The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  98. Mor.42; Grant, “Seventies.”

  99. Qu. Wis. 14–15.

  100. Wis.15.

  101. Ib.

  102. Ib.

  103. Mor.45 ff., with TR.Pri.Di. passim, form the basis of this paragraph.

  104. See also Roosevelt, Nicholas, TR: The Man as I Knew Him (Dodd, Mead, 1967) 99 on TR’s highly individual tennis style. TR.Pri.Di. July 29, 1880.

  105. Ib., Mar. 25, 1880.

  106. Thayer, TR, 20–1.

  107. Welling, “Harvard,” offers the most detailed (and negative) analysis of TR’s thesis.

  108. Qu. ib.

  109. Laughlin, “Harvard,” 394.

  110. See Wag.87–90. TR’s thesis qu. Welling, “Harvard.”

  111. Put.184; Harvard Register, July 1880, 143–4; TR.Pri.Di. June 30, 1880. TR’s marks in his senior year were lower than those of previous years, but high enough to win him his Phi Beta Kappa key. There had been an attrition of 20 students in his class. In later life TR made light of his academic career, saying only that he was “a reasonably good student”; but as one classmate pointed out, his overall average matched those of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. TR.Auto.25; Wilhelm, Donald, TR as an Undergraduate (Luce, 1910) 24. On this Commencement Day, Henry Cabot Lodge marched in the procession as a Marshal, and John D. Long gave the main address.

  112. TR.Pri.Di. June 29, 1880.

  113. Put.198, Hag.Boy.63; Woo.118. TR kept the secret for thirty-five years. Not until January 1915 did he admit to an old classmate that “when he left college the doctors warned him of weakness of the heart.”

  114. Hag.Boy.63; TR.Pri.Di. Feb. 10, 1880.

  115. Ib., July 1, 1880.

  116. Ib., July 4, 1880.

  117. Hag.RF.6; TR, Notes on Some of the Birds of Oyster Bay; Natural History Notes, passim; Mor.73.

  118. Qu. Put.200.

  119. Mor.45.

  120. She managed to take enough time off to win the Mount Desert Ladies’ Tennis Tournament.

  121. Qu. Put.199.

  122. Put.201 ff.; Rob.113; qu. Put.205.

  123. TR to MBR, Aug. 25, 1880; Mor.46.

  124. TR to B, Sep. 2, 1880 (TRB).

  125. TR.Pri.Di. Sep. 1880, passim; Put.205–7. E to B, Sep. 12, 1880: “I think he misses Alice poor dear old beloved brother. But I try to keep him at something else all the time.”

  126. Mor.46.

  127. Put.208.

  128. Qu. Put.209.

  129. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 6, 1880. This paragraph based on: TR to MBR, Oct. 21, 1880 (TRB); qu. Put.209; ib., 210.

  130. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 13, 1880.

  5: THE POLITICAL HACK

  Important sources not in Bibliography: 1. Letters to and from the Roosevelt family and Elliott Roosevelt, traveling in Europe and the Orient, 1880–1881, in FDR.

  1. Par.43; Put.210 and fn.

  2. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 27, 1880. TR’s college Bible is marked at the following passage in Prov. V: “Let thy fountain be blessed; and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.”

  3. Ib.; TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 28, 1880; Put.209.

  4. TR to B, Nov. 10, 1880; Mor.47; TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 4, 1880.

  5. Ib.

  6. Ib., Nov. 1–9, 1880.

  7. Ib., Nov. 13–4, 1880. Elliott Roosevelt was not there: he had left on Nov. 7 for an extended tour of Europe and the Orient. See Las. and Roosevelt, Eleanor, ed., Hunting Big Game in the Eighties (Scribners, 1933) for accounts of his travels.

  8. TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 18, 1881; qu. Rii.36–7.

  9. Put.217.

  10. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 17, 1880; MBR to E, Nov. 27, 1880 (FDR).

  11. Film footage preserved in the Library of Congress documents TR’s rapid walking style.

  12. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 17, 1880; Bigelow, Poultney, Seventy Summers (London, 1925) 273; Bar Association of New York, In Memoriam Theodore William Dwight (1892).

