, would have driven Roosevelt to suicide from sheer boredom.91 The bitterness of this remark is understandable, since it was made by Alice’s successor; but one suspects there may be a grain of truth in it. Alice does indeed seem to have been rather too much the classic Victorian “child-wife,” a creature so bland and uncomplicated as to be incapable of spiritual growth. Her few surviving letters are sweetly phrased and totally uninteresting. Roosevelt, whose own growth, both physical and mental, was so abnormally paced, could not have been happy married to an aging child.

  In his published memorial to Alice, Roosevelt—echoing Dr. Hall—spoke of the “strange and terrible fate” that took her away. Strange, maybe—yet perhaps more kind than terrible. In quitting him so early, she rendered him her ultimate service. In burying her, he symbolically buried his own lingering naïveté. At the time, of course, he felt that he was burying all of himself.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Delegate-at-Large

  Thus came Olaf to his own,

  When upon the night-wind blown

  Passed that cry along the shore;

  And he answered, while the rifted

  Streamers o’er him shook and shifted,

  “I accept thy challenge, Thor!”

  BABY LEE WAS CHRISTENED on Sunday, 17 February 1884, the day after the funeral, and placed in care of Bamie.1 The latter, now in her thirtieth year, seemed irrevocably headed for spinsterdom, and her sudden acquisition of a golden-haired infant was the only happy event of that bitter weekend. Having thus, within twenty-four hours, interred the past and anointed the future, the Roosevelts addressed themselves to the present.

  For all Cutler’s statement that Theodore was “in a dazed, stunned state” on Saturday, there is a tough decisiveness about the family’s actions during the period immediately following that could only have emanated from him. He set the tone by announcing that he would go back to work at once. “There is nothing left for me except to try to so live as not to dishonor the memory of those I loved who have gone before me.”2

  “Mr. Roosevelt, I’m going to veto those bills!”

  Governor Grover Cleveland by Eastman Johnson. (Illustration 10.1)

  With Alice and Mittie dead, Theodore returning to Albany, and Corinne and Elliott already thinking of moving to the country, it was plain that 6 West Fifty-seventh Street must be sold. The Roosevelt mansion had become increasingly expensive to maintain over the years. Mittie’s lavish soirées, receptions, banquets, and balls, complete with orchestras and liveried footmen, had considerably eroded the family fortune.3 Bamie, in her new capacity as surrogate mother, no longer had the time nor the money to keep open house for Astors and Vanderbilts. She agreed to look for a smaller, but equally fashionable home on Madison Avenue, within baby-carriage distance of Central Park. The mansion was put on the market, and in less than a week it was sold. The family was given until the end of April to move out.4

  Roosevelt simultaneously divested himself of the brownstone on West Forty-fifth Street, the only house he and his wife had ever owned. He could not bear to return there, even to close it up. Bamie was left with the sad task of “dividing everything.” Yet on 1 March, just two weeks after Alice’s death, Roosevelt signed a contract for the construction of Leeholm, at a total cost, including outbuildings, of $22,135.5 Construction began immediately, although the weather was so cold Oyster Bay was frozen in ripples. He wanted his manor finished by the summer; why was unclear, since he had no plans to move in. Bamie, ever-resourceful, indefatigable Bamie, would take care of it for him.

  “I have never believed it did any good to flinch or yield for any blow,” he wrote Bill Sewall. “Nor does it lighten the pain to cease from working.”6 He did not care where he lived, for he intended to spend an absolute minimum of time eating and sleeping. Even in happier days, he had been insomniac and febrile; now his only instinct was to sleep less and labor more. The pain in his heart might be dulled by sheer fatigue, if nothing else. “Indeed I think I should go mad if I were not employed.”7

  And so, on 18 February, the Assemblyman returned to Albany.

