The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  “Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs,” he wrote. “There can be nothing more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon in the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our children must see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever with their majestic beauty unmarred.”

  TR begins his western trip by climbing into the locomotive of his train at Altoona, Pennsylvania. He rode next to the engineer for forty-nine miles, and then thanked him for the “bully” start to his cross-country journey.

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  At Yellowstone, Roosevelt (left) and the writer John Burroughs enjoy Old Faithful—which the New York World called the president’s “only rival in intermittent but continuous spouting.”

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  Roosevelt keeps an eye on the photographer as he and his party roll through the Wawona Tunnel Tree in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, now part of Yosemite National Park.

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  Troopers of the all-black 9th Cavalry—called “buffalo soldiers” by the Plains Indians—struggle to control the surging crowds eager to greet the president’s carriage (lower left) as it crosses the Presidio Golf Course in San Francisco. He moved on to Yosemite the next day, but the solitude the West had once provided for him was no longer easy to find.

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  Surrounded by symbols of the nation and the wildness he loved, Roosevelt calls for conservation at Newcastle, Wyoming. “He gave himself very freely and heartily to the people wherever he went” on his western tour, John Burroughs remembered. “He could easily match their western cordiality and good-fellowship.”

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  I Took the Canal Zone

  The American expansionism Roosevelt had advocated since long before his days at the Navy Department had succeeded beyond his dreams. The United States was now a world power. It had annexed Hawaii, driven Spain from the New World, dominated Cuba, and nearly finished subjugating the Philippines.

  But one great expansionist vision remained unfulfilled. For more than half a century, American and European investors had dreamed of a Central American canal linking the Atlantic to the Pacific. Roosevelt believed such an inter-ocean pathway was now indispensable for the full exercise of American naval power.

  There were two rival routes: one through the mountains of Nicaragua (the late James Roosevelt had invested heavily in it), and a shorter path across the Isthmus of Panama in Colombia, where a French company had stalled and thousands of workers had already died of yellow fever.

  When the French company offered to sell its rights to the Panama route for a reasonable price, Roosevelt agreed to buy them, then instructed his secretary of state, John Hay, to negotiate a treaty with Colombia. It called for a payment of $10 million, plus an annual rental fee for a six-mile “Canal Zone” across the isthmus.

  But the Colombian senate unanimously refused to ratify the treaty—and then demanded double the price. Roosevelt was enraged. “I do not think that the Bogota lot of jack rabbits should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization,” he said.

  Roosevelt divided the world into what he called “civilized” powers—industrialized and mostly white—and “uncivilized” nations that produced raw materials, bought products instead of manufacturing them, and were incapable of self-government.

  The great enemy of civilization was what he called “chaos.” To combat it, he believed, it was the duty of “civilized and orderly powers” to police the rest. Britain should be responsible for India and Egypt, he believed. Japan—which Roosevelt numbered among the “civilized” nations because it had become an industrial and military power—should control Korea and the Yellow Sea.

  And the United States—and only the United States—must police the Caribbean. When the dictator of Venezuela defaulted on his country’s loans and German warships steamed in to shell her ports and blockade the coast, Roosevelt threatened war to make Germany back off, then took over Venezuelan customs collecting until the debts were paid.

  In Roosevelt’s view, the refusal of the Colombian senate to honor the government’s commitment was just the latest embodiment of the kind of “chaos” he deplored. He was determined to end it—and get an American canal under way. He would not attack Colombia directly; Congress wouldn’t stand for it. But again and again over the previous fifty years the people of the narrow, jungle-covered Province of Panama had asserted their wish to be independent of Bogotá.

  Philippe Bunau-Varilla was a tiny, fastidious Frenchman, a lobbyist for the French canal builders and in touch with rebels eager to rise against Colombian rule. He visited Roosevelt in the White House. It was a delicate conversation: What did the Frenchman think was going to happen in Panama Province?

  “Mr. President,” his visitor said, “a Revolution.”

  Roosevelt was careful to say nothing about how the United States might respond. He didn’t need to. The Frenchman had “no assurances in any way,” TR remembered. “[But] he is a very able fellow, and it was his business to find out what he thought our Government would do. I have no doubt that he was able to make a very accurate guess, and to advise his people accordingly. In fact, he would have been a very dull man had he been unable to make such a guess.”

  The rebels proclaimed their independence. An American cruiser landed troops to neutralize the handful of Colombian troops the revolutionaries hadn’t already bought off. It was all over within seventy-two hours.

  Roosevelt was presiding at a cabinet meeting at 11:35 on the morning of November 6, 1903, when a messenger brought him the happy news. By the time lunch was served, the United States had recognized the brand-new Republic of Panama.

