The Doctor and the Rough Rider
Page 23
“He wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”
Of course, he had a little something to say about his daughter, too. When various staff members complained that she was running wild throughout the White House, his response was: “Gentlemen, I can either run the country, or I can control Alice. I cannot do both.”
He was Theodore Roosevelt, of course: statesman, politician, adventurer, naturalist, ornithologist, taxidermist, cowboy, police commissioner, explorer, writer, diplomat, boxer, and president of the United States.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was widely quoted after inviting a dozen writers, artists, musicians and scientists to lunch at the White House when he announced: “This is the greatest assemblage of talent to eat here since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” It's a witty statement, but JFK must have thought Roosevelt ate all his meals out.
Roosevelt didn't begin life all that auspiciously. “Teedee” was a sickly child, his body weakened by asthma. It was his father who decided that he was not going to raise an invalid. Roosevelt was encouraged to swim, to take long hikes, to do everything he could to build up his body.
He was picked on by bullies, who took advantage of his weakened condition, so he asked his father to get him boxing lessons. They worked pretty well. By the time he entered Harvard he had the body and reactions of a trained athlete, and before long he was a member of the boxing team.
It was while fighting for the lightweight championship that an incident occurred which gave everyone an insight into Roosevelt's character. He was carrying the fight to his opponent, C. S. Hanks, the defending champion, when he slipped and fell to his knee. Hanks had launched a blow that he couldn't pull back, and he opened Roosevelt's nose, which began gushing blood. The crowd got ugly and started booing the champion, but Roosevelt held up his hand for silence, announced that it was an honest mistake, and shook hands with Hanks before the fight resumed.
It was his strength of character that led to his developing an equally strong body. His doctor, W. Thompson, once told a friend: “Look out for Theodore. He's not strong, but he's all grit. He'll kill himself before he'll ever say he's tired.”
In fifty-nine years of a vigorous, strenuous life, he never once admitted to being tired.
Roosevelt was always fascinated by Nature, and in fact had seriously considered becoming a biologist or a naturalist before discovering politics. The young men sharing his lodgings at Harvard were probably less than thrilled with his interest. He kept a number of animals in his room. Not cute, cuddly ones, but rather snakes, lobsters, and a tortoise that was always escaping and scaring the life out of his landlady. Before long most of the young men in his building refused to go anywhere near his room.
Roosevelt “discovered” politics shortly after graduating Harvard (phi beta kappa and summa cum laude, of course). So he attacked the field with the same vigor he attacked everything else. The result? At twenty-four he became the youngest Assemblyman in the New York State House, and the next year he became the youngest-ever Minority Leader.
He might have remained in New York politics for years, but something happened that changed his life. He had met and fallen in love with Alice Hathaway Lee while in college, and married her very soon thereafter. His widowed mother lived with them.
And then, on February 14, 1884, Alice and his mother both died (Alice in childbirth, his mother of other causes) eight hours apart in the same house.
The blow was devastating to Roosevelt. He never mentioned Alice again and refused to allow her to be mentioned in his presence. He put his former life behind him and decided to lose himself in what was left of the Wild West.
He bought a ranch in the Dakota Badlands…and then, because he was Theodore Roosevelt and couldn't do anything in a small way, he bought a second ranch as well. He spent a lot more time hunting than ranching, and more time writing and reading than hunting. (During his lifetime he wrote more than 150,000 letters, as well as close to thirty books.)
He'd outfitted himself with the best “Western” outfit money could buy back in New York, and of course he appeared to the locals to be a wealthy New York dandy. By now he was wearing glasses, and he took a lot of teasing over them; the sobriquet “Four Eyes” seemed to stick.
Until the night he found himself far from his Elkhorn Ranch and decided to rent a room at Nolan's Hotel in Mingusville, on the west bank of the Beaver River. After dinner he went down to the bar—it was the only gathering point in the entire town—and right after Roosevelt arrived, a huge drunk entered, causing a ruckus, shooting off his six-gun, and making himself generally obnoxious. When he saw Roosevelt, he announced that “Four Eyes” would buy drinks for everyone in the bar—or else. Roosevelt, who wasn't looking for a fight, tried to mollify him, but the drunk was having none of it. He insisted that the effete dandy put up his dukes and defend himself.
“Well, if I've got to, I've got to,” muttered Roosevelt, getting up from his chair.
The bully took one swing. The boxer from Harvard ducked and bent the drunk in half with a one-two combination to the belly, then caught him flush on the jaw. He kept pummeling the drunk until the man was out cold, and then, with a little help from the appreciative onlookers, he carried the unconscious man to an outhouse behind the hotel and deposited him there for the night.
He was never “Four Eyes” again.
The dude from New York didn't limit himself to human bullies. No horse could scare him either.
During the roundup of 1884, he and his companions encountered a horse known only as “The Devil.” He'd earned his name throwing one cowboy after another, and was generally considered to be the meanest horse in the Badlands. Finally Roosevelt decided to match his will and skills against the stallion, and all the other cowboys gathered around the corral to watch the New Yorker get his comeuppance—and indeed, The Devil soon bucked him off.
