The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  Teedie, Mittie, and Great-Heart

  When Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was born at the Roosevelts’ Manhattan townhouse on Twentieth Street on October 27, 1858, his grandmother pronounced him “as sweet and pretty a young baby as I have ever seen.” His mother was initially less enthusiastic: she said he looked like a combination of the attending physician and “a terrapin.”

  Martha Bulloch Roosevelt was witty and charming, her eldest son wrote, “a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman … entirely ‘unreconstructed’ to the day of her death.” She had grown up on a Georgia plantation surrounded by slaves, and would fill her eldest son’s imagination with family tales of duels and chivalry and derring-do. But she herself seems to have been too delicate for daily life. She did bear four children—Anna (known as “Bamie,” for “bambina”), Theodore Jr., Elliott, and Corinne—and she deeply loved her husband. But she was subject to frequent attacks of neurasthenia that made her take to her bed and sometimes sent her away from her family to one spa or another for weeks at a time. “She seemed like an exquisite ‘objet d’art,’ ” her younger daughter recalled, “to be carefully and lovingly cherished.… Owing to delicate health she was not able to enter into the active life of her husband and children, and therefore our earliest memories … turn to my father.”

  To a degree remarkable for a man of his time and class, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. acted as both mother and father to the children who clamored for his attention. “We used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall,” his eldest son wrote, “and then rush out to greet him.”

  Their father was widely admired beyond his household as well. His wealth permitted him to indulge his whims—ensuring that he had a yellow saffronia rose for his buttonhole each morning, driving one of New York’s fastest four-in-hands through Central Park, leading family excursions to Europe and the Middle East. But he also had what he called a “troublesome conscience,” and used his income to become something new in New York—a serious philanthropist who gave half his time each week to one or another of a dozen charitable organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Children’s Aid Society, the Newsboys’ Lodging House and the American Museum of Natural History. Friends on the street greeted him with, “How much this time, Theodore?” He made sure that all of his children understood that there was a price to pay for their good fortune; that they had an obligation to help others.

  The Civil War would divide the Roosevelt household. Theodore’s father and all three of his paternal uncles were ardent supporters of the Union cause; one of them, his next-door neighbor, Uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, immediately joined the New York State militia.

  But when his father, just twenty-nine, also wanted to sign up, his wife refused to allow it. Her family supported the Confederacy. “Mother was very frail,” Bamie remembered, “and felt it would kill her for him to fight against her brothers.” He reluctantly gave in. Instead of serving in uniform, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. paid $300 each for two substitutes, helped persuade President Abraham Lincoln to establish the Allotment Commission, and then spent the better part of two years moving from army camp to army camp, talking soldiers into sending at least a portion of their pay home to their families. It was hard, exhausting work, but the fact that he had kept out of combat would haunt him all his life. He felt, Bamie wrote, that “he had done a very wrong thing in not having put every feeling aside and joined the absolute fighting forces.” His decision would haunt his son as well, leaving him with a question he could never quite resolve: How could his father, the father he would always remember as “the best man I ever knew,” have failed to fight for the Union? It was a failure for which Theodore Jr. would feel compelled to compensate again and again.

  Theodore Roosevelt Jr.—“Teedie” to his parents—at a year and a half

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  Martha Bulloch Roosevelt—“Mittie” to friends and family—at twenty-two. She was talkative and vibrant and, according to a member of the family, did “everything by impulse … with an air of self-confidence”—qualities she passed on intact to her eldest son.

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  Theodore Roosevelt Sr. at thirty. “My father combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness,” his namesake remembered. “No one whom I have ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life and performance of duty.” His children called him “Great-Heart,” after the protector of the weak in The Pilgrim’s Progress, without a hint of irony.

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  By the time this photograph was taken, Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace at 28 East Twentieth had been turned into a store and office building, its historical significance marked only by the easy-to-miss sign in the second-story window. Theodore’s grandfather Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt had given the brownstone to his parents as a wedding gift; his uncle, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, and his family lived in a matching house next door. Both buildings were razed in 1916.

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  The birthplace reconstructed: After TR died in 1919, the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association, led by his sister Corinne, raised private funds with which to buy the site, build an accurate replica of the old family house, and convert the adjacent building into a museum. Since 1963, it has been a National Historic Site under the National Park Service.

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  A House Divided

  I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country,” Theodore Sr. once wrote Mittie from the field, “but I know you cannot understand my feelings, and of course I do not expect it.” She ignored his feelings, in fact, and while he was gone, with her sister and mother in Manhattan she secretly made up bundles of scarce goods to be smuggled through Union lines to their Confederate kin. Over the course of the war, young Theodore recalled, he developed “an alert understanding” of the tensions within his home, “and once, when I felt that I had been wronged by maternal discipline during the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor for the success of Union arms when we all came to say our prayers before my mother in the evening.”

  The end of the Civil War would bring an end to what Theodore’s younger sister Corinne called “difficult and troublous” times between her parents.

