“Such loveliness of line and tinting … such sweet courtesy of manner.”
Martha Bulloch Roosevelt at twenty-two.(Illustration p1.1)
Then King Olaf entered,
Beautiful as morning,
Like the sun at Easter
Shone his happy face.
ON THE LATE afternoon of 27 October 1858, a flurry of activity disturbed the genteel quietness of East Twentieth Street, New York City.1 Liveried servants flew out of the basement of No. 28, the Roosevelt brownstone, and hurried off in search of doctors, midwives, and stray members of the family—a difficult task, for it was now the fashionable visiting hour. Meanwhile Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt lay tossing in her satinwood bed, awaiting the arrival of her second child and first son.
Gaslight was flaring on the cobbles by the time a doctor arrived. The child was born at a quarter to eight, emerging so easily that neither chloroform nor instruments were needed. “Consequently,” reported his grandmother, “the dear little thing has no cuts nor bruises about it.” Theodore Roosevelt, Junior, was “as sweet and pretty a young baby as I have ever seen.”
Mittie Roosevelt, inspecting her son the following morning, disagreed. She said, with Southern frankness, that he looked like a terrapin.2
Apart from these two contradictory images, there are no further visual descriptions of the newborn baby. He weighed eight and a half pounds, and was more than usually noisy.3 When he reappears in the family chronicles ten months later, he has acquired a milk-crust and a nickname, “Teedie.” At eighteen months the milk-crust has gone, but the nickname has not. He is now “almost a little beauty.”4
Scattered references in other letters indicate a bright, hyperactive infant. Yet already the first of a succession of congenital ailments was beginning to weaken him. Asthma crowded his lungs, depriving him of sleep. “One of my memories,” the ex-President wrote in his Autobiography, “is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me.”5 Even more nightmarish was the recollection of those same strong arms holding him, as the Roosevelt rig sped through darkened city streets, forcing a rush of air into the tiny lungs.6
THEODORE ROOSEVELT, SENIOR, was no stranger to childhood suffering. Gifted himself with magnificent health and strength—“I never seem to get tired”—he overflowed with sympathy for the small, the weak, the lame, and the poor. Even in that age when a certain amount of charitable work was expected of well-born citizens, he was remarkable for his passionate efforts on behalf of the waifs of New York. He had what he called “a troublesome conscience.”7
Every seventh day of his life was dedicated to teaching in mission schools, distributing tracts, and interviewing wayward children. Long after dark he would come home after dinner at some such institution as the Newsboys’ Lodging-House, or Mrs. Sattery’s Night School for Little Italians. One of his prime concerns, as a founder of the Children’s Aid Society, was to send street urchins to work on farms in the West. His charity extended as far as sick kittens, which could be seen peeking from his pockets as he drove down Broadway.8
At the time of Teedie’s birth, Theodore Senior was twenty-seven years old, a partner in the old importing firm of Roosevelt and Son, and already one of the most influential men in New York. Handsome, wealthy, and gregarious, he was at ease with millionaires and paupers, never showing a trace of snobbery, real or inverse, in his relations with either class. “I can see him now,” remembered a society matron years later, “in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging-House, and later dashing off to an evening party on Fifth Avenue.”9
A photograph taken in 1862 shows deep eyes, leonine features, a glossy beard, and big, sloping shoulders. “He was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man,” said his nephew Emlen Roosevelt, “… deep through, with a sense of abundant strength and power.” The word “power” runs like a leitmotif through other descriptions of Theodore Senior: he was a person of inexorable drive. “A certain expression” on his face, as he strode breezily into the offices of business acquaintances, was enough to flip pocketbooks open. “How much this time, Theodore?”10
For all his compulsive philanthropy, he was neither sanctimonious nor ascetic. He took an exuberant, masculine joy in life, riding his horse through Central Park “as though born in the saddle,” exercising with the energy of a teenager, waltzing all night long at society balls. Driving his four-in-hand back home in the small hours of the morning, he rattled through the streets at such a rate that his grooms allegedly “fell out at the corners.”11
Such a combination of physical vitality and genuine love of humanity was rare indeed. His son called Theodore Senior “the best man I ever knew,” adding, “… but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”12
IN ALL RESPECTS except their intense love for each other, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt were striking opposites. Where he was big and disciplined and manly, “Mittie” was small, vague, and feminine to the point of caricature. He was the archetypal Northern burgher, she the Southern belle eternal, a lady about whom there always clung a hint of white columns and wisteria bowers. Born and raised in the luxury of a Georgia plantation, she remained, according to her son, “entirely unreconstructed until the day of her death.”13
Of her beauty, especially in her youth (she was twenty-three when Teedie was born), contemporary accounts are unanimous in their praise. Her hair was fine and silky black, with a luster her French hairdresser called noir doré. Her skin was “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and in her cheeks there glowed a suggestion of coral.14 Every day she took two successive baths, “one for cleaning, one for rinsing,” and she dressed habitually in white muslin, summer and winter. “No dirt,” an admirer marveled, “ever stopped near her.”15
On Mittie’s afternoons “at home” she would sit in her pale blue parlor, surrounded always by bunches of violets, while “neat little maids in lilac print gowns” escorted guests into her presence. Invariably they were enchanted. “Such loveliness of line and tinting … such sweet courtesy of manner!” gushed Mrs. Burton Harrison, a memoirist of the period. Of five or six gentlewomen whose “birth, breeding, and tact” established them as the flowers of New York society, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seemed to me easily the most beautiful.”16