  13. Put.217; Bigelow, Summers, 273; Bar Assoc., Dwight, passim; “Life in the old Law School,” Columbia Spectator, Nov. 1, 1878.

  14. Bigelow, Summers, 273; Put.218; Bar Assoc., Dwight, passim.

  15. Put.218–9; TR.Auto.55; Bigelow, Summers, 273.

  16. Bigelow, Summers, 273–4.

  17. Put.219; Joseph A. Lawson in New York State, A Memorial to TR (1919), 53. TR’s law notebooks are preserved in the Columbia Law Library (7 vols.).

  18. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 17, 1880 and passim; Put.219; TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 4, 1880.

  19. Put.221; TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 24, 1881.

  20. Ib., May 2, 1881; Put.220. TR’s other “literary project” was a beautifully written account of an ornithological sailing expedition during which he and Elliott came near to death in a storm. Entitled Sou’ Sou’ Southerly, it was completed in March 1881 but remained unpublished in TR’s lifetime. It finally saw light in Gray’s Sporting Journal 13 (1988) 3.

  21. TR.Auto.24.

  22. See TR.Wks.VI for the complete text of Naval War. See also “Roosevelt as Historian” in Evening Post (N.Y.) Jan. 25, 1919.

  23. Naval War, ch. 1; MBR to E, Nov. 27, 1880.

  24. TR.Pri.Di. passim and Jan. 3, 1881; Brown, H. C., ed., New York in the Elegant Eighties: Valentine’s Manual of Old New York (NY, 1927) passim; TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 22, 1880; MBR to E, Dec. 4, 1880 (FDR); Brown, Valentine’s, 6.

  25. Put.228; Churchill, Allen, The Splendor Seekers (Grosset & Dunlap, 1974) 63; New York Times, Dec. 9, 1880; TR to E, Dec. 6, 1880 (FDR).

  26. O’Connor, Richard, The Golden Summers (Putnam, 1974) 50–1; MBR to E, Dec. 10, 1880, and Jan. 2, 12, 1881. TR was greatly amused when Mrs. Astor, hearing of the death of the Tsar later in the season, remarked, “Mr. Roosevelt, they are attacking us all over the world.” (Mor.130) TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 6, 1881; O’Connor, Summers, 55–6.

  27. TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 1880-Feb. 1881; ib., Dec. 11, 1880.

  28. Unidentified contributor to Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 19, 1901.

  29. Brown, Valentine’s, passim.

  30. Churchill, Seekers, 68; TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 6, 1881.

  31. Wis.24.

  32. Leary int., FRE.; TR.Auto.57; Abbot, Lawrence F., Impressions of TR (Doubleday, 1919) 36–37.

  33. Ib., Pri.59. Morton Hall stood on the south side of 59th St. between Fifth and Madison avenues. The 21st District comprised the area between Seventh and Lexington from 40th to 59th Street south, and between 8th and Lexington from 59th Street north to 86th.

  34. TR.Auto.56–7; Pri.46, 59; Leary Int., FRE.; Hag.Boy.66.

  35. See TR.Auto.57 for an explanation of the clublike, elective nature of the Republican Association. “As a friend of mine picturesquely phrased it, I ‘had to break into the organization with a jimmy.’ ”

  36. Emlen Roosevelt int., FRE. But the Roosevelts, as old Knickerbockers, had been influential in politics until Civil War times. Disdain for grubby politics was a comparatively recent phenomenon, owing much to the Boss Tweed and Grant Administration scandals of the 1870s.

  37. Ib.; TR.Auto.57; Thayer, TR, 27.

  38. TR.Auto.57.

  39. Put.248.

  40. Rob.106.

  41. Cowles Microfilm, TRB.

  42. TR.Auto.57.

  43. Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart at Farewell History Lecture, Harvard (1926) un. clip, TRB.

