PART TWO

CHAPTER SIX

Uptown

1

THE FOLLOWING SUMMER of 1873, alone in New York, Theodore kept steadily on the move. It was his way of fighting loneliness, he said, though the impression is of a man thoroughly enjoying himself. “You know I never approved of rusting out,” he wrote Bamie, which sounds more like him.

The “perpetual rush” of his day began at six in the morning and seldom ended before midnight. The once leisurely pace at Roosevelt and Son was a thing of the past. Orders for plate glass were pouring in and particularly from Chicago, where a new city was being built in the aftermath of the Great Fire. But there were, besides, questions to be settled pertaining to Roosevelt investments and Roosevelt properties. People like Louisa Schuyler came to discuss further good works, others to talk of business schemes needing Roosevelt money. His museums, the Children’s Aid Society, the Orthopedic Hospital, all suddenly required his attention, while work on the new house demanded that he look in there at least once a day, usually first thing in the morning.

He was staying at the Union League Club. Evenings he dined with friends; weekends, whenever possible, he went to the country. One letter mentions an “unexpectedly pleasant” visit with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish at his home in Garrison; in another he reports on a dinner across the river from Dobbs Ferry, “after which we took our cigars on the edge of the Palisades and enjoyed the last shadows of the setting sun.” He went cruising on Long Island Sound with the Aspinwalls on their yacht Day Dream. He bought an expensive new saddle horse named Fritz of which he was inordinately proud and a “very stylish” new T-cart for drives in the park. “Fritz goes beautifully,” he reported, “and it is glorious to be able to go into the country at once from our door . . .”

Seeing the finished house for the first time, he had been astonished by its size and beauty, astonished and tremendously pleased. There was no better-built house in New York, he declared. When he noticed that the architect had included imitation oak beams—beams done with plaster—in the ceiling of the front hall, he ordered that the ceiling be torn down. It “seemed hard to destroy so much beautifully finished work,” he explained to Mittie, but he knew how dissatisfied she would be with anything artificial. There would be real beams instead.

“I can see all who pass in Fifth Avenue nicely from your room,” he told Bamie, “and just came in time to save a bathtub from going, as originally intended, into your closet.”

Farther uptown, on the west side of Central Park at 77th Street, the new American Museum of Natural History was under construction. For the moment it was only a huge hole in the ground for one wing—this in the center of acres of mud and squatters’ shacks—but the plan was for a great red-brick fortress, going on and on, nearly Egyptian in scale, to house one of the most valuable scientific collections in the world. The architect was Calvert Vaux, who, with Frederick Law Olmsted, had laid out Central Park. Theodore, as a member of the committee for plans, had become familiar with every detail. The final complex was to cover fifteen acres, fill a space three times larger than the British Museum. Plate glass for windows and showcases, as it happens, was also to be supplied by Roosevelt and Son.

No other project so appealed to his pride, he wrote Mittie the day he inspected the site. He liked to imagine the value of such a collection for all those who, “like Teedie,” were in quest of scientific knowledge. If there was to be a monument to his own efforts on earth, to prove he had “done something” with his life, he wanted it to be this museum.

“I think without egotism this really would never have been carried through without my aid,” he told her.

His financial contribution to the project that year was $2,250, double what it had been before. When a $10 annual membership was organized, he and five other Roosevelts (brothers, cousins) were among the charter subscribers.

Sunday was his day to write letters. This period was the longest he and the family had been separated since the war and at times his concern for their well-being seems to have been no less than in those earlier years. (One letter is even mistakenly dated 1863.) Bamie was directed to “relieve your mother of every care possible.” Bamie must “bring her home able to undertake the cares of our large house.” Mittie was told to rest, to obey her diet, to avoid “indulgences,” to take every day at Carlsbad very seriously. Mittie must come home strong. “I am so anxious to see you home well, and so well that we will never be obliged to repeat this experiment.”

Her stay at the famous spa had been his idea. (”The more I think of it, the better I am pleased with my own self-denial.”) The regimen at Carlsbad, as he knew from her letters, was a far cry from their life on the Nile or at Vienna. She was living on zwieback and soft-boiled eggs and “nasty glasses” of mineral water, walking, reading, turning in no later than ten. His concern over “indulgences” must have struck her as mildly amusing.

