“Teedie” Roosevelt, age four, and Will Taft, age seven.
WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT WAS BORN on September 15, 1857, in a two-story yellow brick house in a fashionable neighborhood on Mt. Auburn, one of the hills surrounding Cincinnati. Six days after his birth, his father, Alphonso, proudly noted to a friend: “Louise is getting along astonishing well and the baby is fat & healthy.” In the hours after the birth, he explained, Louise “had a fair prospect of milk and on the 3d day the boy had plenty,” but a few days later, the infant’s “clamorous appetite” necessitated a wet nurse to supplement his mother’s milk supply. The plump, ravenous new baby provided welcome relief to his parents. Their first child, Samuel, had been frail from birth and had died of whooping cough at fourteen months, the year before Will was born.
At two months, his mother recorded, Will was “very large for his age, and grows fat every day.” Indeed, she noted with amazement and pride, “he has such a large waist, that he cannot wear any of the dresses that we made with belts.” While his rapid growth kept her busy making ever larger clothes, she “took great comfort” in his “perfect good health” and his fullness of flesh. “The care of him fills in some measure the void left by Sammy’s death,” she wrote her mother, “but I am constantly thinking how interesting [Sammy] would be now if he had lived and how pleasant to have two little boys growing up together.”
Will’s sweet, open nature was evident from infancy. “He spreads his hands to anyone who will take him and his face is wreathed in smiles at the slightest provocation,” Louise told her sister, Delia Torrey. His parents admired his cherubic face, “a solitary dimple in one cheek,” his eyes“deeply, darkly, beautifully blue.” Finding great pleasure and solace in her “healthy, fast-growing boy,” Louise happily acquiesced to his insistence “upon being held whenever he is awake,” even if she felt her “hands and feet were tied” to the child. “Mother would think it poor management,” she confided in Delia, “but I do not understand making him take care of himself.” Her torment at losing her firstborn had convinced her that children “are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time.” Parents, she firmly believed, could never “love their children too much.”
Louise Torrey came from a line of strong, intelligent women. Her mother, Susan Waters Torrey, had studied philosophy and astronomy at Amherst Academy and possessed a vibrant intellectual curiosity, an interest in antislavery politics, and an appreciation for art. After her marriage to merchant Samuel Torrey, they settled in Boston, where she relished the rich culture and lively debates over the critical issues of the day. To her “great disappointment,” her husband, hopeful that country air would improve his health, moved the family to the small town of Millbury, Massachusetts. In Millbury, her spirits plummeted. “She has great mental and physical activity,” her daughter Delia noted, “and there is not a man or woman in town with whom she can have any satisfactory intellectual conversation.” Lacking any immediate outlet for her talents and energy, she shared the frustration of many educated women in the mid-nineteenth century. “Mother, you know, is very ambitious,” Delia dryly wrote Louise, “and ambition in a woman is synonymous with unhappiness.”
Resolved to give her daughters opportunity for intellectual development and involvement in a broader world, Susan Torrey exposed Louise and Delia to good literature, lyceum lectures in Boston, theatre in New York. They studied for a time in New Haven, Connecticut, and attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Cherishing their freedom, they taught at Monson Academy in Maine, studied music, attended opera, and traveled together through Canada, New England, and New York. Both rejected eligible suitors in favor of their own liberated lives. When one disappointed young man upbraided Delia for willfulness, she retorted: “If ‘ladies of strong minds seldom marry,’ I suppose the reverse proves true and ladies with weak minds usually do. I prefer to belong to the first class even though it precluded me from marrying.”
Louise was twenty-six when she was introduced to forty-three-year-old Alphonso Taft at the home of her uncle, Reverend Samuel Dutton, pastor of North Church in New Haven, a meeting that would alter her existence in an unexpectedly domestic direction. Alphonso had grown up on a small farm in West Townsend, Vermont, the only child of Peter Rawson Taft and Sylvia Howard. “One day in an oat field,” he later recalled, he “first told his father of his dream of going to college.” The expense would be a hardship for the family, but “to the boy’s intense delight,” his parents decided to support his education. To help out, Alphonso taught school in Vermont for several years before entering Yale. He made the 140-mile trek from Vermont to New Haven on foot. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa, he taught in a boarding school for two years and then returned to Yale, where he became a tutor and studied law. “He had sacrificed so much and had been so earnest in his pursuit of an education,” his youngest son Horace observed, “that everything that he learned in college was sacred in his eyes.”
Although Alphonso had initially hoped to practice law in New York, a short stay there changed his mind: “I feel well assured I might make a living in that city, but I dont think it the place for me,” he concluded. “I dislike the character of the New York Bar exceedingly. . . . Money is the all in all . . . nothing else brings honor.” He decided instead to go west, finding “the Queen City” of Cincinnati a far more congenial place. “There are no such high partition walls here, between different classes,” he wrote his mother. “Here & there a family is beginning to stiffen up & assume consequential airs, but they are comparatively few.” Perhaps most significant to a man who had striven so hard for his own education, Alphonso found Cincinnati “honourably famous for its free schools,” as the visiting Charles Dickens noted, “of which it has so many that no person’s child among its population can by possibility want the means of education.”
While studying for the Ohio bar, Alphonso clerked in the office of a fellow Vermonter with an established practice. In these early years, he depended for his livelihood on the small sums his parents could send. “I have not spent one dollar,” he assured them in 1839, “not a farthing for any amusement, or for anything which was not a matter of immediate, & necessary use.” With hard work and untiring discipline, he succeeded in building a successful practice that allowed him to buy the substantial two-story house on Mt. Auburn set back from the street on a stretch of green lawn. There he lived with his first wife, Fanny, an intelligent, scholarly young woman, until tuberculosis took her life at twenty-nine. She left him with two sons, Charley, ten, and Peter, six.
Though Alphonso was seventeen years older than Louise Torrey when they met in New Haven, his handsome face, muscular physique, and abundant energy bridged the years between them. She agreed to marry in 1853 and moved with him to Cincinnati, where she grew to love her “noble husband” with a heart “full of a deep and quiet joy.” For his part, Alphonso rejoiced in the affection Louise showed his two older sons, who came to love her as if she were their own mother. “I do feel under the greatest obligation to you, my dear Louise, for the great care and attention you have given to the lads,” he wrote to her several years before Will’s birth.
