The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  James Roosevelt Roosevelt—known as “Rosy”—at the reins of his own four-in-hand, 1886. Rosy was Franklin’s much-older half brother, the product of Mr. James’s first marriage, and spent his summers next door to Springwood. His first wife, Helen Astor Roosevelt, is at his side. Their children—Helen and James Roosevelt Roosevelt Jr., known as “Taddy”—sit behind with their governess. Rosy was amiable and fond of Franklin, but he was also idle, showy, and self-indulgent—everything the elder Roosevelts did not want Franklin to become.

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  Getting On Very Well with the Fellows

  In these times of exceeding comfort,” said the Reverend Endicott Peabody, the founder and headmaster of Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, “the boys need hardness and, it may be, suffering.” The school—which Franklin entered at fourteen, in the third form—was meant to drive that lesson home.

  Quarters were spartan and claustrophobic. Each day began with an icy shower. Bells sent the boys scurrying from class to class. Peabody encouraged his students to inflict rough and often brutal justice on boys they simply didn’t like.

  Theodore Roosevelt was a frequent visitor. Peabody was a cousin of his first wife, and had once offered him a job on the teaching staff. He would eventually send all four of his own sons to Groton. Franklin described an appearance by his celebrated cousin to his parents:

  JUNE 4, 1897.

  Dear Papa and Mama:

  After supper tonight Cousin Theodore gave us a splendid talk on his adventures when he was on the Police Board. He kept the whole room in an uproar for over an hour, by telling us killing stories about policemen and their doings in New York.

  Ever with lots of love,

  FDR

  Franklin was accustomed to pleasing grownups, and his teachers all liked him. But most of his classmates did not. They found him too cocky, too well mannered, too eager to please. Other students outperformed him in the classroom. He was too slight and inexperienced at playing on a team to do well at sports; he ended up managing the baseball team, not playing on it. He called it “a thankless task.”

  He could neither excel nor fully fit in. For a boy who had been the object of almost universal admiration, life at Groton was bewildering, disheartening. “I always felt entirely out of things,” he would admit many years later; something had gone “sadly wrong” for him at school. But his letters to his parents carefully kept those feelings hidden: unpleasantness was not to be acknowledged. Over and over again, he would assure them, “I am getting on very well with the fellows.”

  Hundred House, where Franklin lived. The six-by-nine-foot cubicles had curtains, not doors, because the headmaster believed privacy for adolescents only led to trouble.

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  The Groton fife-and-drum corps escorts President Theodore Roosevelt’s carriage onto the school grounds in 1902, four years after Franklin’s graduation. TR’s frequent visits to the school were always big events.

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  In his first year at Groton, Franklin managed to win first prize in the high kick, an individual sport peculiar to the school. He kicked a tin pan two feet above his head, he reported to his parents, even though “at every kick I landed on my neck.”

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  Groton upperclassmen share a joke while Franklin does his best to seem inconspicuous in a never-before-published photograph, found in the school archives.

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  The Supreme Triumphs

  Theodore Roosevelt’s old friend Henry Cabot Lodge, now a senator from Massachusetts, wrote him that the only thing that had made the McKinley administration hesitate to bring him to the Navy Department was “a fear that you will want to fight somebody at once.”

  McKinley’s concern was understandable. For nearly a decade, Roosevelt had believed no European power should be permitted a foothold in the New World. He’d once favored a war to seize Canada from Britain, and when the people of Cuba rose against their Spanish rulers in 1895, he’d wanted the United States to intervene immediately on their behalf. He also believed that if the United States was to take its rightful place among the world’s great powers it would require a navy that could compete with theirs.

  His new job as assistant secretary of the navy permitted him to battle for both objectives—and his easygoing boss, Secretary John D. Long, gave him plenty of opportunity to act. Long was the amiable former governor of Massachusetts, easily bored by detail work and eager always to get away to his native state. Theodore dismissed him fondly as “a perfect dear.”

  Roosevelt had only been on the job for seven weeks when he made his views on warfare clear to the Naval War College. “All the great masterful races have been fighting races,” he said. “Cowardice is the unpardonable sin. No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war. It may be that at some time in the dim future of the race the need for war will vanish; but that time is as yet ages distant.… It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.”

  On February 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. Two hundred and sixty-six Americans died. The cause was unclear. But Roosevelt blamed Spain and called for vengeance. McKinley moved cautiously: he had seen the dead piled up at Antietam, he said, and wished to see no more. Roosevelt privately accused the president of having “the backbone of a chocolate éclair.”

  Just ten days later, when his boss took still another weekend off, Roosevelt seized the opportunity to cable squadron commanders around the world to be on high alert and directed Commodore George Dewey to be ready to attack the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. When McKinley finally called on Congress for a declaration of war in April, Dewey steamed into Manila harbor and destroyed virtually the entire Spanish fleet anchored there without losing a single American sailor.

  Roosevelt was thirty-nine years old and the father of six children when America went to war, and he held an important post in Washington. But he was determined to get to the front nonetheless. His father had stayed out of the Civil War; he would not give his own children any reason to question his sense of duty. “It was my one chance to do something for my country,” he remembered, “and … my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family. I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to answer that call.”

