Roosevelt received the welcome news in a telegram from New York the following morning. Isaac Hunt would long recall the joyful scene in the assembly that morning when all present congratulated him on the news. “He was full of life and happiness.” Despite an ambivalent report that his mother was “only fairly well,” Theodore had no reason to suspect her condition was anything out of the ordinary.
The family at 57th Street, however, was rapidly becoming aware of considerable cause for worry. The attending doctor recognized the symptoms Alice was developing as signs of acute Bright’s disease, perhaps resulting from an infection that had inflamed her kidneys. Alice could easily have attributed the complications of the disease—back pain, vomiting, puffiness of the face, and distention of the body—to her advanced pregnancy. By the time the diagnosis was made, fluid had likely accumulated in Alice’s lungs, restricting her ability to breathe.
Mittie, meanwhile, slipped in and out of consciousness. The enervating advance of what was indeed acute typhoid racked Theodore’s mother with high fever, diarrhea, vomiting, and a worsening dehydration. As in many cases, the disease had progressed “somewhat insidiously,” with early symptoms of headache, lassitude, and feverishness that gave way to prostration, delirium, internal hemorrhage, and a “coma vigil” when less than a day of life remained.
A second telegram was dispatched to Albany, advising Theodore to come home at once. The thickening fog that stalled the progress of his train ride to New York mirrored his despair. For nearly two weeks, New Yorkers had endured a string of what the Times called “suicidal” days, “dark, foggy, depressing, and dismal.” Visibility was drastically diminished in the pervasive fog, which stalled traffic on the river and railways when signals became invisible. Ferryboats were unable to run; horses jostled one another on the streets; the elevated railway ran off its tracks. “There is,” the Times remarked, “something suggestive of death and decay in the dampness that fills the world, clings to the house door, drips from the fences, coats the streets with liquid nastiness, moistens one’s garments, and paints the sky lead-color.”
The fog that forced Theodore’s train to creep along also delayed the return of Corinne and Douglas Robinson from a brief visit to Baltimore. Elliott met them at the door. “There is a curse on this house!” he said. “Mother is dying, and Alice is dying, too.” It was nearly midnight when Theodore finally reached home. Racing up to the third floor, he found Alice in a state of semi-consciousness. He held her gently, refusing to leave her side, until he was informed that if he wished to see his mother one last time, he had better come downstairs. At three o’clock that morning, surrounded by her children, Mittie died. She was only forty-nine. Returning to the third floor, Theodore once more enfolded his wife in an embrace. By two o’clock that dismal St. Valentine’s Day afternoon, twenty-two-year-old Alice Lee Roosevelt was also dead. Roosevelt’s private diary for that day contains a single, desolate entry. Beneath a large X he wrote: “The light has gone out of my life.”
“Seldom, if ever, has New York society received such a shock,” observed the New York World when word spread that Roosevelt’s wife and mother had died in a single day. When the news of the twin deaths reached Albany, the assembly took an action “wholly unprecedented in the legislative annals of the State or country,” voting unanimously to adjourn until the following Monday evening in recognition of “the desolating blow” suffered by its revered colleague. One assemblyman after another rose to show Roosevelt that he had companions in grief. “It has never been my experience to stand in the presence of such a sorrow as this,” said one speaker. Isaac Hunt’s voice filled with affection as he spoke of his “particular friend.” He called upon his colleagues to appreciate “the uncertainty of human life” and use their remaining hours “to improve the opportunities of the present—to act well our part upon this stage of action.” Witnessing the overwhelming emotions in the chamber, one reporter stated that “no sadder meeting of the Legislature has ever been held.”
Theodore remained “in a dazed, stunned state” throughout the double funeral at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church and the burial at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. “He does not know what he does or says,” observed his former tutor, Arthur Cutler. “I fear he sleeps little, for he walks a great deal in the night,” Corinne told Elliott, “and his eyes have that strained red look.”
Six years earlier, his father’s death had taught Theodore that frantic activity was the only way to keep sorrow at bay. “If I had very much time to think,” he had said then, “I should almost go crazy.” Now he determined to return to the assembly as soon as possible. “I shall come back to my work at once,” he told one friend. “There is now 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.”
He returned “a changed man,” Hunt recalled. “From that time on there was a sadness about his face that he never had before.” When Hunt tried to console his friend, he soon discovered that Theodore “did not want anybody to sympathize with him. It was a grief that he had in his own soul.” He recorded his pain only in his private diary, and even there the account was spare: “We spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others. For joy or sorrow my life has now been lived out.”
Roosevelt’s inability to express and share his grief over the loss of his wife finally locked into an obsessive refusal to speak of her at all. As planned, he allowed the baby to be christened Alice, but in letters to his sister Bamie, with whom the child had gone to live, he referred to her simply as “Baby Lee.” “There can never be another Alice to me,” he confessed to a friend, “nor could I have another, not even her own child, bear her name.” Almost all his love letters to Alice from Harvard were destroyed, along with most of the pictures and mementoes of their courtship. To dwell on the loss, he believed, was “both weak and morbid.”
