The Roosevelts

by Geoffrey C. Ward

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  The Force of His Personality

  In March of 1910, Theodore Roosevelt finally steamed up the Nile and out of the African interior. Reunited with Edith at Khartoum, he began a one-man, three-month parade across North Africa and Europe—making headlines wherever he went.

  He upset Egyptians by telling them that they were not ready for independence from Great Britain. From the pulpit of an Amsterdam church he recited a Dutch nursery rhyme he remembered learning in his grandfather’s house. Near Berlin, he watched maneuvers with Kaiser Wilhelm and took the opportunity to warn him that a war between Germany and England would be “an unspeakable calamity.”

  At the Louvre in Paris, he passed up Rubens’s full-bodied nudes because he did not feel they should be viewed in mixed company.

  At the Sorbonne, Roosevelt set forth his concept of leadership:

  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievements, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

  Everywhere, crowds cheered him as if he still held office. The trip was both exhilarating and exhausting. “Father is so tired that whenever we go in a motor he falls asleep,” Edith wrote home. “The people are quite mad about him and stand around the hotel to see him go in and out.… [Though it was midnight,] I had to send him out on our balcony before they would disperse.”

  King Edward VII of England died while Roosevelt was still abroad, and President Taft asked TR to represent the United States at the London funeral. “With Roosevelt and the Kaiser at King Edward’s funeral,” a former White House aide wrote, “it will be a wonder if the poor corpse gets a passing thought.”

  One day, TR and Edith managed to slip away from onlookers and make an unannounced visit together to St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, where they had quietly been married twenty-eight years before.

  Taft watched Roosevelt’s progress warily. “I don’t suppose there was ever such a reception as that being given Theodore in Europe now,” he wrote. “It illustrates how his personality has swept over the world, for after all no great event transpired during either of his administrations, and no startling legislation was enacted into law. It is the force of his personality that has passed beyond his own country and the capitals of the world and seeped into the small crevices of the universe.”

  TR, Edith, and their party explore the battlefield of Omdurman near Khartoum, where in 1898 British lancers undertook the last great cavalry charge of the nineteenth century.

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  On his way to pick up an honorary degree from Cambridge University, Roosevelt spots a miniature Teddy bear placed in his path by cheering students, its tiny paw extended in welcome.

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  Roosevelt maintains an uncharacteristic silence while a top-hatted guide points out the finer points of the oversized history paintings that line museum walls at Versailles.

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  Kaiser Wilhelm II and TR look on as twelve thousand Prussian soldiers stage a five-hour mock battle. “Well, my dear Roosevelt,” the Kaiser told his guest, “you are the first private citizen that has ever reviewed the Prussian troops!”

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  Roosevelt, in top hat and morning coat, brings up the rear of the parade of befeathered royals attending the funeral of King Edward VII in London. After a week of their company, he said, he feared that “if I met another king I should bite him.”

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  Collier’s, the muckraking weekly that had helped awaken the public to the need for the kind of reforms Roosevelt had championed, welcomes him home.

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  All Franklin’s Plans

  No one followed Theodore Roosevelt’s travels with more interest than Franklin Roosevelt did. He was bored with the law just as the ex-president had once been, and eager to follow the political path his cousin had blazed.

  Other young members of the Roosevelt clan harbored the same ambition. Theodore Robinson, who had married Rosy’s daughter, Helen, was already running for the New York Assembly; Joseph Alsop Jr., married to the ex-president’s niece, was considering a run in Connecticut; Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was just twenty years old, still too young to run for office but already being called the “Crown Prince” in the newspapers; his three younger brothers might choose to run someday as well. All of them were sure to run as Republicans.

  If Franklin were to have a chance, it would be best to run as a Democrat—the party in which his late father had always felt most at home. And so when Judge John E. Mack, the Democratic Dutchess County district attorney, dropped by the Wall Street law firm where Franklin was working and asked if he’d be interested in running for the state legislature, he jumped at the chance. No Democrat could win in Dutchess County unless he could peel votes away from the Republicans: Who was more likely to do that than a personable young man named Roosevelt?

  Franklin saw no need to ask for his wife’s advice. Her husband always lived “his own life exactly as he wanted it,” she remembered. “I listened to all Franklin’s plans with a great deal of interest. It never occurred to me that I had any part to play. I felt I must acquiesce in whatever he might decide to do and be willing to go to Albany.… I was having a baby, and for a time at least that was my only mission in life.” Only one thing held Franklin back. He wanted to be sure his cousin Theodore would not object to a member of the family running for office on the Democratic ticket.

  TR sailed into New York Harbor on the morning of June 18, 1910, aboard the German passenger ship Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. More than a million New Yorkers waited to welcome him home, including scores of reporters eager to ask him what he thought of President Taft and whether he would ever consider running for the White House again himself.