But the main worry, as for so long, was Teedie. His asthma had returned almost from the moment they left the Nile, the first attack coming the Saturday night they reached Port Said after touring the Suez Canal. More attacks followed in the Holy Land, including a “bad” one. He was “very sick” with colic at Constantinople, “had the asthma” again on a cruise up the Danube. At Vienna he turned listless and gloomy. They were staying in the Grand Hotel, enjoying the best of everything. The city’s parks and gardens were in spring bloom. But the “big three” were preoccupied with things in which he could take no part. Theodore had been suddenly pressed into service as a substitute American commissioner for the Vienna Exposition; Bamie and her mother had been taken up by Viennese society, and were busy buying clothes, going to receptions and balls. To Teedie it was all “the most dreary monotony.”

In a letter to Theodore from Dresden, the boy asked forgiveness for his handwriting, since “the asthma had made my hand tremble awfully.” There were more attacks, violent headaches. Alarmed by what she heard, Mittie left Carlsbad for Dresden to find him wheezing badly and forced to sleep sitting up, as he had as a small child. What he needed, he told her, was a change of scene. So a few weeks later came word from the Swiss Alps that all was well. They were enjoying the “bluest of blue skies,” Mittie wrote. Teedie had “improved vastly,” Teedie “goes to bed well.”

In September when the terrible Panic of 1873 burst upon the country, Theodore was as incredulous as everyone else. There had been warnings and most notably a run on the Vienna bourse in May, at the time the Roosevelts were there. Some newspapers and financial specialists kept insisting the country was sound, even as railroads began to fail, that this was only another “Wall Street panic,” like that of 1869, and would soon pass. In fact, a great depression had begun, the worst of the century thus far, the causes of which were many and complex—the staggering costs of the Civil War and of the Franco-Prussian War, overspeculation in railroads, trade dislocations resulting from the opening of the Suez Canal, heavy borrowing to rebuild Chicago, too-easy credit, worldwide inflation. The heady postwar boom had ended with shattering finality. The suffering was to be widespread and of much longer duration than anyone as yet imagined.

It began in Philadelphia September 18 with the bankruptcy of Jay Cooke and Company. When the firm closed its doors shortly before eleven, it was as if the Bank of England had failed. In New York nearly forty banks and brokerage houses went under that same day. September 20 all trading was stopped, the Stock Exchange closed for ten days. “The failures continue in unheard-of numbers,” Theodore wrote Mittie from the quiet of his club. Banks were being mobbed. Henry Clews and Company, a Wall Street bastion, had gone down that afternoon (September 23). He pitied especially “poor Mr. Clews, who has made his business his life. He told me a short time since that he had not for years taken a holiday. . . . Now all. . . is swept away in a day.”

Mittie, again in Paris, wrote of feeling “very anxious” over the news from New York. “At supper last evening a note was handed [to me] telling of the suspension of three banks and [the] Union Trust Company.” But then this seems to have ended such distasteful topics. Their correspondence returns at once to private matters. She is buying china soap dishes for the new house and bolts of claret-colored cloth for new livery for the servants. He is hiring servants (a much larger staff will be needed). A marble mantelpiece has arrived; the new furnace is in and going “full blast.” A carpet she picked out earlier in Paris is in port. He has ordered gas fixtures that he hopes she will like and the old chandelier from the 20th Street library looks quite well, he thinks, in the room that is to be his study.

“I have left the billiard room without any chandelier at present,” he tells Bamie, “only side lights, so if you do find it will answer for dancing it will [not] be in your way.”

Everything on order from Philadelphia—furniture, woodwork, a huge hand-carved front staircase—was behind schedule. When the staircase arrived and was put in place, it missed its connection with the second floor by three feet. The architect had given the wrong measurements, with the result that the entire thing had to be taken out and remade.

The house was filled with ladders and workmen on October 5, the day Theodore moved in, and there was still considerable disorder and no front staircase when the family arrived on the Russia a month later to the day. But with Dora Watkins, Mary Ann, a footman named Frank, some four or five further additions to the “family below stairs,” including a Sophie, a Mary, a George, and a black groom named Davis, they moved in bag and baggage—”all the way up on 57th Street.” The new address was Number 6 West 57th Street.

A remark by Bamie years later that her mother’s European buying spree for the house “proved rather fatal to the family fortunes” would seem to have no basis in fact. Nothing—not the house or its furnishings or the panic—appears to have put the slightest dent in the family fortune. The one inconvenience suffered was the postponement of Bamie’s debut, which was to have taken place before Christmas. As it was, the party was given in January, and in the interim, to please her, Theodore arranged another dance in her honor in Philadelphia.