Within months of her marriage, Louise confided to Delia that she had “the best husband in the United States.” For Delia, the loss of her sister’s companionship was devastating. “Oh, Louise, Louise how can I live the rest of my life without you?” she lamented. “I am but half of a pair of scissors.” As the months passed, however, the gentle Alphonso made Delia an integral part of her sister’s new family.
The family expanded rapidly after Will’s birth, eventually containing six children including Charley and Peter. Henry Waters (always called Harry) was born two years after Will, followed quickly by Horace Dutton, and finally by a long-desired girl named Fanny in honor of Alphonso’s first wife. As the children grew, good-natured Will remained the center of his parents’ affection. “I had more pride in Willie than in all the rest,” Louise acknowledged. “Willie is foremost,” agreed Alphonso, “and I am inclined to think he will always be so.” Rather than displaying the jealousy this favored status might easily have provoked, Will’s siblings responded to his “simplicity, courage, honesty, and kindliness”—qualities he shared with his father—with devoted affection. “If flattery or admiration could have spoiled him he would have been ruined before he emerged from childhood,” Horace recalled, but “his personality made him a favorite everywhere.” The younger brother’s fond dedication to Will never wavered. “It was very hard for anybody to be near him without loving him,” Horace recollected when he had passed his eightieth birthday.
Even as his family grew and his career flourished, Alphonso Taft was rarely able to relinquish the rigid self-discipline that had enabled him to forge a comfortable existence. “Scarcely a night would pass that he was not bent over a table deep in papers or books he had brought from his office,” William’s biographer Henry Pringle notes. “We might almost as well ask a train of cars to go out of its course to carry a passenger,” Delia lovingly observed, “as to expect Mr. Taft to turn aside from his business for the pursuit of pleasure.” To Alphonso, work and family were paramount, and in that order.
Living on the wooded slope of Mt. Auburn with the entire city below “spread out before you like a map” gave the children “the advantages of both city and country,” Horace recalled. Left to their own devices, the children rambled and explored. In the nearby pond, “we learned to swim, but not because anybody taught us. . . . We went fishing or on long hikes . . . we had plenty of games, but they were not organized.” Looking back years later, Horace wished that they “had been taught to sail, or to rough it,” been exposed more to the woods, been challenged by experiences that would have broadened their education. If not adventurous, the life he remembered seemed “wholesome and natural.”
Many citizens of Cincinnati, linked to the South through commerce, sympathized with the Confederacy when the Civil War broke out, but Alphonso had long held anti-slavery views. He had been a delegate to the first Republican Convention in 1856, and after Ohio’s Salmon Chase failed to secure the presidential nomination in 1860, he supported Abraham Lincoln. He sold government bonds, delivered speeches promoting emancipation, and argued government cases against the Copperhead faction at the request of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. When news of General Lee’s surrender came, “the city fairly blossomed with flags, and everybody turned out to join in a rejoicing which included all parties,” Louise told her sister. “Almost every house on Mt. Auburn was lighted to its utmost extent and many were luxuriously ornamented.” Hours after the celebration came word of Lincoln’s assassination. “The transition from such a jubilee to the unlooked-for calamity of the next morning seemed too great to be believed,” she lamented. “The symbols of joy which had been universal were turned into mourning, and the city is draped and creped from one end to the other.”
Eight months after the war ended, Alphonso was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Cincinnati Superior Court bench. The following year, he was elected to a full term on the Republican ticket, and two years afterward, he was nominated and elected to the court by both Republicans and Democrats. “He was . . . a born judge,” his son Horace proudly remembered. “He had the judicial temperament, the moral courage, the ability and patience.”
The most important opinion Judge Taft rendered on the superior court upheld the right of the local school board to prohibit the reading of the Bible in public schools. He argued in a dissenting opinion that “the Constitution of the State did not recognize the Christian religion any more than it recognized the religions of any other citizens of the state” and that “the school board had an obligation as well as a right to keep religious partisanship out of the public schools.” Alphonso was forever proud of his opinion, even though it prompted fierce opposition from conservatives.
For Alphonso, nothing equaled the honor of his judicial calling; indeed, he could envision no office higher than a seat on the Supreme Court. “To be Chief Justice of the United States,” he told Salmon Chase after Lincoln had announced Chase’s appointment to the Court, “is more than to be President, in my estimation.” Nonetheless, after six years on the superior court, Alphonso recognized that his judicial salary could not meet the expenses involved in educating his large family. Reluctantly, he resigned his judgeship and returned to private practice. “No leader of the Bar ever left the court feeling that his case had been too difficult or deep for the Judge’s understanding and learning,” a distinguished lawyer wrote at the time of his resignation. “No beginner at the Bar ever left feeling that the case had been too small and unimportant for the Judge’s patience and kindness.”
Over the years, Alphonso became increasingly involved in the community life of Cincinnati. As a city councilman, he fought to extend the city line to annex a newly built section so that “rich real estate holders” living there would have to pay “their just share of taxes.” He joined future president Rutherford B. Hayes, future Supreme Court justice Stanley Matthews, and lawyer John W. Herron, Nellie’s father, as charter members of the Literary Club. And Alphonso and Louise were instrumental in founding the House of Refuge, a progressive reform school designed to return delinquent children to “the path of virtue and integrity.” Taking a liberal perspective, Alphonso argued that “these children are unfortunate rather than criminal.” Their delinquency, he maintained, was “not the product of nature” but rather of the “cruel circumstances” into which they were born.
At the suggestion of a group of prominent Republicans, Alphonso allowed his name to be put forward as a candidate for governor of Ohio. Though he lost at the convention to his friend Rutherford Hayes, in large part because of widespread opposition to his position on school prayer, his unblemished reputation for being “as honest as the day is long” caught the attention of President Ulysses S. Grant, who brought him into his cabinet. He served first as secretary of war and then as attorney general during Grant’s final months in office, where he was seen as a representative of the “reform element” against the “old regime.” While he enjoyed his short stint in Washington, he was happy to return to his beloved Cincinnati and resume the practice of law.