  44. Savell, Isabelle K., Daughter of Vermont: A Biography of Emily Eaton Hepburn (NY, 1952) 106.

  45. Put.241; TR.Auto.57; Edward C. Riggs in PRI.n.

  46. Put.241; Riggs in PRI. n.

  47. TR.Auto.58; TR to Eleanora Kissel Inicutt, June 28, 1901 (TRB); TR.Pri.Di. passim; TR.Auto.58.

  48. TR.Pri.Di. Mar. 14, 1881.

  49. Ib., Apr. 8; Put.241; Hag.Boy.67.

  50. TR.Auto.61.

  51. Ib.; TR.Pri.Di. May 11, 1881 (baggage list in year-end expenses section); ib., May 12.

  52. Ib., May 18, 1881.

  53. Mor.47; TR.Pri.Di. May 21, 22, 1881.

  54. TR.Pri.Di. passim; Put.229; TR to B, May 24, 1881 (TRB).

  55. TR.Pri.Di. May 25, 1881; Mor.48–9; TR.Pri.Di. June 1; Mor.48.

  56. Ib.;
TR.Pri.Di. June 11–27, 1881; Mor.49; TR to B, July 3, 1881 (TRB).

  57. TR.Pri.Di. July 5, 6, 1881.

  58. Put.244–5; Sto.112 ff.

  59. Put.245; Sto.112 ff. The assassin, Charles Guiteau, had shrieked after firing, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts!” For a post-mortem and meticulously detailed day-by-day account of Garfield’s last days, see Doyle, Burton T., Lives of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (Washington, 1881).

  60. TR.Pri.Di. July 8, 1881.

  61. Put.232; TR.Pri.Di. July 15–29, 1881.

  62. Mor.49; Put.232. Alice begged one of TR’s Harvard classmates, who happened to be staying in Zermatt, to dissuade him from climbing the Matterhorn. But TR was adamant. “I shall climb the mountain.” Gilman, Bradley, Roosevelt the Happy Warrior (Little, Brown, 1921) 62.

  63. Mor.49–50.

  64. Mor.50; Put.221.

  65. TR’s sartorial acquisitions in London included some Savile Row dress suits and (to Mittie’s horror) “two or three satin waist coats—purple, pale yellow, and blue and one rich black silk one.” She eventually grew to like the last, but “the others if others wore them would be very handsome.” (MBR to E, Dec. 4, 1881, FDR.)

  66. Mor.52; Pri.47; Igl.121–2.

  67. Qu. Put.236.

  68. For an exhaustive analysis of TR’s law studies at Columbia, see Robert B. Charles, “Legal Education in the Late Nineteenth Century, Through the Eyes of Theodore Roosevelt,” The American Journal of Legal History 37 (July 1993) 3. This article, based on Charles’s discovery of more than 1,100 pages of TR’s law notes, is a major corrective to the long-held view of historians that TR lacked legal sophistication.

  69. TR.Auto.57; TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 6, 1881.

  70. Abbot, Impressions, 37–9; Put.241.

  71. Hag.Boy. 67 ff.

  72. Ib.; Put.241; TR.Auto.58–64; Thayer, TR, 29.

  73. TR.Auto.61; Charles Dumas to Henry F. Pringle, Apr. 2, 1929, PRI.n.; Abbot, Impressions, 37–9.

  74. Ib., 39; Hag.Boy.70; Abbot, Impressions, 40.

  75. Abbot’s record of this conversation is actually a stenographic transcript of Joe Murray’s own account, told in the smoking-car of a train to Saratoga in 1910. It closely tallies with another version by Murray in TRB.

  76. Abbot, Impressions, 39–41. Mitchell, who later became a U.S. District Attorney, liked to claim in old age that he, not Murray, “was the first person who recognized the practical politician in TR.” See N.Y. Sun, May 31, 1904. Barney Biglin, another of Hess’s lieutenants, also claimed kingmaking honors. TR himself, in his memoirs, settled these and other conflicting claims with a gracious tribute to Joe Murray. “It was not my fight [in 1881], it was Joe’s; and it was to him that I owe my entry into politics.” As President, TR issued his old patron a card: “Joseph Murray to see me at all times and in all places he may wish to see me.” (TR.Auto.61; PRI.n.)

