CHAPTER EIGHT
1
THEODORE SAW HIS SON off to Cambridge—off to become a “Harvard man”—from the little station stop at Syosset, Long Island, on September 27, 1876.
At seventeen the boy was as tall as he would grow, five feet eight inches, and he weighed at most 125 pounds. His voice was thin and piping, almost comical. The blue-gray eyes squinted and blinked behind thick spectacles, which, when he laughed or bobbed his head about, kept sliding down his nose. The sound of his laugh was described by his mother as an “ungreased squeak.”
In conversation he spewed words with a force that often startled people not accustomed to him, and this, with his upper-class New York accent, would be enough to set him off as something out of the ordinary at Harvard—even at Harvard—from the time he arrived. To many it seemed he had a speech impediment, and possibly the problem may have been associated with his asthmatic condition, physiologically that is; but it appears also to have been such an integral part of his make-up, so established a trait, that those within the home circle took no notice of it. They were as oblivious to this, apparently, as they had been earlier to his myopia. If he talked “funny,” they never thought so.
At Harvard, classmates soon learned to goad him into an argument for the sheer fun of hearing him. His large, extremely white teeth appeared to chop sentences to pieces. Words tumbled over one another. “At times he could hardly get them out at all,” remembered a friend, “and then he would rush on . . . as skaters redouble their pace over thin ice.”
The teeth and glasses were the outstanding features, though he preferred his ears, which were unusually small and close to his head. (”I don’t think my features separately are very good with the exception of my ears,” he would one day tell a sculptor. “I like my ears, they are good. I always notice the ears of everyone.”) His hands and feet too were unusually small, his feet actually dainty, a mere size five or six. The slippers he took with him to Harvard were his mother’s and they fit perfectly.
The great reformation of physique to which he had devoted so many hours would have been judged a flat failure by anybody unfamiliar with the circumstances. A classmate named Richard Welling, seeing him for the first time during a workout at the Harvard gym, could hardly believe his eyes. He confronted, Welling said, a “youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development” who was standing between two upright poles, gripping them with both hands and swaying forward and back, rising nicely on tiptoe at each forward thrust. “What a humble-minded chap this must be,” Welling thought, “to be willing to give such a ladylike exhibition in a public place.”
In a “Sporting Calendar” that he had kept at Oyster Bay the summer of 1875, it is recorded that he could do the hundred-yard dash in 12.25 seconds, broad-jump 13 feet, and clear the bar in the pole vault at 5 feet 8.5 inches—in all nothing very special for a boy of his age, but apparently better than his cousins could do and attainments of much pride to him. His health, though unquestionably improved over what it had been earlier, was still a worry and a burden. He was no more a model of good health than he was a strapping physical specimen. His health, like his physique, was impressive only in contrast to what it had been. Some of his sieges of colic, his headaches, the vomiting and diarrhea (his dreaded cholera morbus), appear to have been quite serious. In March, preparing for the Harvard examinations, he worried that he “lost so much time in my studies through sickness.” And after he had been accepted at Harvard, it was decided that for reasons of health he could not possibly live among other students in one of the dormitories. He was to have private rooms of his own and no roommate. Bamie—Bamie “the Major Generaless,” as Ellie called her—was sent on in advance to Cambridge that summer to find suitable quarters off campus. She chose his furniture, had the rooms painted, papered, saw that there was coal for the fireplace.
Except for the time in Dresden, he had never lived apart from the family, and even at Dresden he had Ellie and Conie with him, two cousins and an adoring aunt nearby, and lived with a German family. Harvard was to be his first solo venture into the world, as his father said, and the fact that his father had such faith in him probably counted for more than anything else. “As I saw the last of the train bearing you away,” Theodore wrote, “. . . I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I could place perfect trust and confidence . . .”
His preparation for Harvard under Arthur Cutler had been rigorous. The hardest work had been in mathematics, which was Cutler’s specialty and the subject in which he himself was most obviously deficient. In two years he had accomplished what would normally have taken three and did well on the entrance exams, but like so much else in his life, his tutoring had all been custom-tailored for him and experienced in the privacy of his own home. He was in all things still—in all save his imagination—”a great little home-boy,” as Bamie called him. He had never faced a real professor. He knew little about academic competition, to say nothing of the unwritten rules by which classmates determine who the good fellows are. Most freshmen could count on a certain number of ready-made friends from previous schools, and those from the Boston area—the great majority of the class—were already soaked in Harvard custom and tradition. He came knowing one other boy and that one not very well—John Lamson, of the family that had helped Bamie get out of France the summer of 1870. He apparently had never seen Harvard, knew nothing of Cambridge until the night he found his way to Number 16 Winthrop Street and the rooms Bamie had arranged on the second floor.
The picture we get from his summers at Oyster Bay is of a slight, tousled boy browned by the sun, clothes in disarray, who could barely keep still. As the tutor Cutler would write proudly in remembrance, “the young man never seemed to know what idleness was.” The collecting continued in earnest. (”At present I am writing in a rather smelly room,” he tells Bamie, “as the fresh skins of six night herons are reposing on the table beside me.”) He was busy with his field notes and scientific essays, including one remarkable composition titled “Blarina talpoides (Short-Tailed Shrew),” which appears to have been written sometime shortly before he left for Harvard. He had captured a male shrew and kept it in a wire cage for study, feeding it insects at first, then a live mouse, which the tiny shrew instantly attacked and killed. Fascinated by such ferocity in something so very small, the boy then put in a garter snake.
It did not attack at once as with the mouse [he observed] but cautiously smelt his foe . . . then with a jump the shrew seized it, low down quite near the tail. The snake at once twisted itself right across the shrews head and under one paw, upsetting him; but he recovered himself at once and before the snake could escape flung himself on it again and this time seized it by the back of the neck, placing one paw against the head and the other on the neck, and pushing the body from him while he tore it with his sharp teeth. The snake writhed and twisted, but it was of no use, for his neck was very soon more than half eaten through and during the next twenty-four hours he was entirely devoured.
“Certainly a more bloodthirsty animal of its size I never saw,” he wrote in wonder.
Socially he was generally ill at ease. With girls of his own age he could act theatrically superior—Fanny Smith would recall how he tapped her lightly on the top of her head with his riding crop—or become painfully shy and self-deprecating. At such times he would talk pointedly of Ellie’s superior attainments. Yet he rarely missed a chance to show off, with his shotgun or his memory for things he had read. As Fanny Smith observed, the summer before he left for Harvard, “If I were writing to Theodore I would have to say something of this kind, ‘I have enjoyed Plutarch’s last essay on the philosophy of Diogenes excessively.’”
To family and servants he was young lord of the manor, father’s “noble boy,” and in spirit he hungered for visions of noble quests and high valor. The Saga of King Olaf, the Longfellow epic, had been discovered and devoured by now. He adoredThe Song of Roland,read and reread the whole of theNibelungenlied, taking it all very much to heart.
Another Oyster Bay youngster, Walt McDougall, later a well-known political cartoonist, remembered him as studious, nervous, and “somewhat supercilious besides.” But Fanny Smith confided to her diary that he was “such fun, the most original boy I ever knew,” and a lifetime later she would remember how, at formal dinners, she dreaded being seated next to him for fear he would get her laughing so uncontrollably she would have to leave the table.
