CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1
SHE REMAINED “the strong good wise old sister,” sole survivor of the original “big people.” In January she had turned thirty-one. So she was well established now as a spinster, the role everyone had long since consigned her to. Family and friends spoke of her attributes of character, her poise and wonderful vitality, seldom ever of her looks. “She has no looks,” a friend once remarked. “She is very nearly ugly—she is almost a cripple, and yet no one for a moment thinks of those things.” She was prized for her wit, her breadth of knowledge, her insights, her strong, logical approach to things. “In many ways hers was the best mind in the family, and her personality one of the most dominant and fascinating,” we read in the reminiscences of a Roosevelt of the next generation. There was a subtleness to her not present in her brothers or her sister, she was more of a diplomat, she had more ballast, as it was said. She was stable, capable, a “powerful” figure with a strong sense of duty, and the resources of energy she drew upon, somewhere in her small misshapen frame, seemed greater even than Theodore’s. She was constantly busy—”dear busy Bamie”—but more than that her energy and activity stirred others into motion. Anyone around her for long got going, doing things. She liked minding other people’s affairs, liked responsibility, and because she was so extremely dependable, she was depended upon time and again.
She was, as another of the next generation would say of her, “intensely on-the-ball.” She seemed always to know what was going on, in the world and in the family. She made it her business to know and to keep the others abreast, with letters, clippings, telegrams if necessary. She was the indispensable gatherer and dispenser of vital Roosevelt information, out of thoughtfulness in part, but also because she knew that was what was expected of her and it gave her influence if not exactly control. How would he know anything of importance if it were not for Bamie’s correspondence, James Alfred Roosevelt once remarked while traveling abroad, and her letters to Theodore in the Bad Lands had arrived some weeks by the bundle.
She could deal with “situations” better than anyone, the others felt. In time of need or crisis she was the first person they turned to. When Elliott’s wife, Anna, gave birth to her first child on October 11,1884, after months of family worry, because of what had happened to Alice, it was Bamie they wanted on the scene to help.
“Bamie’s telegram at 11:30 this morning brought us the joyful news,” reads a message from Aunt Anna Gracie. The child had been christened Anna Eleanor—Anna for her mother and for Bamie, Eleanor for her father, Ellie—but she was to be known only as Eleanor and in time would become deeply attached to Bamie, depending on her for the love and understanding she desperately needed and could find nowhere else. Indeed, for the two children born to her two brothers in the year 1884—Theodore’s Alice and Elliott’s Eleanor, two very individual, very different little girls—Bamie was to be childhood’s primary source of kindness, stories, humor, guidance, sympathy, interest, and from what each was to write of her in later years there is no question as to the influence she had on their lives or their utter devotion to “Auntie Bye.” (Bye and Bysie were nicknames her father had sometimes used and that Theodore and others used interchangeably with Bamie as time went on.)
In the world of blond, blue-eyed Alice, now approaching age three, there was no more marvelous figure. Except for summers, when she stayed with her grandparents at Chestnut Hill, she was with Bamie constantly, and no one, as she later said, had such importance. “Always Auntie Bye meant more to me than anyone.” Auntie Bye was “always the mainstream somehow,” it was she who “brought the generations together.”
“Auntie Bye provided . . . a great warmth and pooling of the generations. . . . It was that.”
She used to tell me stories about her, Father’s, Uncle Elliott’s, and Corinne’s childhood, and about Grandfather and Grandmother Roosevelt, what they looked like and the things they did—how Grandfather Roosevelt drove a four-in-hand, how he used to bring them peaches when he came home in the afternoon. . . . She told of the sad, difficult times during the Civil War when Grandmother Roosevelt’s brothers were fighting on the southern side, she living in New York with her northern husband. There were stories too about their trips abroad when they were children, of the time when she was in school near Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. I used to make her describe to me over and over the soldiers marching past, singing, on their way to the fighting.
More wonderful still, Auntie Bye would tell the child about her own real mother who was in heaven. “She was the only one who did,” Alice remembered years afterward. “You see none of the others ever mentioned her. . . . Oh, she said how pretty she was and how attractive she was and how fond Auntie Bye was of her . . . things of that sort.”
“Auntie Bye had a mind that worked as a very able mans mind works,” remembered Eleanor. “She was full of animation, was always the center of any group she was with . . . wherever she lived there was an atmosphere of comfort. . . . The talk was always lively . . . and, young or old, you really felt Auntie Bye’s interest in you.”
To Eleanor she was “one of the most interesting women I have ever known.” Alice, in an interview years later, said Auntie Bye would have been President had she been a man—”because she had such determination . . . [and] an extraordinary gift with people.”
“Her hair was lovely, soft and wavy,” remembered Eleanor. “Her eyes were deep set and really beautiful, making you forget the rest of the face, which was not beautiful. . . . To young people ... she was an inspiration . . .”
