The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  ONE DAY THAT FALL—probably in early October, although the exact date is unknown—Roosevelt returned to his pied-à-terre at 422 Madison Avenue and, opening the front door, met Edith Carow coming down the stairs. For twenty months now, since the death of Alice Lee, he had successfully managed to avoid her. It had been impossible, however, to avoid hearing items of news about his childhood sweetheart, who was still Corinne’s closest friend and a regular visitor to Bamie’s house on days when he was not in town. He must have known of the rapid decline in the Carow family fortunes, following the death of her improvident father in 1883; of the decision by her mother and younger sister to live in Europe, where their eroded wealth might better support them; of Edith’s decision to go with them, having considered, and dismissed, the idea of marrying for money; of her curious aloofness, cloaked behind great sweetness of manner, which frustrated many a would-be beau; of evidence that poor “Edie,” at twenty-four, was already an old maid.76 But that latter item, at least, was mere negative rumor, whereas here, confronting him (had Bamie plotted this deliberately?), was positive reality. Edith was as alarmingly attractive as he had feared—even more so, perhaps, for she had matured into complex and exciting womanhood. He could not resist her.

  Nor could Edith resist him. The Theodore she saw was unrecognizably different from the Teedie she knew as a child, or the Teddy of more recent years. He was a mahogany-brown stranger, slim of leg and forearm, inclining to burliness about the head and shoulders. Most changed of all was the bull-like neck, heavy with muscle and bulging out of his city collar as if about to pop its studs. His hair was sun-bleached, and cropped shorter than she had ever seen it, making his massive head look even larger. Only the reddish-brown mustache had been allowed to sprout freely and droop at the corners in approved cowboy fashion. His toothy smile was the same, and the eyes behind the flashing spectacles were still big and childishly blue. But the corrugations of his mobile face had multiplied and were much more deeply etched than she could remember. Edith had to accept the fact that his boyish ingenuousness, which used to be one of his great charms, was gone. In its place were reassuring signs of wisdom and authority.

  Theodore, for his part, saw a woman of slender yet appealingly rounded figure, with small hands and feet which assumed semiballetic poses when she hesitated, as then, on a stair, in the knowledge that she was being examined. Whether the scrutiny was friendly or hostile, Edith flinched against it; her privacy was so intense, her sensitiveness so extreme, that she stiffened as if posing for an unwelcome photograph. Her own gaze—when she chose to direct it (for the wide-spaced eyes were usually set at an oblique angle)—was icy blue and uncomfortably penetrating. Its strength belied the general air of softness and shyness, and flashed the unmistakable warning, hurt me and I will hurt you more. Her jaw was firm, and her mouth was wide, tightly controlled at the corners. Smiles did not come easily. Yet they did come on occasion, and they transformed her amazingly, for her teeth were pretty, and her cheekbones elegant beneath the peach-like skin. Her most arresting feature, best seen in profile, was a long, sharp, yet classically beautiful nose, of the kind that Renaissance portraitists loved to draw in silverpoint. Here was a person of refinement and steely discipline, yet in the glow of her flesh there was a hint of earthiness, and much sexual potential.77

  No details are known about the meeting in the hallway, except that it occurred,78 and that it was, inevitably, followed by others. Whether these encounters were few or many—again the record is blank—they were certainly ardent, for on 17 November Theodore proposed marriage, and Edith accepted him.79

  THE ENGAGEMENT WAS KEPT a secret, even from their closest relatives. Should the merest whisper of it break out, polite society, just then convening for the season, would be scandalized. Roosevelt, after all, had been only twenty-one months a widower. To post, with such indecent haste, from the arms of Alice Lee to those of Edith Carow—having done the reverse seven years before—was hardly the conduct of a gentleman, let alone a politician famous for public moralizing. At all costs it must seem that Theodore and Edith had merely resumed an old family friendship. Announcement of the engagement must be put off for a year at least.80 In the meantime they could privately, carefully, adjust to the violent change which had taken place in their lives.