  The revenue cutter Manhattan drew up alongside, prepared to take the Roosevelts ashore. Among the newspapermen, old friends, and family members, on her top deck were Franklin and Eleanor. At some point during the day’s festivities, Franklin asked the ex-president for his blessing. He gave Franklin the go-ahead. It was too bad he was choosing to run as a Democrat, TR said, but he knew Franklin could be counted on to battle the bosses in whatever party he chose.

  “I’m so fond of that boy,” Theodore had once told Sara Delano Roosevelt, “I’d be shot for him.”

  Theodore Roosevelt tips his hat to the crowd as he returns from his triumphal tour of Europe. There to greet him are friends, politicians, and family members, including Franklin and Eleanor, standing together at the far right.

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  CHAPTER 3

  The Fire of Life

  1910–1919

  Colonel Roosevelt acknowledges cheers from New York supporters during his Progressive crusade in 1912.

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  I’m Not Teddy

  In the early autumn of 1910, voters living along the back roads of upstate Dutchess County, New York, were startled by something altogether new—a bright red two-cylinder Maxwell touring car, draped with bunting. The car’s owner, a Poughkeepsie piano tuner, was behind the wheel. Next to him was an eager young candidate for the state senate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Hyde Park.

  He was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer who had never run for anything before, and a Democrat running in a traditionally Republican district. But he was also the fifth cousin of the most popular man in America, former president Theodore Roosevelt. Young Roosevelt promised “a strenuous cam
paign.” It proved so strenuous that he spent one afternoon across the state line in Connecticut, pumping the hands of baffled farmers who couldn’t vote for him even if they’d wanted to.

  He professed to be “dee-lighted” by everything, just as his cousin always was. “I’m not Teddy,” he liked to tell the crowds. “A little shaver said to me the other day that he knew I wasn’t Teddy—I asked him why, and he replied, ‘Because you don’t show your teeth.’ ” But he did. A Democratic committeeman remembered that from the first he’d been “a topnotch salesman because he wouldn’t immediately enter into a topic of politics when he met a party … he would approach them as a friend and would lead up to that with that smile of his.”

  The midterm elections proved a disaster for the Republicans nationally. Democrats captured the House for the first time in sixteen years. And, as Franklin’s proud mother kept a tally of her boy’s triumph, the Democratic tide helped sweep him into the New York State Senate. FDR was on his way.

  William Yawkey, members of his family, and the Maxwell in which Franklin Roosevelt’s political career began. For five wearying weeks, Yawkey drove the eager state senate candidate up and down Dutchess County so that he could speak, a friend remembered, wherever “a group of farmers could be brought together.”

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  One of the five hundred placards Roosevelt paid to have printed up and distributed throughout the county. Women could not yet vote, William Yawkey remembered, but large numbers of them turned out at FDR’s evening rallies to see him anyway: “He might have stepped out of a magazine cover picturing a typical college man of the day,” Yawkey said, “descended from the best honest-to-goodness American stock.”

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  FDR meets the voters, 1910. Eleanor is just behind him in the lower picture, wearing a large hat. His enthusiasm sometimes got the better of him. When he ended one roadside speech by saying, “When I see you again I will be your state senator,” a bearded farmer shouted, “Like hell you will!” FDR enjoyed telling that story all his life.

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  Quiescence … Is an Impossibility

  Two weeks after his party’s spectacular defeat at the polls in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt traveled to Washington to make a speech and stopped by the White House. President Taft and his wife were out of town. Roosevelt remembered every servant and gardener by name, asked about their families, and exclaimed over a piece of the corn bread he’d especially loved while living at the White House, brought to him hot from the kitchen.

  When he was shown into the handsome new Oval Office that had been built within the West Wing, he strode across the room and sat down in the president’s chair. It seemed very “natural” to be sitting there, he said. He had once pledged not to try to occupy that chair again, but now he had begun to change his mind.

  Edith hoped to keep “Father safely caged” at Sagamore Hill. “Put it out of your mind, Theodore,” she told him. “You will never be president of the United States again.” But, as his friend James Bryce wrote, “Quiescence for [Roosevelt] is an impossibility. He is a sort of comet … but much denser in substance, and not so much attracted by as attracting the members of the system which he approaches.”

  Roosevelt’s lifelong need for action—for being heard and being admired, as well—had a lot to do with his change of heart. But so did substance. Like other progressives within the Republican Party he had grown more and more disappointed by the conservative path Taft had chosen to follow. Amiable, well meaning, and enormous—he weighed over 330 pounds—Taft had backed away from meaningful tariff reform, retreated in the face of timber and mining interests eager to get at national forests, and refused to intervene in legislative matters on the grounds that it would violate the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers.

