The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse at 16 Winthrop Street in Cambridge, where Theodore lived throughout his time at Harvard

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  A flyer providing the first-known opportunity to hear Theodore hold forth

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  An undergraduate makes his way across Harvard Yard during Theodore’s sophomore year: “When it was not considered good form to move at more than a walk,” a classmate remembered, “Roosevelt was always running.”

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  Theodore, ready for rowing. He hurled himself into sports at Harvard: rowing, wrestling, boxing. A classmate was initially amused to watch him work out in the gymnasium: Roosevelt must be a “humble-minded chap,” he wrote, “to be willing to give such a lady-like exhibition in a public place.” But he changed his mind when he watched him ice-skate on Fresh Pond for three hours in the face of a freezing wind that drove everyone else off the ice.

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  He Was Everything to Me

  Corruption had been a central issue in the presidential election of 1876. Republicans abandoned the struggle over the status of freedmen in the South in the interests of a more lucrative ongoing battle with the Democrats over the spoils of office. Everything seemed to be for sale, and bosses in both parties were determined that it stay that way.

  In 1877, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. allowed the new Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, to nominate him as collector of customs as a symbol of his administration’s commitment to civil service reform. But in the end, the old, corrupt machine crushed his nomination. He said he was relieved. “To purify our Customhouse would have been a terrible undertaking,” he told his son. But he did feel “sorry for the country as it shows the power of partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”

  Two days after his appointment fell through, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. collapsed. On February 9, 1878, he died of cancer of the bowel. He was only forty-six. His eldest son rushed home from Harvard too late to say goodbye. Theodore was shattered. “Sometimes when I realize my loss I feel as if I should go wild,” he wrote. “He was everything to me.… I have lost the only human being to whom I told everything.… With the help of my God I will try to lead such a life as he would have wished.” His father’s example would be a touchstone for Theodore Roosevelt to the end of his life.

  Still mourning at Oyster Bay that summer, Theodore suffered a second blow. He and his childhood friend Edith Carow had always been close and may have had an understanding that they would marry. But in the summer house one afternoon they quarreled and ended their relationship. Neither ever told anyone what had come between them. Theodore later admitted to Bamie only that “we both of us had … tempers that were far from the best.” Afterward, he tried to outpace his anger and his grief—rowing furiously back and forth across Long Island Sound, galloping so hard he injured his horse, shooting a neighbor’s dog when it dared bark at him.

  Finally, he fled to the Maine woods to hike and hunt, finding there what he would always find in wildness—a world in which to restore himself.

  Nineteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, still grieving three months after the loss of his father. “I often feel badly that such a wonderful man as Father would have had a son of so little worth as I,” he noted in his diary. “I realize more and more every day that I am as much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.”

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  This portrait of Theodore Roosevelt Sr., painted by Daniel Huntington from a photograph, is one of four commissioned by his children after his death. Without him, Bamie recalled, “we all had to work out our own salvation.”

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  The Sunny-Faced Queen

  Theodore Roosevelt now had a sizable inheritance—so large, he remembered, it allowed him to live “like a prince” in Cambridge. “Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he wrote his mother after returning to Harvard. “Please send my silk hat at once. Why has it not come before?”

  Everything seemed to go his way. “I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows,” he boasted to his sister Bamie, and “only one gentleman stands ahead of me.” He edited a newspaper, won election to Phi Beta Kappa, and was asked to join three of the college’s most prestigious organizations, the Dickie, Hasty Pudding, and the Porcellian Club. And somehow he found the time—as an undergraduate—to begin writing a 498-page history, The Naval War of 1812, that would eventually influence a generation of naval planners.

  He also fell in love. Alice Lee was seventeen when he first met her at a classmate’s home. She was tall, blond, full of life. “See that girl?” Theodore said. “I am going to marry her, she won’t have me, but I am going to have her!” It took him a year to win her. She was his “sunny-faced Queen,” his “bright bewitching darling.” “So pure and holy,” he wrote, “that it almost seems profanation to touch her.” She called him “Teddy” and “Teddykins.”

  They were married in Brookline, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1880. “Alice looked perfectly lovely,” a guest remembered, “and Theodore was so happy, and responded in the most determined Theodore-like tones.” Edith Carow was among the guests and made a point of outdancing everyone else.

  “Our intense happiness,” Theodore noted in his diary a few days after the wedding, “is too sacred to be written about.” Together, he and Alice began planning a big hilltop house of their own at Oyster Bay—a fourteen-bedroom “cottage” to be called “Leeholm” in her honor.

  Alice Hathaway Lee. Theodore’s pursuit of her was so intense that he once ordered a pair of dueling pistols, intending to challenge another suitor to a duel. A cousin hurried to Cambridge to calm him down.

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  Theodore (middle row, third from the left) with fellow members of Harvard’s oldest and most exalted final club, Porcellian. “I am delighted to be in [the club],” he told Bamie. “There is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch room &c, and my best friends are in it.” On Sundays, the boys enjoyed champagne breakfasts.