The house was a showplace, even by the extravagant standards being set in the vicinity along upper Fifth Avenue. There was no resemblance whatever to the house on East 20th Street. To move “uptown” was to move up in the world, but this was something more. The whole feeling was different, foreign. It was as if one had entered the domain of an altogether different family, another kind of people.

Rooms, hallways, mirrors, fireplaces, bookcases, furniture, everything was larger and infinitely more luxurious. There were tremendous mirrors everywhere, tasseled chandeliers, walls of glassed-in books, intricately carved sliding doors, paneled and tiled fireplaces, huge urns, inlaid woods, polished silver, Persian rugs on Persian rugs. East 20th Street had had a degree of restraint, even simplicity—or at least simplicity as understood by mid-Victorians. There the furniture had been largely the standard pieces for the standard domestic gentility. (Grandmamma Bulloch, it will be remembered, warned of “excessive extravagance and fondness for show.”) But the sumptuous pieces conceived by Furness were all one of a kind, all of rich inlaid woods and mighty in scale—great hand-carved, leather-upholstered, brass-studded dining-room chairs, heavy as thrones and broad enough to accommodate even the very largest of that era’s well-fed gentry; a bed for the master of the house and his lady that might have been commissioned for an oriental potentate.

No one knows what such things cost. A generation later they would be considered in “horrid taste,” “utterly ghastly,” and, except for the bed and one or two other pieces, they would be happily sold off for little or nothing. A generation after that each would be a rare and magnificent period piece.

Windows were few and heavily curtained, closing off the world beyond. On the top floor was a fully equipped gymnasium. (”We are going to have boxing lessons . . .” wrote Ellie; “it will be jolly fun.”) Space for Teedies museum was provided in the attic, his collection now greatly expanded by the birds from the Nile, each of which was to be properly identified with its Latin name on a little card printed in pink.

For Bamie’s “at home” debut, it is recorded, some five hundred invitations were sent, which gives an idea of how large a house it was.

How much of the interior look had been dictated by the architects, or to what degree it was expressive of Mittie or Theodore, is impossible to say. Nor is there any record of what the final bill came to. But it was the only time Theodore had everything built to order for him, and if, as he said, he expected to live out his days there, he obviously intended that no comforts be spared. Had his name not been Roosevelt, he might have been fairly accused of “ruinous display.”

To keep the two boys and Conie on an upward path that winter, he hired a new tutor, a young Harvard graduate named Arthur Cutler, in whose care Cousin West, the son of Theodore’s late brother Weir, was also placed. For several months, until Teedie began pulling ahead, the four youngsters worked at the same pace; but that summer—the summer of 1874—by which time Teedie was working six to eight hours a day at his studies, it was determined that he would be going on to college, whereas Ellie, most likely, would not. Teedie’s efforts under Cutler were directed exclusively to passing the entrance examination at Harvard, this choice having possibly been influenced by the four young men on the Nile, or, more likely, by Harvard’s preeminence in the field of natural science. Yale or Princeton would have been closer to home, Columbia closer still and there were family ties to Columbia. Harvard, however, produced men like Albert Bickmore, head of the Museum of Natural History. The whole approach to teaching the natural sciences had been transformed at Harvard by the late Louis Agassiz, whose son was curator of the new Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Harvard had broken all precedent and made a man of science its president, Charles Eliot, and included on its faculty such figures as Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the geologist, and William James, both of whom, like Bickmore, had been star pupils of the great Agassiz.

To his charitable efforts Theodore gave more and more of himself all the while, as the depression worsened and increasing misery was to be found everywhere. A decade earlier his money had enabled him to miss the war and now, like most of the very rich, he and his sailed high above the panic, quite untouched by it in any material way. But as in the earlier national tragedy, he was incapable of detachment or of withholding his compassion. “All that gives me most pleasure in the retrospect,” he preached to his older son, “is connected with others, an evidence that we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.” He visited hospital wards, talked with the inmates of prisons, went into the slums to console and moralize. He urged the establishment of workhouses for vagrants. He toured the city’s dreadful asylums for the insane on Ward’s and Blackwell’s islands and was so sickened by what he saw that he led a delegation of city officials back to both places. In an insane time the plight of the insane especially became uppermost for him. He lobbied for better conditions and human care, for altogether different kinds of asylums, “where the patients could work out of doors, and gain strength and mental and physical health in useful occupations.”