Her exquisite looks were balanced by exquisite taste. Not surprisingly, for someone who made such a delicate pastel picture of herself, she was a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. She filled her house with the finest furniture and porcelain, and her need for “everything that was beautiful” is said to have strained even the considerable Roosevelt resources. Theodore Senior acknowledged that her palate for wine was superior to his own, and never paid for a consignment until she had personally approved it.17
Mittie was a woman of considerable wit. Her letters, written in a delicate Italian hand, show flashes of inventive humor.18 As a storyteller, especially when recounting what her enraptured children called “slave tales,” she revealed great gifts of mimicry. One evening, at a family party, she grimaced her way through a piece called “Old Bess in a Fit,” while Theodore Senior, who could not bear seeing her lovely face distorted, tried in vain to stop her. Eventually he was reduced to picking her up like a doll and carrying her out of the room on his shoulder.19
FROM HIS FATHER, young Teedie inherited the sturdy Dutch character of Klaes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, one of the early settlers of New Amsterdam, who stepped ashore sometime in 1649. From that day on for the next two centuries, every generation of Roosevelts—Teedie being the seventh—was born on Manhattan Island.20
Oom Klaes had been a farmer, but subsequent Roosevelts ascended rapidly in the social scale, becoming manufacturers, merchants, engineers, and bankers. A Roosevelt had served in the New York State Senate and helped ratify the Constitution with Alexander Hamilton. Another had received his bride from the hands of General Lafayette. Industrious and honest, the family amassed a comfortable fortune. Teedie’s grandfather Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt was worth half a million dollars at a time when the average daily wage was fifty to seventy-five cents.21
The only non-Dutch infusion that Teedie received through his father was that of Grandmother Roosevelt, but it was a rich admixture of Welsh, English, Irish, Scotch-Irish, and German strains traceable back to immigrant Quakers. Strangely enough, she, and not old Cornelius, taught Teedie the only Dutch he ever knew, a nursery song:
Trippel trippel toontjes,
Kippen in de boontjes …
Fifty years later, when he went hunting in Africa, he sang this song to Boer settlers and found that they recognized it. “It was interesting,” he wrote, “to meet these men whose ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America two and a half centuries previously, and to find that the descendants of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at least of the same nursery songs.”22
From his mother, Teedie acquired several refined French traits. Although her forebears were predominantly Scots—James Bulloch of Glasgow emigrated to Charleston in 1729—they had early married into the Huguenot family of de Veaux.23 Mittie, with her rococo beauty and elegance of manner, could have been mistaken for a Frenchwoman, and she passed on to Teedie a certain Gallic volubility.
The Bullochs also contributed aristocratic qualities, not shared by the Roosevelts. Whereas Oom Klaes had been a man of the soil, ranking far below Governor Pieter Stuyvesant, James Bulloch was a learned planter who could entertain Governor James Edward Oglethorpe on equal terms.24 Unlike the Roosevelts, who with two or three exceptions preferred the security of commerce to the glamor of politics,25 the Bullochs stepped naturally into positions of power. Among his direct maternal ancestors Teedie could count six distinguished politicians, including Archibald Bulloch, the first President of Revolutionary Georgia.26
Few Americans, surely, have been born into such a perfectly balanced home environment as the son of Theodore and Mittie Roosevelt. There was a harmony of Southern refinement and Northern vigor, feminine humor and masculine seriousness, and—later on—the rewards of privilege and the responsibilities of charity. Through the front window of the house Teedie looked down on carriages and cobblestones, and heard coming from Broadway and Fifth Avenue the rumble and throb of a great city. Through the rear window he gazed out into another world, an enormous, block-wide garden full of trees and flowers, roamed by ornamental peacocks.27 Were it not for the weight of asthma in his lungs, he might consider himself a child of Paradise.
But then, five months after his second birthday, Southern cannons fired upon Fort Sumter, and the harmonies of 28 East Twentieth Street were jarred into discord.
WHEN WAR WAS DECLARED, on 12 April 1861, Teedie and his six-year-old sister Anna (“Bamie”) had been joined by a fourteen-month-old brother, Elliott (“Ellie”), and Mittie Roosevelt was already pregnant with her final child, Corinne (“Conie”), who arrived in the fall. No sooner had the last been born than Theodore Senior left home, and sadness filled the house.28
He had spent most of the summer agonizing, to the tramp of mustering regiments, over what role he should play in the war. Although he was not yet thirty, and in prime physical shape, his domestic situation was such that he could not contemplate taking up arms. Under his roof lived three women—Grandmother Bulloch, Mittie, and her sister Annie—who owned slaves and a plantation and were passionate in their support of the Confederacy. (Mittie allegedly once hung out the Stars and Bars after a Southern victory.) Two of Mrs. Bulloch’s sons were fighting for the South. Could he fire upon, or receive the bullets of, his brothers-in-law? In anguish Theodore Senior did what many of his wealthy friends were doing. He hired a substitute soldier.29
Yet as a strong Lincoln Republican, his “troublesome conscience” would not let him rest. A certain strain developed between himself and his wife, although their mutual love never wavered. “I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country,” he told her gently. “I know you cannot understand my feelings and of course do not expect it.”30 Eventually he announced that he had decided to aid the war effort in a civilian capacity, and, true to his nature, soon found a charitable cause.
Already, in these early days of war, millions of government dollars were flowing through the pockets of Union soldiers and into the hands of sutlers, who infested military camps, hawking bottles of liquor hidden in loaves of bread. The sutlers charged such exorbitant prices that their customers soon had no money left to send home to their families. It was to right this wrong that Theodore Senior set off to Washington, and, conquering his natural distaste for politics, began to lobby for remedial legislation.