  LOVE AND POLITICS were not enough to drain Roosevelt’s well of vitality in the fall of 1885. If anything, they intensified its flow. During his free time at Sagamore Hill he threw himself into a new sport, as strenuous and bloodthirsty as any of his Western activities, albeit more elegant: hunting to hounds. He had experimented with it a few times before, but rather disdainfully, for the pursuit of the fox was at that time considered effete and un-American.81 But now, with the encouragement of Henry Cabot Lodge, an enthusiastic huntsman, he suddenly discovered in it the “stern and manly qualities” that had to justify all his amusements. Long Island’s Meadow-brook Hunt was certainly one of the toughest in the world: the Marquis de Morès told Roosevelt that he had never seen such stiff jumping.82

  Having formally adopted the pink coat, Roosevelt wore it as proudly as his buckskin tunic, and galloped after fox with the same energy he once devoted to buffalo. Often he was “in at the death” ahead of the huntmaster.83 Although the technique of riding wooded Long Island country was totally different from that he had acquired out West, he showed no fear of coming a serious cropper.

  On Saturday morning, 26 October, the hunt met at Sagamore Hill, and after the traditional stirrup cup set off over particularly rough country. High timber obstacles of five feet or more followed one upon another at a frequency of six to the mile. Some of these barriers were post-and-rail fences, as stiff as steel and deadly dangerous: even Filemaker, America’s best jumper, began to hang back nervously.84

  Roosevelt, riding a large, coarse stallion, led from the start. Careless of accidents which dislocated the huntmaster’s knee, smashed another rider’s ribs, and took half the skin off his brother-in-law’s face,85 he galloped in front for fully three miles. Eventually his exhausted horse began to go lame; at about the five-mile mark it tripped over a wall and pitched over into a pile of stones. Roosevelt’s face smashed against something sharp, and his left arm, only recently knit after the roundup fracture, snapped beneath the elbow. Yet he was back in the saddle as soon as the horse was up, and rushed on one-armed, determined not to miss the death. After five or six further jumps the bones of his broken arm slipped past one other, and it dangled beside him like a length of liverwurst; but this, and the blood pouring down his face, did not deter him from pounding across fifteen more fields. He had the satisfaction of finishing the hunt within a hundred yards of the other riders, and returned to Sagamore Hill looking “pretty gay … like the walls of a slaughter-house.”86 Baby Lee, who was waiting at the stable for him, ran away screaming from the bloody monster, and he pursued her, chortling.87

  Washed clean that night, his cut face plastered and his arm in splints, he presided over the Hunt Ball as laird of Sagamore. Edith Carow was his guest,88 and took her first cool survey of her future home. At midnight, Theodore Roosevelt turned twenty-seven. With his daughter asleep upstairs, his house full of music and laughter, and Edith at his side, he could abandon himself to bliss rendered piquant by pain. Later he wrote to Lodge: “I don’t grudge the broken arm a bit … I’m always ready to pay the piper when I’ve had a good dance; and every now and then I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it.”89

  “Here was a person of refinement … and much sexual potential.”

  Edith Kermit Carow at twenty-four. (Illustration 12.2)

  CHAPTER 13

  The Long Arm of the Law

  “Death be to the evil-doer!”

  With an oath King Olaf spoke;

  “But rewards to his pursuer!”

  And with wrath his face grew redder

  Than his scarlet cloak.

  UNABLE TO TEAR HIMSELF away from Edith, Roosevelt remained in the East for a “purely society winter,” as he c
alled it, of dinners, balls, and the Opera. At the height of the season, through January and February 1886, he was going out every other night.1 Fanny Smith Dana saw him often with Edith, yet suspected nothing: to an old family friend they looked as natural together as brother and sister.2