He gave money, wrote letters, often working at his desk until two in the morning. Friends remarked at his energy and “industry.” Corinne, remembering all he managed to squeeze into a day, said he had the “power of being . . . focused.”

“Without his power of concentration and great physical endurance such a life would have been impossible,” said Louisa Schuyler. He made everything look easy, she said.

Together with Louisa Schuyler he tried to bring some system and order to the welter of charitable efforts going on in the city. They launched a new Bureau of Charities, the first of its kind, with Theodore as chairman, and enlisted the support of Charles Loring Brace, Abram Hewitt, Frederick Law Olmsted, and others. They decided to compile a list of all those on welfare in the city, something that had never been tried before, and in less than a month had ten thousand names. He was particularly alarmed, Theodore told reporters, by the hordes of begging children in the streets whose numbers were increasing daily.

But if the plight of the homeless and downtrodden was tugging him one way, the pleasures of his own extremely good fortune were certainly not going awasting. He embraced his heightened circumstances with open arms, living in style, living as never before, and apparently seeing nothing ambivalent or contradictory about that.

In the spring of 1874, a cornerstone ceremony was being planned for the Museum of Natural History. President Grant was to come on from Washington to do the honors and it was suggested that a silver trowel be specially made up by Tiffany. “My dear Mr. Haines,” wrote Theodore to a fellow member of the museum board, “by all means order the trowel, one must certainly have it and the President is entitled to a good one.”

And he seems to have taken much the same view concerning his own affairs—that he and his were also entitled to a good one, of most anything they wished. It was in these years of dreadful want that Theodore became a thoroughgoing sport, to borrow the word used by his older son in a later-day reminiscence. He was “the first American to drive four horses handsomely through New York—in style, in the good English style, with everything that belonged.” He enjoyed himself to the full—fine clothes, “meals with courses”—and a little more conspicuously every year. That “rich power of enjoyment of everything human” remembered by Charles Loring Brace now included his money as well.

One could be a moralist without being gloomy, one could work for the welfare of others without being an ascetic, his behavior seemed to say. He was “no ascetic,” declared Louisa Schuyler categorically and approvingly. To her, as to others, there was something wonderfully glamorous about him and this, in her eyes, made him an even stronger force for good. She had been observing him for years, from the time she first went to work as a teacher for the Children’s Aid Society, and of course she knew him socially (Miss Schuyler was a descendant of both General Philip John Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton). “I can see him now, in full evening dress, serving a most generous supper to his newsboys in the Lodging House, and later dashing off to an evening party in Fifth Avenue.”

To build support for the Orthopedic Hospital, he and Mittie gave a reception at 57th Street for their wealthiest friends, and with the occasion in full swing he signaled for attention, then dramatically threw back the doors to the dining room. On top of the great round dining table, against a background of heavy paneled walls with inlaid designs of lobsters, fish, and other such symbols of plenty, he had placed several pathetically cripple children, some sitting, some lying on their backs, all in various braces of the kind only large donations could provide. Conie stood beside the children to help show how the braces were fitted and how they worked. The effect was stunning. Mrs. John Jacob Astor III is said to have announced at once that “of course” Theodore must have help in his work.

He was, it was said, “neither spoiled by good fortune, nor soured by zeal.” He was interested in “every good thing,” to quote Louisa Schuyler one more time. To another friend, D. Willis James, “He seemed to be able to control the strongest affections of the heart, and to reach men who were not easily drawn into affection . . .”

Indeed, it is only in the private family correspondence and reminiscences that one finds even an occasional hint that life with such a person may not always have been easy. Mittie, in a letter from Europe to her “dearest old Greatheart Darling,” remarks out of the blue, “I wish you were not so good, it makes me sad.” And later:

I love you and wish to please you more than anyone else in the whole world and will do everything I can to please you . . . I think you have been perfectly lovely to me in your care of me always, and so good and indulgent and thoughtful, and I am so proud of you, and honor and respect you, so don’t be too hard upon me.

Then she adds, “I have decided that your dear letters are just a little plaintive and it rather comforts me to receive the ’Private’ letter to see that you have one little scrap of the devil in you yet.” (The “private letter” has not survived.)