With two colleagues, he drafted a bill for the appointment of unpaid Allotment Commissioners, who would visit all military camps and persuade soldiers to set aside voluntary pay deductions for family support. This proposal, which eventually became standard military practice, seemed eccentric, if not downright suspect, in 1861, as a family friend recalled many years later:
For three months they worked in Washington to secure the passage of this act—delayed by the utter inability of Congressmen to understand why anyone should urge a bill from which no one could selfishly secure an advantage. When this was passed he was appointed by President Lincoln one of the three Commissioners from this State. For long, weary months, in the depth of a hard winter, he went from camp to camp, urging the men to take advantage of this plan; on the saddle often six to eight hours a day, standing in the cold and mud as long, addressing the men and entering their names. This resulted in sending many millions of dollars to homes where it was greatly needed, kept the memory of wives and children fresh in the minds of the soldiers, and greatly improved their morale. Other States followed, and the economical results were very great.31
Lincoln’s private secretary, a round-headed, slant-eyed youth named John Hay, proved a willing conduit to the President, and Theodore Senior made the most of his assistance. “It is a great luxury to feel I am at last doing something tangible for the country,” he wrote Mittie. Homesickness nevertheless tugged at him. “I cannot,” he confessed, “get Bammie’s and Tedee’s [sic] faces, as they bid me goodbye at the door, out of my mind.”32
It is significant that Theodore Junior, when he came to write his own autobiography, made no mention whatsoever of his father’s role in the Civil War—his invariable practice being to leave painful memories unspoken, “until they are too dead to throb.”33 To serve in mufti was, in his opinion, something less than manly, and his tacit disapproval of the episode is the only indication that Theodore Senior was ever less than a god to him. Many biographers, including his own sister, have suggested that guilt over that substitute soldier explains the future Rough Rider’s almost desperate desire to wage war. He himself, at the age of three, made no bones about his wish to be at the front. “Teedie was really excited,” wrote Annie Bulloch, “when I said to him, ‘Darling, I must fit this zouave suit …’ his little face flushed up and he said, ‘Are me a soldier laddie?’ I immediately took his own suggestion and told him he was and that I was the Captain.”34
His liveliness, abnormal even for a small boy, was something of a trial to the languid Mittie. Six weeks after Theodore Senior’s departure she complained: “Teedie is the most affectionate and endearing little creature in his ways, but begins to require Papa’sdiscipline rather sadly. He is brimming full of mischief and has to be watched all the time.”35
Yet the child was simultaneously sinking into what seemed like chronic invalidism. From the moment his father left home, the catalog of Teedie’s ailments became continuous. He suffered from coughs, colds, nausea, fevers, and a congenital form of nervous diarrhea which the family euphemized as cholera morbus.36 “I feel badly,” he told his mother one morning, “—I have toothache in my stomach.” On top of all this, his asthma was worsening. “Rarely, even at his best, could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair,” remembered Corinne. Lack of appetite brought about symptoms of malnutrition. At one stage his whiteness and fragility were such that Annie Bulloch compared him to a very pale azalea. It seemed that he would not live to see his fourth birthday.37
The other children were not much healthier. Bamie, who had been dropped as a baby, suffered from a spinal defect that obliged her to wear a harness; Elliott was prone to colds and rushes of blood to the head; even little Corinne was ailing, and would soon fall victim to asthma as well.38
To Theodore Senior, sloughing tirelessly through the freezing mud of military camps, Mittie’s letters made depressing reading. He was plainly bewildered by the fact that two such beautiful physical specimens had produced such a sickly brood of children. “I cannot help feeling,” he wrote early in 1862, “that there must be something about the furnace or something that prevents them all from being healthy.” With characteristic optimism he hoped for improvements in the summer, when he would be home for a visit, and exhorted his wife: “Remember to enjoy yourself just as much as you can.”39
How much Teedie’s asthma was aggravated by the absence of his father may be inferred from some remarks he made thirty-seven years later to Lincoln Steffens, after a steeplechase which left the reporter breathless:
Handsome dandy that he was, the thought of him now and always has been a sense of comfort. I could breathe, I could sleep, when he had me in his arms. My father—he got me breath, he got me lungs, strength—life.40
WHEN THEODORE SENIOR FINALLY came home, on leave of absence from Washington, the garden behind 28 East Twentieth Street was lush with summer, the children were better, and his own mood had improved. He was able to tell stories of rides with President and Mrs. Lincoln, who had apparently fallen victim—as everybody did sooner or later—to his charm. The First Lady even took him shopping and asked him to choose bonnets for her.41
The effect of his lusty reappearance in the household was like a tonic to his women and children. The latter especially worshiped him “as though he were a sort of benevolent Norse god.”42 During morning prayers they would compete for the privilege of sitting in the “cubby-hole”—a favored stretch of sofa between his body and the mahogany arm. Later in the day, when he was away at work, they would wait for him on the piazza behind the house, until his key rattled in the latch and he burst upon them, laden with ice cream and peaches. He would feed the fruit to them as they lay spread-eagled on the edge of the piazza, letting the juice drip down into the garden. Afterward they would troop into his room to look on while he undressed, eagerly watching his pockets for the “treasures”—heavy male trinkets which he would solemnly deposit in the box on his dressing-table, or, on occasion, present to a lucky child.43 This ritual would one day be faithfully reproduced by the President of the United States before his own children.
Despite the joy Theodore Senior felt at being at home again, he lost no time in restoring paternal discipline. It was during this summer that naughty Teedie felt for the first time the weight of his father’s hand.