If she had a fault it was an instinct for the cutting or caustic remark about those who were perhaps not quite so “on-the-ball” as she, an ability “to stick the knife in” with a word or two, and not without certain pleasure. Yet no one seems to have been damaged as a result. And as Corinne’s daughter—her second child, Corinne Douglas Robinson—was to remark, “She was such a tremendous personality that you wanted to be in her favor.”
As in childhood, because of her back, Bamie was required still to lie down part of each day. She still wore a piece of ram’s wool as a cushion on her back, to ease the discomfort of sitting, and the evidence is that, sitting or standing, she was in pain much of the time, though she never said so.
She read widely, saw a great deal of a few particular friends, visited, entertained constantly, and made one long trip to Mexico and California that spring of 1886, traveling in “the most ideal way,” by private railroad car as the guest of Cousin Sally, still among her closest friends, and James Roosevelt, whom she regarded as “the most absolutely honorable upright gentleman” she knew. Her best friend was Mrs. Whitelaw Reid—Elizabeth Mills Reid—whose husband owned the Tribune and who, somewhat like Bamie herself, would be remembered as a “queer, little dumpy figure, but bursting with vitality and intelligence.”
Her joy was in good talk. She was in her element in stimulating company, with friends who traveled, with artists, men of affairs, “people who wrote,” Theodore’s political friends—”every kind of person,” as Eleanor remembered proudly. All the Roosevelts were talkers, but with Bamie conversation was an art form. She was never torrential, as Theodore could be when off on one of his subjects. She often listened more than she spoke. Corinne was more imaginative, mercurial and gregarious like Theodore. Bamie chose her words with care. But she could, by all accounts, draw out the very best in people; even in the dullest guest she could find something and make that person shine under her encouragement. (”I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out,” her father had written Mittie of someone he had met on a train.) But she could also pick up at once on virtually any subject. “She grasped everything immediately,” remembered a cousin.
Her letters, it is said, suggest little of the life and originality that characterized her talk. Something happened in conversation that did not on paper. She was somebody people wanted to meet and when they did they opened up to her, as they did not to others. Theodore, who was enormously proud of her, kidded her about the “incongruous” circle she attracted, but also saw her as the center of a future salon and hoped, for his own benefit, that she might take that role very seriously.
He called her “the Driving Wheel of Destiny and Superintendent-in-Chief of the Workings of Providence.”
Theodore mattered most of all. He gave focus to her life; he was her consuming interest, her favorite subject, her primary means of selffulfillment. His child, his house, his health, his career, his future, had become uppermost in her life. The house on Madison Avenue was maintained as much for his as for her own use, as his base of operations in New York. “I always insisted that we did not live together,” she later explained, “that we only visited one another.” That way, she said, a breakup, if it ever came, would be easier for both of them. Her teas and “evenings” were for his benefit often as not; the parties—summer dinner dances, hunt breakfasts—she gave at Sagamore Hill (as he had renamed the Oyster Bay house) were designed to bring him back into society, back to the life he knew.
She wanted him to return to politics. She was certain it was where he belonged and she both encouraged whatever she thought beneficial to his career and discouraged anything she thought potentially detrimental. She strongly encouraged his friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, and included Lodge now in her correspondence as though he were one of the family. (“Theodore would not be happy out of public affairs,” Lodge concurred early in what was to be a lifelong correspondence with Bamie.) When Theodore gave her his account of capturing the thieves, she (with Lodge) strongly advised against his doing it as an article for Century, sure that such heroics might strike an eastern audience as a bit extravagant and self-aggrandizing. (”I shall take good care,” he promised her, “that the pronoun ‘I’ does not appear once in the whole piece.”)
She felt she was closer to him than anyone. She knew what he was spending on his cattle venture, and like James Alfred, she worried about it; she knew what the Oyster Bay place had cost, having overseen its construction from the start; she knew what was in his checking account, what his bills were, because in his absences she paid them. “Can you send me at once three or four blank checks from my checkbook?” he writes at one point from the West. “I need them immediately. Darling old Bysie, as usual I am bothering you with my affairs.”
Politics fascinated her and she had followed every step of his career with intense interest. Moreover, she knew how much that interest meant to him, how few people mattered to him in the way she did and how much he needed her approval of all his exploits. In some letters, such as the one describing his battle on the convention floor at Chicago or the one about the bear hunt, it is as if he carries with him his own proscenium arch and is performing for her alone, his audience of one. “Look how well I am doing,” he seems to be saying to her again and again, just as he had done at Harvard when writing to her or to their father.
Possibly more than anyone in the family, she knew how much of himself he withheld from view—the tenderness in him, the overriding attachment to home, to family, how much of the “great little home-boy” he remained at heart.