The limits of his social world had been defined by Oyster Bay summers and the Monday dancing classes in New York under a dancing master named Dodsworth. The “ladies” at these sessions were only those of whom Mittie approved, naturally, and if anything, his own concern over decorum seems to have been greater than hers. Besides Fanny Smith his “great favorites” were Annie Murray, whom he judged both pretty and “singularly sweet,” and Edith Carow, for whom he had lately named his rowboat. When Edith “dresses well,” he observed, “and don’t frizzle her hair, [she] is a very pretty girl.” Fanny, he judged pure, religious, bright, well read, “and I think a true friend.” “The dancing class went off very well,” he noted one evening, “and was very orderly except that Mr. Dodsworth once had to stop the ladies from talking.”
Any expressions of endearment, however, were reserved for his “Darling Motherling,” as he and Ellie had begun calling her, and for Conie, now fifteen and flirtatious, who adored parties and to moon with him over “serious” poetry. Her health, like his, remained “delicate.” She was “Baby Conie” or “Little Pet Pussie,” a nickname in fashion among their “set” (Edith Jones, the future Edith Wharton, was another Pussie). They shared eager “intimacies” and in private correspondence with her, as with his mother, he could slip into a cloying baby-love-talk that no one in that pre-Freudian household thought a thing of. “Little Pet Pussie,” he would write from Harvard, “I want to pet you again awfully! You cunning, pretty, little, foolish Puss. My easy chair would just hold myself and Pussie.”
In the first letter he wrote to Mittie from Harvard, he told her how he had put her picture on his mantelpiece, “where I can always see Motherling.” He emphasized how “cosy” everything was, with a bright coal fire burning in the grate. “The table is almosttoohandsome, and I do not know whether to admire most the curtains, the paper or the carpet.”
His tone with her was very different from what it was with his father. With Father he must measure up, show the progress he was making along approved paths. But with Mittie, or with Conie, he could relax, ramble, even be “frivolous,” sounding at times very much the mama’s boy, or somebody’s parody of a preposterous little Harvard snob. He had been “down to New Haven” to see the Harvard football team play Yale; Harvard had lost, he explained to his mother, “principally because our opponents played very foul.” Yale was not at all to his taste. “The fellows too seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours.”
He tells her he is wearing her slippers, “which remind me of you all the time.”
In pursuing his new social career, he wished all at home to know, he was choosing his acquaintances exclusively from the “gentleman sort” and it was slow going, since he knew so little of anyone’s “antecedents.” “On this very account, I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”
Then, to his amazement, he discovered that numbers of his classmates had come to Harvard with no intention of getting an education. John Lamson, he reported indignantly, was there only to enjoy himself.
“Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies,” the elder Theodore wrote.
They all wrote to him, the letters going off at a rate of two, three, sometimes four a week. One from Liverpool from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch touched him so that it was all he could do to keep from weeping. Like his father, he reserved Sundays for correspondence. “Sundays I have all to myself, as most of the fellows are in Boston on that day. . . . Our ideas as to how it should be spent . . . are decidedly different ...” They must understand that he was not in the least homesick. Ignoring the countless nights he had suffered from asthma, forgetting the fears and loneliness and terrible feelings of inferiority he had lived with for as long as he could remember, he told his Beloved Motherling: “It seems perfectly wonderful, in looking back over my eighteen years of existence to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault! When I think of this, and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am), I feel that I have an immense amount to be thankful for.” To Theodore he wrote, “I do not think there is a fellow in college who has a family that love him as much as you all do me, and I am sure that there is no one who has a father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine.... I do not find it nearly so hard as I expected not to drink and smoke . . .”
He was signing himself Thee, Jr., or Theodore, or, as time passed, Ted or Teddy or Tedo. He seemed not to know what he should be called.
On October 27, from Philadelphia, where he had gone to see the Centennial Exposition, his father wrote as follows, addressing him as Theodore:
I must write a few lines to my oldest boy on his eighteenth birthday. I cannot realize that you really are so old, and still it is a great comfort to find that you are approaching mans estate. I have worked pretty hard all my life and anticipate passing over to you many of my responsibilities as soon as your shoulders are broad enough to bear them. It has always seemed to me as if there was something peculiarly pleasant in the relations between a father and a son, the enjoyment of the father is so great as he cares for the boy and sees him gradually become a reasoning being, his mind and his physique both developing under his care and training, and above all his religious views becoming more fixed. As he approaches manhood the boy enjoys relieving the father of first the responsibilities which he has borne until that time, and those cares prepare the boy to take the fathers place in the great battle of life.
We have both been fortunate so far and have much cause for thankfulness to that one who has guarded and made our lives so much more happy than those of the many by whom we are surrounded. Indeed, it seems strange how few great sorrows I have been called upon to bear and you scarce one.
He wanted the boy to send him a complete description of his daily routine. How much exercise was he getting and of what sort? Did he find he was keeping up his health as well as at home?
The wonder was his health had never been better. It was quite the most remarkable development since leaving home. He was “in beautiful health,” he exclaimed to Mittie after having been away nearly two months; and he added confidently, “I do not think I shall have any difficulty at all on that score ...” His eyes had bothered him a little, but it was nothing to worry about. Most amazing of all, his asthma had disappeared. There had not been a sign of it since leaving home. Nor would there be that entire freshman fall, other than a brief flare-up in November, on the eve of his return for Thanksgiving, but it was so slight an attack that he never bothered to mention it until weeks afterward. To Bamie, at the time, he said it would be mistaken to picture him in anything other than perfect health, “entirely free of asthma,” and without a worry. His real troubles, he said, were math and “my rug, which will curl up at the edges, although I devote a half hour every day to stamping it back into shape.”
Not even a typically miserable, raw Cambridge winter set him back. Cambridge in January and February might have been a health resort, to judge by the state of his health. He wanted the name of a doctor, “in case of accidents,” and through Professor Henry Adams was put in touch with a local man, Dr. Morrill Wyman—an interesting choice, since Dr. Wyman happened to be a leading specialist in pulmonary ailments—but all he was ever treated for was a mild case of measles, a condition he found amusing.
His health was good, his outlook was good. There was too much going on to leave time even to be homesick, he wrote in February. “I have been very much astonished at this, and also at my good health. Excepting a little asthma in November, I have not been sick at all.”
The picture that emerges, sketchy as it may be, is of an almost miraculous transformation, an improvement of the kind often seen among present-day asthmatic children who are treated by removing them temporarily from their home lives and environments. Away from his family for the first time, he had a year of health like none he had ever known. He was “astonished.”
There was to be a misconception in later years that he conquered his childhood infirmities mainly through will power and body building, that he rid himself of asthma by making himself a strong man. But that is not quite the way it happened. First of all, he never would be rid of asthma entirely, and if there was a point at which he clearly found reprieve from suffering of the kind he had known, it came well before he attained anything like rugged manhood. It came when he went to Harvard, when he left home and was on his own in ways he had never been.
Returning to New York for the Christmas holidays, he sported a new beaver hat, a cane, and “English” side-whiskers. Several classmates came on for the New York parties—the first guests of his own choosing to be brought into the house. Mittie and Theodore put on a party in his honor. “We all like his friends so much,” reported Aunt Annie to Elliott, who was back in Texas for more Wild West therapy. “They seem to be such manly gentlemen. . . . Teedie is a lovely boy . . .”
His last day home he spent sleighing in the park with his father. The snow and the day were perfect, the horses in peak condition. “He went off most cheerfully to Cambridge again,” Theodore wrote. “He has had a glorious time . . .”