I bit my elder sister’s arm. I do not remember biting her arm, but I do remember running down to the yard, perfectly conscious that I had committed a crime. From the yard I went into the kitchen, got some dough from the cook, and crawled under the kitchen table. In a minute or two my father entered from the yard and asked where I was. The warm-hearted Irish cook had a characteristic contempt for “informers,” but although she said nothing she compromised between informing and her conscience by casting a look under the table. My father immediately dropped on all fours and darted at me. I feebly heaved the dough at him, and, having the advantage of him because I could stand up under the table, got a fair start for the stairs, but was caught halfway up them. The punishment that ensued fitted the crime, and I hope—and believe—that it did me good.44
THEODORE SENIOR never chastised his son again. It was not necessary. There hung about his big, relaxed body an ever-present threat of violence, like that of a lion who, dozing, will suddenly flick out a lethal paw. His reaction to any form of wrong—in particular “selfishness or cruelty, idleness, cowardice, or untruthfulness”—was so quick, and so certain, that nobody, child or adult, crossed him more than once. “Be sure to make the children obey your first order,” he told Mittie.45 Although her success was indifferent, they nevertheless came to understand “that the same standard of clean living was demanded for the boys as for the girls; that what was wrong in a woman could not be right in a man.”46
ABOUT THE TIME Teedie turned four in October 1862, he began dimly to realize that his parents were not one in their views about the Civil War. These differences had been for the most part diplomatically concealed from the children during the summer, although Bamie recalled nights when Mittie would dine alone in her room rather than be exposed to the brutal Unionism of male conversation downstairs. “She must have been homesick for her own people until her heart bled in those early days … it was out of the very fulness of her heart that she used to tell us of home.”47
Mittie, however, was not entirely alone. The flames of Southern patriotism burned as high in the breasts of her sister and mother, who, fond as they were of Theodore Senior, felt some embarrassment at having to live under the roof of a Lincoln Republican. As soon as their host left home these scruples vanished, and the three women busied themselves in support of the Confederacy. There were “days of hushed and thrilling excitement” when little Teedie helped the ladies of the house pack mysterious boxes, “to run the blockade.”48
As Teedie became aware of the intensity of their feelings, he learned to play upon them, with some cruelty. “Once, when I felt I had been wronged by maternal discipline during the day, I attempted a partial vengeance by praying with loud fervor for the success of Union arms, when we all came to say our prayers before my mother in the evening.” Mittie’s sense of humor neutralized this moment of truculence, so Teedie tried the same trick on Aunt Annie, who was much less amused. She said she would never forget “the fury in the childish voice when he would plead with Divine Providence to ‘grind the Southern troops to powder.’ ”49
Annie Bulloch had volunteered to pay for her bed and board by giving all the Roosevelt children their first lessons, an offer her lethargic sister was only too happy to accept. Perhaps with some trepidation, she now undertook the education of Teedie. It was on her knee that he learned the three Rs, and showed a decided preference for the first two at the expense of the third. Aunt Annie was a born teacher: energetic, practical, and kindly, with a dramatic flair that enlivened the dullest fact. Often as not—for she was an even better storyteller than her sister—the lessons would drift into reminiscences of the Old South. A mood of spinsterish melancholy colored Aunt Annie’s tales of life on the Georgia plantations: of minuets under the mistletoe, and coach lamps drowned in warm darkness, as lovesick young men drove away—forever; of cock-fights and turkey-wrestling; of horses that had been named after, or (to a child who had only recently confused God with a fox) perhaps were Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett; of the famous fighting Bullochs and their exploits during the American Revolution; of Bre’r Rabbit, the Tar Baby, and “queer goings-on in the Negro quarters.”50
Teedie thus, at a very early age, acquired a love for legend and anecdote, and inherited a nostalgia for a way of life he had never known. The key to his imagination had been unlocked by a woman to whom the past was more real than the present. As an adult reader of history, and as a professional writer of it, he always showed a tendency to “live” his subject; he always looked for narrative which was “instinct with the truth that both charms and teaches.”51
Since Aunt Annie had three other children to take care of, she could not spend all her time satisfying Teedie’s lust for information, which rapidly became insatiable. Confined indoors by ill health and winter weather, he wheezed restlessly from room to room in search of further entertainment. For a while he amused himself with objets d’art in the parlor: a Russian moujik pulling a tin sledge across a snowfield of malachite; a carved Swiss hunter chasing chamois goats around an improbably small mountain; and floor-to-ceiling mirrors in which he could exchange stares with a small, blond, stern-faced boy. Dominating his little universe, like some remote yet brilliant galaxy, was a gas chandelier coruscating with cut-glass prisms. “These prisms struck me as possessing peculiar magnificence,” he wrote in later life. “One of them fell off one day, and I hastily grabbed it and stowed it away, passing several days of furtive delight in the treasure, a delight always alloyed with fear that I would be found out and convicted of larceny.”52
The splendors of the parlor soon palled. There was little to detain him in the dining room, except at mealtimes; besides, its black haircloth furniture scratched his bare legs. The kitchen was terra non grata to pesky children. Eventually he was forced to explore the most forbidding room in the house: a windowless library, with tables, chairs, and gloomy bookcases.53 Chancing upon a ponderous edition of David Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa, Teedie opened it, and found within a world he could happily inhabit the rest of his days.
Although the book’s pages of print meant nothing to him, its illustrations were copious, explicit, and strangely thrilling. Here were rampant hippopotami with canoes on their backs, horizon-filling herds of zebra, a magnified tsetse fly, as big as his hand, and an elephant so spiked with assegais as to resemble an enormous porcupine. For weeks Teedie dragged the volume, which was almost as big as he was, around the library, and begged his elders to fit stories to the pictures.54
Among the first books Teedie learned to decipher for himself were an unscientific study of mammals by Mayne Reid, and two natural histories by the English biologist J. G. Wood.55 He pored endlessly over these in the library, curled up in a tiny chair which became his favorite article of furniture. Softly upholstered in red velvet, and fringed with long tassels, it seemed designed to comfort the scrawny angles of his body. For years the boy and his “tassel chair” were so inseparable it even accompanied him to the photographer’s studio for his formal birthday portraits.
The library’s gloom vanished at night, when gas lamps began to hiss, and the coal fire made its rugs and tapestries glow a rich, romantic red. Teedie was given free access to all the books on the shelves, save only a racy novel by Ouida, Under Two Flags. “I did read it, nevertheless, with greedy and fierce hope of coming on something unhealthy; but as a matter of fact all the parts that might have seemed unhealthy to an older person made no impression on me.… I simply enjoyed in a rather confused way the general adventures.”56
As his reading abilities developed, and his ill-health continued, he turned more and more to stories of outdoor action, in which he could identify with heroes larger than life: the novels of Ballantyne, the sea-yarns of Captain Marryat, Cooper’s tales of the American frontier. Epic poetry, too, inspired him—above all Longfellow’s Saga of King Olaf, with its wild warlocks, blaring horns, and shields shining like suns.