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  In a formal group photograph in the summer of 1880, Theodore (front row, second from right) seems unable to tear his gaze away from the fiancée he was to marry on his twenty-second birthday in October. “I worship you so that it seems almost desecration to touch you,” he told her, “and yet when I am with you I can hardly let you out of my arms.”

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  So Much Enjoyment in the Country

  That same fall of 1880, there was another marriage in the extended Roosevelt clan.

  Fifty-six-year-old James Roosevelt belonged to the Hudson River branch. His summer home was “Springwood,” a sprawling estate high above the river’s eastern shore, near the village of Hyde Park. There he lived the life of an English country gentleman, his money made in coal and railroads and investments. Springwood delighted him. “I often wonder,” he once wrote, “why men are satisfied to live all their lives between brick walls and thinking of nothing but money and the so-called recreations of so-called society when there is so much enjoyment in the country.”

  His servants and tenant farmers all called him “Mr. James.” He was an Episcopalian and a Democrat who took both his religious and civic duties seriously. But he had been a widower for four years. His late wife, a distant cousin, had died of heart disease. Their only child, a son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt, nicknamed “Rosy,” had married an heiress to the Astor fortune and moved away.

  In his loneliness, Mr. James had once suggested marriage to Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Bamie. Although she thought him the “most absolutely upright gentleman” she ever knew, she gently turned him away—he was older than her late father would have been had he lived—and then invited him to dinner to meet a friend of hers, Miss Sara Delano. “He talked to her the whole time,” Theodore’s mother, Mittie, remembered. “He never took his eyes off her.”

 
; Sara Delano was twenty-five, less than half James’s age, tall and regal, a member of a French Huguenot clan that had flourished in America even longer than the Roosevelts had. Her father, Warren Delano, who had made himself a millionaire selling tea and opium in the China trade, had “the true patriarchal spirit,” Sara remembered, and supervised every detail of family life within the big walled estate he’d built at Newburgh, twenty-five miles downriver from Hyde Park. No Democrat could ever work for him, Warren Delano once explained, because, while not all Democrats were horse thieves, it had been his experience that all horse thieves were Democrats.

  His five daughters attracted what he called an “avalanche of suitors,” but he was startled when Mr. James asked for Sara’s hand. James was a business associate and Mr. Delano’s rough contemporary, after all, and he was a Democrat. Before he gave his approval, Mr. Delano had to be convinced that Sara was, as he said, “earnestly, seriously, entirely” in love.

  She was. James Roosevelt and Sara Delano were married on October 7, 1880, just six months after they met. A guest remembered that several women wept at the thought that “such a lovely girl should marry an old man.”

  On January 30, 1882, at Springwood, they had a son. Sara and her baby very nearly did not make it. Labor had stretched on for more than twenty-four hours. Sara was given too much chloroform. The doctor had to breathe life into her boy.

  Seven weeks later, at St. James’ Episcopal chapel in Hyde Park, the baby was christened Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sara asked Elliott Roosevelt, Theodore’s younger brother, to be his godfather. Mittie Roosevelt came to visit and wrote that the child was “such a fair, sweet, cunning, little bright … darling baby. Sara looks so very lovely with him like a Murillo Madonna and infant.”

  Sara Delano Roosevelt in 1878, two years before Bamie Roosevelt introduced her to James Roosevelt. The most beautiful of five sisters, at home in French and German, she had been courted on three continents by then; her most ardent suitor had been the future architect Stanford White, whom her protective father had dismissed as “the red-headed trial.”

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  James Roosevelt at home in Hyde Park. A reform-minded Democrat widely admired by his Republican neighbors, he served a single term as town supervisor but refused ever to run for any other public office. To him, the sweaty world of electoral politics was not for gentlemen.

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  This splendid enameled watch from Cartier was presented to Sara when Mr. James learned his new wife was pregnant. Its face is ringed with pearls; diamonds decorate the reverse side.

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  Franklin and his mother, 1882. “At the very outset he was plump, pink and nice,” she remembered. “I used to love to bathe and dress him.” For the first nine years of his life, a Scottish nurse saw to his needs, but his mother was rarely more than a few steps away.

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  Who’s the Dude?

  Six days before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born, Theodore Roosevelt made his first headlines—as the brand-new Republican assemblyman from Manhattan’s 21st District and, at twenty-three, the youngest man ever elected to the New York Assembly. Albany had never seen anyone quite like him. A fellow assemblyman remembered his first glimpse of the newcomer: “Suddenly our eyes … became glued on a young man who was coming in through the door. His hair was parted in the center, and he had sideburns. He wore a single eye-glass.… He carried a gold-headed cane in one hand, a silk hat in the other, and he walked in the bent-over fashion that was the style with the young men of the day.… ‘Who’s the dude?’ I asked another member.… ‘That’s Theodore Roosevelt of New York.’ ”

  He had dropped plans to become a scientist while still at Harvard, then dropped out of Columbia Law School, refused to go into the family business, and finally surprised everyone by deciding to try his hand at Republican politics and run for the assembly.