  His wife was in fact seriously ill that spring, recovering from surgery. Secretary Long noted in his diary that all Roosevelt’s friends thought he was “acting like a fool.” And yet, he added, “how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES A tattered American flag flies above the wreck of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, 1898. No evidence of Spanish explosives was ever found, but many Americans, including Theodore Roosevelt, saw Commodore Dewey’s destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay (depicted here in a lithograph based on a painting by J. G. Tyler) as just revenge.

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  In a frame from an early motion picture film, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt hurries past the White House on his way to work.

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  The Wolf Rises in the Heart

  Roosevelt left the Navy Department, had Brooks Brothers run up a special uniform “in blue Cravenette,” ordered a dozen pairs of spare spectacles, and went to war as a lieutenant colonel in the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. Its commander was a regular army officer and close friend, Colonel Leonard Wood. But the outfit quickly became known as “Teddy’s Terrors,” “Teddy’s Cowboy Contingent,” and, finally, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.”

  There had never been a regiment like it. One thousand eager horsemen, mostly from the West: bronco-busters and Indians and buffalo hunters; sheriffs and marshals and Texas Rangers who had tamed frontier towns—and the cowboys and prospectors who had shot up the same towns on Saturday nights. And serving rig
ht alongside them, Irish cops from New York and Protestant clergymen from New England; fox hunters and yachtsmen and British adventurers; the world’s best polo player and the amateur tennis champion of the United States.

  “You would be amused,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend from the Rough Riders’ Texas training camp, “to see three Knickerbocker club men cooking and washing dishes for one of the New Mexico companies.”

  Roosevelt was determined to get into battle before the fighting ended. When the expedition was finally ordered to sail for Cuba from Tampa, Florida, and he was told his men would have to wait for the second wave of transports, he personally commandeered a ship and ordered his men aboard.

  Nothing went as planned. Half the unit’s horses had to be left behind. The heat soared above 100 degrees. Drinking water was foul. Tinned beef proved inedible.

  The landing at Daiquiri was chaotic, even though the Spanish never fired a shot. Horses were forced to swim ashore; one of Roosevelt’s two mounts drowned. General William Shafter, the overall commander, weighed more than three hundred pounds and was so crippled by gout he could not walk. The commander of the cavalry division, General Joseph Wheeler, was a onetime Confederate who sometimes forgot he was fighting Spaniards, not Yankees, and was determined that his men, not the infantry, would get the credit for fighting the Spanish first.

  The American target—nineteen miles away, seven of them through heavy jungle—was the port city of Santiago de Cuba, where American warships already blockaded the harbor.

  Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were in the lead when they were ambushed on a jungle path near the village of Las Guasimas. In a letter home written the following morning, Roosevelt remembered the clash a little differently: “[We] struck the Spaniards and had a brisk fight for 2½ hours before we drove them out of their position. We lost a dozen men killed or mortally wounded and sixty severely or slightly wounded.… One man was killed as he stood beside me. Another bullet went through a tree behind which I stood and filled my eyes with bark. The last charge I led on the left using a rifle I took from a wounded man; and I kept three of the empty cartridges for the children.”

  The Rough Riders, aided by the 1st Cavalry and black troops of the 10th Cavalry, forced the enemy to withdraw. They pushed on toward Santiago, where Spanish troops were dug in along the San Juan Heights and on top of a lower summit the Americans would call Kettle Hill.

  On the first of July, the order was given to drive them off. The Rough Riders were assigned to support regular troops as they stormed Kettle Hill. The battle began with an exchange of artillery. Spanish shrapnel bruised Roosevelt’s wrist and tore the leg from a man standing next to him. Bullets ripped through the air, Roosevelt remembered, “making a sound like the ripping of a silk dress.”

  He led his men forward. One captain, a former quarterback at Harvard, carried his sabre on one shoulder and a six-shooter in the other. “Oh Jesus, I’m scared,” he said. “But, by God, I’ll stay with it.”

  Spanish fire poured down as the Americans splashed across San Juan Creek. Several Rough Riders were hit. Eventually, hundreds of men were stalled at the foot of the hill awaiting orders to attack.

  What Theodore Roosevelt was always to remember as his “crowded hour” was about to begin. “All men who feel any power of joy in battle,” Roosevelt later wrote, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in the heart.” When the orders did not come, Roosevelt mounted his horse, Texas, and led his Rough Riders forward through the milling men. “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” he demanded of one private. The man got to his feet and was killed instantly.

  “If you don’t wish to go forward,” he told an officer, “please let my men pass.” He waved his hat, spurred his horse, and started up the hillside. A bullet nicked his elbow. His spectacles fell off, and he somehow managed to replace them as he rode.

  The Rough Riders followed him, cheering. The regulars they had been supposed to support struggled to keep up. A wire fence forced Roosevelt to dismount. He got through it and kept going. The Spanish began to flee. He shot one Spaniard with a revolver; “doubled him up,” he remembered, “neatly as a jackrabbit.”

