The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  “This is splendid, this is magnificent,” Roosevelt told a friend after it was signed. “It’s a mighty good thing for Russia, and a mighty good thing for Japan, and mighty good for me, too!”

  For all that he had done he would win the Nobel Prize for Peace.

  A 1904 Japanese woodcut shows Japanese warships battering the Russian fleet during the siege of Port Arthur. It was the first modern clash of steel battleships on the high seas and a great victory for Japan.

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  While a twenty-one-gun salute echoes off Oyster Bay, President Roosevelt hurries aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower on August 5, 1905, determined to get peace talks between Japan and Russia under way.

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  Aboard ship, Roosevelt poses for an official photograph, flanked by Russian and Japanese diplomats. “I think we are off to a good start,” he said that evening. “I know perfectly well that the whole world is watching me, and the condemnation that will come down on me, if the conference fails, will be world-wide, too. But that’s all right.”

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  The White House Gang

  The country was as obsessed with Roosevelt’s family as it was with him, and newspapermen competed to find fresh copy about its members. “The other day,” the president wrote in August of 1905, “a reporter asked Quentin something about me, to which that affable and canny young gentleman responded, ‘Yes, I see him sometimes; but I know nothing of his family life.’ ”

  Everything the Roosevelt children did seemed to make headlines.

  Theodore Jr.—“Ted”—was an eighteen-year-old Harvard freshman. His father had pushed him so hard when he was small that Edith and a physician had had to intervene. He remained a “regular bull terrier,” his proud father wrote, stoical enough to have finished a Groton football game despite a broken collarbone, but combative enough to relish what the president called “sanguinary battles with outsiders.” Photographers now dogged his steps, and his father urged him not to let his temper get the better of him.

  Sixteen-year-old Kermit was at Groton. But the White House was still home to fourteen-year-old Ethel and eleven-year-old Archie. Both were quiet and sweet-tempered.

  Seven-year-old Quentin was sweet-tempered too. “A roly-poly, happy-go-lucky personage,” his father wrote, “the brightest of all the children.” But he was also mischievous and irrepressible, a “fine little bad boy,” according to his mother, fond of big words that he bit off just as his father did, and accustomed to giving orders to the band of small boys who called themselves “the White House gang.”

  The children’s pets were allowed to roam everywhere—rabbits, raccoons, exotic birds, a kangaroo rat, dogs, a cat that attacked the Speaker of the House, and snakes that Quentin enjoyed bringing into cabinet meetings. The children rolled giant snowballs down the White House roof and onto the heads of policemen, spattered Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington with spitballs, and used mirrors to reflect sunlight into the eyes of clerks trying to work in the neighboring State, War, and Navy Building—until the president himself ordered semaphore men stationed on its roof to signal them to stop “and report to me right away.”

  The president often saw himself as one of the gang. “I came up-stairs,” he once reported to “Darling Kermit,” “[and found] Archie … driving Quentin by his suspenders which were fixed to the end of a pair of woolen reins. Then they would ambush me and we would have a vigorous pillow-fight, and after ten minutes of this we would go into Mother’s room, and I would read them the book Mother had been reading them. Archie and Quentin are really great playmates.”

  Archie and Quentin await orders from the White House police force. “Not one of my children ever wants to be told or directed about anything whatever,” Edith once complained, and her husband was no help. “He thinks children should be given entire freedom for their own inclinations.”

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  The president and his family in the summer of 1903 (left to right): Quentin, TR, Ted Jr., Archie, Alice, Kermit, Edith, and Ethel

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  Harvard freshman Ted Jr. being helped off the field at Harvard with a broken nose. When sportswriters suggested that Yale players had deliberately tried to injure the president’s son, Ted indignantly denied it in a letter to his father: “They played a clean straight game.… They beat us by simply and plainly outplaying us.”

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  Quentin, the youngest and liveliest of the Roosevelt children. “His tow head was always mussed,” a member of the White House Gang of small boys he led recalled. “His head seemed too large for his body. He was as irrepressible mentally as he was physically, and, either way, there was no holding him back.”