  HIS ACTIVITIES, through the remainder of the session of 1884, were so prodigious that one gropes, as so often with Theodore Roosevelt, for an inhuman simile. Like a factory ship in the whaling season, he combined the principles of maximum production and perpetual motion. The naked cliffs of the Hudson Valley must have grown drearily familiar to him, for he commuted constantly in his dual capacity as Assemblyman (on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays) and chairman of the City Investigating Committee (on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays). Often as not he got his only sleep on the overnight train. The House was now sitting in the evenings as well as daytime, while the committee’s hearings began at ten in the morning and lasted until six.8

  Thus we find him, on, say, Monday, 25 February, interrogating a New York corrections officer on illegal charges for the transport of prisoners; on Tuesday 26 rising in the Assembly to urge passage of his Municipal Indebtedness Bill; on Wednesday 27 amending a Bill for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, and reporting four bills out of his regular Cities Committee. On Thursday 28 he brings out seven more bills, whose subjects range from security to sewers; on Friday 29 he is back at the New York investigating table, demanding information on clerking procedures in the Surrogate’s Court, political patronage in the Bureau of Citations, and research fees in the Bureau of Arrears; next day, Saturday, 1 March, after an exhausting spell of testimony on drunkenness and sex in city jails, he agonizes over, and finally signs, the Leeholm contract. That night he tries to rest, but without much success (“He feels the awful loneliness more and more,” Corinne tells Elliott, “and I fear he sleeps little, for he walks a great deal in the night, and his eyes have that strained red look”).9 At 10:00 A.M. on Monday he gavels another investigative session to order; twenty-four hours later, he is in Albany, moving some banking legislation to the third reading, and making a major speech on behalf of his Liquor License Bill; on Wednesday afternoon he reports twelve new bills out of the Cities Committee, and on Thursday night a further seven; in New York next morning, he begins a final long weekend of hearings (his committee’s report is due the following Friday). While awaiting counsel’s draft of this document, he makes another major speech on municipal government, reports out of various committees a total of thirty-five new bills—the final six on Thursday evening 13 March, as he simultaneously checks every word of the Investigative Report. That night he does not sleep at all, for the text does not satisfy him—it is “a whitewashing performance”10 that ignores his committee’s most sensational findings. Roosevelt retires to the Delavan House with 1,054 pages of testimony, summons relays of stenographers, and begins to dictate a new report; when the stenographers wilt in the small hours, he sends them home and takes up the pen himself. He writes on through breakfast; at ten, when the Assembly opens, he transfers his papers there, and continues to write all morning, undisturbed by the roar of debate (although he hears enough to jump to his feet at times and comment on bills before the House). As each sheet of manuscript is finished, it is rushed to the printer. By mid-afternoon the last page is pr
inted and bound, and the 47-page, 15,000-word document is handed in. He delivers a “masterful presentation” on its behalf, introduces nine audacious bills arising from his findings, and concludes with a request for authority to investigate other areas of city government.11

  NOTWITHSTANDING ROOSEVELT’S other preoccupations, it is probable that he found time to read a front-page article in The New York Times on 25 February, for its subject-matter was of intense interest to him. The headlines read DRESSED BEEF IN THE WEST—THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE OF THE MARQUIS DE MORES, and the copy consisted of an interview with the Frenchman, just arrived at the Hotel Brunswick. Much was made of his elegant city attire, in contrast to the broad sombrero and buckskin suit he wore out West. “The Marquis is a young man of 26, with a clear-cut and refined face and expressive gray eyes. He wears a dark brown mustache and slight sidewhiskers. He went West 18 months ago to organize the dressed beef business on the Northern Pacific Railroad. He put his first slaughterhouse on the Little Missouri. Here it was that the trouble [between himself and the three frontiersmen] occurred.…” But de Morès would not discuss “the Buffalo Bill side” of life in Dakota. He was more interested in promoting Medora as a future capital of the beef industry. The little town’s population was put at 600, and it already boasted a newspaper, the Bad Lands Cowboy. De Morès was prepared to invest a million dollars in his enterprise, and was confident of profitable returns. “In his region, he says, are the most magnificent cattle farms to be found anywhere. Grass-fed cattle keep fat all Winter.”12