I was nervous and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired,—ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan’s riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite stories—and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them.57
IN THE SPRING of 1863 Theodore Senior, whose voluntary war services were now more and more concentrated in New York State, transported his ailing family to Loantaka, a country place in Madison, New Jersey. The children reacted to their rural surroundings with such delight, and with such general improvement to their health, that Loantaka remained the Roosevelt summer home for four consecutive seasons.
Here the bookish Teedie became aware of the “enthralling pleasures” of building wigwams in the woods, gathering hickory nuts and apples, hunting frogs, haying and harvesting, and scampering barefoot down long, leafy lanes. Despite his frail physique and asthma, he seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of nervous energy. This, combined with the ability to improvise countless stories about his environment, caused him to be accepted as an unquestioned leader by Corinne and Elliott, and such family friends as came to stay. (Bamie’s four-year seniority, along with a certain adult seriousness of manner, disqualified her from membership in his gang.) Even on days when illness confined him to bed, the other children would forsake the fields in order to be entertained by the prodigal Teedie. His stories, remembered by Corinne into old age, were “about jungles and bold, mighty and imaginary fights with strange beasts … there was always a small boy in the stories … who understood the language of animals and would translate their opinions to us.”58
Even in these early years, his knowledge of natural history was abnormal. No doubt much of it was acquired during his winters in the “tassel chair,” but it was supplemented, every summer, by long hours of observation of the flora and fauna around him. The other children noticed that their leader “also led a life apart from us, seriously studying birds, their habits and their notes.”59 At first this study was haphazard, and Teedie made no attempt to document his observations, beyond filing them in his retentive memory. Not until he was seven years old, and back in New York City, did his formal career as a zoologist begin.
I was walking up Broadway, and as I passed the market to which I used sometimes to be sent before breakfast to get strawberries, I suddenly saw a dead seal laid out on a slab of wood. That seal filled me with every possible feeling of romance and adventure. I asked where it was killed, and was informed in the harbor … As long as that seal remained there I haunted the neighborhood of the market day after day. I measured it, and I recall that, not having a tape measure, I had to do my best to get its girth with a folding pocket foot-rule, a difficult undertaking. I carefully made a record of the utterly useless measurements, and at once began to write a natural history of my own, on the strength of that seal. This, and subsequent natural histories, were written down in blank books in simplified spelling, wholly unpremeditated and unscientific. I had vague aspirations of in some way or another owning that seal, but they never got beyond the purely formless stage. I think, however, I did get the seal’s skull, and with two of my cousins promptly started what we ambitiously called the “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History.”60
His next major thesis was entitled “The Foregoing Ant.” According to Corinne, it was inspired by a passing reference in Wood’s Natural History. Teedie assumed that the adjective was physiological, perhaps referring to the ant’s gait, and his subsequent essay on the subject was read aloud to a circle of mystified adults.61
Unfortunately for posterity, neither the Broadway Seal nor the Foregoing Ant appear in surviving records of Teedie’s museum. There exists, however, a rather more learned opus, entitled “Natural History on Insects,” which dates from his ninth year. “All the insects that I write about in this book,” the author declares, “inhabbit North America. Now and then a friend has told me something about them but mostly I have gained their habbits from ofserv-a-tion.” He discusses and illustrates various species of ants, spiders, lady-bugs, fireflies, horned “beetlles,” and dragonflies. Then, with a fine disregard for the limitations of his title, he moves on to the study of hawks, minnows, and crayfish. The latter rather defeats his childish powers of description: “Look at a lobster,” he suggests, “and you have its form.”62
Apart from such lapses, Teedie’s “ofserv-a-tion” is amazingly keen. A paragraph on the tree-spider, for example, notes that it is “grey spoted with black,” and lives “in communitys of about 20” under patches of loosened bark; its web “looks exactly like some cotten on the top but if you take that off you will see several small little webs, all in a ‘gumble’ as we children yoused to call it, each having several little occupants.” Even more remarkable, for a nine-year-old boy, is the methodical arrangement of classifications, and the patient indexing.
Teedie’s interest in all “curiosities and living things” became something of a trial to his elders. Meeting Mrs. Hamilton Fish on a streetcar, he absentmindedly lifted his hat, whereupon several frogs leaped out of it, to the dismay of fellow passengers. Houseguests at No. 28 learned to sit on sofas warily, and to check their water-pitchers for snakes before pouring. When Mittie, in great disgust, threw out a litter of field-mice, her son loudly bemoaned “the loss to Science—the loss to Science.”63
From time to time, members of the domestic staff threatened to give notice. A protest by a chambermaid forced Teedie to move the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History out of his bedroom and into the back hall upstairs. “How can I do the laundry,” complained the washerwoman, “with a snapping turtle tied to the legs of the sink?” Finally, when a noxious odor permeated the entire house, even the good-natured cook issued her ultimatum: “Either I leave or the woodchuck does.” Teedie had killed a fine specimen for anatomical study and ordered her to boil the animal, fur and all, for twenty-four hours.64
ON 28 APRIL 1868, Teedie wrote a letter to Mittie, who was paying a visit to Savannah along with Theodore Senior and Corinne. It is the earliest of his 150,000 letters to survive, yet there glitters, in virtually every sentence, a facet of his mature personality.