Alphonso and Louise supported and expected excellence in their children, pushing them at every level to succeed in their studies. Charley attended Yale and went on to Columbia Law School. Peter followed his brother to Yale, graduating first in his class with the best record ever achieved to that time. The pressure upon Will, his parents’ favorite child, to match the sterling records of his older half brothers created anxiety. From his grammar school days, he had to work harder than his fellow students to succeed. His tendency to procrastinate when anxious about assignments further intensified his nervousness. In the afternoons he was frequently seen reading under a tree on the grassy lawn in the front of his house. He was ridiculed by passing neighborhood boys for not playing ball, mocked because he was a “fatty,” a “lubber” who could not keep up in their rough-and-tumble games. “If you can’t walk,” they taunted, “we’ll roll you, old butter ball.” Refusing to be provoked, he merely smiled and returned to his book.
The desire to please his parents became central to young Taft’s temperament and development. At the age of seven he was reading, but his mother had to work with him in “arithmetic and writing.” “He means to be a scholar and studies well,” Alphonso proudly recorded. “I have never had any little boy show a better spirit in that respect.” When he fell to fifth in his class, Alphonso tersely declared: “Mediocrity will not do for Will.” By the age of twelve, his last year in grammar school, he ranked first in his class, earning both his school’s highest medal and his father’s praise.“His average was 95,” Alphonso told Delia, “and the nearest to him averaged 85. This was doing uncommonly well, and makes us all very happy.” His younger brothers were conscientious students as well, placing second and third in their respective classes. “We felt that the sun shone brighter if we brought home good reports,” Horace recalled. Yet each successful performance only fueled higher expectations, giving Will, who drove himself intensely to perform, little peace. Years later, his mother realized the mechanism they had unwittingly fostered: “Love of approval,” she acknowledged, became her adored son’s “besetting fault.”
In the summer of 1869, when Will was eleven, Alphonso and Louise sailed to Europe to join their older sons, Charley and Peter, who were studying and traveling abroad with the aid of $50,000 bequeathed to each upon the death of their maternal grandfather, Judge Phelps. For Charley, Europe proved life-altering, awakening a love of music, art, and theatre that would continue to deepen in the years ahead. Of all the Taft boys, Charley seemed best able to balance study and relaxation. For Peter, the most brilliant yet brittle of the brothers, the desire to meet his father’s expectations produced a chronic state of nervous exhaustion, marked by headaches and eye trouble. His family hoped that the year in Europe would restore his spirits.
Will and his younger siblings remained behind during this European sojourn, missing excursions to historical sites in England, Italy, and Germany that would likely have provided far more vivid and spacious lessons than the daily round of class work in their local grammar school. In their letters from abroad, the parents suggested readings that would connect their sons to their various stops along the way. When they reached Liverpool, Louise advised Will to “read up in the Gazetteer and Encyclopedia of this the greatest harbor in the world,” trusting that the knowledge his parents were there would “make his geography real & impressive to him.” Writing from Rome, where he had visited the supposed site of Julius Caesar’s assassination at the base of Pompey’s colossal statue, Alphonso re-created for Will the story of Caesar’s rivalry with Pompey and the struggle with the senators that led to his death.
In the fall of 1870, Will entered rigorous Woodward High, a public school for college-bound students in downtown Cincinnati. His years there were marked by the same pattern of hard work, procrastination, and an anxiety driven by his need to maintain the family standard of excellence. In his study of Taft’s early education, the historian David Burton concludes that Will left high school with “a mastery of fact and a commitment to disciplined study, rather than a sense of an intellectual adventure.” Horace Taft, who eventually became a celebrated educator, recalled the learning environment of their childhood home and concluded that “the most conspicuous thing about it was its limitations. My father was very ambitious for all of his children but, like most Americans of that day, thought of education as a school affair and as connected almost exclusively with the school curriculum. . . . We had no music, no art, no mechanical training, and our reading was done with very little guidance.” So long as his children worked hard and performed well, Alphonso believed his obligation regarding their education had been met.
The winter of Will’s senior year, his brother Charley, who was then practicing law in Cincinnati, married Annie Sinton, the only daughter of the city’s wealthiest man, iron king David Sinton. Charley’s wedding to Annie Sinton was “the great social event” of the year. Long afterward, Nellie Herron Taft, who was twelve at the time, recalled the excitement of the gala staged at the splendid Sinton mansion situated at the top of her street. A long and happy marriage commenced when the young couple moved into that mansion with Annie’s widowed father. Charley would eventually leave the law to become publisher of the Cincinnati Times, which merged into the Evening Star to form the Times-Star, a Taft family holding for the next seven decades. Over the years, Charley accrued considerable wealth that would help provide a foundation for Will’s public service career.
Even as a high school student, Will began to develop a progressive sensitivity informed by the feminist teachings of his mother and grandmother. His inclinations for social justice were reflected in a thoughtful essay he wrote during his senior year. “The result of coeducation of the sexes shows clearly that there is no mental inferiority on the part of the girls,” he asserted. These views echoed the liberal views of his mother, who was incensed by an article in the New York Times suggesting that “from their constitutional peculiarities girls cannot be pushed in school as rapidly as can boys.” Moving beyond coeducation, Will argued for woman’s suffrage. “Give the woman the ballot, and you will make her more important in the eyes of the world.” The right to vote, he optimistically predicted, would beget other benefits. “Every woman would then be given an opportunity to earn a livelihood. She would suffer no decrease in compensation for her labor, on account of her sex. . . . It becomes this country, as a representative of liberty, to lead in this great reform.”
Will graduated second in his high school class, with an average of 91, earning him an acceptance at Yale. Still, his father expressed concern about his work habits, citing a teacher who believed the only obstacle to Will’s achieving great success was laziness. Despite the affection his parents showered on young Will, the impression remains that he never experienced their love as a steady force, but rather as a conditional reward dependent upon his achievements.
