ANNA
In the summer of 1895, to the astonishment of all the Roosevelt tribe, Bamie announced her engagement to Navy Commander (later Admiral) William Sheffield Cowles, a large, dignified, placid man from Connecticut. She was forty, he nearly fifty, and at age forty-three, she gave birth to a son, William Sheffield Cowles, Jr. In the years Theodore was President she established a home on N Street that became known as “the little White House.” As Eleanor was to recall, “There was never a serious subject that came up while he was President that he didn’t go to her at her home on N Street and discuss it with her before making his decision. He talked things over with her, that was well known by all the family. He may have made his own decision, but talking with her seemed to clarify things for him.”
In her middle years Bamie became almost totally deaf, yet few people ever knew since she learned to read lips, and later still, living in Connecticut, she suffered intensely from arthritis, a condition she refused to discuss. Recalling an evening at her Connecticut home, when she sat in a wheelchair talking and laughing with Cousin Sally’s son, Franklin, who by then was also in a wheelchair, a family friend remarked, “You felt such gallantry in all of them, you know, such humor, such complete elimination of any problem about bodies.”
Though devoted to her husband, her own dear “Mr. Bearo,” she refused to let him call her Bamie or Bye, only Anna, and her feelings for him were never what they were for her brother Theodore, who remained the center of her universe for as long as he lived.
Bamie died in August 1931, at the age of seventy-six.
THEODORE
With the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Theodore became at forty-two the youngest President in history and possibly the best prepared. He had by then served six years as a reform Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland), two years as Police Commissioner of New York City, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on the eve of the Spanish-American War, as a colonel in the Rough Riders—and “hero of San Juan Hill”—as Governor of New York, and as Vice President. He was also the first President born and raised in a big city, and the first rich man’s son to occupy the White House since William Henry Harrison. He was a well-to-do, aristocratic, big-city, Harvard-educated Republican with ancestral roots in the Deep South and a passionate following in the West, which taken all together made him something quite new under the sun.
As President he was picturesque, noisy, colorful in ways that amused and absorbed the press, worried the elders of his party, and delighted the country. To his admirers he was “the outstanding, incomparable symbol of virility in his time” (Mark Sullivan), “a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital” (Harry Thurston Peck), “the most striking figure in American life” (Thomas Edison); while to others, some of whom had once been his friends, he was “that damned cowboy” (Mark Hanna), a man “drunk with himself” (Henry Adams), “an excellent specimen of the genus Americanus egotisticus” (Poultney Bigelow). The cartoonists had a field day. But he was also a President with a phenomenal grasp of history, who spoke German and French (in a style entirely his own) and knew something of the world from having traveled abroad from the time he was a child. More important, he was as able an executive as ever occupied the office. He loved being President, loved the power, for what he could accomplish with it.
He settled the great anthracite coal strike of 1902 by entering the mediation as no President had done before. He initiated the first successful antitrust suit against a corporate monopoly, the giant Northern Securities Company (and when his fathers old friend J. P. Morgan came to Washington to demand an explanation, such action served only to harden his resolve). He “took the Isthmus” and built the Panama Canal, and served as peacemaker in the Russo-Japanese War, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. And he was openly proud of all his achievements.
As President, the boy who adored hero stories, and who idolized Captain James Bulloch, built a new Navy and sent a fleet of battleships around the world on a good-will mission. As President, the asthmatic child who craved the out of doors—for whom the unspoiled natural world had literally meant life itself—increased the area of the national forests by some forty million acres, established five national parks, sixteen national monuments (including the Grand Canyon), four national game refuges, fifty-one national bird sanctuaries, and made conservation a popular cause. As President, the son of the first Theodore Roosevelt made the White House “a bully pulpit,” preached righteousness, courage, love of country, “The Strenuous Life”—which, everything considered, may have been his greatest contribution. Once, when the old family friend Louisa Schuyler asked how he “felt the pulse” of the country, his response was: “I don’t know the way the people do feel... I only know how they ought to feel.”