  What the couple were at pains to conceal in public, they also concealed in private. Page after page of Roosevelt’s diary for the period contains nothing but the cryptic initial “E.”3 One can only sigh for the rhapsodies of self-revelation that Alice Lee evoked. But Roosevelt had been a boy then, as much in love with love as with a girl. Now he was a man in love with a woman, and his passion was correspondingly deeper, more dignified. Edith was not the sort of person to encourage rhapsodies, anyway. She disapproved of excess, whether it be in language, behavior, clothes, food, or drink. Too much ardor was just as vulgar as too much cream on too many peaches—another Rooseveltian tendency she was determined to restrain. In her opinion, any revelation of the intimacies between lovers, even in a man’s diary, was abhorrent. The thought of such details ever becoming public obsessed her, to the point that “burn this letter” became a catch-phrase in her own correspondence. Her influence over Theodore was already sufficient to control his pen in the winter of 1885–86; yet it must be remembered that he, too, had become something of a self-censor. The mature Roosevelt wrote nothing that he could not entrust to posterity. Many of his purportedly “family” letters were quite obviously written for publication. On such occasions he signed himself formally THEODORE ROOSEVELT instead of his usual “Thee.”4 Only in his letters to Edith did he spill out his soul, in the secure knowledge that she would read, understand, and then destroy. By some freak chance one of these love letters has survived. Although written in old age, it is as passionate as anything he ever composed during his courtship of Alice Lee.

  “We took them absolutely by surprise.”

  Deputy Sheriff Roosevelt and his prisoners:

  Burnsted, Pfaffenbach, and Finnegan. (Illustration 13.1)

  They continued to suppress details of their engagement, and in later years Edith even went through family correspondence to weed out every single reference to it.5 Why she should be quite so secretive is unclear, for it flowered out into a famously successful marriage. Possibly there were quarrels, even estrangements; both she and Theodore were powerful personalities, used to getting their own way. Whatever the case, history must respect their fierce desire for privacy.

  As the season proceeded, Roosevelt saw more and more of Edith. He grew bored and restless when forced to socialize without her. “I will be delighted when I get settled down to work of some sort again,” he told Henry Cabot Lodge. “… To be a man of the world is not my strong point.”6 Lodge was now president of the Boston Advertiser, had contracted to write a life of George Washington for the prestigious American Statesmen series, and was determined to run again for Congress later in the year. On a trip to New York at the end of January, he projected such an air of purposeful industry that Roosevelt felt ashamed of his own dallying. “I trust that you won’t forget your happy-go-lucky friend,” he wrote, after Lodge’s return to Boston. “Anything connected with your visit makes me rather pensive.”7

  Lodge, meanwhile, had sympathetically pulled a few strings, with the result that Roosevelt also received a commission to write an American Statesmen book.8 His biography was to be of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the Western expansionist. It was an ideal subject for a young author of proven historical ability and intimate knowledge of life on the frontier. He accepted with delight, and plunged at once into his preliminary research.

  AS FEBRUARY MERGED into March, Roosevelt began to feel neglectful of his “backwoods babies” on the Elkhorn Ranch. They had not seen him for nearly six months, and their morale was surely low: he knew how depressing winter in the Badlands could be. If he did not go West soon, the pessimistic Bill Sewall might work himself into such a state of gloom as to ask for release from his contract. Will Dow would certainly follow suit. With Elkhorn now fully capitalized and turning over satisfactorily, Roosevelt could ill afford to lose either man.

  Edith, moreover, would not long detain him in the East. She had confirmed her decision to accompany her mother and sister to Europe in early spring, perhaps because she could not afford to remain behind, or more likely because she knew her absence would remove any lingering doubts Roosevelt might have about marrying her. (He was still racked with guilt about the memory of Alice Lee.) If, by next winter, he was ready to follow her across the Atlantic, a quiet wedding could be arranged in London.9

  So, on 15 March, after spending ten final days almost entirely with “E,” Roosevelt left New York for Medora.10

  ELKHORN RANCH

  March 20th 1886

  Darling Bysie [Bamie],

  I got out here all right, and was met at the station by my men; I was really heartily glad to see the great, stalwart, bearded fellows again, and they were as honestly pleased to see me. Joe Ferris is married, and his wife made me most comfortable the night I spent in town. Next morning snow covered the ground; but we pushed [on] to this ranch, which we reached long after sunset, the full moon flooding the landscape with light. There has been an ice gorge right in front of the house, the swelling mass of broken fragments having been pushed almost up to our doorstep … No horse could by any chance get across; we men have a boat, and even then it is most laborious carrying it out to the water; we work like Arctic explorers.