At Cambridge, he came suddenly to life socially. He was being asked to friends’ homes for dinner. He wrote now of an assembly dance at Brookline, of a sleighing party with “forty girls and fellows, and two matrons in one huge sleigh. . . . dragged by our eight horses rapidly through a great many of the pretty little towns which form the suburbs of Boston.” Another dance at Dorchester was “quite a swell affair.” He was playing cards, drinking coffee, taking dancing lessons. A Miss Wheelright, a Miss Richardson, a Miss Andrews, and a Miss Fisk began to appear in his letters. He was having a “pretty gay time” and happened also to be needing some money. A hundred dollars ought to do, he thought, though “by rights” it should be more. (A year at Harvard then could cost anywhere from about $500 to $1,500, depending on the style in which the student chose to live. The average was about $800. But for this first year the elder Theodore would pay $1,600—or roughly $17,000 in present-day money—and it was to be the boys most economical year of the four.)
He and another boy, Henry Minot, were already planning a collecting trip to the Adirondacks once classes ended in June. Henry Minot was his one close friend, the son of a prominent Boston family (the “antecedents” were quite acceptable), who, at seventeen, had already published a book on New England birds. He would bring Henry home one day, he wrote in a long letter to Mittie and Theodore; he was sure they would approve.
By the way, as the time when birds are beginning to come back is approaching, I wish you would send on my gun, with all the cartridges you can find and my various apparatus for cleaning, loading it, etc. Also send on a dozen glass jars, with their rubbers and stoppers (which you will find in my museum), and a German dictionary, if you have one.
He was in a world of his own, absorbed, bookish, happy. He had a manservant to black his boots and light his fire in the morning. A large black woman looked after his laundry. To please his father he began teaching Sunday school at Christ Church, opposite the town common, just outside Harvard Yard. Of Cambridge life in general, however, he cared nothing. Of the whole workaday world, or those happenings that filled the newspapers, he appears to have been oblivious. That fall, just before the national elections—if we are to believe the reminiscences of one or two classmates—he had marched in a demonstration for Rutherford B. Hayes. It was supposedly his first show of political interest and he is described responding with characteristic, theatrical anger, fists thrashing in the air, when a potato came flying from an upstairs window. But his own letters from that freshman year contain no mention of such an event, no mention of politics or of the election and its bizarre outcome—which is odd mainly in view of how greatly such events filled the thoughts of his beloved father.
2
The elder Theodore had first seen the Republican candidate in the flesh at the Philadelphia Exposition, during one of Hayes’s rare campaign appearances; and having seen him, Theodore felt even better about what had happened in Cincinnati.
“He talked very pleasantly,” Theodore wrote to his Harvard son, “and impressed one as being perfectly honest.” Most people found Hayes disappointing, dowdy. A reporter for The New York Times covering the same occasion despaired over the candidates “dreadfully shabby coat and shockingly bad hat, all brushed up the wrong way.” But Theodore concentrated on the face, finding in it no sign of “divided character.”
Theodore took most of what he knew of the campaign from his morning paper, the Tribune, as ardent a Hayes paper as any in New York, and his faith in Hayes held steady, even afterward, during the drawn-out winter months when nobody knew who—whether Hayes or Tilden—had been elected President. At first it seemed Tilden had. Tilden swept New York and nationally held a clear majority. But the votes in four states—Oregon and three in the Deep South—were in dispute, states that, if carried by the Republicans, would swing the electoral vote to Hayes. Republican “statesmen” rushed south to confer with election boards. Through February a special committee met daily in Washington to appraise the conflicting tallies, and outraged Democrats from all walks spoke of violence should the Republicans try to steal the election. In Columbus, Ohio, somebody fired a shot at Hayes’s house as he sat down to dinner.
Given the conscience he had, it is somewhat hard to picture Theodore wholly at ease with the declaration on March 2 that Hayes was the winner by a single electoral vote, but like countless others (including Hayes), he appears to have accepted the proposition that the Republicans really did carry all four of the disputed states and that claims to the contrary were but further evidence of the usual Democratic calumny. Like peaceable men of both parties he breathed a sigh of relief at Tilden’s refusal to contest the decision, and like every true liberal Republican he brightened at the news that Carl Schurz was to be the new Secretary of the Interior and that William Evarts, the eminent New York attorney and old Conkling foe, had been named Secretary of State. Even James Russell Lowell was to be rewarded with the post of minister to Spain.
Hayes’s inaugural address carried the memorable line, “he serves his party best who serves his country best.” And in another month came word of a full-scale investigation into the affairs of the New York Customhouse. A blue-ribbon investigating commission was announced, with John Jay, an old friend of Theodore’s, at its head. By the time Hayes made his first visit to New York as President in May, the hearings were under way downtown at the Customhouse and causing a stir wherever politics were talked. Quite obviously the Administration had decided it was time to cut Conkling down to size.
The record of what was going on behind the scenes is far from complete, but from all available evidence it appears that William Evarts was in charge of the assault. It was Evarts who proposed to Hayes that Chester Arthur be removed and that the new man at the Customhouse be Theodore Roosevelt.
Evarts was the law partner of Theodore’s close friend Joseph Choate, himself a crusading liberal Republican and somebody who had had ample opportunity to appraise Theodore’s executive abilities at close hand over many years. (It was Choate who, at Theodore’s request, had drawn up the original charter for the Museum of Natural History, for example.) And Evarts, too, had had his own dealings with Theodore only the year before, when Evarts headed a committee to raise the money for a pedestal for a promised gift from France of a giant Statue of Liberty. Theodore had served on the committee and served well, seeing at once the importance that so great a work—like his museums or the bridge to Brooklyn—would have to his beloved city.
At what point Theodore’s name was first broached for the Customhouse is impossible to determine, but judging by the attention he received during the days that the President was in town, it could have been as early as May. One gets the impression certainly that he was being looked over or lined up for something and it took no great acumen to see what an ideally suited choice for the post he was. Few men stood higher in the estimate of the community—or of those high-toned, high-placed liberals upon whom the Administration must count for support in any fight with Conkling. Theodore, moreover, had already proved himself admirably in a somewhat analogous situation at Vienna in 1873 when he stepped in as a commissioner at the Exposition. The authorized commissioner had been found to be dishonest and Theodore, at a moments notice, had righted a confused and embarrassing situation with both dispatch and tact, and the home papers had taken note.
His very name bespoke rectitude. Great wealth—supposedly—placed a man above such crass temptations as were traditional at the Customhouse. As a merchant and importer, he had ample knowledge of customs procedures. Yet with the Roosevelt family now divested of the glass trade, there could be no charge of conflicting allegiances. The point that Collector Arthur happened to be doing a rather respectable job, all things considered, was immaterial since the real target was Conkling.
Beyond all that there was William Evarts himself, who was not without his own ambitions concerning future control of party machinery in the state. A strong, reliable, honest man in the Customhouse—his man—would be as valuable to him as “Chet” Arthur was to Conkling. And the fact that Theodore had shown himself to be such a fiercely outspoken foe of Conkling meant he was not just a worthy ally but one whose appointment was guaranteed to enrage the unforgiving Conkling.
The Collectorship of the Port of New York was a government post like none other. Politically it was the ultimate plum. The power and responsibility attending the job were enormous, greater than those of most Cabinet officers; and the pay, as things were constituted, could exceed even that of the President.
Everything about the Customhouse was mammoth. If considered as a business operation, it stood in a class by itself, doing an annual dollar volume approximately five times that of the largest business office in the country. The revenues collected exceeded those of all the other American ports of entry combined. Roughly two-thirds of the country’s total tariff revenue was taken in at New York. Employees numbered more than a thousand. The building itself was colossal.
Customs collectors and clerks, importers, and customs brokers carried on their transactions in an echoing rotunda beneath a huge dome supported by marble columns, the desks of the collectors and clerks being arranged in concentric circles around a large four-faced clock at the center of the floor. Messengers darted in and out while visitors, there to enjoy one of the “sights” of downtown, watched from the periphery. Collector Arthur, tall, radiant, invariably dapper, paraded through to his private office usually around noon, ready for his official day.