When he entered Yale, Will stood over six feet tall and weighed 225 pounds, quickly earning him the admiring nickname “Big Bill.” His affable disposition and genial companionship with students of all backgrounds combined to make him the most popular man in the freshman class. “To see his large bulk come solidly and fearlessly across the campus,” one classmate enthused, “is to take a fresh hold on life.” Observing him walk through the college auditorium was “like seeing a dreadnaught launched.” When the sophomore class challenged the freshmen to a tug-of-war, the freshman team proved seriously outmatched, its members “dragged bodily down the field” until Big Bill entered the fray, anchored the rope, and hauled his classmates back, inch by inch, to victory.
Academics came less easily for Will; he found his courses in Latin, Greek, and mathematics especially difficult. “I begin to see how a fellow can study all the time and still not have perfect [marks],” he warned his father only days after the semester had begun. Nevertheless, when grades were posted after six weeks, his tireless efforts placed him in the first division, where he was joined by his good friend from Cincinnati, Howard Hollister. “It is not more than we expected,” Louise told Delia. “Now that the best scholars are in one division, the motive for effort, incited by constant comparison with each other is very strong, inspiring them with unflagging ambition.” The added pressure only aggravated Will’s distress. There was no respite so long as self-esteem depended on the approval of his parents. “Another week of this ‘dem’d horrid grind,’ has passed by . . . I am somewhat embarrassed in this first division,” Taft confessed to his father. “You expect great things of me but you mustn’t be disappointed if I don’t come up to your expectations.” Despite the worry of such expectations, the fact that Will was able to speak openly to his father about his fears indicates the depth of their relationship.
He did not try out for football, baseball, or crew. His father “had other ideas,” Taft recalled years later, insisting he focus solely on his class work. Nor was Alphonso pleased to hear that his social son had been elected president of Delta Kappa and taken into Skull and Bones. “I doubt that such popularity is consistent with high scholarship,” he warned. Will disagreed: “If a man has to be isolated from his class in order to take a high stand I dont want a high stand. The presidency of Delta Kap takes none of my time except so much as I spend on Saturday night which I sh’d use any how. There’s got to be some relaxation.” This brief spark of rebellion was quickly doused as Will settled into a structured regimen that produced the expected academic distinction. Rising at half past six, he studied before breakfast, followed by prayers, morning recitation, lunch, and afternoon recitation until three o’ clock. Then he went to the gym for half an hour and studied until his last recitation at five. If he had time before dinner he would stop by the post office in hopes of finding letters from home, and then work until ten or even eleven at night.
“As a scholar, he stood high,” a fellow classmate, Herbert Bowen, recalled; more important, “he towered above us all as a moral force.” He was the class leader, directing all manner of college activities, from the literary board to the junior prom. He listened sympathetically to the troubles of his fellow students, who regularly sought his counsel. His classmates found him “safe and comforting,” always ready to “come up with a cheery bit of wholesome discourse.” Without a single dissenting vote, Taft’s colleagues affectionately appointed him “father” of their graduating year and long remembered his perpetual smile and rumbling, hearty laugh. In sum, Bowen writes, he “was the most admired and respected man not only in my class, but in all Yale.”
Nonetheless, David Burton concludes, “there was little in his academic training at Yale to suggest that learning was exciting for him, a galvanizing experience.” Rather, Will was conditioned to regard his subjects “as hurdles to be taken on the way to a degree.” When a younger student inquired about setting himself “a course of outside reading” to facilitate a deeper immersion in French and German literature and culture, Will Taft advised: “Don’t do it. Get over it. You mustn’t try to be too independent, just yet. These University professors have laid out a course, and it’s the result of their long experience, while you—well, this is just your first trial at educating anybody. . . . You’d just better stick to the course.”
In the spring of his sophomore year, Will delivered an oration on the continued vitality of the Democratic Party, tracing its history from Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to the present day. Despite his own strong Republican leanings, he could appreciate and praise various Democratic leaders, noting in particular Jackson’s “hard common sense which is only acquired by knocking about among the masses.” Even at this young age, his biographer observes, “Taft was judicial beyond the comprehensions of a Theodore Roosevelt,” who not long thereafter would write a paper at Harvard accusing Jefferson of “criminal folly” and labeling Jackson “a spoilsman before anything else.”
Taft would recall one professor above all, the political economist William Graham Sumner, who, he said, “had more to do with stimulating my mental activities than any one under whom I studied during my entire course.” Considered one of the most gifted educators of his generation, Sumner lectured to classes packed not only with eager students but with professors from various universities “seeking the secret of his success.” An impassioned advocate of laissez-faire and social Darwinism, of property rights and economic freedom, Sumner was an apostle for the gospel of wealth, the reigning philosophy of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age that followed the Civil War.
Sumner passionately rejected concerns about the consolidation of business and the excessive concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, arguing on the contrary that wealthy business leaders like John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt should be lionized. Through their enterprise, ingenuity, and capital, America had become the world’s leading industrial power, capable of building more railroads, producing more oil and steel, manufacturing more clothing, appliances, and consumer goods than any other nation on earth. “If we should set a limit to the accumulation of wealth,” he argued, “we should say to our most valuable producers, ‘We do not want you to do us the services which you best understand how to perform, beyond a certain point.’ It would be like killing off our generals in war.”
Will absorbed Sumner’s central teaching—that property rights demanded protection against the onslaught of radical theories and socialist ideals. Like Sumner, he argued that “princely profits” represented the just reward for “the men of judgment, courage and executive ability who have conceived and executed the great enterprises.” Unlike Sumner, however, he did not place the businessman at “the highest pinnacle of honor and trust.” Nor did he regard property rights as absolute, deserving precedence at every turn over human rights. From his father he had learned that the man who devoted himself to his community—“the lawyer who makes man’s peace with man; the doctor who makes his peace with Nature; the minister who makes his peace with God”—deserved greater praise than the man who pursued wealth for its own sake. Wealth was honorable only to the extent that it contributed to the well-being of the community.
Honors were showered upon Will Taft during his senior year. His proud father boasted to Delia in late October 1877 that Will had been chosen by his classmates to be class orator, “the greatest prize in college,” valedictorian notwithstanding. “He has in this respect surpassed his older brothers,” Alphonso noted. “The honor too is of the historical kind which will not be forgotten by his class.” He would “have his hands full, however,” Alphonso explained, for the chosen student was expected to deliver “a long speech of half an hour to the class, carefully written & committed, & practiced.”
