The Roosevelts
Page 15
Schrank’s bullet hit him in the chest. “He pinked me,” Roosevelt said. He dabbed at his mouth, found no blood, concluded his lungs were undamaged, and insisted on delivering his scheduled speech despite his wound. “Friends,” he said from the podium, “I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot.… The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech.” Pale and sometimes swaying at the podium, he went on for more than an hour before his aides could get him to stop and agree to go to a local hospital. From there, he was rushed by train to Chicago, where better care was available.
The news spread fast. Edith Roosevelt heard it while attending the theater in New York. He sent her a telegram urging her to stay home. He’d been far more seriously injured falling off horses, he said. But she hurried west anyway; assurances like that had been made about William McKinley, too.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, still recovering from typhoid, anxiously telephoned the New York Times that evening to get the latest bulletins on TR’s condition. Woodrow Wilson suspended his campaign. Even Roosevelt’s enemies were impressed by his courage.
He was out of action and under his wife’s strict care for almost two weeks. “This thing about ours being a campaign against boss rule is a fake,” Roosevelt joked to a reporter. “I was never so boss-ruled in my life.”
On election day, Roosevelt easily beat Taft. But Woodrow Wilson won the presidency, and his party gained control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the first time in almost two decades. Roosevelt was gracious to the winner, but privately he was wounded. “There is no use disguising the fact that the defeat at the polls is overwhelming,” he told Kermit. “I had expected defeat, but I had expected that we would make a better showing.… I try not to think of the damage to myself personally.”
“I cannot bear to have Father beaten,” Edith confided to her diary at Sagamore Hill. “It makes me so choky … when I think of [him] almost being assassinated … and the people being such cold fishes.”
Roosevelt campaigns. “As this movement has developed,” he said, “instead of my growing less radical, I have grown more radical.… This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in if it is not a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.”
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ABOVE AND FOLLOWING TWO IMAGES Roosevelt, moments after he was shot. The bullet, slowed because it hit the pages of his folded address and his glasses case before entering his chest, nonetheless broke his rib and lodged dangerously close to his lung. Being shot, he said, was “a trade risk which every prominent man should accept as a matter of course.”
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An ambulance brings TR from Chicago’s North Western Depot railroad station to Mercy Hospital. Once he was settled in room 314 he called in the reporters who had been traveling with him. How did he feel? one asked. Roosevelt laughed. “I feel as well as a man feels who has a bullet in him!”
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Roosevelt’s family rushed to his side, including his sons Kermit and Quentin. Their father assured them that his time in the hospital was “a positive spree.”
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Eight days after he was wounded, Roosevelt gingerly climbs down from the train that carried him home to Oyster Bay.
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Theodore Roosevelt casts his ballot, November 5, 1912. By dinnertime it was clear that while he had beaten Taft, his own strong showing had ensured a victory for Wilson. TR assured the press that “like every good citizen” he accepted the result “with good humor and contentment,” but Edith wrote Kermit that his father’s “disappointment went deeper than he admits to himself.”
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I’d Like It Bully Well
On the same day that Theodore Roosevelt was defeated, Franklin Roosevelt was easily reelected to the New York State Senate.
Recovered from their illness, Franklin and Eleanor went to Washington for Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, where Josephus Daniels, the new secretary of the navy, sought Franklin out. Roosevelt had been an early supporter of the new Democratic president. He had a reputation as a reformer. He had a lifelong interest in sailing and the sea. And, most important, he bore the country’s most famous name.
“How would you like to come to Washington as assistant secretary?” Daniels asked. He was offering him Theodore Roosevelt’s old job.
“I’d like it bully well!” Franklin said.
Theodore Roosevelt sent his congratulations right away.
Dear Franklin:
I was very much pleased that you were appointed as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. It is interesting to see that you are at another place which I myself once held. I am sure you will enjoy yourself to the full as Assistant Secretary and that you will do capital work. …
New York Democratic bosses were as glad to see Franklin leave the state senate for Washington as Republican bosses had been to see Theodore Roosevelt run for vice president fourteen years before.
He was just thirty-one, the youngest assistant secretary of the navy in history, seven years younger than Theodore Roosevelt had been when he first sat at the same desk, so young and so young looking that a dinner companion who didn’t catch his name thought him a “naughty little boy, just out of college.”
He and his new boss seemed hopelessly mismatched. The new assistant secretary had attended Groton and Harvard, learned to sail aboard his father’s yacht, and, like his cousin Theodore, believed in a strong defense and a big navy.
Josephus Daniels was a newspaper editor from North Carolina who called battleships “boats,” seemed most concerned with banning wine from officers’ messes throughout the fleet, and was a close ally of Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, who believed strong defenses were a provocation and promised that the United States would never go to war on his watch.