The Collector had direct authority over the majority of employees. The next highest ranking officials were the Naval Officer, who was primarily a backup for the Collector; the Surveyor of the Port, who ran a staff of inspectors, weighers, gaugers, and “keepers of storage places”; and the Appraiser, whose people decided what incoming goods were worth and therefore determined the size of the duty to be paid. These officials had their deputies and the deputies had their deputies, and as previous investigations had shown, “overemployment” was standard down the line. Indeed, the customs service was notorious as an asylum for nonentities and has-beens, a kind of warm, dry dumping ground for failed merchants and broken-down sports with political connections, and for every kind of political hack. Numbers of customs service people were, of course, honest and hardworking. One, we know, was a genius, Herman Melville, who was finishing out his life in dreary anonymity as a customs inspector at a Hudson River wharf at $4 a day. But the opportunities for personal “rewards” in addition to salary—for emoluments, gratuities, and for plain bribery—were so great that almost any job could be made to pay handsomely.
Of greatest importance, and especially to those at the top, was the moiety system, as it was known, a practice deep in the grain at the Customhouse and quite within the law. It was the chief reason why the Collectorship was known as the best-paying job “within the gift of government.”
Instituted as early as 1789, the system provided that employees share in all fines and forfeitures. The idea had been to inspire perseverance among inspectors, but the temptation, naturally, was for inspectors to find discrepancies where there were none, in order to collect their share of the fine and also win favor with those at the top—the lieutenants of the New York machine—whose own shares would be substantial. Every importer resented the system but it was not until Chester Arthur’s first year as Collector, with the sensational Phelps, Dodge case, that their feelings turned to outrage. Theodore, with his ties to the Dodge family, could hardly have been more stunned, one imagines, had his own firm been the victim.
The case can be summarized briefly as follows:
Phelps, Dodge and Company, importers of copper, lead, zinc, and other metals, was among the most respected firms in New York. It was headed by William E. Dodge, Sr., and by his son, William E. Dodge, Jr., Theodore’s lifelong friend. In 1872 the senior Dodge was summoned to the office of a special agent at the Customhouse, a man named Jayne, and was informed privately that by undervaluing certain shipments his firm had been defrauding the government. Dodge, who had been an outspoken critic of Customhouse mores, was impressed with the extreme seriousness of the situation and given a choice. He could either settle out of court for the amount owed to the government, all of which had been figured down to the penny ($271,017.23), whereupon the case would be closed, or he could face a lawsuit and whatever costs and publicity that might entail, in addition to an ultimate fine that conceivably could exceed a million dollars. Never bothering to question the authenticity of the charge, Dodge paid up, only to learn that in actual fact the government had been cheated of nothing. The few undervaluations committed by his firm had been minimal, less than its errors of overvaluation. He had been the victim of an extortion. He spoke out at once, a congressional investigation resulted, and in 1874 Congress put an end to the moiety system. But the money paid by Dodge had been divided up meantime. The Collector, the Naval Officer, and the Surveyor of the Port—good Conkling men all—got some $22,000 each; special agent Jayne received roughly three times that for his part; and for legal services rendered, Senator Conkling received a sizable fee. Claiming he knew nothing of the details of the case, Collector Arthur survived the investigation untouched.
Though the fixed salary of the Collector was $12,000, which was more than that of a Cabinet officer, Collector Arthur’s real annual income from his position ranged around $55,000. The present-day equivalent would be $500,000 or more.
“We look back upon it, and we think . . . that we were fools,” Dodge had told the congressional committee. The government, he said, must have intelligent men in the Customhouse, men of high character and standing.
Theodore, Collector Arthur, and both Dodges were present with several hundred others at the lavish Chamber of Commerce banquet given for the President at Delmonicos the night of May 14. Dodge, Sr., in fact, was seated with John Jay, Schurz, and William Evarts at the head table. The Jay Commission was in its third week of hearings by this time and Schurz, the main speaker of the evening, was at his rousing best. The time had come for a “thorough reform of the public service of the country [loud applause]—the organization, I mean, of a public service upon sound business principles [renewed applause]. . . . The public service ought not to be a souphouse to feed the indigent, a hospital and asylum for decayed politicians [great cheering]. . . .” The expression on Collector Arthurs face through all this is not recorded.
Then the following afternoon, May 15, a soft, lovely spring day in New York, Theodore and Albert Bickmore escorted the President on a preview tour of the American Museum of Natural History, which was in its final stages before being officially opened to the public. They peered together at cases of Cherokee beadwork, arrowheads, spearpoints, and silver ornaments unearthed from burial mounds in Georgia.
Mittie was included at the reception for the President and Mrs. Hayes given that same evening by former governor Edwin D. Morgan at his Fifth Avenue mansion. And the morning of the sixteenth, when the President went downtown for an official welcome at City Hall, Theodore was again part of the official entourage, riding in the second carriage with old Thurlow Weed and Webb Hayes, the Presidents son. At the conclusion of still one more opulent affair that night, this at the home of John Jacob Astor III, Theodore and Mittie were asked to stay on for a small, private gathering with the President and the First Lady, as the wife of the Chief Executive was now being called.
In another few weeks rumors were in the wind of Arthur’s dismissal. Hayes refused to say anything officially until the Jay Commission completed its work, which consumed most of the summer, as witness after witness confirmed the worst suspicions of Customhouse corruption, inefficiency, waste, and stupidity. On June 22, however, Hayes issued an executive order forbidding party assessments of federal employees and forbidding federal employees any role in the running of party affairs—an order aimed squarely at Conkling and his “boys.” Chester Arthur, for whom nobody seems to have felt any ill will, was invited to Washington and quietly offered the consulship in Paris if he would simply resign, but this he refused to do. Presently, when the newspapers learned before he did that his resignation was to be requested, Arthur felt he had no choice but to stand fast. The New York Sun, a Democratic paper, speculated that perhaps Secretary Evarts’ real wish in bringing new management to the Customhouse was to foster some fresh Republican leadership in New York.
To date there had been no response from Roscoe Conkling, who had been abroad for the summer (Mrs. Sprague was currently living in Paris). It was not until September that he opened his attack, in a speech at a Republican state convention in Rochester, and with a savagery that appalled everyone, including many of his admirers.
Who were these men cracking the whip over him like schoolmasters, Conkling demanded, these man-milliners, these carpet knights of politics with their veneer of superior purity. George William Curtis, who had spoken in support of Hayes only moments before, sat muttering, “Remarkable! What an exhibition! Bad temper! Very bad temper!” Hammering on, glaring at Curtis, Conkling said no party was ever built on deportment or ladies’ magazines or gush. The speech was taken to be an unfortunate emotional outburst, the senator having momentarily lost hold of himself. The New York Times said he sounded like a maniac. But in fact it had all been quite carefully prepared and memorized, every breath of it timed for maximum effect.
“We are all excited here about politics just now, everybody outraged at the late performances at Rochester,” wrote Joseph Choate to his wife after spending the weekend with Theodore and the family at Oyster Bay.
For Theodore life went on all the same. He had become interested in a scheme to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to New York. He was busy at the office, busy as always with his good deeds, and working too hard, the family felt. In May he had taken a break to escort Bamie, Conie, Cousin Maud, and Edith Carow on a weekend visit to Harvard, and again in midsummer he and Bamie went off to stay with friends at Mount Desert Island in Maine. Back at his office later, he observed that he, the gay butterfly, had been reduced once more to a grub. Elliott had returned from Texas to stay and young Theodore was embarking on prodigious expeditions up and down Long Island Sound by rowboat, covering in one day as much as twenty-five miles. The long summer was a “capital time,” highlighted by a visit from Uncle Jimmie Bulloch. Then the first week in September Theodore went off to Saratoga to a State Board of Charities meeting to discuss the conditions of insane children.