My Dear Mamma I have just received your letter! What an excitement. What long letters you do write. I don’t see how you can write them. My mouth opened wide with astonish when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you. I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mocking-bird, get some of its feathers if you can. Thank Johnny for the feathers of the soldier’s cap, give him my love also. We cried when you wrote about Grand-Mamma. Give my love to the good-natured (to use your own expresion) handsome lion, Conie, Johnny, Maud and Aunt Lucy. I am sorry the trees have been cut down. Aunt Annie, Edith, and Ellie send their love to you and all I sent mine to … In the letter you write me tell me how many curiosities and living things you have got for me. I miss Conie very much. I wish I were with you and Johnny for I could hunt for myself … Yours loveingly.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
P.S. I liked your peas so much that I ate half of them.65
Promptness, excitability, warmth, histrionics, love of plants and animals, physical vitality, “dee-light,” sensitivity to birdsong, fascination with military display, humor, family closeness, the conservationist, the natural historian, the hunter—all are here. Teedie mentions, passim, the name of his future wife, and there is a hint of the two-hundred-pound President in the embarrassed postscript. Even the large, childish handwriting is touchingly similar to that of the dying Colonel Roosevelt, scrawling his last memorandum half a century later.
DURING THE SUMMER of 1868, about the same time he was completing his “Natural History on Insects,” Teedie began to keep a diary.66 The Roosevelts were then living in their new country place at Barrytown-on-Hudson, New York, and the little volume is full of the joys of bird-nesting, swimming, hiking, and long rides through grass “up to the ponys head.” Apart from one reference to “an attack of the Asmer” on 10 August, the diary reads like that of any normal nine-year-old. Yet Teedie’s health was as bad as ever: he was never well for more than ten days at a time. So accustomed was he, by now, to recurrences of illness that he rarely bothered to record them.
Theodore Senior grew seriously worried as the summer went by, and Teedie, for all his hyperactivity, remained pasty-faced and skeletal. The other children were blooming in comparison—but only with their brother. Bamie’s crippled spine, Elliott’s tendency to rushes of blood in the head, and little Corinne’s own asthma tormented all his protective feelings. Yet another cause for alarm was the strange decline of Mittie Roosevelt.
A certain wistfulness, combined with increasing fragility and indolence, had begun to affect this exquisite woman since the end of the Civil War. It was as if Sherman’s looting of her ancestral home, and the simultaneous death of her mother, not to mention the banishment overseas of her two Secessionist brothers,67 had cut the Southern lifelines that hitherto sustained her. Gradually she sank into a kind of gentle invalidism which was something not unlike a second childhood. Always helpless and fluttery, she grew incapable of running the house, and was treated by her children as one of its prettier ornaments—a doll in the parlor, whom they could pet when they chose. “Sweet little china Dresden mother,” Elliott used to call her affectionately. Coaches summoned to take her for her three o’clock drive would creak up and down Twentieth Street for hours while Mittie made flustered attempts to get ready. Often as not she would never emerge at all.68 Although she remained beautiful, charming, and witty, Theodore Senior was saddened to see yet another blossom wilt upon his boughs.
When Mittie herself suggested in the winter of 1868–69 that a trip to Europe might do the whole family good, he welcomed the idea. His business was prospering, and after the hard grind of his war work, a Grand Tour of Europe sounded like a welcome diversion. It would be of immense educational value to the children, none of whom had yet received outside schooling. With characteristic enthusiasm, Theodore Senior sat down and drafted an itinerary that must have given his wife pause, for it covered nine countries and a whole year of traveling time. The children reacted with even more dismay. They had been hoping to return to the Hudson Valley that summer. Theodore Senior turned a deaf ear to their pleas, and went ahead with the bookings. On 12 May 1869, he escorted his tearful brood aboard the paddle-steamer Scotia, bound for Liverpool.69
Although Teedie later declared that he “cordially hated” the Roosevelt Grand Tour, he recorded it at great length in his diaries. During all the 377 days he was away from home, he did not miss a single entry, with the exception of one stormy week on the return crossing. The spelling, in these cheap, battered notebooks, is that of a child, but the density of remembered detail would be extraordinary even in an adult. Some entries read like miniature museum catalogs. Evidently the cornucopia of Europe awakened his faculty of near-total recall.
The diaries begin on an enigmatic note. “It was verry hard parting from our friend,” Teedie writes, confessing that he “cried a great deal.” This mysterious person was almost certainly a seven-year-old girl named Edith Carow. For as far back as he could remember, quiet, steady-eyed little “Edie” had been his most intimate acquaintance outside the family circle. Indeed, it seemed at times that she lived within it, for her father’s house was on Union Square, only a few blocks away from 28 East Twentieth Street, and she had come to regard the latter as her second home. Edith and Corinne had been born within weeks of each other, and were wheeled side by side in their baby carriages. When Aunt Annie began giving lessons to the younger Roosevelts, it was natural that Edith should be included. Although she was, in these early years, more attached to Corinne than anyone else, it was plain that a special relationship was developing between herself and Teedie. He was permitted to play “house” with her, whereas Elliott was not. They shared a passionate interest in books, and their characters complemented each other. Where he was ardent and impulsive, feverish in his enthusiasms, she was sensitive and cautious, a cooling breeze across his sometimes overheated landscape.70
Seasickness and homesickness were added to Teedie’s normal quota of ills, as the Scotia thrashed her way slowly across the Atlantic. He remained aloof from the deck-games of other children on board, burying himself in books, or else gazing vaguely at gulls and passing ships, “a tall, thin lad,” someone remembered, “with bright eyes and legs like pipe-stems.”71 During the latter part of the voyage he made friends with a learned gentleman from the West Indies, and had long conversations with him on the subject of natural history. Late on the evening of 21 May the ship docked at Liverpool, and Teedie set foot in “Briten” for the first time.72