  77. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 28, 1881; Put.244.

  78. TR.Pri.Di. Oct. 28, 1881. “We somehow knew the boy was right,” a Roosevelt cousin admitted. “We early recognized that Theodore had a great dream in him … and that dream was a pure government.” Emlen Roosevelt int., FRE.

  79. Thayer, TR, 30; Sul.385.

  80. Facsimile of N.Y. T. quote in Lor. 190.

  81. TR.Pri.Di. Nov. 1, 1881; TR.Har.Scr.

  82. Lor.192 (facsimile).

  83. Ib.; TR.Auto.61-2.

  84. Put.248; un. clip in letter from B to C, 1881 (n.d.) TRC.

  85. TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 3, 1881. Around this time TR bought a share of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, set up a desk there, and declared himself a “silent partner” in the firm. George Haven Putnam, the president, was doubtful. “Can we think of Roosevelt being silent in any association?” Predictably, TR was soon instructing Putnam in “how to run a publishing business,” and producing such a flood of unworkable editorial ideas that his departure for Albany caused sighs of relief. G. H. Putnam in Century Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1919), 37. See also Putnam in “Roosevelt, Historian and Statesman,” TR.Wks.IX.xvi.

  86. Admiral W. M. Sims in TR.Wks.VI. xvii; Bea.4; N.Y. Tribune, Oct. 16, 1886. For sample reviews, see N.Y.T., June 5, 1882 (“The volume is an excellent one in every respect”); Army and Navy Journal, May 27 (“easy command of material … broad reasoning … excellent historical perspective … masterly manner”); Philadelphia Bulletin in TR.Scr. (“a rich contribution to our national history”); N.Y. Evening Post in ib. (“remarkable and worthy of high praise”); Saturday Review (GB), June 24, 1882 (“very little disposition to national self-laudation … none whatever to abuse or depreciate the enemy”). The Naval War of 1812 is still available (2001) as a Modern Library reprint.

  87. Her.196; Gable, John A., TR as Historian and Man of Letters, intro. to TR’s Gouverneur Morris, Bicentennial Ed. (Oyster Bay, 1975), vii.

  88. TR.Wks.VI.46–7.

  89. Ib., 98.

  90. Ib., 32.

  91. Ib., 223, 226–8.

  92. Ib., 372, 114; Preface.

  93. Hag.Boy.61; Sims in TR.Wks. VI.xiv.

  94. TR.Pri.Di. Dec. 6, 21, 1881; MBR to E, Dec. 10.

  95. Mor.55.

  6: THE CYCLONE ASSEMBLYMAN

  1. TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 2, 1882.

  2. Ib.; Albany Illustrated (H. R. Page Co., 1892); Phelps, H. P., ed., The Albany Handbook, 1881 and 1884; Put.249. The text’s assumption that TR stayed at the Delavan House is based on the following facts: it was the depot hotel; it functioned as Albany’s political headquarters; lastly, George F. Spinney recalled his presence there later that night. (See HUN. passim, and Put.250.)

  3. TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 2, 1882.

  4. Phelps, Handbook; Albany Argus, Jan. 3, 1882. Sunset on Jan. 2 was at 4:40 p.m., the exact time of arrival of the New York express. Other meteorological details from Albany Argus, Jan. 1 and 3.

  5. Roseberry, Cecil R., Capitol Story (ill.), New York State, 1964, 9; Phelps, Handbook, 19.

  6. N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 3.

  7. Roseberry, Capitol, 31.

  8. The last sentence closely follows TR in TR.Wks.XIII. 47.

  9. Put.250; New York Times, Jan. 3, 1882, states that Jan. 2 was the coldest day of the winter thus far in Albany. “Those who climbed the hill to the Capitol … encountered a cold penetrating blast that chilled everything before it.”

  10. The author, who prides himself on his resistance to cold, followed TR’s route in 15-degree weather; although he was well covered, and the day calm, he arrived at the Capitol groaning.