Bamie, recalling her debut and the parties at which he was her escort, writes of “mingled feelings of pleasure and disappointment.” Knowing so few of her contemporaries had made that winter difficult; “and Father himself was so very young. . . and he was so popular that I felt like a wall flower.”

Sunday mornings he led them two blocks south to the new Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, which opened its doors the spring of 1875.

There they prayed among Auchinclosses and Blisses, Livingstons and Wolcotts, “the most influential congregation” in the city, and listened to the word as preached by John Hall, the Irishman of golden tongue, as Beecher called him.

Mittie organized a dancing class for the youngest three—rounding up some forty children altogether—and encouraged Bamie in a new friendship with tall, graceful Sara Delano, who came down from her family’s estate on the Hudson to spend some of each winter season at 6 West 57th Street.

Mittie’s portrait was painted, a first for any of the family, and it must have pleased Theodore greatly. The face that looks out from the canvas is radiant, poised, quite as beautiful as she is described in so many contemporary accounts. Dressed for one of those society occasions he so enjoyed, she must have been something to see. Bamie described later how she looked as she left for a wedding at the Jay estate.

She had on an enormous crinoline and a perfectly exquisite white muslin dress over a pink silk lining, with all the little ruffles at the bottom edged with real lace, and the cloak, which was a very long sort of cape, matched the dress, and the bonnet tied under her chin with great pink ribbons and . . . on the brim of the bonnet was a great big pink rose with perfectly realistic little green dragonflies. She also had a parasol with a real ivory handle and the lining of pink covered with muslin and trimmed with real lace. She was considered one of the beauties at the wedding . . .

It was only at “the store” that things were not going so well any longer. The depression had produced not only business stagnation, but knife-edge competition of a kind that Theodore and James Alfred were unaccustomed to, and from domestic manufacturers of glass in particular. So rather than attempting to save their sagging import trade, the two brothers spent their time looking for new outlets for their money. They became financiers, James Alfred being the “guiding genius.”

City real estate still comprised a large part of the family fortune, and no one, even in these worst of times, had lost faith in the future of New York. The Chemical Bank, true to tradition, was also surviving the depression with flying colors.

Yet rich as these Roosevelts had become, they might have become richer still. (All things are relative, including the disappointment of missed opportunities.) Some years earlier the brothers had backed a copper-mining venture in Montana, the National Mining and Exploring Company, of which James Alfred was president. (Brother Rob, who had the least business sense supposedly, was the only one who bothered to go out to see the site.) The copper found did not amount to much. It was only with the discovery of gold that the venture proved “not without profit” to the family. The mines, however, were in the vicinity of Butte, in the heart, that is, of what would become one of the richest copper regions of all. Had deep mining been possible at the time, the Roosevelts might have become some of the richest men of their day.

It is said also that among those who came looking for Roosevelt backing was Alexander Graham Bell, who hooked up his newly invented telephone so that Theodore could talk from his desk to a room down the hall. While agreeing that it was an interesting device, with potential as a toy perhaps, Theodore thought it had no real future and refused to put money into it.

He was made a Supervisor of the Census, a director of the Bank of Commerce and of the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company. The glass import business was eventually sold to a British firm in 1876, after which Roosevelt and Son switched over entirely to private banking and investment. It was no longer to Maiden Lane that Theodore went each morning, but to new offices on Pine Street.

“What business I shall enter . . . I do not know,” his older son wrote, “for we have been forced to give up the glass business on account of the ‘panic.’” But were it not for this and one or two other chance remarks, one might conclude that such workaday concerns as business, or so disturbing a word as “panic,” never actually penetrated the charmed circle of family life, at the center of which, like some elegant patron saint, stood Theodore.

2

The best of times for him—for all of them—were at Oyster Bay. The years of random summer houses in New Jersey or along the Hudson were also behind now. In conjunction with the move uptown, he had decided to join the Roosevelt colony at the quiet little watering spot on Long Islands North Shore, beginning the summer of 1874. Oyster Bay itself was a mere hamlet of modest white clapboard houses built around the time of the Revolutionary War or earlier, many occupied by old local families with ties going back to the days of earliest settlement. The summer houses—the Beekmans’, the Tiffanys’, the Swan “place” —were of a different order and set on low wooded hills or bluffs beyond town and in view of the water.

The one Theodore “hired” was out Cove Road a short way from the village, a roomy, old white frame ark with long windows and a columned front porch reminiscent of Bulloch Hall. The requisite porch rockers faced the bay and the best air; the bathing beach was only a short walk across the road.