Almost immediately, as Will anticipated his performance, anxiety set in. Two months after his selection, with more than five months left to prepare, he so agonized over his insufficient progress that he determined to forgo Christmas vacation in Cincinnati. “We shall regret that Willie cannot come home, but believe he does right in giving time to the great work,” Alphonso wrote Delia. “I rely on his strength of purpose, & of intellect to accomplish it all and raise his reputation every time.” As spring approached, Will lamented that his oration was “coming on slowly.” Though he had settled upon his theme, he had not formulated how to present it. A month later he was still struggling, “finding it rather difficult to adapt its tone to the occasion.” Another vacation was spent toiling in New Haven alone.
In the end, young Taft delivered a splendid oration before an overflow crowd at the Battell Chapel. “The sound of approaching music was heard,” the New York Times reported, “followed by the measured tramp of the Class of ’78, as in long line they filed up the aisle and took their places for the last time in their accustomed seats, where they would listen to the address of the Class Orator.” No accolade could have pleased Taft more than the comparisons to his father drawn by the Times. “The orator in physique, in the method of handling his subject, and in style of oratory, presented some strong resemblances to his distinguished father. The address was characterized throughout by a transparency of thought, a clearness of statement, and an appearance of manly sincerity.”
In the weeks before his graduation, Will had grown increasingly alarmed and troubled by news that his brother Peter had suffered a nervous breakdown and been committed to a private hospital for the insane in College Hill, Ohio. “I wish you could get Peter to come to Commencement,” he beseeched his father. “We might turn his thoughts back to his college days and ease his mind considerably. President [Noah] Porter asked about him. I told him that we thought he was suffering from some mental disease.”
Before his breakdown, Peter had begun practicing law in Cincinnati. There he met and married Tillie Hulbert, daughter of another prominent and wealthy local family. Unfortunately, his marriage did not share the productive harmony of Charley’s. The union shortly proved disastrous, and his old anxieties multiplied. “Peter continues so strange,” his mother confided to her sister. “He is very cross to Tillie and quarrels about everything in the arrangement of the house. He . . . puts in partitions, buys paper, carpets & furniture and changes the position of everything in the house in opposition to Tillie’s wishes.” Tormented by a series of ailments, including wild mood swings and a recurrence of the mysterious eye trouble that rendered him unable to read, Peter began the first of several treatments at the sanitarium.
“I am doing my best to be reconciled to the treatment in this institution,” he wrote his father. “You have thought it best, and whatever your judgment thinks best I shall obey. But the course here is very hard. The Doctor gives me a kind of tonic that heats my head very much, and makes my mind so sensitive that any exercise of it deprives me of rest at night. . . . You are proceeding on a mistaken theory in my case. What I need is, not to be shut off from you and the family, but to be drawn to you and made to feel your love. . . . It seems to me that I am on a downward path. Whatever is the result of treatment, remember always that I, your son, love you more than I do any living mortal, and I respect your will above all others.” Despite the entreaties of both Will and Peter himself, Alphonso decided that Peter should remain in the hospital rather than join the family at Yale.
On June 27, 1878, Will Taft was honored as salutatorian of his class, having surpassed all of his 132 classmates save Clarence Hill Kelsey, who would become a lifelong friend.
Even as he prepared to enter Cincinnati Law School the following fall, much of Will’s motivation continued to stem from his father’s high expectations rather than from any strong internal drive. Indeed, years later, Taft would credit his father’s indomitable will and lofty aspirations in prompting his own achievements. When his father lay dying, he described this enveloping paternal spirit to Nellie: “I have a kind of presentiment that Father has been a kind of guardian angel to me in that his wishes for my success have been so strong and intense as to bring it, and that as his life ebbs away and ends I shall cease to have the luck which has followed me thus far.”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS BORN THIRTEEN months after Will Taft, on October 27, 1858, in a four-story town house at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan. “Teedie,” as he was nicknamed, was by his own admission “a sickly and timid boy . . . a wretched mite,” whose childhood was shaped by an assortment of troubling ailments, the most dangerous of which was asthma. When these agonizing attacks came, he found himself frantically gasping for breath, terrified he would suffocate. “Nobody seemed to think I would live,” he recalled. His younger sister, Corinne, remarked on the irony that “Theodore Roosevelt, whose name later became the synonym of virile health and vigor, was a fragile, patient sufferer in those early days of the nursery.” His fierce determination to escape an invalid’s fate led him to transform his body and timid demeanor through strenuous work; Taft, on the other hand, blessed from birth with robust health, would allow his physical strength and energy to gradually dissipate over the years into a state of obesity.
During the worst of Teedie’s asthmatic attacks, when the constriction in his chest made sleep impossible, his father comforted him with “great and loving care.” “Some of my earliest remembrances are of nights when he would walk up and down with me,” Roosevelt later wrote. “I could breathe, I could sleep, when he had me in his arms.” If carrying the gasping child from room to room around the house proved inadequate, Theodore Senior drove him with horse and carriage through the gaslit city streets, hoping that the chill gusts of wind would fill the boy’s lungs with air.“My father—he got me breath, he got me lungs, strength—life.”
Teedie’s father, known as “Thee,” was the youngest of five sons born to Margaret and Cornelius Van Shaack Roosevelt, a glass merchant who had amassed a substantial fortune in real estate and banking. Considered “one of the five richest men in New York,” C.V.S. hired tutors to educate his sons in the basement study of his imposing brick mansion on Union Square. Instead of enrolling Thee in college, which he feared would “spoil” him, C.V.S. sent him on a Grand Tour of Europe when he turned nineteen. Returning from the year abroad, Thee followed his older brother, James, into the family business. As the years went by, however, his keen sense of social justice began to shift his focus from the firm. Increasingly, he was drawn to philanthropic efforts to improve the lives of the poor at a time when extravagant wealth and abject poverty stood side by side.