  American work on the great canal would soon begin. Years later, Roosevelt would boast that “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate and while the debate goes on, the Canal does, too. And now instead of discussing the Canal before it was built, which would have been harmful, they merely discuss me—a discussion which I regard with benign interest.”

  Rusting French equipment and a section of the unfinished canal across the Isthmus of Panama, abandoned after twenty-two years of effort by the Panama Canal Company. Where the French despaired, Roosevelt saw opportunity.

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  Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. Despite his bellicose reputation, Roosevelt was proud that during his seven and a half years in the White House “not a shot had been fired against a foreign foe.” (The bloody Philippine insurrection inherited from McKinley didn’t count in his mind because the islands were then American territory, not a foreign country.)

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  Harper’s Weekly defends Roosevelt’s decision to strong-arm Colombia and tacitly support the secession of Panama.

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  General Esteban Huertas (center), the diminutive commander of the Colombian garrison at Panama City, was paid $65,000—more than a million and a half dollars in today’s terms—to persuade the soldiers shown here not to resist the revolution.

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  THIS AND THE PRECEDING IMAGE Clifford Berryman of the Washington Post saw TR’s action in Panama as the latest in a long line of heroic American deeds, while, for Puck, Grant Hamilton depicted Roosevelt as an enthusiastic and distinctly un-American imperialist.

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  E Is an Angel

  For Thanksgiving that year, Franklin and his mother traveled to the Delano family homestead at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, rather than face the prospect of being at Springwood without Mr. James. After dinner, Franklin took Sara for a walk in the garden. He had something to tell her. He had fallen in love with Eleanor Roosevelt, the orphaned daughter of the president’s late younger brother, Elliott Roosevelt.

  He had asked her to marry him.

  She had said yes.

  Sara was stunned. They were too young, she thought: Franklin
was just twenty-one; Eleanor only nineteen. And if they married she feared she would be left alone.

  Franklin and Eleanor did their best to reassure her. “You know, dear mummy, that nothing can ever change what we have always been & always will be to each other,” he wrote. “Only now you have two children to love & to love you.” Eleanor echoed that sentiment: “It is impossible for me to tell you how I feel toward Franklin. I can only say that my one great wish is always to prove worthy of him.… I know just how you feel and how hard it must be, but I do want you to learn to love me a little.”

  Loving her a little was the best Eleanor Roosevelt dared wish for.

  “[Franklin] had always been so secure in every way,” she remembered, “and then he discovered that I was perfectly insecure.” Everything in her upbringing had seemed calculated to make her feel that way. When she was seventeen, her grandmother had insisted she come home from Allenswood to prepare for her debut in New York society. She spent a summer at Tivoli, where one of her drunken uncles had become so uncontrollable that he could not be discouraged from spraying buckshot from his bedroom window at anyone who dared venture onto the lawn. Three locks had to be installed on her bedroom door. “It was not a very good preparation for being a gay and joyous debutante,” she remembered.

  One of the young men who sought her out to dance that season remembered that “the spirit of competition [among his fellow suitors] was distinctly present.” Her own memories were different. “I imagine that I was well-dressed, but there was absolutely nothing about me to attract anybody’s attention.… I was tall, but I did not dance very well.… By no stretch of the imagination could I fool myself into thinking that I was a popular debutante.”

  On November 17, 1902, just five weeks after Franklin had said goodbye to the beautiful Alice Sohier, he attended the New York Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. Several Roosevelt cousins had been invited to sit in his stepbrother Rosy’s special box, including Eleanor. She and Franklin had seen one another casually at family events over the years, but now he asked to see her again—and again and again—noting each meeting in his diary with an “E,” precisely as Theodore Roosevelt had once kept the courtship of his second wife secret in his journal.

  A little over a year later, he invited her to Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game. Franklin led the cheers. That evening, he wrote another entry in his special code: “After lunch I have a never to be forgotten walk to the river with my darling.”

  He had proposed. With her help, he said, he could make something of himself.

  She had asked him, “Why me? I am plain. I have little to bring you.” But she had also said yes.

  When Franklin told his mother his big news a few days later, she asked him to keep the engagement a secret for a year to see if his feelings for Eleanor and hers for him were truly lasting, just as her father had insisted that she and Mr. James let time pass before announcing their engagement.

  The home built by Sara Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where the Delano clan gathered for holidays and where Franklin revealed his great secret

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  Eleanor Roosevelt, photographed in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in 1900, two years before she was called home from the Allenswood School and became reacquainted with her cousin Franklin

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  Franklin Roosevelt at twenty-one, playing with a Delano family pet. Decades later, Eleanor would tell a close friend that “the nicest men in the world are those who always keep something of the boy in them. Franklin was like that.”

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  In June of 1903, Eleanor, seated second from the right, came to Springwood for a four-day house party. Franklin, wearing a straw hat, stands nearby. All the guests, invited by his mother, were relatives by blood or marriage.

