The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Ignoring the relentless rain, Theodore Roosevelt strides ashore at La Boca, Panama, November 15, 1906.

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  Roosevelt and Manuel Amador, the Panamanian president who had led the uprising against Colombia, meet on the steps of the Metropolitan Cathedral in Panama City. “To reorganize the great work [of digging the Canal], to grasp … its immense magnitude, a superior man was necessary,” Amador told TR through his interpreter, “and you were this man.” The rain-soaked riders in the foreground are Panamanians wearing Rough Rider uniforms because it was thought that would please the American president.

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  Roosevelt at the controls of a ninety-ton Bucyrus steam shovel that could lift eight tons of rock and earth in a single scoop

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  A Heart Well-Nigh Broken

  In the winter of 1908, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt moved into the six-story New York townhouse his mother had built for them at 49 East Sixty-fifth Street. With them came their first two children, two-year-old Anna and eleven-month-old James, Eleanor’s younger brother, Hall—and six servants.

  Sara and three more servants occupied the house’s twin at number 47. The Roosevelt family crest was carved above the common entrance and open doors on three floors connected the households.

  Sara had hired the staff. She and her son had also overseen the construction and furnishing. Eleanor had played almost no part. Not long after they moved in, Franklin found her weeping. He asked what was wrong. “I said I did not like to live in a house which was not in any way mine,” she remembered, “one that I had done nothing about and which did not represent the way I wanted to live. Being an eminently reasonable person, he thought I was quite mad and told me so gently, and said I would feel different in a little while and left me alone until I should become calmer.”

  Eleanor did calm down, she recalled, but her outburst was the first sign that in the interest of her marriage she had simply been “absorbing the personalities of those around me and letting their tastes and interests dominate me”—and that she resented it.

  Franklin delighted in his children. Eleanor seemed mostly puzzled by them. “I had never had any interest in dolls or in little children,” she remembered, “and I knew absolutely nothing about handling or feeding a baby.” Nannies hired and fired by her mother-in-law saw to such details. “Brother fell out of his chair this morning,” Eleanor noted one day. “Anna did not come to breakfast because she said, ‘No, I won’t.’ ” Misbehavior alarmed her; so did the nurses who told her how to handle it.

  Franklin was home only in the evenings. He had finished Columbia Law School, passed the New York bar, and, with the help of family connections, had gone to work as a clerk for the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. The law itself didn’t interest him much. A member of the firm recalled that he “tended to dance on the top of the hills” and leave to others the hard work on the slopes below.

  But “thanks to Uncle Ted,” his wife remembered, he was already interested in politics, and so he did enjoy getting to know all kinds of people he’d never encountered at Groton or Harvard—ambulance chasers and penniless plaintiffs and witnesses, both credible and incredible.

  A few months after the Roosevelts moved to Sixty-fifth Street, Eleanor gave birth to a third child, at eleven pounds “the biggest and most beautiful of all the babies,” she remembered. They named him Franklin Jr. and immediately registered his name at Groton.

  That summer, Eleanor and several servants took the three children to Campobello. Sara had bought the younger Roosevelts their own “cottage” on the island, entirely separate from hers. There was no electricity, no telephone; all the cooking had to be done on a small coal stove. Eleanor loved it. It was hers, the first real home she had ever known.

  But as the weeks went by, it became clear that something was wrong with the baby’s heart. Doctors were consulted, first on the island, then in Hyde Park, finally in Manhattan. No one seemed able to do anything.

  Sara recorded the baby’s final hours in her journal.

  November 1st. At a little before 7 A.M., Franklin [called my room] “Better come, Mama, Baby is sinking.” I went in. The little angel ceased breathing at 7:25 … Franklin and Eleanor are most wonderful, but poor Eleanor’s mother’s heart is well-nigh broken. She so hoped and cannot believe her baby is gone from her.

  November 2. I sat often beside my little grandson. It is hard to give him up and my heart aches for Eleanor.

  Franklin Roosevelt Jr. was buried in the family plot at St. James’ Church in Hyde Park. It seemed “cruel,” Eleanor wrote, “to leave him out there in the cold.… I reproached myself very bitterly for having done so little about the care of this baby. I felt he had been left too much to the nurse and I knew too little about him, and that in some way I was to blame.”

  Within a month of her baby’s burial, Eleanor would find herself pregnant again.

  Sara Delano Roosevelt’s 1905 Christmas note promising to build Franklin and Eleanor a brownstone

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  The twin houses into which she and they moved three years later

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  Eleanor and her mother-in-law at Springwood the following year

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  Family portrait, 1908: Eleanor and James, Franklin and Anna

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  Franklin takes Anna for a walk at Campobello, while Eleanor and Anna’s nurse look on.