In 1853, at age twenty-one, Thee married seventeen-year-old Martha “Mittie” Bulloch, daughter of a high-spirited family from Roswell, Georgia. Mittie had been raised in Bulloch Hall, a white-columned antebellum plantation mansion, where every need was attended to by a dozen slaves. The story of their courtship suggests an intense attraction from the moment they met in Roswell when Mittie was only fifteen. They renewed their acquaintance when she came north to visit relatives in the spring of 1853, and within weeks they were engaged. A southern beauty with delicate features, blue eyes, black hair, and radiant skin, Mittie possessed a quick mind and playful sense of humor. She proved irresistible to a young man raised amid the staid gentility of the Roosevelts’ ordered social world.
In June, Thee came to Roswell to meet the members of the large Bulloch clan. “I am trying to school myself to coolly shaking hands with you when we meet—before the family,” Thee told her. After his visit, Mittie assured him she was now “confident” of her “own deep love,” confessing that “everything now seems associated with you. Even when I run up the stairs going to my own room, I feel as if you were near, and turn involuntarily to kiss my hand to you. I feel, dear Thee—as though you were part of my existence, and that I only live in your being.” Her words so thrilled Thee that he felt “the blood rush” to his temples, forcing him “to lay the letter down, for a few minutes to regain command” of himself. “O, Mittie,” he declared, “how deeply, how devotedly I love you!” Within four months, the young couple settled into their new 20th Street home, one of two adjoining houses that C.V.S. had purchased for Thee and his brother Robert.
Here, in the eight years that followed, four children were born: Anna, who was nicknamed “Bamie”; Theodore, Elliott, and Corinne. The advent of the Civil War, however, blasted the idyllic days of Thee and Mittie’s marriage. While Thee passionately supported the Union cause, Mittie remained loyal to her homeland. Her brother, two stepbrothers, and all the young men she had known in Georgia had enlisted in the Confederate Army. Before the outbreak of war, Mittie’s widowed mother, Martha, and her sister, Anna, had left Georgia and moved in with Thee and Mittie. Their plantation eventually fell into the hands of Union soldiers. “If I may judge at all of the embittered feeling of the South against the North by myself,” Martha told her daughter, “I would say they would rather be buried in one common grave than ever again live under the same government. I am confident I should.” The strain of a divided household took a toll on Mittie’s health. “I shudder to think of what she must have suffered,” Bamie later said. “I remember that Mother for a long time never came to the dinner table.” Unable to bear the inevitable arguments, she withdrew more and more to the sickroom, plagued by an assortment of ills: palpitations, stomach troubles, and debilitating headaches.
Thee suppressed his impulse to volunteer for the Union Army, fearing that it would destroy his fragile wife “for him to fight against her brothers.” Reluctantly, he decided to purchase a substitute. Although it seemed the only choice at the time, he “always afterwards felt that he had done a very wrong thing,” recalled Bamie, “in not having put every other feeling aside and joined the absolute fighting forces.” Thee worked tirelessly on behalf of the Union cause, devoting all his time and abundant energy to the great work of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, the Union League, the U.S. Allotment Commission, and the U.S. Employment Bureau, which found work for soldiers who had lost limbs, yet the decision not to enlist caused an indelible regret.
All four Roosevelt children idolized their father, “the most dominant figure” in their childhood, especially since their mother’s fragility absented her from so many of their activities. He was “the most intimate friend of each of his children,” Corinne recalled, “and we all craved him as our most desired companion.” Theodore described the joyful anticipation when “we used to wait in the library in the evening until we could hear his key rattling in the latch of the front hall, and then rush out to greet him.” Bamie was convinced “there was never anyone so wonderful” as her father, while Elliott marveled that “he was one of those rare grown men who seem never to forget that they were once children themselves.” He took the children sailing on the swan boats in Central Park and brought them to museums. He tutored them in riding (first on Shetland ponies and then saddle horses) and in tree-climbing, pointing out “the dead limbs” to avoid.
In contrast to Alphonso Taft, who was rarely able to “turn aside from his business for the pursuit of pleasure,” the elder Theodore Roosevelt skillfully balanced work and leisure in his family’s life. “I never knew anyone who got greater joy out of living than did my father,” Theodore declared, “or any one who more whole-heartedly performed every duty.” His hard work in both business and philanthropic activities never precluded a rich social life. He reveled in the company of friends at dinner parties, relished a good cigar, danced into the early morning hours, and raced his four-in-hand coach through the streets. While acknowledging the often cruel class divisions that drove Alphonso from New York, he saw the city “not so much for what it was as for what it might become” under enlightened leadership. In an era when assistance to the poor remained mainly in the hands of private charity, Thee developed a sterling reputation for his dedication to improving the lives of tenement children through his work with the Newsboys’ Lodging House, the Children’s Aid Society, Miss Sattery’s School for Italian Children, and the Five Points Mission.“Father was the finest man I ever knew, and the happiest,” Roosevelt later told his journalist friend Jacob Riis.
Their father’s affection and vitality compelled the Roosevelt children to surmount serious physical ailments. Bamie was deformed at birth by a severe curvature of the spine which gave her a hunchbacked appearance. Elliott was afflicted by what were considered epileptic attacks. Corinne, like Teedie, suffered from asthma, though her illness was not as severe as her brother’s. Concern with the children’s health prompted Thee to arrange home tutoring rather than send them to school. They were taught the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic by Mittie’s sister, Anna, but their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encouraged pursuit of their special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urged them to recite poetry. In addition, their mother provided a romantic and engaging perspective on history through accounts of her childhood in the vanished world of plantations, slaves, and chivalrous codes.
Even at a young age, Teedie held a distinct place among his siblings; the asthma that had weakened his body seemed to have inordinately sharpened his mind and sensibilities. “From the very fact that he was not able originally to enter into the most vigorous activities,” Corinne noted, “he was always reading or writing” with a most unusual “power of concentration.” He especially loved animal stories, adventure tales, and inspiring chronicles of “men who were fearless” in battle. His voracious reading gave him a rich cache of ideas for stories of his own to entertain his younger sister and brother. “I can see him now struggling with the effort to breathe,” Corinne recalled, describing her eight-year-old brother’s winding serial narratives, “which never flagged in interest for us” though at times they “continued from week to week, or even from month to month.”