  Roosevelt felt both personally and politically betrayed by the man he’d chosen to succeed him and whom he had now come to consider “utterly helpless as a leader.” Social justice in America, TR said, in advocating what he called a “New Nationalism,” could only be achieved through a strong federal government headed by someone who saw it as his duty to act as “the steward of the public interest”—someone like himself.

  But Taft’s Republican Party did not see things that way. It was actually a collection of strong state parties. Those state parties controlled their state legislatures, which were, in turn, largely controlled by the interests—banks in New York, timber in Michigan, copper in Montana, and railroads everywhere. And when Roosevelt said that special interests should be driven out of public life, party stalwarts were understandably alarmed. Old friends and once-friendly editorialists denounced him. “I fear things are going to become very bitter before long,” President Taft told an aide.

  His combative spirit was aroused. By the end of 1911, Roosevelt was no longer willing to say that he would not challenge Taft. He did not wish to run, he said; but if there were “a genuine popular demand” he would not “shirk a plain duty if it came unmistakably as a plain duty.”

  ABOVE AND FOLLOWING IMAGES TR takes to the air. When the colonel visited an aviation meet near St. Louis in 1910, the pioneer aviator Arch Hoxsey asked if he’d like to join him in his flying machine. Roosevelt eagerly agreed to be buckled in. As they flew over the grandstand, Hoxsey felt the plane cant alarmingly; Roosevelt was leaning out to wave at the crowd in the grandstand below. They stayed up for three minutes and twenty seconds. “It was great! First class!” TR said when he was back on the ground. “I wish I could stay up for an hour.” He was the first prominent American politician ever to fly. Hoxsey died in a crash at another air show less than two months later.

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  Seated in his automobile aboard a Hudson River ferry, gawked at by fellow passengers and at least one photographer, the colonel’s attention remains fixed on his book, one of the two or three he often read every day. Not a moment was to be wasted.

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  TR indulges in a favorite exercise. His fondness for felling trees was so great that once, as he left Bamie’s breakfast table at Farmington, Connecticut, with his ax over his shoulder and fueled by a dozen cups of black coffee, his sister had to remind him that the oak trees that shaded the town green were off-limits.

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  Keppler’s “The New Tattooed Man” perfectly captures Roosevelt’s dilemma as the 1912 presidential election approached: How could a man so prone to moral preachments go against his own solemn vow never to run for president again? It also artfully echoes Bernhard Gillam’s celebrated series of cartoons showing Republican presidential nominee James G. Blaine tattooed with his own transgressions twenty-eight years earlier.

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  Standing on a flag-draped table, the colonel delivers the most important speech of his political career, August 31, 1910. Before some ten thousand eager listeners gathered in a grove at Osawatomie, Kansas, he called for a “New Nationalism.” “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is second to his profit,” Roosevelt said, “must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” He made headlines all across the country—and made anxious the occupants of the Taft White House.

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  Roosevelts Run True to Form

  Franklin Roosevelt’s debut in Albany was nearly as noisy as his cousin’s had been the year he was born. “Senator Roosevelt is less than thirty,” said the New York Times. “He is tall and lithe. With his handsome face and his form of supple strength he could make a fortune on the stage and set the matinee girl’s heart throbbing with subtle and happy emotion. But no one would suspect behind that highly polished exterior the quiet force and determination that now are sending shivers down the spine of Tammany’s striped mascot.”

  Theodore Roosevelt had made his reputation by embarrassing
the bosses of his own Republican Party. Franklin lost no time in taking on Tammany Hall, a decision not calculated to make him popular among his fellow Democratic senators.

  When the political boss of the Bowery saw Franklin’s name on the list of Democratic newcomers, he said, “Well, if we’ve caught a Roosevelt, we’d better take him down and drop him off the docks. The Roosevelts run true to form.”

  A seat in the United States Senate for New York opened up. In those days, U.S. senators were still chosen by their state legislatures. The Democrats were in control in New York and their boss, Charles Murphy, had already made his choice—a Buffalo millionaire named Billy Sheehan, personally charming, privately corrupt—and the outnumbered Republicans had agreed not to put up a fight.

  But a band of twenty-one reform-minded Democrats resolved to block Sheehan with a nominee of their own. Franklin joined their ranks and—because he alone was wealthy enough to rent a house rather than a room in Albany—the rebels met in his library each morning, producing so much blue cigar smoke that Eleanor had to move the children to the top floor.

  The press found the idea of a new Roosevelt repeating his celebrated cousin’s Albany battles irresistible. “It’s the most humanly interesting political fight for many years,” wrote the Albany stringer for the New York Herald, Louis Howe. Franklin thought so, too. He denounced Tammany Hall as a “noxious weed,” its members as “hopelessly stupid” and “beasts of prey.” Tammany spokesmen responded that Franklin was a snob, a secret Republican, anti-Catholic. “There’s nothing the matter with Sheehan,” Manhattan Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith said, “except he’s an Irishman.”