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  Archie and a pet badger his father brought home from his western tour. It looked like “a mattress with legs,” the president wrote. Archie assured nervous visitors that it bit only legs, “not faces.”

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  Quentin rides Algonquin, the calico pony he and a footman once smuggled into the White House elevator and up to the second-floor family quarters to cheer up his brother Archie, who was mourning the loss of a favorite dog.

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  An illustrated letter from Theodore to his son Kermit at Groton depicts a White House pillow fight in which the president of the United States took a prominent and enthusiastic part.

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  Never Anything but Trouble

  Alice was twenty-one in 1905, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife. Her early life had been divided among her mother’s parents, her aunt Bamie, and her father’s other children at Sagamore Hill. Like her cousin Eleanor, she felt she had never had a real home of her own.

  “Father doesn’t care for me one-eighth as much as he does for the other children,” she once confided to her diary. “It is perfectly true that he doesn’t, and Lord, why should he? We are not in the least congenial, and if I don’t care overmuch for him and don’t take a bit of interest in the things he likes, why should he pay any attention to me or the things I live for, except to look on them with disapproval.”

  Edith and Theodore had urged her to remain ladylike, tractable, reserved—to behave the way Eleanor did. Instead, Alice set out to be “conspicuous.” The “First Daughter”—the first teenage girl to grow up in the White House in a quarter of a century—was attractive, outspoken, and desperate to be noticed. She did everything—or almost everything—a young woman of her age and standing should not have done. She smoked. She bet on the horses, took long unchaperoned automobile rides in a bright red roadster, jumped into a swimming pool fully clothed, flirted with battalions of wealthy young men in New York and Newport, and wore a green snake as a wriggling fashion accessory to divert attention during one of her father’s meetings with the press.

  Her face was everywhere—candy boxes, song sheets, the front pages of newspapers around the world. The German navy named a ship for her. Overseas crowds hailed her as “Princess Alice.” She couldn’t get enough of it. “The family was always telling me, ‘Beware of publicity!’ ” she remembered. “And there was publicity hitting me in the face every day.… And once stories got out, or were invented, I was accused of courting publicity. I destroyed a savage letter on the subject from my father.… There was he, one of the greatest experts in publicity there ever was, accusing me of trying to steal his limelight.”

  One evening, a troubled young man had driven his carriage up to Sagamore Hill and insisted on seeing the president. When the Secret Service told him to go away, there was a struggle. A pistol was found. Roosevelt stepped out onto the porch to see what all the fuss was about. An agent said the intruder was a harmless lunatic, convinced he was destined to become the president’s son-in-law.

  “Of course, he was crazy,” Roosevelt later told the family. “He wants to marry Alice.”

  Republican Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio did want to marry Alice, and she accepted his proposal. He was s
ixteen years older than she, drank too much, and had a reputation as a ladies’ man, but he was also a member of Porcellian and, Alice’s father assured the king of England, “much the best violinist ever to come out of Harvard University.”

  Their wedding at the White House on February 17, 1906, was the social event of the year. Eleanor was pregnant and unable to attend. But Franklin and Sara rode together up the White House driveway and stood side by side inside to watch the exchange of vows.

  Afterward, the president, his new son-in-law, and thirty-eight other members of Porcellian slipped into a private dining room for the ceremonial toast to the groom that club tradition called for. Franklin had to stand outside with the other guests. Later, when the official photograph was being made, he helped adjust Alice’s veil, then stepped back before the camera clicked.

  As the newlyweds left the White House, Alice embraced her exhausted stepmother. “Mother, this has been quite the nicest wedding I’ll ever have,” she said. “I’ve never had so much fun.”

  Edith answered, only half in jest, “I want you to know that I’m glad to see you leave. You have never been anything but trouble.”