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  Eleanor and the first Franklin Jr., photographed at Campobello in the summer of 1908

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  During the early years of her motherhood, Eleanor wore this locket marked by her and her husband’s initials and the year of their engagement. The dents were caused by one teething baby after another.

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  Oughtn’t We All Be Proud?

  America’s place in the wider world continued to matter most to Theodore Roosevelt. U.S. relations with Japan had deteriorated since he’d helped end the Russo-Japanese War.

  Americans living along the Pacific coast had not helped. The San Francisco school board voted to segregate Japanese from white children. The California legislature called for cutting off Japanese immigration altogether. Newspapers issued dire warnings about a “Yellow Peril.” Asian immigrants and their descendants were burned out, beaten, killed.

  The president got the school board to change its policy and under a so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” persuaded Japan quietly to limit the outflow of emigrant workers on its own. But Japanese sea power was growing and Japanese sensibilities had been hurt.

  When Roosevelt thought he detected what he called “a very, very slight undertone of veiled truculence in [Japanese] communications,” he felt it was time to show “that I am not afraid of them.”

  He resolved to send sixteen American warships around the world to remind everyone that “the Pacific is as much our home waters as the Atlantic”—and to impress the voters with the U.S. Navy’s new importance, as well. Thanks in large part to Roosevelt’s resolve, America’s naval power was now second only to Great Britain’s.

  When Congress balked at approving the money for such a long voyage, he ordered the Great White Fleet to set sail across the Pacific anyway, confident that in the end legislators would not want to be responsible for keeping fourteen thousand American sailors from coming home again. “I determined on [sending the fleet] precisely as I took Panama, without consulting the Cabinet. A council of war never fights, and in a crisis the duty of a leader is to lead.”

  Looking back, Roosevelt believed the fourteen-month voyage of the Great White Fleet—steaming into twenty ports on six continents—had been “the most important service that I rendered to peace.”

  The ceremony celebrating the fleet’s return on February 22, 1909, would be one of the high points of Roosevelt’s life. “Did you ever see such a fleet?” he asked everyone around him. “Isn’t it magnificent? Oughtn’t we all be pr
oud?”

  But the president remained a realist about the prospects for a permanent peace in the Pacific. “Sooner or later, the Japanese will try to bolster up their power by another war. Unfortunately for us, we have what they want most, the Philippines.… When it comes, we will win over Japan, but it will be one of the most disastrous conflicts the world has ever seen.”

  The Great White Fleet of sixteen battleships and their escorts leaves Hampton Roads, Virginia, on December 16, 1907.

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  Americans followed the progress of the thirty-seven-month round-the-world voyage on newspaper maps.

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  The fleet visited twenty ports of call, including (TOP, LEFT AND RIGHT) Havana and Rio de Janeiro; (BOTTOM, LEFT AND RIGHT) Wellington and Sydney.

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  The Great White Fleet’s voyage continues:

  TR was most keen that Japan be impressed by American naval power.

  Sailors went ashore wherever their ships anchored, including Ceylon and Egypt.

  The sight of the fleet steaming past the Rock of Gibraltar inspired an insurance company to adopt it as its symbol.

  Thousands of New Yorkers poured into Riverside Park to see the anchored fleet lit up at night.

  On February 22, 1909, the fleet returned to Hampton Roads, where President Roosevelt climbed onto the gun turret of the fleet’s flagship, the USS Connecticut, and welcomed her crewmen home. “Another chapter is complete,” he said that day, “and I could not ask a finer concluding scene for my administration.”

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  My Future Is in the Past

  Theodore Roosevelt had accomplished a great deal during his seven years as president: the breakup of National Securities, the coal strike settlement, the Panama Canal, an end to the Russo-Japanese War, millions of wild acres preserved for future generations to enjoy. “I do not believe that any president has ever had as thoroughly a good time as I have had,” he wrote. “Or ever has enjoyed himself as much.”

  But privately he was not satisfied. He could not class himself as a great president, because he had faced no great crisis while in office. “A man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come. If there is not war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name.”

  Now, hampered by his own pledge not to run again in 1908, Roosevelt hand-picked a successor, his good friend and secretary of war, William Howard Taft of Ohio, who promised to remain true to the progressive principles the president had laid down. The country seemed to want that, too. Taft won easily.

  As he left the White House, Roosevelt did his best to seem cheerful, but when a friend assured him that he had not finished with politics he said, “My dear fellow, for Heaven’s sake don’t talk about my having a future. My future is in the past.”