  Some of his friends had advised him against it. Politics in either party was no place for a gentleman, they told him. It was a “low” business, run by “saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors and the like.” “That merely means that the people I know do not belong to the governing class,” he answered, “and I intend to be one of the governing class.”

  He took to the floor again and again, denouncing both Democratic and Republican machines, pushing for municipal reform bills sometimes even when they were opposed by his own party’s leaders, forcing an investigation of a state supreme court justice for accepting bribes, and denouncing Jay Gould, the powerful Wall Street manipulator, for offering them. “I … mean to act up here [in Albany] on all questions as nearly as possible as I think Father would have done.… I thoroughly believe in the Republican Party when it acts up to its principles—but if I can prevent it I never shall let party zeal obscure my sense of right and decency.”

  When the courts overturned his bill meant to relieve the terrible conditions under which tenement dwellers were forced to manufacture cigars, he angrily denounced the judiciary. “It was this case,” he remembered, “which first waked me to a dim and partial understanding of the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions. They knew legalism, but not life.”

  Always, he would seek a middle course between change and stability: he had a deep lifelong fear of what he called “the mob.” He saw everything in terms of right and wrong, and seemed, one critic wrote, “to have been born with his mind made up.” Those who dared oppose him were by definition self-interested and dishonest. “The average Democratic Catholic Irishman … as represented in this Assembly,” he confided to his diary, “is a low, venal, corrupt and unintelligent brute.”

  They didn’t like him, either. When a hulking assemblyman known as “the McManus,” a representative of the Democratic Tammany machine, was overheard planning to toss the freshman assemblyman in a blanket, Roosevelt tracked him down. “By God!” he told him. “If you try anything like that I’ll kick you, I’ll bite you. I’ll kick you in the balls. I’ll do anything to you—you’d better leave me alone.” The McManus backed off.

  Democratic newspapers lampooned him as “His Lordship” and “Jane-Dandy.” Republican papers praised his courage and independence. But all the newspapers loved him for the colorful copy he provided. He was reelected twice, served a term as minority leader, and made himself the best-known Republican in New York State—all before he was twenty-six.

  Roosevelt’s greatest triumph as a New York legislator, heralded by a cartoonist for Puck. His bill changed the New York City charter to empower New York mayors to hire and fire personnel without having to consult the Tammany-dominated board of aldermen. The cartoon was published on February 20, 1884, just one week after Roosevelt suffered the worst tragedy of his life.

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  Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt in 1884. To a good many Albany veterans he seemed at first a representative of what one called the “kid glove, scented, silk-stocking, poodle-headed, degenerate aristocracy.” But as the months went by he began to make friends outside his own circle, he remembered, men able to “grapple with real men in real life … bankers and bricklayers, … merchants and mechanics, … lawyers, farmers, day-laborers, saloon-keepers, clergymen and prize-fighters.”

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  The Light Has Gone Out of My Life

  February of 1884 looked to be a momentous month for the Roosevelts. Alice was nine months pregnant and under the care of her mother-in-law in Manhattan. Theodore was engaged in a fierce struggle in Albany over his measure to reform the New York City charter—and delighting in the fact that the newspapers were calling it the “Roosevelt Bill.”

  The baby was due on Thursday, February 14—Valentine’s Day. Theodore had come home the previous weekend but on Tuesday decided to make a quick trip back to Albany to see how his bill was faring. He was in the legislative chamber on Wednesday morning the 13th when he was handed a telegram: his wife had given birth to a healthy girl the n
ight before. She would be named for her mother—Alice. His fellow assemblymen crowded around to offer congratulations. He was “full of life and happiness,” one remembered.

  Then a second telegram arrived. He rushed for the railroad station. Dense winter fog shrouded the tracks. It took more than five hours to reach New York. He did not get to 6 West Fifty-seventh Street until midnight. His brother, Elliott, opened the door. “There is a curse on this house,” he said. “Mother is dying, and Alice is dying, too.”

  Mittie Roosevelt had typhoid fever. Alice was barely conscious, weakened by childbirth, and suffering from Bright’s disease—kidney failure. Helpless, Theodore went back and forth between their bedsides. His mother died at three o’clock in the morning of February 14. Alice died at two o’clock that afternoon. Only the baby survived.

  Two hearses waited outside the double funeral service outside the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. Many in the congregation wept at the sight of two rosewood coffins side by side.

  Afterward, Theodore gave his favorite photograph of Alice to his aunt, saw to it that his newborn daughter was christened, handed her off to his sister Bamie to raise as if she were her own, and asked her to help close up the Roosevelt house; he could not bear to enter it again.