Roosevelt had at first been thrilled to realize that his baby shared her birthday with Abraham Lincoln, one whose high and profound character he considered without parallel. Yet the manner in which his hero had dealt with the death of his ten-year-old son Willie from a typhoid epidemic that swept Washington in 1862 could hardly have differed more from Roosevelt’s response to the loss of his wife and the needs of their child. Rather than dispose of all reminders and mementoes, Lincoln cherished every vestige of his son’s life: a painting by the child adorned his mantelpiece; he spent hours leafing through a scrapbook in which Willie had followed the various battles of the war; and he told countless stories about his son to visitors and friends. Believing that the dead continue only in the minds of the living, Lincoln willfully maintained an intense connection with his dead son. In starkest contrast to Lincoln’s fervent determination to consecrate a part of his daily life to his child is Roosevelt’s systematic suppression of his wife’s memory. Indeed, Roosevelt’s Autobiography, written three decades later, failed even to recognize that his first wife had ever lived. And years later, when his niece had lost her fiancé, he likewise advised her “to treat the past as past, the event as finished and out of her life. . . . Let her never speak one word of the matter, henceforth.”
UPON HIS RETURN TO ALBANY, Roosevelt immersed himself in the long hours of work. The routine of the daily sessions and the camaraderie of his fellow legislators worked to mitigate his misery, just as the circumscribed world of Harvard had offered refuge from the pain of his father’s death. “We are now holding evening sessions and I am glad we are,” he told Bamie; “indeed the more we work the better I like it.” In the weeks that followed, his Committee on the Cities conducted a series of dramatic investigations, and eventually nine reform bills were reported to the floor. He was able to secure passage of the most vital of these, including his bill to diminish the scope of the machine-controlled Board of Aldermen by centralizing responsibility in the hands of the mayor. The brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast celebrated Roosevelt’s success in a Harper’s Weekly caricatur
e of the young Republican legislator holding out reform bills to receive the signature of Democratic governor Grover Cleveland. Entitled “Reform Without Bloodshed,” the cartoon juxtaposed the bipartisan “Law and Order” triumph in New York with the corruption warping Cincinnati’s legal system. Cincinnati’s woes were illustrated by headlines announcing the deadly riots and destruction in the wake of the shocking verdict in William Berner’s murder trial.
Yet Roosevelt was thwarted in other reform measures, according to William Hudson of the Brooklyn Eagle, because his bills were badly constructed. Cleveland felt compelled to veto them, certain they would embroil the state in “prolonged and expensive litigation.” Roosevelt was furious. “You must not veto those bills,” he told Cleveland. “I can’t have it, and I won’t have it.” The governor could not be dissuaded. “As debate is his strong point,” an editorialist observed of the young Roosevelt, “so parliamentary procedure is his weak one.” Too often, the critique concluded, he dives into legislative waters “without considering whether broken bottles or blue water are below him. With more attention to these necessary preliminaries and several years’ additional experience, he will be fitted for the larger field of national politics.”
That involvement in national politics, however, came sooner than even Roosevelt anticipated. During the weeks before the Republican Convention in June 1884, he had joined a group of reformers that included a new friend, Massachusetts state legislator Henry Cabot Lodge. The reformers backed the presidential candidacy of George F. Edmunds, an honorable but little-known senator from Vermont, over the two leading contenders, President Chester Arthur and James Blaine. While Arthur’s admirable performance as president in the wake of Garfield’s assassination had surprised reformers, Roosevelt could never forgive the man who had defeated his father for the collectorship. And Blaine, to his mind, was “by far the most objectionable, because his personal honesty, as well as his faithfulness as a public servant, are both open to question.”
At the convention, Roosevelt and the small band of reformers fought tirelessly to bring in votes for Edmunds, but in the end widespread popular support for Blaine carried the nomination. “Our defeat is an overwhelming rout,” Roosevelt admitted to Bamie. The choice of Blaine “speaks badly for the intelligence of the mass of my party,” he ruefully continued. “It may be that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ in fifty one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.” Still, he concluded, “I am glad to have been present at the convention, and to have taken part in its proceedings; it was a historic scene.”
“Although not a very old man, I have yet lived a great deal in my life,” the twenty-six-year-old Roosevelt confided to a reporter friend during the Edmunds campaign, “and I have known sorrow too bitter and joy too keen to allow me to become either cast down or elated for more than a very brief period over any success or defeat.” Despite an almost pathological reticence in his personal life, it seemed the recent devastating losses had put the vagaries of politics into perspective.
His three terms in the New York State Assembly had provided Roosevelt with considerable reason for pride and satisfaction in his accomplishments. He had led the fight against Judge Westbrook and been instrumental in the passage of both the cigar bill and civil service reform. He had steered landmark governmental reform bills through his committee and on the floor. Passion and pridefulness might have occasioned some arrogant foolishness, but his perceptiveness and diligence allowed him to develop broader, more effective strategies in the wake of these mistakes. His rigorous honesty and independence inspired adulation in young reformers, and old-timers began to treat him with grudging respect.