  He was just fifty years old. “I want him to be the simplest American alive after he leaves the White House,” Edith wrote. “And the funniest thing to me is that he wants to be also and says he is going to be, but the trouble is he has really forgotten how to be.”

  Keppler heralds the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt’s chosen successor, Secretary of War William Howard Taft. “Taft will carry on the work substantially as I have carried it on,” Roosevelt assured a British friend. “His policies, principles, purposes and ideals are the same as mine.… In leaving, I have the profound satisfaction of knowing that he will do all in his power to further every one of the great causes for which I have fought and that he will persevere in every one of the great governmental policies in which I most firmly believe.”

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  Roosevelt and President-elect Taft (in top hats) climb the snow-covered Capitol steps on inauguration day. “I knew there would be a blizzard when I went out,” Roosevelt told a newspaperman.

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  William Howard Taft. “Mr. Taft was so nice and big and beaming over his victory,” Edith Roosevelt wrote after election day, “that it did one good to look at him.”

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  Bwana Mkubwa Sana

  All his life, Roosevelt had dreamed of hunting big game in Africa. Now, with his son Kermit at his side, he could make that dream a reality—and not be tempted to answer reporters’ questions about how his successor was doing. On that subject he promised to be “silent as an oyster.”

  When the former president sailed for Africa, J. P. Morgan was supposed to have said, “Every American hopes that every lion will do its duty.”

  The Roosevelt safari reminded onlookers of a military campaign. A vast American flag flew over the ex-president’s tent. Skilled white hunters served as guides. Three naturalists from the Smithsonian Institution saw to the steadily growing collection of specimens. Two hundred and six porters carried supplies, including cans of California peaches and Boston baked beans, ninety pounds of jam, four tons of salt to cure animal skins, and sixty miniature volumes, ranging from Alice in Wonderland to The Federalist—specially bound in pigskin, Roosevelt explained, so that dust and dents and bloodstains would “merely [make them] look as a well-used saddle looks.” His tent was cared for by two men; two more saw to his horses; another pair were responsible for his guns and ammunition. To his face, they all called him “Bwana Makwuba Sana,” or “Very Great Master.” Among themselves he was “Bwana Tumbo,” “The Master With a Big Stomach.” When Roosevelt overheard the second title and asked about it, he was told it meant “The Man with Unerring Aim.”

  For good luck, the ex-president carried a gold-mounted rabbit’s foot, given to him by his friend the former heavyweight champion John L. Sullivan.

  He didn’t need it. Together, his and Kermit’s rifles accounted for 512 animals and large birds, including twenty rhinoceroses, seventeen lions, eleven elephants, and nine giraffes—and not including countless smaller birds felled by their shotguns. They kept only a dozen trophies for themselves, Roosevelt said, and “shot nothing that was not used either as a museum specimen or for meat.” The expedition would eventually send home crates and barrels containing 11,397 preserved creatures, “not … a tenth,” Roosevelt wrote, “nor a hundredth, part of what we might have killed, had we been willing.”

  He reveled in all of it, but he was away from his wife for eleven months and he missed her. “Oh sweetest of sweet girls,” he wrote toward the end of the safari on the twenty-fourth anniversary of their engagement, “last night I dreamed that I was with you, that our separation was but a dream; and when I [woke] up it was almost too hard to bear. Well, one must pay for everything; you have made the real happiness of my life; and so it is natural and right that I should constantly [be] more and more lonely without you.… Do you remember when you were such a pretty engaged girl, and said to your love, ‘No, Theodore, that I cannot allow’? Darling, I love you so.… How very happy we have been for these last twenty-three years.” He signed his letter, “Your own lover.”

  The Roosevelt safari marches across the East African plain flying an oversized American flag, in a photograph by Kermit Roosevelt.

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  Kermit and his father atop a slain Cape buffalo. “Down at the bottom,” TR admitted to his friend William Allen White, “my main reason for wishing to go to Africa for a year is so that I can get where no one can accuse me of running, nor do Taft the injustice of accusing him of permitting me to run, the job.”

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  Edith Roosevelt, for whom TR began to yearn while in Africa

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  Reporters waylay TR at the end of his safari on March 11, 1910, hoping to elicit his views. “We have nothing to say and will have nothing to say on American or foreign policy questions,” he told them. “I will give no interviews and anything purporting to be an interview with me can be accepted as false as soon as it appears.”

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  Shielded from the harsh noonday sun, Roosevel
t devours one of the sixty miniature volumes in his personally selected “Pigskin Library.” His British-made tent was so comfortable and so spacious, Roosevelt told a white hunter, that it made him feel “a little effeminate.”