WHILE MITTIE PLUNGED INTO an ecstatic, ten-day reunion with her exiled brothers, the younger Roosevelts “jumped and romped” on the chilly English seashore. Theodore Senior, however, had not brought them abroad to play, and began to expose them to the bewildering variety of English history and architecture. Trips were made to the Duke of Devonshire’s country seat at Chatsworth, and “Haden hall an old feudeul castle of the 11th century,” where Teedie admired “the Leathern jacket in which a lord received his death wound.” In early June they proceeded north via “furnace abby” and the Lake District to “Edinbourg.” Despite the inevitable Scottish rain Teedie overcame an attack of asthma and greatly enjoyed visits to Walter Scott’s mansion at Abbotsford, “the tweed (quite a decent brook),” and “Loch Lomend … where the poem ‘Lady of the lake’ was lade.” The pace of sight-seeing intensified as the Roosevelts swung south via York to Oxford, by which time the young diarist had developed a formidable headache. “I have a tendency to headache,” he noted in London five days later, apparently still suffering. He was “a little disappointed” at the range of fauna in the Zoological Gardens, but had fun playing in “hide park” and visiting “Westnubster abby.” The “rare and beautiful specimens” in the British Museum fascinated him, as did the “christal palace” with its “imitations of egyptian, roman, greek etc. marbles,” and the ancient Tower of London, where “I put my head on the block where so many had been beheaded.” During this stay a doctor examined him and pronounced his lungs perfect. Teedie was immediately stricken with asthma so violent he had to be rushed to Hastings for three days of sea air.73
On 13 July the Roosevelts sailed down the Thames, “a verry, verry small river or a large creek,” and crossed the English Channel to Antwerp. Teedie prided himself on being the last of his family to vomit, and “the first one that got on the continent.” From Antwerp they began a leisurely tour of the Netherlands and northern Germany. While traveling up the Rhine, Teedie began to wheeze and cough: a rainy visit to Strasbourg made him “verry sick” and he spent the next morning in bed. In Switzerland he suffered alternate attacks of gastroenteritis, toothache, and asthma, yet showed amazing bursts of energy in between. He climbed an eight-thousand-foot mountain at Chamonix, scorning mules, walked nineteen miles across “the tatenwar” (La Tête Noire), thirteen miles around Visp, twenty miles through the Grimsel Pass, and ascended alone the steep hill of Wallenstein. “It is 3—and 3 miles back, and I went and came in 1 hour.” Such incredible statistics might be dismissed as boyish exaggeration were it not for the fact that Theodore Senior frequently accompanied him and confirmed them. In his diaries, as in all his later writings, Teedie was a scrupulously accurate reporter.
Despite recurring moments when the boy was “verry verry home sick,” he continued to stare seriously at everything around him, sketching the plan of a grotto in Geneva, comparing live Swiss chamois with the carved ones at home in East Twentieth Street, exploring the “gloomey dungeons” of Chillon Castle, researching everything he saw in guidebooks and geographies. In lighter moments he clowned raucously with Elliott and Corinne, gorged himself on fresh berries and cream, and waged war upon “several cross chambermaids.”
On 9 September, Teedie and his father hiked over the crest of the Splügen Pass. The other Roosevelts followed in a carriage. “Soft balmy Italy of the poets,” Teedie noted sarcastically, “is cold dreary smelly.” However the “sceneerry” around “lake Coma” soon improved his attitude, and after a row across the lake “by the light of a golden moon” he himself began to wax poetical. “I strayed from the rest and now in the wood around the villa Colata … with no sound save the waterfall and the Italian breeze on my cheek, I all alone am writing my Journal.”
The moon changed to “silver” over Lake Lugano, and Isola Bella, on Lake Maggiore, was “the most beautiful creation of mans, with lemons cactuses camphor trees lemons bamboos sugar cane in sight of snow white alps.” Here a particularly vicious attack of asthma struck. “It came to a point,” wrote Mittie to her sister, “where he had to sit up in bed to breathe. After taking a strong cup of black coffee the spasmodic part of the attack ceased and he slept … Had the coffee not taken effect he would have gone on struggling through the night, and been a complete wreck the next morning, in which condition you have so often seen him.”74
Teedie’s dormant literary talents were stimulated afresh by Venice. “We saw the moonlight on the water and I contrasted it with the black gondola’s darting about like water goblins.” Although the weather here was clear and dry, he became so “dreadfully ill” that on 20 September he collapsed in total exhaustion.
During the next two weeks his attacks of diarrhea and asthma were incessant. One night on the Austrian border, “I sat up for 4 successive hours and Papa made me smoke a cigar.” This unorthodox remedy seems to have had temporary effect, for the following day he climbed the Adelsberg for two hours “in the broiling sun.” But the long train trip to Vienna laid him low yet again. Theodore Senior, whose compassion for his son was tempered by an aggressive attitude to illness, refused to mollycoddle him. After only a day in bed Teedie was whisked off to the Treasury to see “the crowns of Charlamang and Roudolph the 2d rudly carved jewels and pearls yellow with age contrasting strangly with the polished pearls and sparkling gems of moddern times. Then Father and I went to a Natural history museum. It is a most interesting place, but I was hurried.”
Throughout Teedie’s diaries the masterful, all-capable figure of Theodore Senior strides with giant steps, tirelessly encouraging, comforting, supervising, and protecting his family. Handsome and resplendent in evening dress, he escorts Mittie and Bamie to the Vienna Opera. He leaps like a tiger upon a monk who shoves Teedie aside, and hurls him bodily into the crowd. Determined to picnic in an attractive orange grove, he overcomes the hostility of peasants and proprietor, and ends up gaily entertaining all comers to chicken, champagne, and honey. Only once, in the entire twelvemonth tour, does he lose patience with his children, and angrily call them “bothers.” Even this mild imprecation is enough to make Teedie miserable for a whole evening.
As autumn settled over the Alps, the frequency of Teedie’s asthma attacks increased until they were rarely more than three days apart.75 His diaries become poignant reading. In Salzburg, “I had a nightmare dreaming that the devil was carrying me away and have collerer morbos.” In Munich, “I was verry sick … Mama was so kind telling me storrys and rubing me with her delicate fingers.” In Dresden somebody more vigorous massaged his chest until “the blood came out.” Yet the touring and sightseeing relentlessly continued. Teedie calculated that the Roosevelt Grand Tour was not yet half over, and he was overcome by a paroxysm of homesickness.