The formal announcement that he was to replace Arthur at the Customhouse came in October. Two others—General Edwin A. Merritt and a lawyer with the majestic name of Le Baron Bradford Prince—had been picked to fill the posts of Surveyor and Naval Officer. The nominations went to the Senate on the twenty-fourth, by which time it was obvious that more than the fate of the Customhouse or the Conkling machine was riding on the outcome. At issue was the power of the presidency as measured against that of the Senate, and the realities of Senate politics being what they were, and in view of the decline of presidential power since Lincoln, the chance for a Hayes victory looked slim. For one thing, the committee through which the nominations would first have to pass was the committee on commerce, of which Senator Conkling was chairman. Still, Hayes remained firm. “I am clear that I am right,” he wrote in his diary. “I believe that a large majority of the best people are in full accord with me.” Senator George Edmunds, Republican of Vermont, was delegated to warn Hayes of the risks he was running and to ask that he “cooperate.” “We must cooperate in the interests of the country,” Hayes responded.
To the reformers, of whom very few were members of the United States Senate, it had become a test case.
Conkling’s committee sat on the nominations for another month and more, during which, to the delight of reporters, Conkling gave forth with some of the choicest invective of his career. Stopped one day in New York by a man from the Herald, Conkling observed that there were in total perhaps three hundred in the city who opposed him, “who believe themselves to occupy the solar walk and the milky way, and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear even the heavens might stain them. . . . They would have people fill the offices by nothing less than divine selection.”
Theodore, meantime, was appearing at City Hall before the New York Board of Apportionment to protest, in behalf of the State Board of Charities, scandalous conditions in the city’s asylums for the indigent and the insane. (TERRIBLE CHARGES, read the headline in the Herald the morning after he had spoken his piece.) He denounced the mixing of criminals with the sick and the insane, deplored the wretched food, the rampant incompetence and “graver moral deficiencies” of the people employed to work in such places. The underlying problem, he insisted, was politics, the system by which every job was political and no one person could ever be held accountable.
To friends and admirers he seemed to have reached a new plateau of maturity and influence. The stature of the Collectorship would be raised to new heights the moment he took office, his admirers knew. One friend, D. Willis James, who had been away from the city for a year, wrote after seeing him again that fall that “he seemed to me another man,” so great was the change. “I was astonished. I was amazed at the growth . . .”
At age forty-six he was, as said the Tribune, “in the prime of vigorous manhood” and stood ready to do his duty. Naturally he stood ready to do his duty. “I will take the office not to administer it for the benefit of a party,” he told the papers, “but for the benefit of the whole people.” If confirmed he would serve without pay. Editorials praised the appointment. “Mr. Roosevelt is a gentleman above reproach and would unquestionably inaugurate a new order of things at the Customhouse.” George William Curtis said inHarper’s Weekly that the President could have found no man “of higher character or greater fitness.”
But the fight over the confirmation was one in which Theodore himself could take no personal part, conspicuous as he was made by the appointment; and his frustrations and worries compounded as weeks went by and nothing happened beyond talk and speculation. Greatly as he detested Conkling he was unable to speak out. He must bide his time, maintain perfect decorum and silence, and so passive a role did not sit at all well with him.
In secret he hoped he would be turned down, he later told young Theodore. To “purify” the Customhouse would be a task of unfathomable difficulty and he dreaded it. He knew what to expect at the hands of the politicians and the press.
To the rest of the family, meantime, he seems to have said as little as possible about the job or the changes it would mean for all of them; and to judge by the very little his son said about the subject in what he wrote from Harvard, none of them was overly concerned in any event. “Tell Father I am watching the ’Controllership’ movements with the greatest interest,” the boy added to the end of a letter to Bamie, suggesting he was ignorant even of the name of the job. But he also asked that his subscription to theTribune be renewed and observed in another letter to Bamie in November that it looked as though their father would not get the Collectorship. “I am glad on his account, but sorry for New York.” His own triumph of the moment was “The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks in Franklin County, N. Y.,” his first published work, a pamphlet of three or four pages that he and Henry Minot had gotten up as a result of their trip the previous summer.
There was something in the papers about the Customhouse nominations nearly every day. On November 10, Senate Republicans caucused in “unusual secrecy” for five hours during which Conkling argued against any nomination made to succeed an officer dismissed without cause. On November 30, Conkling’s committee on commerce unanimously rejected the Customhouse appointments, and four days later when the Senate went into executive session to consider the full list of presidential appointments—circuit judges, Indian commissioners, postmasters—time was somehow never found to decide on any appointments to the customs service. Since the current session of Congress expired that same day, the Administration would thus be required to send those particular nominations to the Senate all over again with the start of the next session. Conkling was not merely stalling for time to line up the votes he needed, but giving the Administration opportunity to see the light and drop the matter altogether.
By now the story filled the front pages. Following a Cabinet meeting on December 4, it was reported that a compromise was in the making. Allegedly, to appease Conkling, Theodore Roosevelt would not be named again for the Collectorship. Conkling, it was understood, might accept some other nominee, but not Roosevelt under any circumstances. But on December 6, Hayes told a delegation of New York congressmen who had come to speak for Collector Arthur that his nominees were “good men” and he would make no changes. He sent his customs service list to the Senate later the same day and the Senate went into executive session at once.
Conkling challenged Hayes for not giving due cause for removing Arthur. He denounced Hayes personally, ridiculed the civil service passages in Hayes’ annual message to Congress issued the day before. Conkling was “forcible, witty, and severely sarcastic.” He also proved himself grandly inconsistent by supporting the nomination of a new customs Collector at Chicago to replace someone being removed without explanatory cause.
“I am very much afraid that Conkling has won the day,” young Theodore wrote to his father.
On December 11, the committee on commerce confirmed the appointment of Edwin A. Merritt and rejected those of Theodore Roosevelt and Le Baron Bradford Prince. The vote in the Senate came the afternoon of the twelfth, when the doors of the Senate were again swung shut for another executive—secret—session. Conkling’s speech this time was one of his major orations, reputedly one of the three most brilliant performances of his political career. He spoke last and for nearly an hour and a half. From an undisclosed source a reporter put together a vivid picture of the scene, of Conkling striding up and down the aisle as he spoke, his voice gathering strength until he was shouting “and [he] clinched every sentence with violent gestures.” He tore into the Administration, as before; he defended his dear and loyal friend Arthur. He denied “in an excited manner” that the Customhouse was in any way a political machine. But the climax came with his attack on Theodore Roosevelt. “He said Mr. Roosevelt was hisbitter personal enemy, who had lost no opportunity of denouncing him, and he appealed to Senators to protect him and the four millions of people he represented.” It was because Roosevelt was his enemy that the Administration had picked Roosevelt for the job in the first place. The appointment, Conkling said, had been made solely to destroy and humiliate and dishonor Roscoe Conkling and he would not have it.
The vote came at eight that evening and of the Republicans a mere six refused to go along with Conkling. The nominations of Theodore and Le Baron Bradford Prince were rejected by a count of 31 to 25. “In the language of the press,” wrote Hayes in his diary, “’Senator Conkling has won a great victory over the Administration.’ . . . But the end is not yet. I am right, and shall not give up the contest.”