The assembly had proved a “great school” for Roosevelt. He had learned to cooperate with colleagues far removed from his patrician background, even those he had initially dismissed as “stupid looking scoundrels” and illiterate thugs. He had come a long way from the Harvard prig who found it necessary to ascertain if a prospective friend’s social standing was equal to the status of his own family. “We did not agree in all things,” he later said of his colleagues, “but we did in some, and those we pulled at together. That was my first lesson in real politics. . . . If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.”
Though he insisted that he would stay in public life only if he could remain true to his principles, his singular success in the rough-and-tumble world of the state assembly revealed a temperament supremely suited for politics, strife, and competition. He thrived in the cauldron, functioning best when dramatic moral issues were at stake. He fought with gusto against fraud and corruption, delivering speeches studded with bold and original turns of phrase. “Words with me are instruments,” Roosevelt said, and so they were—instruments to galvanize the emotions of the people in spirited battles for reform. “There is little use,” he liked to say, “for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.” When his critics fought back, he relished the fight, believing that “only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor,” would victory be won.
TAFT STEADFASTLY SHUNNED THE VERY spotlight Roosevelt craved. He preferred to fight his battles from the inside, trusting logic, reason, and the careful recitation of facts. A conciliator by nature, Taft was never comfortable when called upon to deliver partisan diatribes at political rallies. Though reluctant to stir controversy, or give avoidable offense, Taft was not ready to compromise his principles for approval or expediency. He had demonstrated quiet courage in his fight against Tom Campbell and his refusal to fire conscientious workers simply because of their political preferences.
William Taft’s amiable disposition and jovial countenance, evident from his earliest days, earned the goodwill and cooperation of family, friends, and colleagues alike. Within the family, Horace recalled, his brother often assumed the role of mediator. His keen perception and empathy allowed him to resolve the little conflicts that inevitably arose among parents and siblings. In his professional world, Taft’s skill in developing relationships proved vital to his ascent. He established a rapport with a diverse cadre of mentors, from Murat Halstead and Miller Outcault to Benjamin Butterworth, Major Lloyd, and finally, Joseph Foraker.
Always plagued by procrastination and insecurity, Taft struggled to turn this intuitive emotional intelligence inward to access his own desires and use that knowledge to steer his life and career accordingly. Had he been able accurately to analyze the root of his unhappiness in the collector’s office, he might have understood that his temperament was not suited for the turbulent world of politics. He detested political gamesmanship, found no pleasure in giving speeches, and chafed at public criticism. Yet, just as his desire to please Benjamin Butterworth had led him to take the collector’s job, so, in the years ahead, his anxiety to please Nellie Herron—the complex woman who would become his wife—would eventually lead him away from his beloved law into the often scathing vortex of political life.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nellie Herron Taft
Nellie Herron, ca. 1886, the year she married William Howard Taft.
EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD NELLIE HERRON was enjoying her debutante season when she was introduced to twenty-two-year-old Will Taft. “It was at a coasting party,” she wrote years later, recalling a merry gathering where young people went sledding down a steep snow-covered Mt. Auburn hill. Though their parents were acquainted and their younger sisters, Maria and Fanny, were close friends, Nellie and Will had not met before this festive night. “Tall and slender with fine gray eyes and soft brown hair,” Nellie was described as handsome rather than beautiful, with a smile that “lights up her whole countenance.”
; Nellie was the fourth of eleven children born to Harriet Collins and John Herron. She was raised with five sisters and two brothers, while three other siblings had died in infancy. Although her mother, Harriet, was born in Lowville, New York, a hamlet in the Adirondack foothills, the family was connected with a larger world of culture and politics. Harriet’s father, Eli Collins, had served in the New York State Assembly and the U.S. Congress before his sudden death when she was eleven. Six years later, Harriet moved to Ohio to reside with her older brother. There, she met and married twenty-six-year-old lawyer John Herron.
John Herron had been a Miami University of Ohio schoolmate of future president Benjamin Harrison. When Herron opened his law practice in Cincinnati, he shared an office with another man who would be president, Rutherford B. Hayes. “Quite like living my college life over again,” Hayes recorded in his diary. “We sleep on little hard mattresses in a little room cooped off from one end of our office.” The lifelong friendship that developed between Herron and Hayes would eventually include their wives, Harriet and Lucy. Years later, Harriet said of Lucy that she “had no other friend with whom there has been such freedom of intimacy, none other so ready to respond with generous sympathy.” This bond between the two couples would play a significant role in shaping Nellie Herron’s ambitions.
When Hayes became governor of Ohio in 1869, he nominated his good friend Herron to the superior court. Herron hungered for the post but could not afford to relinquish his law practice. His wife’s hankering for high society and insistence on private schooling for their children meant that he was forced “to go for money and leave glory to others.” Hayes tried again a few years later. “I wish I could accept it. I may never have such another chance,” Herron replied. “Like other things when I want them, I can’t get them. And when I can get them I can’t take them. At present I haven’t one dollar coming in from a single investment that I have made & so I must look to my profession to support my family.”
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