In the summers, Thee sought a broader field of educational activities for his children in the country, moving the family first to the Hudson Valley, and then to Oyster Bay, in the rambling house called Tranquillity—although Corinne wryly observed that “anything less tranquil than that happy home,” crowded with cousins and friends of all the children, “could hardly be imagined.” Her friends Edith Carow and Fanny Smith were regular visitors every summer. To Fanny Smith, these summer sojourns to Oyster Bay seemed a blissful round of “riding, driving, boating, picnicking, games and verse-writing—no day was long enough.” Fanny was so taken with “the extraordinary vitality and gusto with which the Roosevelt family invested life” that she felt as if they had all been “touch[ed] by the flame of the ‘divine fire.’ ”
In the woodlands surrounding the Roosevelts’ summer retreat, young Theodore’s avocation as a naturalist took shape. As he roamed the forest trails, he began to observe the birds, listening to their distinctive songs, carefully noting flight patterns, beak and bill shapes, and coloration. When his interest expanded to a wide range of animals, he studied in scientific books, and then took lessons, which his father arranged, from a professional taxidermist. He began to collect, prepare, and mount hundreds of meticulously labeled specimens. Encouraged by Thee, he set about establishing his own “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History,” with the fervent aspiration to become the next J. J. Audubon or Spencer Baird.
The expansive education the Roosevelt children enjoyed, with boundaries stretching far beyond the classroom, closely resembled the ideal of learning envisioned by Horace Taft, when he wished that he and his siblings had been exposed to the natural world, to the arts and music, to reading unconfined by pedantic needs and standards. Years later, when Roosevelt was president, he tried to interest Taft in birds and nature. “He loves the woods, he loves hunting,” Taft said of Roosevelt; “he loves roughing it, and I don’t.” On one occasion, when Taft served as Roosevelt’s secretary of war, he entered the Oval Office while Roosevelt was speaking with an ornithologist. Taft was anxious to talk about the Philippine tariff bill, but Roosevelt tried to engage Will in his discussion. “Sit down, Will, and we will talk about something more interesting; we’ll tell you something about birds,” the president exclaimed. Taft responded with a laugh: “I don’t believe that you can interest me in natural history, and I don’t want you to send me any more such books as you sent me the other day. I read it because you asked me to, and it took me nearly all night. What do I care about dog-wolves, and whether they help she-wolves in procuring food for their young. I don’t think I ever saw a wolf, and certainly . . . I am not interested in their domestic affairs.”
The same year that Alphonso and Louise traveled abroad, without Will and their younger children, Thee and Mittie took ten-year-old Teedie and the entire family to Europe for a twelve-month journey through England, Scotland, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France. Although Teedie, affectionately known within the family as “a great little home-boy,” sorely missed his childhood friends, particularly eight-year-old Edith, his faithful diary entries reveal scores of invigorating adventures. He traversed fields where the Wars of the Roses were fought, inspected the tombs at Westminster Abbey, stood astride the boundary of France and Italy, ascended Mt. Vesuvius, and admired the art treasures of the Vatican.
And always, the children were accompanied by books, allowing Teedie the occasional opportunity to withdraw into his own world. At the end of four months, before the trip was half over, he proudly announced that “we three” (the three younger children, Bamie being considered part of the “big people” world) had read fifty novels. Beyond works of popular fiction, the family carried a small library of classic history and literature, which Thee read aloud to stir discussion.
Although the European voyage answered Thee’s hopes “that a real education for his children would be acquired more easily through travel,” he feared that Teedie, whose asthma and stomach troubles had necessitated frequent days of bed rest, was becoming too familiar with illness, timidity, and frailty, too prone to retreat into invalidism. When they returned home, he took his young son aside. “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should,” he admonished. “You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.” Teedie responded immediately, according to Corinne, giving his father a solemn promise: “I’ll make my body.”
The boy threw himself into a strict regimen of strength and endurance training; week after week, month after month, he lifted weights and pulled himself up on horizontal bars. Methodically, he sought to expand “his chest by regular, monotonous motion—drudgery indeed,” first at Wood’s Gymnasium and then in the home gym his father constructed on the second floor. The fierce determination that had propelled Teedie to become a serious student of nature, a voracious reader, and a sensitive observer was now directed toward expanding his physical capabilities by refashioning his body. Years would pass before the potential of these labors would be actualized in an adult capacity and physique that made him an exemplar of “the strenuous life.”
In the meantime, his physical inferiority made him vulnerable to a humiliating experience that remained fresh in his mind forty years later. In his Autobiography, he recounted a stagecoach ride to Maine where he was set upon by two “mischievous” boys, who “proceeded to make life miserable” for him. Attempting to fight back, he discovered that either boy alone could handle him “with easy contempt.” The injury to his self-respect was such that he was determined never again to be so helpless. In addition to his regular exercise regimen, he began taking boxing lessons. “I was a painfully slow and awkward pupil,” he recalled, “and certainly worked two or three years before I made any perceptible improvement whatever.”
Transforming his body was only one step in the psychological struggle against what Teedie shamefully considered his “timid” nature. “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first,” he acknowledged, “but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.” As a childhood friend observed, “by constantly forcing himself to do the difficult or even dangerous thing,” he was able to cultivate courage as “a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will-power.”
When Teedie was fourteen, his family went abroad again. Rather than repeat the heady pace of their first sweep through the Continent, they spent an entire winter in Egypt, three weeks in Palestine, two weeks in Lebanon and Syria, three weeks in Athens, Smyrna, and Constantinople, and five months in Germany. None of the children benefited more from this remarkable journey than Teedie, whose romantic nature conjured visions of ancient lives entwined with his own. “We arrived in sight of Alexandria,” he wrote in his diary. “How I gazed on it! It was Egypt, the land of my dreams; Egypt the most ancient of all countries! A land that was old when Rome was bright, was old when Babylon was in its glory, was old when Troy was taken! It was a sight to awaken a thousand thoughts, and it did.”