Theodore, who is not known ever to have kept a diary, wrote to his older son the following Sunday evening.
6 West 57th Street
December 16, 1877
DEAR OLD THEODORE,
As usual I sit down to my desk in my little room after the others have gone to bed. You know that it is not the want of the will that makes me a poor correspondent, but even tonight when I had passed over the newsboys to Mr. Blagdon’s care and anticipated a quiet evening we have been obliged to devote ourselves to others. People have been calling, including Mr. [Albert] Bierstadt, who came in late to ask me to dine with him and gave some very interesting descriptions of the manner in which he made his studies of the buffalo.
A great weight was taken off my shoulders when Elliott read the other morning that the Senate had decided not to confirm me, no one can imagine the relief. To purify our Customhouse was a terrible undertaking which I felt it was my duty to undertake but I realized all the difficulties I would encounter and the abuse I must expect to receive. I feel now so glad I did not refuse it. The machine politicians have shown their colors and not one person has been able to make an accusation of any kind against me. Indeed, they have all done me more than justice. I never told your mother but it would have practically kept me in the city almost all the time in summer and that would be no joke. I feel sorry for the country, however, as it shows the power of the partisan politicians who think of nothing higher than their own interests. I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.
What he failed to mention was that in the final weeks of the battle he had been stricken with severe intestinal pains, of which he apparently wished the boy to know nothing. Bamie, however, had already sent word on and in a letter to her written from Cambridge that same Sunday he said he was “very uneasy about Father.” Did the doctor think it anything serious, he asked. “Thank fortune, my own health is excellent, and so, when I get home, I can with a clear conscience give him a rowing up for not taking better care of himself . . . The trouble is the dear old fellow never does think of himself in anything.”
3
Theodore died less than two months later. He had his good days, mornings when the pain subsided as if by miracle and he and Bamie would go for a drive. Through one long remission—the week after Christmas, with young Theodore home—he actually seemed to be recovering. But even then his confidence and cheer were a front. When the American Museum of Natural History had its grand opening on December 22, he was too ill to attend. Again President Hayes took part and Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, was the main speaker. It was described in the papers as “one of the most brilliant daylight assemblages that New York has ever seen,” and for Theodore, by all rights, it should have been a day of days, a moment of acclaim and restitution after what he had been through since October. Of his defeat at the hands of Senator Conkling, he had been willing to say only that he remained “definitely hostile” to machine politics in any form.
The first sign that there was something seriously wrong with him had come less than forty-eight hours after he had written the long letter to young Theodore, his final letter to the boy so far as is known. The diagnosis then was acute peritonitis, which was regarded as extremely alarming. As one of young Theodore’s friends would write, “You couldn’t have your appendix out then, you didn’t know the word, you got something they called peritonitis, or inflammation of the bowels, and usually died.” But as later determined, he was, in fact, dying of cancer of the stomach—of a malignant, inoperable tumor of the bowel that was growing rapidly.
The anxiety that swept through the family may be felt even in such brief entries as to be found in a diary kept by Anna Gracie.
Tuesday, December 18
Ellie stopped on his way downtown, and his father was taken very ill about 4 o’clock this morning. Bamie’s party tonight. I saw Thee before I went into [the] drawing r[oo]m, very ill. Conie sat with him until two o’clock.
Thursday, December 20
All day at 57th St. Thee desperately ill.
Friday, December 21
First ray of hope, dear Thee will be better of this attack of peritonitis, but the disease is no better.
Sunday, December 23
Took tea at 57th St. Thee so ill but more comfortable.
Monday, December 24
Spent tonight at 57th, arranged table and stockings of children’s things. Thee more easy but very weak.
Tuesday, December 25
Saw dear Thee a short time before we went to church. Afternoon sat with him while Bamie rested. He made us all but Mittie go in to Xmas dinner . . .
“Can I do anything for you and Mrs. Roosevelt?” asked Louisa Schuyler in a note to Bamie. “I mean by way of sitting downstairs to answer messages and notes—or anything of the kind?” “Xmas. Father seems much better,” wrote young Theodore, who was keeping a “Private Diary” of his own once again and who left for Harvard after New Year’s convinced his father had passed the crisis.
They said goodbye to each other January 2, and according to later entries in the new diary, Theodore told him he was the dearest of his children and had never caused him a moment’s pain. There had been a heavy snowfall. The city was a winter scene fromHarper’s Weekly and the boy and the family coachman, bundled to the ears, were not a hundred feet from the door, heading for the boat, when their sleigh tipped over and they were dragged off down the street by the horses like a snowplow—all “rather good fun,” as the boy said. He expressed no particular concern for his father in the letters that followed from Cambridge, nor in his diary, but then neither was he being told anything of the actual situation. It had been decided that he should be spared any worry. With Henry Minot, he had now joined the Nuttall Ornithological Club of Cambridge, before which, on the evening of January 28, 1878, he presented a paper on certain aspects of the English sparrow problem.
As the days passed, Theodore’s physical pain became excruciating. Mittie seldom left his side. But they all took their turns watching over him—Anna Gracie, James Alfred, who came in from next door, Bamie, Elliott, Conie, the maid Mary Ann. They sat and read aloud to him, or they just sat. “I have sat with him some seven hours,” Conie told Edith Carow. “He slept most of it but at times was in fearful agony. Oh, Edith, it is the most frightful thing to see the person you love best in the world in terrible pain . . .” He was suffering so, she said, that his hair was turning gray.
The morning of February 7 he was either sufficiently free from pain or sufficiently sedated to be taken for a sleigh ride, Bamie riding in the seat beside him; and that afternoon there was a letter from young Theodore that pleased him enormously. “I was with your dear father when your mother read your letter to him out loud,” wrote Anna Gracie. “You would have felt more than repaid for the exertion of writing such a cheery, long letter to him, if you could have seen the expression of his face. . . . His whole face lighted up with a beautiful smile when she read the figures out of the two examinations you have just passed. . . . I have not seen him look so pleased and like himself for a long time.”
The next morning, early, he and Bamie went off again, though this time, on return, he was again in agony. The doctor was sent for. Carriages came and went through the rest of the day as friends called to express their concern and to ask if there was anything they could do. Word of his condition had also reached the newspapers by now and the day following, Saturday, February 9, a crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside. It was there hour after hour as the day passed. Conie would remember it as a “huge” crowd, which perhaps it was, and most heartrending to her, as to all those who came and went, were the numbers of ragged children who stood waiting—his newsboys and orphans. The scene, as recalled, seems so very Victorian as to be not quite real, like some sentimental deathwatch from Dickens. One imagines the wind whipping the snow. (Actually it had turned warm and rain fell several times during the day.) But the children were there at the steps to the house waiting for news of the man who doubtless meant, just as Conie said, more to them than any other human being.
A telegram was sent telling young Theodore to return at once. Three doctors were rushed to the house. James Alfred and Aunt Lizzie stood by on the first floor. Cornelius and Laura arrived, as did Anna and James Gracie. Counting the servants there were at times as many as twenty people in the home.
The end did not come until nearly midnight. Of the long day itself, there is only one firsthand account. It was written by Elliott, whose devotion to his father over the past week or more had been heroic. He had hardly taken time to eat or sleep. He was ill, close to a complete collapse, his “young strength . . . poured out,” as Conie remembered, even before the day began. The account, given here with only a few minor deletions, appears to have been written soon after Theodore died, possibly the following day, the “terrible Sunday” when young Theodore arrived by the night boat from Boston.