Women, she knew, did not greatly interest him and this made her role in his life all the more exceptional. He did not enjoy the company of women the way their father had, or as Elliott obviously did. Until that summer, and the mention of a Mrs. Selmes at Mandan, there had been nothing since Alice’s death to suggest the slightest interest in any woman beyond the Roosevelt circle. Tilden Selmes was a young lawyer, a Yale man and neophyte rancher; his wife, Martha Flandrau Selmes, was the daughter of a distinguished Minnesota jurist and historian, Charles Eugene Flandrau. Theodore had been a guest at their Mandan home on several occasions in August and September and “the singularly attractive” Mrs. Selmes was somebody he wanted Bamie to know about. “She is, I think, very handsome,” he wrote; “... she is very well read, has a delicious sense of humor and is extremely fond of poetry—including that of my favorite, Browning, as well as my old one, Swinburne.” Other accounts of Mrs. Selmes and several surviving photographs bear him out—she was indeed a vivacious and strikingly beautiful young woman—and unquestionably she impressed him as few women ever had or ever would (he was to refer to her, as time went on, as “the wonderful Mrs. Selmes”), but the fact that there was also a Mr. Selmes would, for Theodore—and doubtless for Bamie also—have precluded any thought of a romantic involvement. The contribution Mrs. Selmes makes to what can be pieced together of the larger story is a recollection, offered years later, of Theodore pacing the floor during one of his visits, muttering audibly that he had no “constancy.”
2
In the last days of August 1886 The New York Times carried a small social item reporting the engagement of ex-Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt to Miss Carow of New York and then, on September 5, a retraction, which was doubtless placed in the Times by Bamie:
The announcement of the engagement of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, made last week, and which came from a supposedly authoritative source, proves to have been erroneous. Nothing is more common in society than to hear positive assertions constantly made regarding the engagement of persons who have been at all in each other’s company, and no practice is more reprehensible.
Theodore was notified as to what had happened and Bamie waited for his answer. It came by return mail in a letter from Medora dated September 20. What the Times had reported was true, he told her. “I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean to marry her.” How anyone had found out was a mystery to him. “You are the first person to whom I have breathed one word on the subject.” He had hoped to be able to tell her before this, but that had been impossible. He would explain everything when he saw her.
I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages [his remarkable letter continued]; I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man’s character. You could not reproach me one-half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead. No matter what your judgment about myself I shall assuredly enter no plea against it. But I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith. It is certainly not her fault; the entire blame rests on my shoulders.
Bamie could keep Baby Lee, she was told. Nor should she feel obligated to inform the others; he would take care of that himself by letter. Meantime, he wanted nothing said to anyone beyond the immediate family.
Bamie and Corinne were both taken totally unawares by this news. Nor were they at all pleased.
Edith Carow was, of course, a very known and admired quantity, as close to the family as anyone could be, very like “family,” no less than ever. She was someone they had both continued to see on a regular basis, until just that previous spring when Edith’s widowed mother, due to straitened circumstances, sold her house and departed with Edith and another daughter for an indefinite stay in Europe. “It makes me quite blue,” Corinne had written at the time.
Edith was lovely-looking, with a mind of her own and wide-ranging interests. If somewhat reserved by Roosevelt standards and somewhat disapproving of fashionable society, she had a quiet kind of dignity and a will to match Bamie s, which was the problem.“They didn’t want it at all,” said Alice years afterward, “because they knew her too well and they knew they were going to have a difficult time with her, that she would come between them and Father.”
Doubtless they too wished Theodore had more “constancy.” Ideally, by the prevailing, romantic code, he would never remarry—as a testimony of his love for his beautiful dead wife, his first and only great love. Or, at the least, a decent interval of several more years would have been expected, during which the widower brother and the spinster sister could carry on just as they were and quite happily.
He was home by early October. He and Edith, Bamie learned, had been secretly engaged for nearly a year. It had been the previous September in Bamie’s front hall that they had met one day by chance, having until then seen little or nothing of each other since Alice’s death. Theodore had started calling on her in New York after that—quietly, discreetly, and though he even asked Edith to attend a hunt ball at Sagamore Hill in October, apparently no one imagined there could be anything between them. In November he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes, with the understanding that the engagement would be kept secret until a more propitious moment. He had returned to the Bad Lands in March; in April she sailed for Europe. “What day does Edith go abroad, and for how long does she intend staying?” he had inquired innocently, almost as an afterthought, in a letter to Corinne, the same letter with his observations on Anna Karenina, written at Dickinson the day after bringing in the thieves. “Could you not send her, when she goes, some flowers from me? I suppose fruit would be more useful, but I think flowers ‘more tenderer’ as Mr. Weller would say.”