October 17th Sunday [Dresden] I am by the fire with not another light but it … It is now after 5. All was dark excep the fire. I lay by it and listened to the wind and thought of the times at home in the country when I lay by the fire with some hickory nuts until like the slave who
Again he is king by the banks of the niger
Again he can hear the wild roar of the tiger
Again I was lying by the roaring fire (with the cold October wind shrieking outside) in the cheerful lighted room and I turned around half expecting to see it all again and stern reality forced itself upon me and I thought of the time that would come never, never, never.
His misery lasted through visits to Berlin and Cologne, where he noted gloomily that 27 October was “the first of my birthdays that it snowed on.” However, the Roosevelts celebrated the occasion with their customary blend of warmth and formality, donning full evening dress for dinner and showering him with such splendid gifts that his mood noticeably improved.
Five days into his twelfth year, the child gives the first of several indications that the man is beginning to develop within him: “We went to a shoe makers [in Brussels] and I saw a girl … the most beautiful but ferocious girl I have ever seen in my life.” Another, more emotional entry, written three weeks later in Paris, records that “Mama showed me the portrait of Eidieth Carow and her face stired up in me homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.”
TEEDIE REMAINED DEPRESSED and ill in Paris. A doctor was summoned to his bedside three times, and three times changed his medicine; but neither this nor frequent “russian baths” had any effect. When at the end of November the Roosevelts started south to winter on the Riviera, his melancholy spilled out in tears: “I cried for homesickness and a wish to get out of the land where friends (or as I think them enemies) who can not speak my language are forced on me.”
But the inexorable Theodore Senior pressed on down the Route Napoléon. On 6 December, Teedie was cheered by his first “decent” hill-climb in months, but his health was still a cause for concern: “I read till mama came in and then she lay down and I stroked her head and she felt my hands and nearly cried because they were feverish.” As they proceeded east along the Riviera, his powers of observation revived. The diaries have vignettes of cruelty to animals, the military might of Monaco (“a few gendarmes and some dismounted cannon”), primitive house paintings, and a “verry romantic” sunset on the Italian border.
At Finale the Roosevelts amused themselves in jingoistic fashion with a crowd of Italian beggars:
We hired one to keep off the rest. Then came some more fun. Papa bought two baskets of doughey cakes. A great crowd of boys girls and women. We tossed the cakes to them and we fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr Stevens [a fellow traveler] kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a “Coup de Grace” we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings … We made the crowds … give us three cheers for U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.76
Unfazed by such alarming evidence of Italian poverty, Teedie once again rhapsodized over the beauties of the Mediterranean landscape. His diary entries double or triple in length, to as much as a thousand words a day.
Moving leisurely down the Ligurian coast via Genoa and “Piza,” the Roosevelt family arrived in Rome in time for Christmas. “Hip! hip! hurrah!!!!” rejoiced Teedie. “The presents passed our upmost expectations.”77 Rome, on the other hand, did not: his first impression of it, through rainy windows, was a dirty jumble of old buildings. But when the weather improved he explored the city and its environs enthusiastically, from the depths of the Catacombs to the heights of “rockety papa” (Rocca di Papa).
He showed similar conscientiousness on an excursion to Naples and Pompeii. The temptingly precipitous and icy slopes of Vesuvius enabled him to work off his superabundant energy on the last day of 1869. Reaching the summit long before other members of the family, Teedie happily inhaled sulfur fumes until his bronchii rebelled, and threw pebbles into the lava, careless of the turbulence that spewed them back into his face.
New Year’s Day 1870 came and went, and, from the children’s point of view, the worst part of the Grand Tour was over. Although several months of winter in Europe yet remained, spring was on its way, and the longed-for recrossing of the Atlantic no longer wavered in the impossible distance, like a mirage. For six weeks in Rome, while the elder Roosevelts socialized with fashionable American expatriates, they became ball-playing regulars on Pincian Hill.
Here, one glistening January day, “suddenly there came a stir—an unexpected excitement seemed everywhere.” Gorgeously robed sampetrini approached, carrying an august Personage in a sedan-chair. Teedie, conscious of his Dutch Reformed heritage, hissed frantically that “he didn’t believe in popes—that no real American would.” As Corinne later recalled:
The Pope … his benign face framed in white hair and the close cap which he wore, caught sight of the group of eager little children craning their necks to see him pass; and he smiled and put out one fragile, delicate hand toward us, and, lo! the late scoffer who, in spite of the ardent Americanism that burned in his eleven-year-old soul, had as much reverence as militant patriotism in his nature, fell upon his knees and kissed the delicate hand, which for a brief moment was laid upon his fair curly hair.78
Teedie, recording the incident in his diary that night, was much less sentimental. “We saw the Pope and we walked along and he extended his hand to me and I kissed it!! hem!! hem!!”
The rest of his stay in Rome was happy, educational, and comparatively free from illness. So were two subsequent weeks spent touring the galleries of Florence, Bologna, and Turin. Teedie revealed a precocious sensitivity to art, commenting in his diary on as many as fifty-seven items in a single day.79 He was particularly moved by “the most beautiful of all beautiful pictures St. Cecelia listingning to the heavenly music.”
On 10 March 1870, Theodore Senior took his family back to Paris for seven more weeks of sight-seeing. Damp and snowy weather aggravated Teedie’s asthma, necessitating quick excursions out of town to Fontainebleau. As spring came in, the air warmed and sweetened, and he enjoyed “the happiest Easter I ever spent.” At the end of April, Bamie, who was to stay in France for a year of finishing school, bade everybody a tearful good-bye.80
Recrossing the Channel for a final fortnight in England, the Roosevelts embarked from Liverpool on 14 May in a calm shower of rain. As they drew near to America, a joyous escort of whales sprayed Teedie with water. Sandy Hook drifted into view; the spires of Manhattan grew tall against the sky, dipped, swayed, and came to rest. “New York!!! Hip! Hurrah! What a bustle we had geting off.”