Ironically, he who had worried that he might never live up to his father’s name loomed so large in his own time that he obliterated his father’s name. Only one Theodore Roosevelt was to be remembered, once his father’s generation had passed from the scene.
His devotion to the memory of his father, a feeling of his father’s presence in his life, remained with him to the end. “My father, Theodore Roosevelt, was the best man I ever knew,” he would say. It was to him he felt he must be true. In the study at Sagamore Hill between small portraits of Lincoln and Grant, he hung a large oil portrait of his father. Four duplicate portraits had been done posthumously from a photograph, one for each of the four children, and Theodore placed his so the pale-blue eyes kept steady watch over him at his desk. His first day in the White House following McKinley’s death was September 22, his fathers birthday. (Had he been alive then, in 1901, the elder Theodore would have been seventy.) “I have realized it as I signed various papers all daylong, and I feel that it is a good omen,” he remarked to Bamie and Corinne, who with their husbands were his only guests at dinner that evening. “I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder.”
Among his first acts as President was to have all those Victorian embellishments introduced by Chester A. Arthur, including the fifty-foot Tiffany screen, torn out and the house restored to its original “stately simplicity.”
His highest-ranking Cabinet officer, the Secretary of State, inherited from McKinley, was his father’s friend John Hay. (In 1905 Theodore named another of his father’s friends, Elihu Root, to succeed Hay; when Root resigned in 1909, Theodore filled the position with his Harvard classmate Robert Bacon.)
“It was peculiarly pleasant having you here. How I wish Father could have lived to see it too!” he wrote to Uncle Rob following his inauguration in 1905. “You stood to me for him and all that generation, and so you may imagine how proud I was to have you here.” (Uncle Rob was in his seventy-sixth year. Following the death of Aunt Lizzie Ellis, in 1887, he had married Mrs. Minnie O’Shea Fortescue.)
Of his mother Theodore was to say comparatively little. But to some who had known her, he was more a Bulloch than a Roosevelt. The New York Sun in 1900 quoted an unnamed New Yorker, a transplanted “old-time southern gentleman” of social prominence: “I have always thought, and others who knew Miss Bulloch in Savannah have quite agreed with me, that it was from his mother that Governor Roosevelt got his splendid dash and energy.”
Of Alice Lee, Theodore was to say nothing. Nor, supposedly, was her name ever spoken within the new family he and Edith established. To judge by his Autobiography (1913) she never existed; their romance, his first marriage, never happened. Whether this was his doing or Edith’s remains an issue of debate among later-day Roosevelts. The one possible explanation to be found in his own writings is a comment in a letter to Corinne concerning a mutual friend whose life had taken a tragic turn.
I hate to think of her suffering; but the only thing for her to do now is to treat the past as past, the event as finished and out of her life; to dwell on it, and above all to keep talking of it with anyone, would be both weak and morbid. She should try not to think of it; this she cannot wholly avoid, but she can avoid speaking of it. She should show a brave and cheerful front to the world, whatever she feels; and henceforth she should never speak one word of the matter to anyone.
His own brave and cheerful front was what the world knew him for, what the large proportion of his countrymen most loved him for. No one seemed to do so much or to enjoy what he did so thoroughly. Yet his favorite contemporary poet was Edwin Arlington Robinson, whose themes were loneliness and the burden of personal memory. The robust, quick-stepping, legendary “T.R.” was a great deal more pensive and introspective, he dwelt more on the isolation and sadness inherent in human life, than most people ever realized. Black care, for all the phenomenal pace he maintained through life, clung to him more than he let on.
He kept at his writing. In his public career, it is estimated, he wrote 150,000 letters. He also wrote his own speeches and presidential messages, and more than twenty books dealing with history, literature, politics, and natural history. His Autobiography is particularly interesting if read with a view to all that is left out. (Not only does he make no mention of Alice Lee or their marriage, he neglects to mention his sisters by name and devotes all of three sentences to his mother. He leaves out his race for mayor of New York—the one resounding political defeat of his early career. He says nothing of his father’s actions at the time of the Civil War, just as he says nothing about Elliott’s tragic life and other lesser family “failures.”)