Bamie, whatever misgivings or pain she felt, was ready to stand by him. In the face of his overwhelming good health and high spirits it is hard to imagine her doing anything else. He was ready to embrace life again. He was also being asked by the Republicans to run for mayor of New York, almost from the moment he had his bags unpacked, an offer he at once accepted, to her great delight, even though, as they both appreciated, he had little chance of winning. . . . Get action! Seize the moment! It was to be a three-way race. His opponents were the Democrat Abram Hewitt and a Labor candidate, Henry George. Hewitt, distinguished in manner, admired as an “enlightened” businessman, had been a friend of their fathers and appeared the likely winner. Henry George was the author of Progress and Poverty, famous as the great exponent of the single-tax scheme, and a fiery speaker who drew huge street-corner crowds and gave newspaper editors and propertied people a bad case of the jitters. Theodore set up headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and Bamie, by all signs, could not have been happier. The office of mayor, since the passage of Theodore’s Reform Charter Bill, was one of real consequence.
He was called “the Cowboy Candidate” and the Times at one point claimed he was in the lead. “We haven’t had campaign headquarters that looked so much like business in this county since ex-President Arthur was chairman of the county committee and carried things with a rush,” one party worker was quoted as saying. “It seems like old times and warms the cockles of an old-time Republican’s heart. This is just glorious . . .”
So convinced was Theodore that he had no serious chance of being elected that he bought two tickets under false names—Mr. and Miss Merrifield—on the Etrura, which was due to sail for England on Saturday, November 6, or four days after the election. Bamie had agreed to go with him to London, where he and Edith were to be married. The only thing she would not agree to was any talk of her keeping the child.
“It almost broke my heart to give her up,” Bamie was to recall years later. “Still I felt. . . it was for her good, and that unless she lived with her father she would never see much of him . . .” It was remembering what she had felt as a child for her own father, the knowledge of what his love had meant to her own life, she said, that made her decide as she did.
In a letter to Edith Carow dated October 23, Bamie wrote in a swift, strong, somewhat illegible hand:
MY DEAREST EDITH,
You will be astonished at another letter so soon, but though of course Theodore writes you of everything, still you wish to hear what I try to write; of the wonderful enthusiasm he certainly inspires; never mind what the results . . . it is astounding the hold that he has on the public. . . . Douglas has been as always a trump, having organized “the Roosevelt Campaign Club of businessmen” which brings in many active workers. Theodore breakfasts and sleeps at home where he is very comfortable . . . by half after nine he is in the Headquarters at the Fifth Avenue, never leaving except for lunch and dinner... even then he can but spare a short time; he is very bright and well considering the terrific strain which of course will be worse constantly until the second [of November] is past. It is such happiness to see him at his very best once more; ever since he has been out of politics in any active form, it has been a real heart sorrow to me, for while he always made more of his life than any other man I knew, still with his strong nature it was a permanent source of poignant regret that even at his early age he should lose these years without the possibility of doing his best and most telling work; in that there should be the least chance that he might find his hold over the public gone when he once more came before them and this is the first time since . . . [Albany] days that he has enough work to keep him exerting all his powers. Theodore is the only person who had the power, except Father, who possessed it in a different way, of making me almost worship him and now it is such a desperate feeling to realize that in all this excitement I cannot help him in the least except that he knows how interested I am. I would never say or write this except to you, but it is very restful to feel how you care for him and how happy he is in his devotion to you . . . I go back again tomorrow [to Sagamore Hill] to remain over the Hunt Ball. I wish you were to be there this year also as you were last. . . I send you the pieces from this morning’s Times, they are samples of what appear daily, of course, the favorable side, but those most against him can find nothing but his youth, supposed wealth, and being born a gentleman to say as detrimental. . . .
“Theodore is radiantly happy and we sail on Saturday for England,” she wrote on Election Day to Lodge’s wife, Nannie.
Edith will be in London and they are to be married there early in December. . . . Edith we have known intimately always. She is very bright and attractive and I believe absolutely devoted to Theodore so I think their future looks most promising. . . . Today is of course politically one of intense excitement to me personally and apparently to New York generally. Theodore, Douglas and a number of men have been in to lunch and tonight I shall simply haunt the streets. . . .
Abram Hewitt was swept into office as expected, and as Bamie later observed, he “made an admirable mayor.” Henry George ran second and Theodore, for all the excitement he had generated, finished third. Large numbers of Republicans, fearful that a vote for Theodore might increase George’s chances of winning, had voted instead for Hewitt. Historically, it would stand as one of the most interesting campaigns the city had ever seen and at the age of twenty-eight Theodore was the youngest man who had ever been a candidate for mayor. “At least I have a better party standing than ever before,” he wrote to Lodge, who had just been elected to Congress.
Friday night, after the horse show, their last night before sailing, Bamie and he worked together until nearly daybreak addressing the last of the engagement announcements.