  The summit gave him a clear view of the ongoing battle for San Juan Heights. He decided to join that struggle, too, and rushed toward the fighting. But he forgot to give the order to follow. Only five men did. Three were shot down. He ran back, rallied his men, and joined the assault by black and white troops that finally drove the enemy from its fortifications.

  All in all, it had been “fun,” Roosevelt said, and “the great day of my life.” “No hunting trip so far has ever equaled it in Theodore’s eyes,” a Rough Rider and old friend wrote Edith after the battle. “[He] was just revelling in victory and gore.” He thought himself worthy of a Medal of Honor and would lobby hard for it. “I do not want to be vain,” he told a friend, “but I do not think that anyone else could have handled this regiment quite as I have handled it.” His men agreed. “We were drawn to him,” one remembered. “We’d have gone to hell with him.”

  Even before he sailed for home, letters began to arrive, urging him to run for governor of New York.

  The hat TR wore up San Juan Heights and a portrait of him in his Rough Rider uniform, commissioned by Edith Roosevelt from the artist Fedor Encke not long after her husband returned from Cuba. “I cannot say that it looks particularly like me,” he once said of this portrait, but he preferred it to other portraits because he wanted his children to remember him as a warrior.

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  Eager for battle, Roosevelt’s Rough Riders crowd the deck of the transport ship Yucatan on their way to Cuba, June 14, 1898. One man hung a sign on her hull reading STANDING ROOM ONLY; another added, AND DAMN LITTLE OF THAT.

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  The minstrel impresario William H. West was just one of scores of American showmen who would find ways to incorporate Roosevelt’s victory into their performances.

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  Wounded Spanish troops on San Juan Heights: “Look at all those damned Spanish dead,” Roosevelt exulted to a friend as soon as the shooting stopped.

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  Rough Riders pinned down by Spanish fire from the summit of Kettle Hill. Moments later, Theodore Roosevelt would lead them up the slope—and make himself a national hero.

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  Roosevelt’s men bury one of their dead. Their colonel was proud that his regiment suffered eighty-nine casualties, “the heaviest loss suffered by any regiment in the cavalry division.”

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  The Coming American

  When a reporter called at Sagamore after Roosevelt got home and asked five-year-old Archie where “the colonel” was, the boy answered, “I don’t know where the Colonel is but Father is taking a bath.”

  Reform-minded Independents pressed him to run on their ticket. But his old antagonist Boss Platt now wanted him, too; a war hero was sure to help the Republican slate. Roosevelt rejected the reformers and ran as a regular Republican: “Idealism,” he said, must be combined with “efficiency,” and that could only be done as part of a major party.

  He barnstormed with six uniformed Rough Riders at his side. One of them remembered an early appearance at Carthage, New York: “He spoke for about ten minutes—the speech was nothing, but the man’s presence was everything. It was electrical, magnetic—I looked in the faces of hundreds and saw only pleasure and satisfaction—when the train moved away scores of men and women ran after it [it] waving hats and handkerchiefs and cheering, trying to keep him in sight as long as possible.”

  Every speech was preceded by a bugle call. “You have heard the bugle that sounded to bring you here,” Roosevelt would shout. “I have heard it tear the tropic dawn at Santiago.” At one whistle-stop, an overenthusiastic veteran introduced him as the man who “led us up San Juan Hill like sheep to the slaughter—and so will he lead you!”

  Roosevelt won. “I have played it with bull luck this summer,” he tol
d a friend. “First to get into the war; then to get out of it; then to get elected.”

  No one was prouder of his victory than the Hyde Park Roosevelts who had deserted the Democrats to support him. “Hyde Park gave the Colonel [an] 81 [vote] majority,” Mr. James wrote proudly to Franklin. “Last spring, the Democrats carried the town by 91, so we think we did very well by our cousin.” Franklin was so thrilled by what the man his mother called “your noble kinsman” had done that when he was told he needed glasses he ordered two sets of lenses, one mounted in a gold-rimmed pince-nez precisely like the ones Theodore Roosevelt wore up Kettle Hill. He only rarely wore the other pair.

  Boss Platt feared the new governor harbored “altruistic ideas,” and was “a little loose” on questions affecting “the right of a man to run his own business in his own way.” Roosevelt promised to consult Platt as he went along, but he had concluded that it was neither wise nor safe for Republicans to take refuge in what he called “mere negation.” New circumstances demanded a new kind of reform—progressive reform. The unprecedented but reckless growth that had transformed the country since the Civil War was meant to continue, but the old “natural laws” of the marketplace were no longer adequate; government needed to step in to tame its excesses and maintain necessary order. Wrongs now had to be righted through legislation as well as persuasion.

  As governor, Roosevelt intended to strike a “just balance” between what he called “mob rule” and improper corporate influence.

  Platt controlled the legislature. But Roosevelt held two press briefings a day to rally support for his positions—and won more battles than he lost. In less than six months, he secured passage of bills that taxed corporations, limited working hours for women and children, improved sweatshop conditions, and created forest preserves in the Catskills and Adirondacks.