Judged by almost any criteria, his second marriage was an unequivocal success. Edith, a person of marked intelligence, poise, and common sense, brought “wonderful balance” to his life. She was, “in many ways, as formidable a figure as Bamie, or even as Theodore,” said a cousin. “It is curious and notable that few great men have had closely related to them three women of such exceptional intelligence and gifts as those of Bamie, Corinne and Edith.”
The second marriage produced five children—Theodore, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin—to whom their father was openly, passionately devoted. He read to them at night, told ghost stories (of which he knew many), joined headlong in their games (pillow fights, hide-and-seek, running obstacle courses down the halls of the White House); he bounced with them in the haymow at Sagamore Hill, led them on long morning excursions on horseback, exactly as his father had done and over the same hills, a half dozen of their cousins or friends usually joining the cavalcade. “To be with him was to have fun,” remembered one of the cousins, “if for no other reason than that he so obviously was having a good time himself.” “I love all these children and have great fun with them, and am touched by the way in which they feel that I am their special friend, champion, and companion,” he wrote Edith’s sister. The letters he wrote his children—from Cuba, the White House, Panama, whenever separated from them—were to become famous when published as a best-selling book the year of his death.
Yet there is evidence that being his child could be very difficult. Just before the Spanish-American War, when the family was living in Washington, young Ted, who had asthma, began suffering from severe headaches or “nervous prostration,” because, as the family doctor was convinced, his father was driving him too hard. At the doctor’s urging, the boy was sent to stay with Bamie in New York, where the headaches and other ailments quickly went away. “Hereafter I shall never press Ted either in body or mind,” Theodore wrote Bamie. “The fact is that the little fellow, who is peculiarly dear to me, has bidden fair to be all the things I would like to have been and wasn’t, and it has been a great temptation to push him.”
Theodore continued to ride, shoot, hike, spar, row, play tennis. He never did kill a tiger, but of the other most fearsome beasts of the wilds he could claim at least one of each—as all the world was made aware. His knowledge of the large animals of North America probably surpassed that of anyone of his day. The last letter he wrote, like the first that we know of, had to do with birds.
A book was about the only thing that could make him sit still and his love of books lasted as long as he lived. He read everything and anything, sometimes two books in an evening, and his favorites—the Irish sagas, Bunyan, Scott, Cooper, the letters of Abraham Lincoln, Huckleberry Finn—he read many times over.
The two cousins who had been closest to him in boyhood, Emlen and West, had families of their own close by at Oyster Bay. Emlen was Theodore’s financial adviser and West, who was a physician, delivered two of Theodore’s children.
His health was not particularly good in later life, appearances to the contrary. He was dogged by all his old ailments, by stomach trouble, insomnia, chest colds, and by asthma from time to time. Poor eyesight was a lifelong handicap. Sailing off to fight in Cuba in 1898, he carried a dozen extra pairs of glasses in his pockets and in the lining of his hat, and a blow suffered during a sparring match in the White House blinded him permanently in his left eye, something about which the public was to be told nothing. He put on weight (he weighed over two hundred pounds when he was President) and as time passed he was bothered with rheumatism or gout, he did not know which. “I am falling behind physically,” he told his son Ted as early as 1903.
When he died, in his sleep at Sagamore Hill in the early hours of January 6, 1919, he was sixty years old, yet seemed much older. But by then, since leaving the White House, he had fallen out with his hand-picked successor (Taft); broken up the 1912 Republican National Convention; launched his own Progressive (”Bull Moose”) Party; campaigned again for President; been shot in the chest by a fanatic in Milwaukee (his glasses case and a folded copy of a speech in his breast pocket saved his life); lost the 1912 election; he had hunted big game in Africa, flown in a plane, led an exploring expedition in the Amazon jungles (during which he contracted malaria, lost fifty pounds, and again nearly died); campaigned to get the country into the First World War; and suffered the loss of a son, Quentin, the youngest, who was killed in aerial combat behind German lines in 1918.