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  Two weeks later, after another encounter with the cousin with whom he’d fallen in love, Franklin used an amateurish private code to write “E is an Angel” in his diary. The cipher was intended to keep his mother from knowing what was on his mind.

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  Bedlam Let Loose

  Within days of becoming president, Theodore Roosevelt had issued an executive order changing the official name of his new residence from the Executive Mansion to what most people had always called it—the “White House.” The place was in dreadful shape: shabby, cramped, still lit by gaslight with an elevator that rarely worked and floors so shaky that whenever a large gathering was expected, the floors of the public rooms had to be shored up with timbers.

  The fashionable New York architect Charles F. McKim was called in to renovate and rebuild: much of the interior had to be gutted, and the executive offices of the president were to be moved from the second floor into a new building.

  In May 1902, Roosevelt ordered that it all be done in six months. He moved to a bedroom across Jackson Street until he could join his family at Sagamore Hill for the summer. “The house is torn to pieces,” McKim wrote that summer, “bedlam let loose cannot compare with it.”

  When work was finished in the fall of 1902, the Roosevelt White House had an almost royal air: the coachmen’s buttons bore the initials “T.R.”; Edith met weekly with the cabinet wives to decide who was and who was not to be invited to dinner; those asked to accompany the president on his frequent rides through Rock Creek Park were instructed to stay behind him and not get closer than ten yards. Critics spoke of an “Imperial Court,” and some White House dinner guests complained that the president monopolized the conversation: “Hardly an observation was made by anyone else at the table,” one wrote, “and, in fact, it would only have been possible by the exercise of a sort of brutal force.”

  “I do not think that any two people have ever got more enjoyment out of the White House than Mother and I,” TR told Ted. “We love the house itself without and within, for its associations, for its stateliness and its simplicity.… We almost always take our breakfast on the south portico now, Mother looking very pretty and dainty in her summer dresses.”

  PRECEDING AND FOLLOWING IMAGES John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, painted in the White House. TR loved it and had it hung in the expanded entrance hall. Henry Adams thought it was “good Sargent and not very bad Roosevelt. It is not Theodore, but a young intellectual idealist with a taste for athletics, which I take to be Theodore’s idea of himself.”

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  Workers roofing the new Executive Office Building, where the president’s offices would eventually be located. The building was meant to be a temporary structure but has remained in place ever since—the West Wing.

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  The people of France presented Edith Roosevelt with this portrait by Théobald Chartran. The first lady is seated in the White House garden with the south portico of the White House in the background.

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  The expanded State Dining Room, lit by a brand-new electric chandelier, its walls a menagerie of the president’s hunting trophies

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  The Steam-Engine in Trousers

  Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to have been born in a city, and the first to be known by his initials—“T.R.” He was so many things at once that one admirer called him “polygonal”: moral crusader and canny politician; birdwatcher and big-game hunter; historian and expansionist and naturalist; omnivorous reader and hands-down the most prolific writer in presidential history. (In addition to his thirty-five books he would write some 150,000 letters before he was through.)

  He moved fast, talked fast, seemed to harbor an opinion on every topic—and to be more than happy to express any or all of them. “I always believe in going hard at everything,” he told one of his sons. “My experience is that it pays never to let up or grow slack and fall behind.”

  “His personality,” said one visitor, “so crowds the room that the walls are worn thin and threaten to burst outward. You go to the White House.
You shake hands with Roosevelt and hear him talk—and then go home to wring the personality out of your clothes.”

  An admirer hailed him as “a stream of fresh, pure bracing air from the mountains, [sent] to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital.” Another called him “a steam-engine in trousers.” But the novelist Henry James, who had known him for years, dismissed him as “the monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.” Mark Twain thought him a showoff, a “little imitation cowboy.” And the biographer Gamaliel Bradford felt that he was always “playing a game.… Forcing optimism, forcing enjoyment with the desperate instinctive appreciation that if he let the pretense drop for a moment, the whole scheme of things would vanish away.”

  Whatever they thought of him, no one was ever able to ignore him. “Roosevelt has the knack of doing things and doing them noisily, clamorously,” a reporter wrote, “while he is in the neighborhood the public can no more look the other way than the small boy can turn his head away from a circus parade followed by a steam calliope.”

  TR takes a fence. When a photographer failed to capture his first jump, the president was happy to repeat the process for the camera. Photographs of him playing tennis on the new courts just outside his office were forbidden, however, because he feared voters would find the game effete.

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  Roosevelt mounts a chair to make sure a Denver crowd can see as well as hear him. “He has only one limiting and devouring ambition,” a French observer wrote, “which is to move and convince.… He is a workman who puts the best of his energy into driving rivets. He hammers out understandings.”