Not long after Franklin took up his new duties, his boss went off on an inspection tour, leaving him in charge.
“There’s a Roosevelt on the job today,” Franklin told a reporter. “You remember what happened the last time a Roosevelt occupied a similar position?”
What had happened then, of course, was the Spanish-American War.
Eleanor, sensitive always to any feeling among her Oyster Bay relatives that she and Franklin might unfairly be exploiting their link with Theodore Roosevelt, was appalled. It was a “horrid little remark,” she told her husband.
Franklin did not apologize.
Secretary Daniels had already noted in his diary that Franklin’s “distinguished cousin TR went from the Navy Department to the Presidency. May history repeat itself,” Daniels said.
Franklin could not have agreed more. He and Eleanor rented Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Bamie’s home at 1733 N Street. TR had spent the first few nights of his presidency there, and afterward had walked there so often to talk things over with his shrewd sister that the press called it the “little White House.” It would be Franklin Roosevelt’s headquarters for the next several crowded, frenetic years.
Eleanor brought to it all the organizational skills she’d learned in Albany, seeing to the needs of her growing household, entertaining her uncle’s old friends, getting to know new people from all over the country who might be helpful to her husband’s ambitions. “My calls began [in the autumn of] 1914,” she recalled, “under poor auspices, for I was feeling miserable again, as another baby was coming along.… Somehow or other I made my rounds every afternoon, … [and] from ten to thirty calls were checked off on my list day after day. Mondays, the wives of the Justices of the Supreme Court; Tuesdays, the members of Congress.”
Franklin’s official duties at the department included procurement, budgets, and overseeing the 65,000 civilians who worked in the navy yards. But he was not content with that. “I get my fingers into about everything,” he said, “and there’s no law against it.”
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sp; Franklin reveled in the trappings of his new job. Seventeen guns greeted him whenever he stepped aboard a ship. He affected a navy cape and designed an official assistant secretary’s flag for himself. And whenever he could get away to his summer home on Campobello Island, he liked to come and go by destroyer, guiding the big warship through the narrows with his own sure hand at the wheel.
Louis Howe, seated in his boss’s anteroom at the Navy Department. He controlled access to Roosevelt and acted as his publicist, investigator, and closest adviser. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels remembered that Howe “would have sidetracked both President Wilson and me to get Franklin to the White House.”
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With a pensive Franklin sitting behind him, Secretary Daniels speaks on Flag Day in 1913. Also listening, left to right, are Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, President Wilson, Assistant Secretary of War Henry S. Breckenridge, and third assistant secretary of state William Phillips.
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Assistant Secretary Roosevelt clambers up a warship’s rigging off Old Point Comfort, Virginia. “Alive and well and keen about everything!” he reported to Eleanor at Campobello. “I am running the real work, though Josephus is here! He is bewildered by it all, very sweet but very sad.”
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Roosevelt, wearing a derby, returns to Brooklyn eleven months later for the laying of the keel of Battleship #39—which, the New York Times explained, was meant to be “the world’s biggest and most powerful … superdreadnought ever constructed.” She would be christened the USS Arizona in 1915. Twenty-six years later, at Pearl Harbor, she would virtually be destroyed by Japanese aircraft, with the loss of more than eleven hundred members of her crew.
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Franklin and Eleanor lead a delegation from the Navy Department into the Brooklyn Navy Yard not long after FDR became assistant secretary in 1913. The tall civilian bringing up the rear is Livingston Davis, a raffish but admiring Harvard classmate whom Roosevelt had appointed as his personal assistant.
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My Last Chance to Be a Boy
After Theodore Roosevelt’s defeat as the Progressive Party’s candidate for president in 1912, he undertook another great adventure: an expedition into the Amazon rain forest to chart the course of a newly discovered jungle waterway. The expedition’s leader was Cândido Rondon, the Brazilian explorer who had discovered its headwaters and given it its name—“Rio de Duvida”—the “River of Doubt.” No one knew where it led.
Roosevelt’s twenty-four-year-old son Kermit, now a trained engineer, went with him. The depression Kermit had first experienced as a child had deepened, and, like his late uncle Elliott, he had begun drinking to obliterate it. His mother wanted him to take care of his father; his father hoped this dangerous mission would provide his son with the kind of action that had always eased his own bouts of melancholy.
The expedition was the fifty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt’s “last chance to be a boy,” he said. Instead it would nearly kill him—and turn him into an old man.
The Roosevelt party—twenty-two men and seven dugout canoes—would not see another human being for forty-eight days. Flesh-eating piranhas prowled the river; so did fifteen-foot caimans. Insects swarmed so thickly Roosevelt had to wear protective gear to write articles for Scribner’s. Termites ate part of his pith helmet. Rain fell in sheets. Roosevelt noted that everything that didn’t rot, rusted.