Feb. 9, 1878
This morning at ten while I was sitting in my room smoking, Corinne ran in and said, “Ellie, Father wants to be moved, will you come upstairs?” I went immediately and found Father still under the influences of sedatives, sitting in the rocking chair in the morning room. As I came in he beckoned to me. I ran to him and . . . my arms about him, he got up and with my help tottered to the mantel. Here suddenly his face became distorted with pain and he called out loud for ether. I left him, got the bottle and taking him in my arms put him on the sofa and drenching the handkerchief I held it on his face. Mother, Bamie, and Mary Ann came up and we sent for the doctor. This was 10:15. From then until 11:30 all the strength I had could barely keep him on the sofa. He never said anything but “Oh! My!” but the agony in his face was awful. Ether and sedatives were of no avail. Little Mother stood by with a glass of water which I drank at intervals, being deathly sick. Pretty soon Father began to vomit after which he would be quiet a minute, then with face fearful with pain [he] would clasp me tight in his arms. . . . The power with which he would hug me was terrific and then in a second he would be lying, white, panting, and weak as a baby in my arms with sweat in huge drops rolling down his face and neck. . . . At 11:30, thank God, the doctor came. I ran up to the Ellises, found Dr. Thomas and returned to find the doctor about to give Father chloroform. On its application Father became quiet instantly but the two doctors despaired of his life and from then until 1:30 Mother sat at his head and I by him with the chlo[roform] and handkerchief. We put him from one chlo[roform] sleep into another . . . Dr. Polk relieved Mother and I at 1:30 when we tried to take a bit of lunch. The afternoon Dr. Polk, Mother, Uncle Jim, [Dr.] Thomas, and I were by his side all the time. . . . At 6:30 Mother and I went down and tried to eat dinner. I felt so sick I stayed to smoke a cigar and after felt well and more myself. I sat in the little room with Uncles Corneil and Jim and Aunts Laura and Lizzie and little Mary Ann. Going upstairs at 7:30 I found the servants in the hall waiting with scared faces in Corinne’s room, Aunt A[nna], B[amie], and C[onie] all in tears. Mother, Dr.’s Polk and Goldthwait and Uncle Jimmie by the bedside. Father seemed the same but his pulse much feebler. Dr. P[olk], Bamie, and C[onie] went to bed. Uncle Jim came up and Mother and the two uncles and Dr. G[oldthwait] and watched. Oh, my God, my father, what agonies you suffered. . . . So it went on. At eleven fifteen he opened his eyes. I motioned to the Dr. who applied the tube and brandy to his mouth. He did not make an effort to suck even. We put the glass up and dropped it [the brandy] down. He turned sharp to the left and throwing up his arms around, he gave one mighty clasp and then with a groan of pain turned over and with his right hand under his head and left out over the side of the sofa began the gurgling breathing of death. “Call the doctor.” “Bamie—Corinne.” “Mother, come here for God’s sake quick.” And then Dr. Polk sitting by his side. Mother kneeling by him, Bamie by her. The little Baby [Corinne] trembling and crying, kneeling by me on his left side and all the rest standing near. His eyelids fluttered, he gave three long breaths. It is finished. No, my God, it cannot be. “Darling, darling, darling, I am here,” cried my little widowed mother. I knelt down and prayed, “Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy will be done, Thy will be done.” As the last breath left his body the little clock on the table struck one—one half past eleven. Thirteen and a quarter hours of agony it took to kill a man broken down by three months’ sickness.
We got the girls and Mother to bed. The uncles watched the dead. I lay down on the sofa in Father’s dressing room but not to sleep . . .
4
He was extolled from a half-dozen pulpits and by the editorial pages of nearly every newspaper in the city, by lifelong friends, fellow philanthropists, and political reformers during memorial tributes at the Union League and the State Charities Aid Association. He was praised for his “high moral purpose” (in the Tribune), his “singular public spirit” (Evening Mail), his “generous public spirit” (Telegram), his contributions to science and art (Evening Post), for “using great opportunity for the best end” and preserving the honor of a great family name (The New York Times).
George William Curtis, in what he wrote for Harper’s Weekly, called him “an American citizen of the best type—cheerful, hearty, sagacious, honest, hopeful, not to be swerved by abuse, by hostility or derision.” Godkin, in The Nation, said New York should take heart in such a life: “We believe, the mere fact that New York could even in these later evil years produce him, and hold his love and devotion, has been to hundreds of those who knew him and watched his career a reason for not despairing of the future of the city.”
His “sweet strong influence,” his “magnetic power in influencing others,” the “stirring summons” of his example, were all mentioned repeatedly. “What a glorious example!” a friend wrote to Bamie. And in the other sympathy notes that poured into the house most people seemed to be saying in one way or other that they felt better for having known him.
At the family’s request there were no flowers at the funeral. Eight pallbearers—William E. Dodge, Jr., and Howard Potter among them—carried the plain rosewood coffin out of the house after a brief family service in the front parlor. The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church was filled to overflowing. There were two thousand people, perhaps more, within the huge nave as the coffin was borne down the sloping center aisle to the altar. Two preachers officiated, John Hall and the venerable William Adams, Theodore’s former pastor at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church and now head of the Union Theological Seminary, whose voice broke several times in the course of his remarks. Burial was at Greenwood Cemetery, in the family plot, beside Mittie’s mother, the funeral procession crossing the East River in Brooklyn by ferry under a cold winter sky.
Secluded once more at 57th Street, the devastated family hardly knew which way to turn, let alone how to face what Conie called “the blank” of life without Father. Anna Gracie was staying on, to be near Mittie. Everyone drew nearer. Conie was to remember“something infinitely inspiring” about those days. Father had preached that one must live for the living, and so “[we] felt that our close family tie must be made stronger rather than weaker by the loss . . .”
What Mittie felt we cannot begin to know. A month later she would write to young Theodore simply, “It is so hard to have parted with him. I think of him daily and almost hourly . . . long to have him with us. It must be a comfort to you to know that you never gave your dearly loved and prized father anything but pleasure.”
Years later Bamie would say only that “Of course, after his death, we all had to work out our own salvation.”
Elliott, we know, was shattered. It was as if, in the convulsive grip of his father’s arms, he had had something crushed irreparably within. Theodore’s death was the ultimate disaster from which he would never quite recover.
To young Theodore it was all a “hideous dream.” His mother and sisters were suffering the worst, he wrote to Henry Minot, and “it was best that Fathers terrible sufferings should end.” But in his Private Diary he let go, pouring out pain and bewilderment and presently a torrent of longing and loneliness and angry self-judgment. He began within hours after the funeral, describing the suspense of his ride home on the night boat, the “bitter agony when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me,” the sound of the first clod of earth striking the casket.
“He was the most wise and loving father that ever lived: I owe everything to him.”
His anguish spills across pages, for weeks, months. Back at Harvard, alone in his room, he wrote of little else:
Sunday, March 3
Have been thinking about Father all evening, have had a good square breakdown, and feel much better for it.
Wednesday, March 6
Every now and then there are very bitter moments; if I had very much time to think I believe I should go crazy . . .
Saturday, March 9
It is just one month since the blackest day of my life.
Sunday, March 10
. . . had another square breakdown.
Sundays, with all their memories, were the hardest for him. It had been a Sunday, “that terrible Sunday,” that he had “kissed the dear, dead face.”
In the margin of his Bible he writes “February 9,1878” beside a verse of the 69th Psalm: “I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.”