Now the customary family summer extended nearly four months, beginning as early in June as possible and lasting until late September or early October, the fashionable time to “return to town.”

Theodore took the same house year after year. He longed for a country place of his own, he told Mittie, and anticipated the day when he might own one. The children always assumed the house was theirs, that naturally he owned it. To them it was “home,” “dear home.”

“I had a very delightful visit at Oyster Bay at the Roosevelts’ and wish you could see their pleasant way of life there,” Theodore’s friend Joseph Choate wrote his wife. “They are only twenty-seven miles from New York, and in the midst of a country which doesn’t correspond in the least to your ideas of Long Island. Instead of the dreary sandy wastes of the South Shore, it is pleasant and well-wooded rolling country and apparently filled with quiet good people.”

The full complement of servants was in residence. As would be said, no Russians of the ruling class tucked away in a dacha were better tended or more safely removed from the unpleasantness of the world. The hard years of the depression, summers of breadlines and bloody labor violence, were times of “every special delight” at Oyster Bay, “the happiest summers of our lives.”

There were lovely mornings on horseback, with Father leading the cavalcade, long sparkling afternoons on the water. Everyone had his own horse or pony. There were rowboats, a sailboat, other large Roosevelt houses for children to charge in and out of, miles of shoreline to explore, woods and fields to tramp and shoot in. To the noisy troop of Roosevelt cousins were added the Elliott cousins, who came as guests, and two other “regulars,” Conie’s friends Edie Carow and Fanny Smith, whose well-to-do fathers, both old friends of Theodore’s, were experiencing “temporary reverses” due to the panic and could ill afford such vacations for their families.

Theodore had them put on theatrical productions and spent hours rehearsing them in their lines. (”But, Uncle, I am not a passionate man!” protested Johnny Elliott, upon being cast as the lover in something called To Oblige Benson.) At the dinner table, as the plates were being cleared, he would ask this child or that to get up and give an impromptu speech, an experience some of his young guests would remember until their dying day. “These Roosevelts were without inhibitions to an unusual degree,” wrote Fanny Smith. She loved them for their vitality, their kindnesses, their “explosions of fun.” To her they were “a family so rarely gifted as to seem . . . touched by the flame of the ’divine fire.’” Their gaiety was “unquenchable.” They were lovers of books and poetry. They invested everything they did with their own “extraordinary vitality.” Of Theodore Senior she remembered mainly the enthusiasm with which he entered into every activity, the inspiration he was. (It was she he picked for the female lead in To Oblige Benson—her first chance ever to put on makeup and play a part.) That he insisted on calling the house Tranquillity struck her as wonderfully inappropriate.

“How I will enjoy my holiday,” he wrote at the start of the second summer at Oyster Bay. When he was absent everyone felt let down. Teedie, who had begun calling himself Thee or even Theodore on occasion, wrote of the tonic it was just to be in his presence.

He will be with us now . . . enjoying his holiday with a vim. I wish he would not sit down on something black whenever he has on white trousers. At the close of the day he always has a curiously mottled aspect. Seriously, it is a perfect pleasure to see him, he is so happy and in such good health and spirits. We become quite stagnant when he is away.

3

There was, however, one rather serious problem casting a shadow on all these perfect summers and the winters between, a peculiar turn of events about which as little as possible would ever be said outside the immediate family. Ellie had started having strange seizures—fainting spells, a rush of blood to the head as it was described, even fits of delirium.

The trouble had begun the very first summer at Oyster Bay, when the boy was fourteen, and it was for this reason that Theodore ruled out college for him. Almost overnight his hitherto robust, confident second son, “the strong one,” the boy for whom there seemed to be no obstacles, had become the family’s chief concern, a victim of spells, a child afraid of the dark, afraid to sleep alone.

The policy seems to have been the less said the better. Not even Fanny Smith appears to have known there was anything wrong with Elliott, close as she was; or, if she did, she also chose to delete that part of the story. In her account, as in others, he remains only the perennial family charmer. To judge by what she, Conie, and others said of those summers, there were no problems, no bad days, no bad nights. Teedie, in one letter, observes that Ellie has been at times “very ill,” but then goes no further.