  But while his father was away, three-year-old Theodore had begun to suffer the recurring allergic asthma attacks that would make him an invalid for much of his boyhood. Night after night, he wheezed and coughed, fearful that he would not be able to breathe deeply enough to stay alive.

  He was thought too frail for school, and accompanied his mother to one resort after another in the hope that mineral waters would somehow cure him. He was subjected to electric shocks, too, made to swallow ipecac to make him vomit, endured mustard plasters and massage so rigorous it made his chest bleed. During especially acute attacks he was forced to down black coffee and smoke cigars. Nothing worked, though time spent with his father seemed sometimes to calm him. “I could breathe,” he remembered. “I could sleep, when he had me in his arms. My father—he got me breath, I could sleep when he had me in his arms, he got me lungs, strength—life.”

  Confederate Captain Raphael Semmes on the deck of the warship Alabama: built by Theodore’s maternal uncle, James Bulloch, she captured or burned sixty-five Union merchant ships before being sunk by the USS Kearsarge off the French coast in 1864.

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  A carte de visite portrait, signed and presented by Abraham Lincoln to his friend Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and treasured by Theodore Jr. all his life

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  On April 25, 1865, six-year-old Theodore and five-year-old Elliott Roosevelt—the tiny figures in the second-floor window of their grandfather’s mansion at Broadway and Fourteenth Street—watch as Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession passes below.

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  Hip! Hip! Hurrah!

  In the spring of 1869, the Roos
evelts began a yearlong trip to Europe, hoping that travel abroad might somehow improve ten-year-old Theodore’s health. He kept a journal in which he displayed characteristics that would stay with him all his life: strong opinions and insatiable curiosity; a highly developed sense of drama; a craving always to be at the center of things; and a love of the outdoors that helped him in his struggle to breathe.

  The Tower of London—where, Theodore proudly wrote, “I put my head on the block where so many had been beheaded”

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  The paddle steamer RMS Scotia, the pride of the Cunard fleet, took the Roosevelts to Europe; she carried only first-class passengers, was the fastest ship across the Atlantic, and was the second largest vessel on earth.

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  Theodore, photographed in Paris, and the boyishly grandiloquent cover of the journal he faithfully kept while away from home

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  MAY 12TH. We sail in the English steamship, Scotia.… We three jumped around the deck and played.… I was a little seasick …

  JUNE 18TH. EDINBURGH. We saw the Melrose Abbey (a mere ruin) and then crossed the Tweed (quite a decent brook) to Dryburg Abbey where there was the tomb of Sir Walter Scott.

  JULY 10. We all went to the Tower of London … and I put my head on the block where so many had been beheaded.

  AUGUST 21. SWITZERLAND. We went through the Grimsel Pass and I, Papa and a Scotch gentleman walked far ahead and had fresh cream and raspberries. I walked 20 miles and Papa 22 miles.

  AUGUST 23. SWITZERLAND. In the afternoon we … threw paper balls at [the] waiter and chambermaid and rushed around upstairs and downstairs to dodge them.

  SEPTEMBER 24. VENICE. I was sick with asthma and did not sleep at all.

  SEPTEMBER 26. TRIESTE. I was sick of the asthma. I sat up for four successive hours [and Papa made me smoke a cigar {to help me breathe}].

  SEPTEMBER 30. VIENNA. Father and I went to a Natural History Museum. In the department of nests I recognized two with birds which I had seen wild at home. Their names: “Baltimore Oriole” and “Waxen Chatterer.”

  OCTOBER 27. COLOGNE. It is my [eleventh] birthday and the first of my birthdays that it snowed on.… Papa played tag with us [and] told us a story of a runaway slave and at five we had dinner, and afterwards I received my presents.… Splendid!

  NOVEMBER 22. PARIS. Mama showed me the portrait of Edith Carow and her face stirred in me homesickness and longing for the past which will come again never, alack, never.

  DECEMBER 8. NICE. [We] tossed bread on the heads of waiters and ran about generally. I read till Mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and nearly cried because they were feverish. We had a fine sociable time …

  DECEMBER 14TH. SAN REMO. The beggars came round.… Papa bought two baskets of doughy cakes. A great crowd of boys and girls and women. We tossed the cakes to them and I fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it.… We made [them] give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.

  DECEMBER 31, 1869. MT. VESUVIUS. I began the ascent of the snow-covered [slope and] soon passed the rest far behind.

  JANUARY 31, 1870. ROME. We saw the Pope and we walked along and he extended his hand to me and I kissed it!! Hem!! Hem!!

  SUNDAY, APRIL 17. FONTAINEBLEAU. Today was the happiest Easter I ever spent. Mama, Papa and all we children went in the woods to hunt for violets and see if the bunnies had [laid] any eggs. [We] had Sunday school in the woods and picked cowslips and heard the cuckoo sing. We had such a happy time.

  MAY 25. This morning we saw land of America … New York!! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!

  Seeing this portrait of his seven-year-old playmate Edith Carow made Theodore long for home; leaving her behind, he wrote as his voyage began, had been “verry hard.”