  Things are looking better than I expected; the loss by death has been wholly trifling. Unless we have a big accident I shall get through this all right; if not I can get started square with no debt.…

  Your loving brother

  THEE11

  THE ABOVE-MENTIONED BOAT was, like Roosevelt’s rubber bathtub, an object of some curiosity in the Badlands. There were, to be sure, a few scows tied up at various points along the valley, but often as not their keels rotted away from disuse. For most of the year the Little Missouri was too shallow even for a raft: cowboys galloped across it wherever they chose, barely wetting their horses’ bellies. In winter the river froze rapidly, and men and wolves traveled up and down it as if it were a highway.12

  Only in freak weather, such as that prevailing in March 1886, did the Elkhorn boat really come in useful. Sewall and Dow, who were experienced rivermen, kept it in beautiful trim. Small, light, and sturdy, it was available at a moment’s notice whenever they wanted to cross the river for meat, or to check up on their ponies.13

  Arctic conditions continued for days after Roosevelt’s arrival. At night, as he lay in bed, he could hear the ice-gorge growling and grinding outside. Floes were still coming down so thickly that the jam increased rather than diminished. If the ranch house had not been protected by a row of cottonwoods, it would have been overwhelmed by ice.14 Fortunately a central current of speeding water kept the gorge moving. To prevent the boat from being dragged away, Sewall roped it firmly to a tree.

  Early on the morning of 24 March, however, he went out onto the piazza and found the boat gone. It had been cut loose with a knife; nearby, at the edge of the water, somebody had dropped a red woolen mitten.15

  Roosevelt reacted so angrily on hearing this news that he had to be dissuaded from saddling Manitou and thundering off in instant pursuit of the thieves.16 A horse, Sewall pointed out, was of little use when the river was walled off on both sides with ice. Roosevelt would never get within a mile of the men in his boat: all they had to do was keep floating downstream (the current was such they could not possibly have gone upstream) until he gave up, or galloped to his death across the gorge. There was only one thing to do: build a makeshift scow and follow them. The thieves probably felt secure in the knowledge that they had stolen the only serviceable boat on the Little Missouri, and would therefore be in no hurry. He had at least an even chance of catching them. Roosevelt agreed, and sent to Medora for a bag of nails.17

  It was not the value of his loss that annoyed him: the Elkhorn boat was worth a mere thirty do
llars. But he was, by virtue of his chairmanship of the Stockmen’s Association, a deputy sheriff of Billings County, and bound (at least by his own stern moral code) to pursue any lawbreakers. Besides, he had been intending to use the boat on a cougar hunt that very day, and his soul thirsted for revenge. He knew very well who the thieves were: “three hard characters who lived in a shack, or hut, some twenty miles above us, and whom we had shrewdly suspected for some time of wishing to get out of the country, as certain of the cattlemen had begun openly to threaten to lynch them.”18 Charges of horse-stealing had been leveled against their leader, “Redhead” Finnegan, a long-haired gunman of vicious reputation. (During the previous summer he had blasted half the buildings in Medora with his buffalo-gun, in consequence of a practical joke played on him while drunk.)19 Finnegan’s associates were a half-breed named Burnsted, and a half-wit named Pfaffenbach. All three men must be desperate, or they would never have made a break in such weather; if chased, they would certainly shoot for their lives.

  While Sewall and Dow labored with hammers and chisels, Roosevelt, ever the schismatic, began to write Thomas Hart Benton. He completed Chapter 1 on 27 March, by which time the boat, a flat-bottomed scow, was ready.20 But a furious blizzard delayed their departure for three more days. Roosevelt soothed his impatience with a literary letter to Cabot Lodge. “I have got some good ideas in the first chapter, but I am not sure they are worked up rightly; my style is rough, and I do not like a certain lack of sequitur that I do not seem able to get rid of.” Casually mentioning that he was about to start downriver “after some horse thieves,” he added, “I shall take Matthew Arnold along.”21 He also took Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and a camera to record his capture of the thieves. Already he was thinking what a good illustrated article this would make for Century magazine.22