  Portrait of the first daughter by Edward Curtis, 1905. “Ever since she debuted into society,” the New York Times wrote, “there has been constant danger that she would stampede the cabinet with her poodle and pet garter snake or demoralize the senate with one of her skirt dances and acrobatic stunts.”

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  Alice at play. “I can be President of the United States,” her exasperated father once told a friend, “or I can attend to Alice. I cannot possibly do both!”

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  Congressman Nicholas Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, and her father pose for the official wedding photograph. “Alice looked remarkably pretty,” Sara Delano Roosevelt reported to Eleanor, “and her manner was very charming.” The lace that trimmed the bride’s satin gown came from the wedding dress worn by her late mother, Alice Lee, when she married Theodore Roosevelt twenty-six years earlier.

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  Bystanders watch as, one by one, carriages drop off some of the seven hundred wedding guests, Franklin and his mother among them. “The number of people at the wedding will be so great,” the president had complained as the lists were drawn up, “that we shall be fortunate if we escape a riot.”

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  Breathless wedding coverage from the front page of the Washington Times, February 17, 1906

  I Attack Inequities

  In June of 1906, Theodore Roosevelt seemed almost invincible. In his most recent message to Congress he had called for a series of what he called “national solutions to National problems.” Then, employing both the power of what he was the first to call the “bully pulpit” to rally public support, and his hard-won ability to outthink and outmaneuver the opposition behind the scenes, he’d pushed through a series of bills that made good on some of the most important of those promises. “I attack,” he once wrote. “I attack inequities. I try to choose the time for an attack when I can get the bulk of the people to accept the principles for which I stand.”

  Over the furious objections of the railroads—and the powerful Republican senators they controlled—Roosevelt won passage of the Hepburn Act. It empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission to limit the rates the railroads could charge to move goods from place to place—and for the first time in American history gave the rulings of a federal agency the force of law.

  With indirect help from crusading journalists, he pushed through the Pure Food and Drug Act, which demanded that the producers of everything from patent medicines to canned tomatoes accurately label their products. And when the meat-packing trust tried to block a meat inspection bill, Roosevelt released part of the appalling findings of a federal investigation into industry practices and then threatened to make public the rest if they didn’t back down. They did.

  Roosevelt enraged those whom he denounced as “malefactors of great wealth”—especially those who had contributed to his 1904 campaign in hopes of having some control over his policies. “We bought the son of a bitch,” one said, “but he wouldn’t stay bought.”

  The Antiquities Act Roosevelt had also signed in June of 1906 empowered the president to provide protection for prehistoric ruins as well as “objects of scientific interest” on federal lands—without having to ask permission of Congress. He immediately reinterpreted the act so that he could also save as National Monuments some of the country’s most extraordinary natural wonders—including Devil’s Tower and the Muir Woods, Mount Olympus, and more than 800,000 acres of the grandest canyon on earth.

  “A Short Interview in the White House.” Puck often opposed Theodore Roosevelt, but its stable of cartoonists found him irresistible, nonetheless.

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  Theodore Roosevelt at the peak of his power in 1906

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  “The Infant Hercules and the Standard Oil Serpents.” In 1906, TR attacked Standard Oil for profiting from secret rail rates and found himself locked in combat with two formidable opponents, John D. Rockefeller (with the forked tongue), and Nelson W. Aldrich, who was both the father-in-law of Rockefeller’s son and the Senate whip of the president’s own party.

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  A Colossal Blunder

  On August 16, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt received a telegram from the mayor of Brownsville, Texas. Black troops of the 25th United States Infantry (Colored) stationed at nearby Fort Brown had shot and killed a white bartender, he charged, had wounded a white police officer, and then had vowed to “repeat this outrage.” He demanded that the guilty be punished and the regiment immediately be stationed elsewhere.

  The soldiers denied any wrongdoing. The regiment’s white commanding officer backed them up; his men had all been safely in their barracks on the night in question. An all-white Texas grand jury had failed to indict any of the soldiers.

  Roosevelt ordered the inspector general—a white South Carolinian—to investigate.