  11. Phelps, Handbook; Schuyler, Montgomery, “A Dream of the New Albany,” Scribner’s, Dec. 1879; Roseberry, Capitol, 45–6. The Golden Corridor is now a row of shabby offices.

  12. Trib., Jan. 3, 1882. Some Republicans were missing: the total House strength was 61.

  13. See, e.g., But.233.

  14. John Walsh in Kansas City Star, Feb. 12, 1922.

  15. Albany correspondent of the New York Star, qu. TRB mss.; Sul.227; New York Sun, Jan. 3, 1882.

  16. TR.Auto.64; N.Y. Sun correspondent (see Note 15).

  17. Sul.215; HUN.23; Put.251 n.

  18. Isaac Hunt, supplementary statement in HUN.34; Put.251.

  19. Citations of this diary refer to the published version in Mor.1469–73.

  20. Isaac Hunt has anecdotes concerning the original Ms. of this diary, which startled him considerably when he first read it in TR’s Albany room. It struck him as libelous, and indeed TR seems to have been the victim of a libel suit later in the season; whether or not the diary caused it Hunt does not say. See HUN. passim.

  21. Mor.1470.

  22. Ib., 1471.

  23. Ib., 1469–73.

  24. Ib., 1469.

  25. Put.255 gives a typical ballot. (N.B.: his phrase “necessary for choice 61” applies to a day when only 120 members were voting.)

  26. Auto.91; Mor.1469.

  27. TR.Wks.XIII.57; Phelps, Handbook, and Albany Illustrated, passim.

  28. MBR to E, Jan. 8, 1882 (FDR).

  29. Anna Bulloch Gracie diaries in
TRC, passim; Mrs. Joseph Alsop Sr. in TRB mss.; Anna Bulloch Gracie to E, Jan. 8, 1882 (FDR).

  30. HUN.42. Hunt was nearly seventy at the time he recalled this first meeting with TR (see Bibl.). He placed it “in the early part of the first session,” saying that the caucus had been called to discuss a proposed Republican-Democratic “deal” regarding appointments. If so, the meeting took place on Feb. 21, 1882. But TR, in his Legislative Diary, Jan. 10, writes enthusiastically about some fellow-members “from the country,” doubtless including Hunt; and since there was a caucus on appointments around this time (Put.250) Hunt was probably confusing the one with the other. The author therefore assumes, as Putnam does, that the meeting took place at the earlier caucus. In any case the date matters less than Hunt’s vivid memory of TR’s appearance and behavior.

  31. Hunt, supplementary statement, HUN.32.

  32. Ib., 33.

  33. Ib. A Harvard classmate recalled to Bradley Gilman how TR had once pounced on him, overwhelmed him with a barrage of questions, then withdrawn as suddenly and picked up something to read. “He was just bored with me. That was all. He had drained me of the information he sought.” Gilman, Roosevelt the Happy Warrior (Little, Brown, 1921) 49.

  34. Hunt, supplementary statement, HUN.33.

  35. HUN.75.

  36. TR.Pri.Di. Jan. 13, 1882; Mor.56. Elsewhere Alice is, e.g., “Baby,” “little darling Alicey,” and “poor baby-wife.”

  37. Pri.48; HUN.22; Hunt, supplementary statement, 23.

  38. HUN.50; TR.Auto.65; HUN.84–5. George Spinney told the story of the blanket-tossing incident in ib. The word “balls” was erased from the typed transcript, although five symbolic spaces remain. The story sounds apocryphal, but Spinney reminded TR of it in early January 1907, and the President was highly amused. “That was a mighty good letter of yours and sounded so like the Spinney of twenty-five years ago that it made me laugh as I read it.” (Mor.5.559).

  39. HUN.85 ff.; supplementary details from James Taylor in TRB mss. Other versions of this incident have TR flattening three toughs at a tavern outside town, and knocking out a Tammany spoiler at the entrance to the Delavan House. All share the Rooseveltian qualities of lightning response to any hostility, and aristocratic contempt for the provoker. See, e.g., Gilman, Warrior, 74.

  40. Phelps, Handbook, 24; Roseberry, Capitol, 46 ff. The ceiling is now boarded up.