Roosevelt got on again. And got bucked off again.
According to one observer, “With almost every other jump, we would see about twelve acres of bottom land between Roosevelt and the saddle.” The Devil sent him flying a third and then a fourth time.
But Roosevelt wasn't about to quit. The Devil couldn't throw him a fifth time, and before long Roosevelt had him behaving “as meek as a rabbit,” according to the same observer.
The next year there was an even wilder horse. The local cowboys knew him simply as “The Killer,” but Roosevelt decided he was going to tame him, and a tame horse needed a better name than that, so he dubbed him “Ben Baxter.” The cowboys, even those who had seen him break The Devil, urged him to keep away from The Killer, to have the horse destroyed. Roosevelt paid them no attention.
He tossed a blanket over Ben Baxter's head to keep him calm while putting on the saddle, an operation that was usually life-threatening in itself. Then he tightened the cinch, climbed onto the horse, and removed the blanket. And two seconds later Roosevelt was sprawling in the dirt of the corral.
And a minute later, he was back in the saddle.
And five seconds later he was flying through the air again, to land with a bone-jarring thud!
They kept it up most of the afternoon, Roosevelt climbing back on every time he was thrown, and finally the fight was all gone from Ben Baxter. Roosevelt had broken his shoulder during one of his spills, but it hadn't kept him from mastering the horse. He kept Ben Baxter, and from that day forward “The Killer” became the gentlest horse on his ranch.
Is it any wonder that he never backed down from a political battle?
Having done everything else one could do in the Badlands, Roosevelt became a deputy sheriff. And in March of 1886, he found out that it meant a little more than rounding up the town drunks on a Saturday night. It seems that a wild man named Mike Finnegan, who had a reputation for breaking laws and heads that stretched from one end of the Badlands to the other, had gotten drunk and shot up the town of Medora, escaping—not that anyone dared to stop him—on a small flatboat with two confederates.
Roosevelt, the experienced hunter, managed to approach silently and unseen until the moment he stood up, rifle in hands, and announced that they were his prisoners. Not a shot had to be fired.
But capturing Finnegan and his friends was the easy part. They had to be transported overland more than one hundred miles to the town of Dickenson, where they would stand trial. Within a couple of days the party of three lawmen and three outlaws was out of food. Finally Roosevelt set out on foot for a ranch—any ranch—and came back a day later with a small wagon filled with enough food to keep them alive on the long trek. The wagon had a single horse, and given the weather and conditions of the crude trails, the horse couldn't be expected pull all six men, so Sewell and Dow rode in the wagon while Roosevelt and the three captives walked behind it on an almost nonexistent trail, knee-deep in snow, in below-freezing weather. And the closer they got to Dickenson, the more likely it was that Finnegan would attempt to escape, so Roosevelt didn't sleep the last two days and nights of the forced march.
But he delivered the outlaws, safe and reasonably sound. He would be a lawman again in another nine years, but his turf would be as different from the Badlands as night is from day.
He became the police commissioner of New York City.
New York was already a pretty crime-ridden city, even before the turn of the twentieth century. Roosevelt, who had already been a successful politician, lawman, lecturer and author, was hired to change that—and change it he did.
He hired the best people he could find. That included the first woman on the New York police force—and the next few dozen as well. (Before long, every station had police matrons around the clock, thus assuring that any female prisoner would be booked by a member of her own sex.)
Then came another innovation: when Roosevelt decided that most of the cops couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with their sidearms, target practice was not merely encouraged but made mandatory for the first time in the force's history.
When the rise of the automobile meant that police on foot could no longer catch some escaping lawbreakers, Roosevelt created a unit of bicycle police (who, in the 1890s, had no problem keeping up with the cars of that era, which were traversing streets that had not been created with automobiles in mind.)
He hired Democrats as well as Republicans, men who disliked him as well as men who worshipped him. All he cared about was that they were able to get the job done.
He was intolerant only of intolerance. When the famed anti-Semitic preacher from Berlin, Rector Ahlwardt, came to America, New York's Jewish population didn't want to allow him in the city. Roosevelt couldn't bar him, but he came up with the perfect solution: Ahlwardt's police bodyguards were composed entirely of very large, very unhappy Jewish cops whose presence convinced the bigot to forego his anti-Semitic harangues while he was in the city.
Roosevelt announced that all promotions would be strictly on merit and not political pull, then spent the next two years proving he meant what he said. He also invited the press into his office whenever he was there, and if a visiting politician tried to whisper a question so that the reporters couldn't hear it, Roosevelt would repeat and answer it in a loud, clear voice.
As police commissioner, Roosevelt felt the best way to make sure his police force was performing its duty was to go out in the field and see for himself. He didn't bother to do so during the day; the press and the public were more than happy to report on the doings of his policemen.