  The president had made a few symbolic gestures toward civil rights. He had denounced the lawlessness of lynching, and when whites in Indianola, Mississippi, forced his black appointee as postmistress to resign, he closed the post office and made Indianola residents travel twenty miles to get their mail. But he also made much of his Confederate ancestry whenever he was in the South and privately thought it would take black people “many thousands of years” to match the intellectual powers of white people.

  The inspector general’s report on the Brownsville incident recommended that the president declare at least some of the accused guilty. “The colored soldier,” he charged, is inherently “secretive,” and too “aggressive in his attitude toward social equality.” Since none would confess, all should be dismissed.

  Booker T. Washington hurried to the White House and begged the president not to do anything before he could undertake an investigation of his own. To act without actual evidence of guilt and without giving the troops any chance to defend themselves, he said, would be a “colossal blunder.”

  Roosevelt contemptuously dismissed Washington’s appeal. He waited until November 7—the day after hundreds of thousands of black voters cast their votes for his party’s congressional candidates all across the North—and then dismissed all 167 men from the service. None would get a penny in pension. One of the sergeants had fought alongside Roosevelt in Cuba; he remembered splitting his rations with the colonel himself after the battle of Las Guasimas.

  Roosevelt angrily denounced critics of his Brownsville decision as naive “sentimentalists,” but when the time came to write his autobiography, he chose to make no mention of the case.

  After Brownsville, W. E. B. Du Bois urged black voters to abandon TR and his party. “What, after all, do we have to thank Roosevelt for?” he asked the readers of the Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line, and then answered his own question: “For asking a man to dine with him,” for appointing perfectly well-qualified black men to a h
andful of federal jobs, “and for saying, publicly, that the door of opportunity ought to be held open to colored men.” But, Du Bois continued, “the door once declared open, Mr. Roosevelt, by his word and deed since has slammed most emphatically in the black man’s face.”

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  Harper’s Weekly comments on the injustice done to the men of the 25th U.S. Infantry. More than six decades later, Augustus F. Hawkins, a black congressman from Los Angeles, introduced a bill that persuaded the Department of Defense to grant honorable discharges to all 167 of the men who had been dismissed. By then, just two members of the battalion were still living.

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  While Our Civilization Lasts

  The Brownsville controversy was soon buried by the news that TR and Edith had made a three-day surprise visit to the Panama Canal, the first time a sitting president had ever set foot on foreign soil. “ROOSEVELT IS THERE,” declared the Washington Post.

  TR described it all in a letter to Kermit: “We worked from morning till night. The second day I was up at a quarter-to-six and got to bed at a quarter of twelve, and I do not believe that in the intervening time, save when I was dressing, there were ten consecutive minutes when I was not busily at work in some shape or form. For two days there were uninterrupted tropic rains without a glimpse of the sun … so that we saw the climate at its worst. It was just what I desired to do.”

  Wearing a Panama hat and a seaman’s sou’wester over his white tropical suit, TR seemed oblivious to the steady deluge that at its height deposited three inches of rain in less than two hours. He inspected hospitals, barracks, and kitchens; ate with workers rather than the dignitaries waiting for him at Panama City’s grandest hotel; ordered the train that was supposed to keep him dry and safe to stop again and again so that he could jump down to ask the men how they were being treated or wade through the mud to see for himself what they were doing. “I went over everything that I could possibly go over in the time at my disposal … ,” he remembered, “and spent a day in the Culebra Cut where the greatest work is being done.” Thousands of men were at work there, blasting, digging, and scooping out an artificial valley a third of a mile wide across the Continental Divide. “With intense energy men and machines do their task,” Roosevelt told his son, “the white men supervising matters and handling the machines, while the tens of thousands of black men do the rough manual labor where it is not worthwhile to have machines do it.… American canal-builders and the thousands of men laboring under them are changing the face of the continent, are doing the greatest engineering feat of the ages, and the effect of their work will be felt while our civilization lasts.”