Twice, in different letters, he reaches out to Bamie. With Father gone, he says, she must help him. She must take Father’s place in his life. “I know only too well the dull, heavy pain you suffer,” he wrote, “and I know too that it . . . has been easier for me . . . for here I live in a different world . . . I am occupied busily all the time.” Still, she must stand by him. She must tell him what to do. “My own sweet sister, you will have to give me a great deal of advice and assistance, now that our dear father is gone, for in many ways you are more like him than any of the rest of the family.” Henry Minot, his closest friend at Harvard, has “left college!” he reports in dismay to her that spring. “His father has taken him away and put him in his office to study law.” To Henry himself he writes of how greatly he misses “someone to talk to about my favorite pursuits and future prospects.”
With Father gone, nothing seems to have any purpose. “Am working away pretty hard,” he reports in May; “but I do not care so much for my marks now; what I most valued them for was his pride in them.”
Other times he seems insistent that Father had not “gone.” “I almost feel as if he were present with me,” he tells his mother; and it is emphatically in the present tense that he writes, “Every event of my life is tied up with him.” Father’s words keep coming back with a vividness that is “really startling.” During a brief visit to Oyster Bay just before exams, he picks up the journal he kept during the winter on the Nile and finds that “every incident is connected with him.” He walks about the empty house and “every nook and corner . . . every piece of furniture . . . is in some manner connected with him.” “Oh, Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you,” he writes June 7, still at Oyster Bay. “All the family are wonderfully lovely to me,” reads the next entry, “but I wish Mother and Bamie would not quarrel among themselves.”
Then Sunday, June 9, in the dim light of the little Presbyterian church at Oyster Bay, he sees Father sitting beside him in the corner of the pew, “as distinctly as if he were alive.”
Father was the shining example of the life he must aspire to; Father was the perfect example of all he himself was not. Grief turned to shame and a sense of futility. He felt diminished by the memory of the man. “Looking back on his life it seems as if mine must be such a weak, useless one in comparison.” He was engulfed by self-doubt. Self-reproach bordered on self-contempt. How could such a wonderful man have had a son of so little worth, he asked. One especially difficult Sunday he brooded over “how little use I am, or ever shall be . . . I am so much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.” He had failed his father when his father had needed him most and for this, in the light of his own conscience, he stood condemned.
He did everything for me, and I nothing for him. I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a very weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms . . . and oh, how my heart pains me when I think I never was able to do anything for him during his last illness!
“Sometimes, when I fully realize my loss,” he writes, “I feel as if I should go mad.”
Conie would recall sitting with him by moonlight on a high point called Cooper’s Bluff, overlooking Long Island Sound, and listening while he recited Swinburne in a high-pitched singsong voice:
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
But there were notable chinks in all this gloom, moments even in the diary when he was unable any longer to deny his own good cheer or outright exuberance. It was only a few weeks after Theodore’s death when he confided to Conie that he felt not nearly so sad as he had expected to. He is “astonished,” he says later in the diary, at how readily he goes about his daily life “as if nothing had happened.” And as summer begins he is feeling so very good at times, his spirits so high, that he can no longer hold back. “I could not be happier,” he writes, but then immediately feels obliged to justify this. It would be “wrong,” he says, for him to be anything other than cheerful; “. . . and besides, I am of a very buoyant temper, being a bit of an optimist. Had a glorious 20-mile ride on Lightfoot, cantering the whole time.”
It was a summer of tremendous highs and lows. At Harvard, the week before his final examinations, his asthma had returned. (It was for “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma,” he explains, that he did so poorly in French.) He had yearned as never before for the “wilds” of Oyster Bay, to be in the woods again, to be on horseback, to be out alone on the water in his rowboat. One day in July he rowed alone all the way across the Sound to Rye Beach and back again. Elliott was the sailor, as Conie explained, while “Theodore craved the actual effort of the arms and back.” He “loved to row in the hottest sun, over the roughest water, in the smallest boat. . .”
He ran, he hiked, rain or shine; he blasted away with a new Sharps rifle at birds, bottles, almost anything in sight. On one “tramp” he went twenty-five miles “through awful places.”
Some days in the diary he seems about to burst with his joyous outdoor freedom. He turns to one of his father’s favorite passages in the Bible: “For ye shall goout with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing . . .” “Oyster Bay is the perfection of a place for fellows,” he declares. “I wonder if anyone could have a happier time than I...” It is August 9, a date he has marked heavily in black, as it is now six months since Theodore’s death.
Yet one senses a darker undercurrent, a kind of desperate, underlying frenzy bespeaking anger and fear. The pace of his activities is punishing, sometimes cruel. It is as if he is striking back at something, taking it out on Lightfoot, his horse, taking it out on himself—do or die, literally. Annoyed by a neighbor’s dog on a morning ride, he shot and killed it, “rolling it over with my revolver very neatly as it ran alongside the horse,” he reports in the diary. The horse he rode so hard day after day that he all but ruined it.
From one or two comments he and others made long afterward, it appears there was also a romance that summer with Edith Carow, and that it too blew up in a fit of anger. The diary says nothing of any of this, but years later he would tell Bamie how close he and Edith had been, and that “we both of us had . . . tempers that were far from being of the best.”
By midsummer he was down with stomach troubles (his dreadful cholera morbus), then hit “pretty hard” by an attack of asthma in early September en route to the genuine wilds of Maine. He went with cousins West and Emlen and a doctor named Thompson.“Look out for Theodore,” the doctor is said to have advised their Maine guide. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.”
His fathers fatal illness, it had been concluded among the family, stemmed from a hike he had taken in Maine the previous summer. Theodore had strained himself somehow mountain climbing, during the stay at Mount Desert with Bamie. Beyond that there seemed no possible explanation why someone of such vigor—such a “splendid mechanism”—could have been brought down. With his Maine guide, a large, bearded, kindly man named William Sewall, a man as large as Theodore had been, the boy now hiked twenty, thirty miles a day, all such feats being recorded in his diary, just as during another summer in the mountains of Switzerland when he was ten.
“I feel sorry for the country...” Theodore had told the boy in his last letter. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.” He would keep his fathers letters always, the boy vowed. They were to be his “talismans against evil.”
Death and political defeat had coincided in the life of “the one I loved dearest on earth.” It is not known for certain that he or others in the family made a direct connection between what had happened at the hands of Senator Conkling and the tragedy that befell Theodore and thus all of them so soon afterward. But it is almost inconceivable that they would not have made such a connection and have felt it deeply.
President Hayes, true to his word, had refused to concede defeat over the Customhouse. That same summer of 1878, with Congress in recess, he simply fired Chester Arthur and put Edwin Merritt in his place. The appointment was subsequently endorsed by the Senate (the Democrats had since gained a majority), the Conkling forces were rolled back. So had Theodore lived, he would have been made Collector after all, and his political fortunes thereafter might have been considerable. Instead, he had died a loser. If not exactly killed off by Conkling, he had been unhorsed, made to look foolish and impotent in a battle known to the entire country.
So what should a noble boy and namesake make of that? How should one respond to the downfall of Greatheart?
It is easy enough to speculate about all this, tempting to see an edge of vengeance in the career that was to follow. Allegedly, the family resolved to have nothing more to do with politics. But in fact we really do not know what was resolved, if anything. The future was very much on the young man’s mind; this we do know from the Private Diary. “I should like to be a scientist,” he declared only a few months after Theodore’s death. He felt he had aged since the tragedy. He tried to picture himself a man as head of a family of his own. “I so wonder who my wife will be! ‘A rare and radiant maiden,’ I hope; one who will be as sweet, pure, and innocent as she is wise. Thank heaven I am at least perfectly pure.”
“How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name,” he would write in the diary. For the moment, however, having had a private talk with James Alfred, he decided to think only of his remaining two years at Harvard, resolving to study hard and to conduct himself “like a brave Christian gentleman.”