Theodore was buried with a minimum of ceremony on a bitter cold day in a small cemetery at Oyster Bay, just off the road between Tranquillity and Sagamore Hill. Of the things said in his memory, among the simplest and best is this by a friend since childhood,Edith Wharton:
... he was so alive at all points, and so gifted with the rare faculty of living intensely and entirely in every moment as it passed . . .
ELLIOTT
Elliott’s tragic life ended in August 1894, at age thirty-four, after a torturous battle with alcoholism. His marriage had become a shambles, he had been involved in a paternity suit, threatened suicide more than once, and was placed in various institutions in Europe and the Middle West for the “cure,” beginning the winter of 1891 when Bamie escorted him to a sanitarium in the Austrian Alps, at Graz. Determined that nothing go amiss, she persuaded the head of the sanitarium to break the rules and let her have a room also, so she could keep watch over him.
In 1892 his wife, Anna, died of diphtheria. In May 1893 his son and namesake, “little Ellie,” died of scarlet fever. “Poor Elliott is wandering about New York. Heaven knows where,” wrote Edith the following summer. “He rarely spends a night in his rooms ... drinks a great deal... will not come to Sagamore ... it wears on Theodore dreadfully and if he gets thinking of it he cannot sleep.”
Corinne and Douglas Robinson tried to keep track of Elliott, going regularly to his hotel. Theodore eventually gave up on him. “He can’t be helped,” he told Bamie. Little Eleanor, who was being looked after by her Grandmother Hall, came to visit at Sagamore Hill in the spring of 1894. “Poor little soul,” wrote Edith to Bamie, “she is very plain. Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future, but as I wrote to Theodore, the ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan.”
In that last year of his life Elliott was living under an assumed name with a mistress on West 102nd Street, “like some stricken, hunted creature,” Theodore wrote to Bamie, who was in London. “His house was so neat and well kept,” Theodore continued, “with his Bible and religious books, and Anna’s pictures everywhere, even in the room of himself and his mistress. Poor woman, she had taken the utmost care of him, and was broken down at his death.”
I only need to have pleasant thoughts of Elliott now [Theodore later wrote to Corinne]. He is just the gallant, generous, manly, loyal young man whom everyone loved. I can think of him when you and I and he used to go round “exploring” the hotels, the time we were first in Europe; do you remember how we used to do it? And then in the days of the dancing class, when he was distinctly the polished man-of-the-world... Or when we were off on his little sailing boat for a two or three days’ trip on the Sound, or when we first hunted . . .
Eleanor, who had idolized her father, would strive to be as brave and selfless as he had wanted her to be, guided by Bamie and encouraged by Theodore, who, in 1905, while President, gave her away at her wedding to Cousin Franklin, for whom Elliott had once served as godfather.
CORINNE
The youngest of the four, Corinne lived until February 1933, or long enough to know that another Roosevelt had been elected President. More gregarious even than Theodore, she became a figure and patron in literary circles, and among her own large, loud, spirited family she thrived especially on talk and roars of laughter and huge dinner parties. On an evening when Fanny Smith and her new husband, James Parsons, were going to Corinne’s house for dinner, Fanny is said to have advised him, “Now, don’t forget!Talk as loudly as you possibly can and answer your own questions!”
While her marriage to Douglas Robinson survived satisfactorily, Corinne never found it in her heart to love him. Like Bamie, her strongest affection was reserved for Theodore, who, she said, “was truly the spirit of my father reincarnate.” Together with Bamie after his death, she organized a reconstruction of the 20th Street house as a memorial, complete in every detail, exactly as it was when they were growing up. She lectured on the subject of Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote and published poetry in his honor, as well as My Brother Theodore Roosevelt, an adoring book of personal memories.
Like so many others she never ceased to be amazed by her brother or to be inspirited by his power of curiosity, by that delight in so much else other than self, which, with courage, had carried him forward since childhood. Walking beside him on the White House grounds one spring morning she watched him stop, stoop, pick up, and examine a minute feather, which he held between thumb and forefinger. “Very early for a fox sparrow,” he said.