In later years, among later-day Roosevelts, it would be said Elliott suffered some form of epilepsy. There was no record of epilepsy in the family but then neither was there a record of asthma. The family physician attending him appears to have been baffled and diagnosed the trouble only as a nervous condition or “congestion of the brain.” The word “epilepsy” does not appear in the multitude of family papers dating from the time.

Descriptions of what exactly went on during these seizures are also fragmentary and inconclusive. But the chance that the problem was in fact epilepsy seems remote. More likely the trouble stemmed from some intense inner turmoil. That the boy was chagrined by his failure to keep pace with Teedie academically, that he worried excessively over his future, his ability to live up to his fathers expectations, are all quite evident and particularly in the confidences he shared with his father. Even before the return from Europe he had written of the extreme difficulty he was having with German, and a letter he mailed from Liverpool just before sailing for home could not have but touched Theodore deeply.

“What will I become when I am a man?” he had asked his father. “Are there not a very large number of partners in the store . . . I think Teedie would be the boy to put in the store if you wanted to be sure of it, because he is much quicker and [a] more sure kind of boy, though I will try my best and try to be as good as you if [it] is in me, but it is hard. But I can tell you that better when I get home and it does not look nice to read.”

In the fall of 1874, following the first summer at Oyster Bay, his condition was such that another sea voyage was arranged—still one more therapeutic “change of scene.” Theodore took him back to England on a business trip. But Ellie had a relapse at Liverpool. When Theodore left him behind with the Bullochs while he went on to Paris, a serious attack followed and Theodore had to be summoned at once.

The attack [Theodore wrote Mittie] has been decidedly the worst he has had and very difficult in character. It came from overexcitement but of so natural a kind that I foresee it will be very difficult to guard him from it. A pillow fight was perhaps the principal exciting cause; it was Harriott’s children. It produced congestion of the brain with all its attendant horrors of delirium, etc. The doctor says that there is no cause for anxiety as it is only necessary to avoid all excitements for two or three years and he will entirely outgrow it. He is perfectly well again now, but of course weak and confined to his bed. . . . Ellie’s sweetness entirely won the heart of the doctor as it has that of all the servants here. The doctor says . . . that the boy should lead a quiet life in the country and I have vainly puzzled my brain to think how this can be accomplished.

There were signs of improvement in another week. The one problem now, Theodore wrote, was nighttime. “He evidently still has a fear of being left alone at night (i.e., is nervous) although he stoutly denies it. He sleeps in my bed. I think it would be very wise for Theodore and himself to occupy the large bed in [the] back third-story room for while together. I should be afraid to leave him alone.”

A little later, in an affectionate letter to the son at home, Theodore said that, things being what they were, he, Teedie, would have to start acting more like the older brother. In some ways it may have been as important a directive as the one to make his body.

It is a pleasure to receive your letters and gives Ellie so much enjoyment to hear them read. His first inquiry is if there is anything from Teedie when a bundle of letters is brought in. You will have to assume more of the responsibilities of elder brother when we return. Ellie is anticipating all sorts of pleasures with you that he will not be able to realize, and it will require much tact on your part not to let him feel his deprivations too much.... His sickness at night, although worse, often reminds me of your old asthma, both of you showed so much patience and seemed more sorry on account of those about you than for yourselves. Aunt Ella is singing to him upstairs now; music often seems to soothe him when he is nervous.

“It is so funny, my illness,” Ellie himself wrote to his brother, “it comes from the nerves and therefore is not at all serious, but my body is getting so thin I can get a handful of plain skin right off my stomach, and my arms as well as my legs look like I have the strength of a baby. I jump involuntarily at the smallest sound and have a perpetual headache (and: nearly always in low spirits). . .”

The doctor came again and said the attacks were “hysteria.” “I scarce know how I will come back to active life again,” Theodore wrote Mittie.

Another trip was arranged for the boy that winter, almost from the time his father brought him home. He was sent south with the family physician, John Metcalfe, for several months of shooting and outdoor life and it did him wonders. “I have not had a respectable suit on since I left home, or a white shirt,” he wrote proudly, “and as I have to clean all the guns on our return from shooting you may imagine the state of my hands. I am very well and happy.” The one problem he acknowledged was homesickness, “sometimes.”