The expedition soon ran out of food—and found it hard to replenish its supply. The animals off which they had expected to live were furtive, invisible.
Unseen Indians of the Cinta Larga tribe, who sometimes killed and ate strangers who dared intrude into their forest, stalked the party—and shot one of the expedition’s dogs full of arrows. Five out of seven dugout canoes were lost in the fast-moving water. New ones had to be carved from hollowed trees and hauled by land around rapids and waterfalls. One man was swept away by a torrent.
Roosevelt and Kermit both contracted malaria, and things got steadily worse. Two of the new canoes got trapped by the rushing water. Roosevelt, already ill, waded in to help free them and gashed his leg—the same leg that had been injured in the trolley accident nine years earlier. The wound became infected. Soon he could no longer stand.
The expedition struggled on and soon came to a series of six rapids. The men somehow had to find a way to leave the river and move through the rain forest. Roosevelt told his son that the party should go on without him. The ex-president of the United States intended to swallow a lethal dose of the morphine he always carried with him into the wilderness; he did not want to be a burden. But Kermit would not hear of it. He was a Roosevelt too. He would sooner have died himself than leave his father behind, alive or dead.
Roosevelt changed his mind: “I saw that if I did end [my life], that would only make it more sure that Kermit would not get out. For I knew he would not abandon me, but would insist on bringing my body out, too. That, of course, would have been impossible.… So there was only one thing for me to do, and that was to come out myself.”
Kermit’s weeks of working alongside the expedition’s porters and paddlers paid off. He used his engineering skills to lower the dugouts down the steep canyon walls, and kept his men moving forward.
But there was still more trouble. A porter shot and killed a companion and fled into the forest. A deep gorge and an apparently impassable series of new rapids stretched on ahead.
Theodore was helpless now, forced to be paddled along beneath a makeshift tent. His fever rose to 104. He grew delirious, reciting the same few lines of poetry over and over again: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree …” The expedition’s doctor cut open his leg to save his life. Roosevelt endured the surgery without anesthetic.
Finally, on April 26, after a month and a half in the wilderness, they came upon a six-man relief party that had been sent to help them out of the rain forest.
The River of Doubt, which turned out to be almost half as long as the Rhine, was renamed “Rio Roosevelt.”
New Yorkers gave Roosevelt another big welcome when he returned home, but friends were shocked by his appearance. He had lost fifty-five pounds—roughly a quarter of his weight—could barely make himself heard when speaking, and leaned on a cane he bravely called “my Big Stick.” “As he limped down the companionway,” a reporter for the New York Sun wrote, “the impression was strong that the Colonel had endured the greatest hardships of his life.” It now seemed likely that his public life really had finally come to an end.
Colonel Roosevelt, surrounded by admirers, sets sail for South America aboard the SS Vandyck.
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Roosevelt, seated, and George Cherrie, an ornithologist from the American Museum of Natural History, settle into their dugout canoe.
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Roosevelt’s canoe starts down the River of Doubt, February 27, 1914. A companion left behind remembered watching “the dark forest … shut out our erstwhile leader and his Brazilian companions” and wondering “whether or not we would ever see them again.”
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Roosevelt, wreathed in mosquito netting and wearing specially made gauntlets, struggles to write an account of his day’s travels.
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A map of the river the expedition explored, based on TR’s own notes
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Kermit Roosevelt, a victim of malaria himself, would find himself struggling to keep his father alive.
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In this battered photograph, a makeshift canvas tent shields Roosevelt from the sun as he is paddled downriver. Suffering from malaria and a badly infected leg, he was unable even to sit up and considered committing suicide rather than slow the expedition’s return to civilization.
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Roosevelt returns to New York, fifty-five pounds lighter than he had been when he set out for South America. He was “thinner and older-looking,” a newspaperm
an wrote, “and there was something lacking in the power of his voice.” An old friend would be more blunt: “The Brazilian wilderness stole away ten years of his life.”
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The Complete Smash-up
In early August of 1914, five weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Germany declared war on Russia and France and sent troops across the Belgian border. Britain declared war on Germany. Russia then went to war against the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
“A complete smash-up is inevitable,” FDR told Eleanor. A “great black tornado trembles on the edge of Europe and the whole question of peace and war trembles in the balance,” Theodore Roosevelt told a friend. “It is not a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as Secretary of State, nor a college president [like Mr. Wilson] as head of the nation, with … a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people … and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs.”
By the end of the year almost all of Europe and parts of Asia would be engulfed in what would be called the Great War.
President Wilson called for “strict and impartial neutrality,” and insisted that strengthening American armed forces would only serve to provoke the belligerents. The British fleet blockaded Germany to choke off armaments. In retaliation, the Germans loosed submarines and warned that they would sink enemy vessels on sight.