No, what he did was go out into the most dangerous neighborhoods, unannounced, between midnight and sunrise, usually with a reporter or two in tow, just in case things got out of hand. (Not that he thought they would help him physically, but he expected them to accurately report what happened if a misbehaving or loafing cop turned on him.)
The press dubbed these his “midnight rambles,” and after a while the publicity alone caused almost all the police to stay at their posts and do their duty. They never knew when the commissioner might show up in their territory and either fire them on the spot or let the reporters who accompanied him expose them to public ridicule and condemnation.
Roosevelt began writing early and never stopped. You'd expect a man who was governor of New York and president of the United States to write about politics, and of course he did. But Roosevelt didn't like intellectual restrictions any more than he liked physical restrictions, and he wrote books—not just articles, mind you, but books—about anything that interested him.
While still in college he wrote The Naval War of 1812, which was considered at the time to be the definitive treatise on naval warfare.
Here's a partial list of the non-political books that followed, just to give you an indication of the breadth of Roosevelt's interests:
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
The Wilderness Hunter
A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open
The Winning of the West, Volumes 1–4
The Rough Riders
Literary Treats
Papers on Natural History
African Game Trails
Hero Tales from American History
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
The Strenuous Life
Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail
I've got to think he'd be a pretty interesting guy to talk to. On any subject.
In fact, it'd be hard to find one he hadn't written up.
A character as interesting and multi-faceted as Roosevelt's had to be portrayed in film sooner or later, but surprisingly, the first truly memorable characterization was by John Alexander, who delivered a classic and hilarious portrayal of a harmless madman who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt and constantly screams “Charge!” as he runs up the stairs, his version of San Juan Hill, in Arsenic and Old Lace.
Eventually there were more serious portrayals: Brian Keith, Tom Berenger, even Robin Williams…and word has it that, possibly by the time you read this, you'll be able to add Leonardo DiCaprio to the list.
Roosevelt believed in the active life, not just for himself but for his four sons—Kermit, Archie, Quentin, and Theodore Junior—and two daughters, Alice and Edith. He built Sagamore Hill, his rambling house on equally rambling acreage, and he often took the children—and any visiting dignitaries—on what he called “scrambles,” cross-country hikes that were more obstacle course than anything else.
His motto: “Above or below, but never around.” If you couldn't walk through it, you climbed over it or crawled under it, but you never ever circled it. This included not only hills, boulders, and thorn bushes, but rivers, and frequently he, the children, and the occasional visitor who didn't know what he was getting into, would come home soaking wet from swimming a river or stream with their clothes on, or covered with mud, or with their clothes torn to shreds from thorns.
Those wet, muddy, and torn clothes were their badges of honor. It meant that they hadn't walked around any obstacle.
“If I am to be any use in politics,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “it is because I am supposed to be a man who does not preach what he fears to practice. For the year I have preached war with Spain…”
So it was inevitable that he should leave his job as undersecretary of the navy and enlist in the military. He instantly became Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt, and began putting together a very special elite unit, one that perhaps only he could have assembled.
The Rough Riders consisted, among others, of cowboys, Indians, tennis stars, college athletes, the marshal of Dodge City, the master of the Chevy Chase hounds, and the man who was reputed to be the best quarterback ever to play for Harvard.
They were quite a crew, Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders. They capt
ured the imagination of the public as had no other military unit in United States history. They also captured San Juan Hill in the face of some serious machine gun fire, and Roosevelt, who led the charge, returned home an even bigger hero than when he'd left.
While on a bear hunt in Mississippi, Colonel Roosevelt, as he liked to be called after San Juan Hill and Cuba, was told that a bear had been spotted a few miles away. When Roosevelt and his entourage—which always included the press—arrived, he found a small, undernourished, terrified bear tied to a tree. He refused to shoot it, and turned away in disgust, ordering a member of the party to put the poor creature out of its misery. His unwillingness to kill a helpless animal was captured by Washington Post cartoonist Clifford Berryman. It made him more popular than ever, and before long toy companies were turning out replicas of cute little bears that the great Theodore Roosevelt would certainly never kill, rather than ferocious game animals.
Just in case you ever wondered about the origin of the Teddy Bear.
Some thirty years ago, writer/director John Milius gave the public one of the truly great adventure films, The Wind and the Lion, in which the Raisuli (Sean Connery), known as “the Last of the Barbary Pirates,” kidnapped an American woman, Eden Perdicaris (Candice Bergen) and her two children, and held them for ransom at his stronghold in Morocco. At which point President Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith, in probably the best representation of Roosevelt ever put on film) declared that America wanted “Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” and sent the fleet to Morocco.
Wonderful film, beautifully photographed, well-written, well-acted, with a gorgeous musical score.
Would you like to know what really happened?
First of all, it wasn't Eden Perdicaris; it was Ion Perdicaris, a sixty-four-year-old man. And he wasn't kidnapped with two small children, but with a grown stepson. And far from wanting to be rescued, he and the Raisuli became great friends.