Curiously, Theodore then wrote to say that in the future he must always stand by Teedie, who was a “noble boy,” a charge Ellie took greatly to heart. Why Theodore did this, having so recently said almost the same thing to the other boy, is open to question. Possibly he felt that in Ellie’s case the best medicine might be a feeling of importance, the assurance from his father that he qualified for so manly a mission no less than ever and had his fathers confidence. Something of this same psychology may also, of course, have been behind what he wrote to Teedie from Liverpool, though in that instance, one senses that he did in truth need the boys help and was counting on him.

Whatever his reasons, the directive evoked a heartrending response from his distant and obviously very heartsick second son.

Dear Old Governor—for I will call you that not in public but in private for it does seem to suit you, you splendid man, just my ideal. . . My darling Father you have made me a companion and a very happy one. I don’t believe there is any boy that has had as happy and free of care life as I have had.

Oh, Father, will you ever think me a “noble boy”? You are right about Teedie, he is one and no mistake, a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. If you ever see me not stand by Thee you may know I am entirely changed. No, Father, I am not likely to desert a fellow I love as I do my brother, even you don’t know what a good noble boy he is and what a splendid man he is going to be as I do. No, I love him, love him very very dearly and will never desert him and if I know him he will never desert me.

Father, my own dear Father, God bless you and help me to be a good boy and worthy of you, goodbye.

Your Son.

[P.S.] This sounds foolish on looking over it, but you touched me when you said always to stand by Thee in your letter.

Elliot’s closest friend by now was a cousin once removed, Archibald Gracie, and from the time Cousin Archie had been sent off to St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, Elliott had been begging that he be allowed to go also. The following summer (1875) Theodore consented. But only weeks after arriving, the boy was stricken, first by nearly paralyzing homesicknesses, then by the most severe attacks to date.

“Yesterday, during my Latin lesson, without the slightest warning, I had a bad rush of blood to my head,” he wrote his father in a letter marked Private; “it hurt me so [much] that I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out . . .

“Don’t forget me please and write often,” he added.

By December he was in no condition to remain. “Poor Ellie Roosevelt has had to leave on account of his health,” Archie Gracie wrote. “He has ’ever been subject to a rush of blood to his head’ and while up here exerted himself too much both physically and mentally. He studied hard and late. One day he fainted just after leaving the table and fell down. . . . His brother came up to take him home.”

That Theodore chose to respond as he did should come as no surprise. He had been warned to keep the boy from excitement, a quiet life in the country was what the doctor in England had advised, but he did exactly the opposite. Ellie was packed off to the wilds of central Texas, to “rough it” on an army post, Fort McKavett, where the officer staff included several friends of Theodore’s from the war years. The decision was made at once and Ellie was on his way, accompanied yet again by Dr. Metcalfe, who appears to have gone more for the promise of sport and adventure than out of any great concern for his patient.

“Do you know, Father, it strikes me it’s just a sell my being down here,” the boy wrote during a stop at Houston: “it’s a very pleasant one but a sell nevertheless, for I feel well enough to study and instead here am I spending all your money down here as if I was ill, I don’t believe I will ever be ‘weller’ than I am; it’s rather late to think of this but the Dr. evidently don’t think I’m sick and I am not, and altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying.”

So it was Ellie, not his brother, who went first to try the great elixir of life in the West, who became the true-life Mayne Reid kind of boy-hunter on the prairie. The letters he wrote of his adventures were quite amazing—long, spirited, and wonderfully well written, disclosing his own full-hearted love of the hunt and the great outdoors (not to mention his own obvious appreciation for the Mayne Reid style). His brother was held spellbound. And it is hard to imagine Mittie and Theodore being anything but pleased and proud.

As time passed he wrote of “fearfully cold” nights about the campfire, of long days in the saddle and keeping company with “rough-looking chaps.”

I have not taken a drink or a smoke [he also reported to his father], but I do want to do the latter very much, I don’t care how much you laugh and I can see you do it just as plainly as you did that night in the study. It seemed rather hard at first to say “I never drink” or “I never smoke,” when asked about every five minutes of the day, for the young officers have unfortunately no way of spending their time but in one of the two of those employments, but it was a very difficult thing to do.

He was enjoying Texas “just as much as anyone ever enjoyed anything.” He slept one night on the floor of a log hut, sharing a blanket with a real “cowboy from way out west” and using a dog for a pillow, “partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bedfellow.” It was all Teedie had ever dreamed of and the letters kept coming. Elliott’s health was perfectly fine and Theodore, who so recently wondered how he would ever get back to active life again, had embarked already on a new adventure of his own in politics.