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  You Must Make Your Body

  Happy to be home, Theodore returned to the activities he enjoyed most—reading books of history and science and adventure and running what he grandly called the “Roosevelt Museum,” a constantly expanding collection of “curiosities and living things.” He kept live mice in his shirt drawer and dead ones in the icebox, tied turtles to the laundry tubs, and took lessons in taxidermy, a noisome hobby that made family maids reluctant to enter his bedroom.

  “My triumphs,” he recalled, “consisted in such things as bringing home and raising—by the aid of milk and a syringe—a family of very young gray squirrels, in fruitlessly endeavoring to tame an excessively unamiable woodchuck, and in making friends with a gentle, pretty, trustful white-footed mouse which reared her family in an empty flower pot.”

  Unable to win his rightful place in his loving but fiercely competitive family through size and strength, he learned the power of words and charm and book learning to call attention to himself. He talked incessantly, his thoughts sometimes tumbling so far ahead of his words that some visitors thought he suffered from an impediment.

  There was nothing wrong with Theodore’s mind, his father told him in 1872, but sickness, his father said, was “always a shame and often a sin.” To overcome asthma, he told his fragile son, “[y]ou must make your body.” Theodore did his best to comply, spending hour after hour on rings and parallel bars set up on the third-floor piazza of the family home. He took boxing lessons from an ex-prizefighter, too, so that his younger brother, Elliott, wouldn’t have to shield him from bullies anymore.

  When he was fourteen, his father presented him with a gun; when he couldn’t manage to hit anything with it, Theodore Sr. bought him spectacles that opened up the world still further. He began to think of pursuing a career in science.

  The Roosevelts went to Africa in 1873 and spent several months sailing on the Nile, while work was finished on a new family house on West Fifty-seventh Street. By then, Theodore was fit enough to spend whole days in the saddle, shooting some two hundred birds for his collection.

  He would never fully conquer asthma, but his struggle against it reinforced his belief that life itself was an ongoing battle. His father gave him the credo by which he would continue that struggle: “Do things. Be sane. Don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.”

  Theodore at eleven

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  The freshly completed American Museum of Natural History dominates the still largely unbuilt Upper West Side of Manhattan, 1880. Over the years, the museum became a sort of Roosevelt family project. Theodore Sr. was one of its founders; the documents of incorporation were signed in his parlor. Both his son Theodore and his distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt would contribute specimens to its collections.

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  Theodore’s rendering of a pet mouse, one of the prize exhibits in his personal “Roosevelt Museum”

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  A Superabundance of Energy

  In the summer of 1875, the United States was in the third year of a depression. Factories were shuttered. Banks had failed. A million workers had lost their jobs, and most of those who continued to work saw their wages cut by a quarter. Striking coal miners and railroad workers battled state militias.

  None of it affected the Roosevelts, now enjoying their second season in the rented house they called “Tranquility” at Oyster Bay. “These Roosevelts were without inhibitions to an unusual degree,” a summer playmate remembered, and “so rarely gifted that [they] seemed touched by the flame of divine fire.”

  All five Roosevelt children were photographed that summer. Each had a distinct personality.

  Bamie, shown here with the father she adored, was nineteen in 1875 but old beyond her years. She suffered from a deformation of the spine, and had become an adviser rather than a playmate to her younger siblings, who always saw her as one of “the big people.”

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  The rest of the Roosevelt children: Elliott, at the right, was fourteen that summer—handsome, athletic, and charming, but already persuaded
that he could never match the achievements of his older brother. Twelve-year-old Corinne, her back to the tree, was the baby of the family, witty, sensitive, and worshipful of her brothers. But the focus of everyone’s attention was fifteen-year-old Theodore, at the left. He seemed infatuated with everything—so long as it provided him with the opportunity to excel. As a cousin later remembered, “He always thought he could do things better than anyone else.” He was rugged, exuberant, aggressive, and in almost perpetual motion: riding, swimming, shooting, competing in the long jump and hundred-yard dash against his brother and his cousins. He rarely won; he always tried. “His energy seems so superabundant,” his father wrote, “that I feel it may get the better of him in one way or another.” The young woman seated on the grass is Theodore’s sometime sweetheart, Edith Carow.

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  See Here, Roosevelt

  In the fall of 1876, Theodore Roosevelt descended on Harvard. His sister Bamie had picked out and furnished his Cambridge rooms. A manservant was hired to black his boots and keep things tidy. “If you asked me to define in one word the ‘temper’ of the Harvard I knew,” one of Roosevelt’s Harvard contemporaries recalled, “I should say it was patrician, strange as that word may sound to American ears.” Roosevelt fit right in, choosing his friends exclusively from classmates he called “the gentleman sort,” concerned that he not become “very intimate” with anyone whose “antecedents” he didn’t know.

  But he was also uniquely himself. A young Cambridge woman who met him during his freshman year remembered him as freakish, “with stuffed snakes and lizards in his room, with a peculiar violent vehemence of speech and manner, and an overriding interest in everything.” He quickly wearied of the dry kind of science being taught and spoke up so often in his geology class that the professor snapped, “See here, Roosevelt, let me talk.”