In addition to the cultural sites, young Theodore was thrilled by the chance to observe and catalogue exotic species he had hitherto known only in books. This was his “first real collecting as a student of natural history.” During their two-month journey along the Nile in a private vessel, staffed by a thirteen-man crew, furnished with comfortable staterooms and a dining saloon, he was able clearly to perceive the habits of these entirely new birds and animals at close range, for finally, he had been fitted with spectacles that corrected his severe nearsightedness. “I had no idea,” he later said, “how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles.” In the mornings he and his father would go out shooting along the banks of the Nile, retrieving specimens to be skinned, dissected, preserved with chemicals, and labeled. “My first knowledge of Latin was obtained by learning the scientific names of the birds and mammals which I collected and classified.” His early dedication to such pursuits revealed “an almost ruthless single-mindedness where his interests were aroused,” one biographer, Carleton Putnam, observed, “suggestive of a purposeful, determined personality.”
Summer found the children in Dresden, where their father had arranged for them to live with a German family. Throughout that summer of 1873 and into the early fall, the daughter of the hosts was hired to teach them the German language, literature, music, and art. Teedie was so earnestly focused upon his studies, which occupied six hours of the day, that he asked to extend the lessons further. “And of course,” his younger brother Elliott complained, “I could not be left behind so we are working harder than ever in our lives.”
In the course of the year abroad, young Theodore had traveled by ship and by train, by stagecoach and on foot; he had stayed in hotels, inns, tents, and private homes. Armed with an innate curiosity and a discipline fostered by his remarkable father, he had obtained firsthand knowledge of the peoples and cultures in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Forty years later, Roosevelt remained appreciative of the opportunity afforded him. “This trip,” he wrote in An Autobiography, “formed a really useful part of my education.”
The family returned to a new home at 6 West 57th Street, a stately mansion with a fully equipped gymnasium for the children and a large space set aside in the garret to house Teedie’s ever-expanding taxidermy collection. Although the fifteen-year-old’s travels abroad had given him an unusually strong foundation in natural science, history, geography, and German, he was, in his own words, “lamentably weak in Latin and Greek and mathematics.” If he wished to enter an Ivy League school, he could not compete with students like Will Taft, who had mastered the strenuous program at Woodward High that fully prepared him for Yale. To fill the gaps in Teedie’s learning and prepare him for Harvard’s rigorous entrance examinations, his father hired a recent Harvard graduate, Arthur Cutler. Under Cutler’s tutelage, Teedie worked long hours every day and completed three years of college preparation in two. “The young man never seemed to know what idleness was,” marveled Cutler, “and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.”
Elliott also studied under the guidance of a tutor, but lacking his brother’s inner motivation and self-confidence, he proved unable to master subjects on his own. Even at thirteen, he worried about his future. “What will I become when I am a man,” he plaintively demanded of his father. Acknowledging that Teedie was “much quicker and [a] more sure kind of boy,” he pledged that he would “try to be as good . . . if [it] is in me, but it is hard.” Desiring perhaps to separate himself from daily competition with his brother, Elliott entreated his father to send him to St. Paul’s preparatory school. The summer before his entry, however, he suffered a series of mysterious seizures rooted, doctors believed, in a nervous disorder. Thee decided to postpone St. Paul’s, choosing instead to take his son to Europe on a business trip. In Liverpool, Elliott suffered another attack, more severe than any previous incident. “It produced congestion of the brain with all its attendant horrors of delirium,” Thee reported to Mittie. Two weeks later, Elliott remained ill. “I jump involuntarily at the smallest sound,” he confided in a letter to Teedie, “and have a perpetual headache (and nearly always in low spirits).”
Upon returning home, Elliott resumed working with his tutor, but his hopes were still set on St. Paul’s, where, he wrote his father, he “could make more friends” than studying at home. “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.” That fall, Thee agreed to let Elliott go to boarding school, but only a few weeks after arriving, he again fell ill. “During my Latin lesson, without the slightest warning,” he told his father, “I had a bad rush of blood to my head it hurt me so that I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out.” The boarding school experiment ended two months later when he “fainted just after leaving the table and fell down.” Teedie was sent to St. Paul’s to bring him home. Believing that a vigorous physical regimen would help, Thee sent his son to an Army post in Texas that built up his body but did little to cure his nervous disorder.
Meanwhile, Teedie’s systematic effort to prepare himself for Harvard paid off. “Is it not splendid about my examinations,” he triumphantly wrote Bamie. “I passed well on all the eight subjects I tried.” If he was intellectually prepared for college, however, he lacked the social skills of many of his fellow students. Years of ill health and home schooling had isolated him from regular contact with boys and girls outside his family circle. He entered Harvard at scarcely five feet eight inches tall and only 130 pounds, “a slender nervous young man with side-whiskers, eyeglasses, and bright red cheeks.” While Will Taft’s sturdy physique, genial disposition, and empathetic manner won immediate popularity at Yale, Theodore Roosevelt took longer to establish a core group of friends at Harvard. He worried initially about the “antecedents” of the people he met, maintaining distance from classmates until he could determine whether their families shared the Roosevelts’ station in life.
One contemporary remembers him as “studious, ambitious, eccentric—not the sort to appeal at first.” He filled the shelves in his room with snakes and lizards, stuffed birds and animals; the smell of formaldehyde followed him from one class to the next. At a time when indifference toward one’s studies was in vogue, Theodore was blatantly enthusiastic. “It was not often that any student broke in upon the smoothly flowing current” of their professors’ lectures, one classmate recalled, “but Roosevelt did this again and again,” posing questions and requesting clarification until finally one professor cut him short. “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.” He also had a curious habit of dropping into classmates’ rooms for conversation; then, rather than joining in, he would retreat to a corner and immerse himself in a book as if seated alone on a tree stump in the middle of the forest. Furthermore, he scorned fellow students who drank or smoked.
“No man ever came to Harvard more serious in his purpose to secure first of all an education,” recalled one classmate, Curtis Guild, Jr.; “he was forever at it, and probably no man of his time read more extensively or deeply, especially in directions that did not count on the honor-list or marking-sheet.” Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breadth of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology to philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics.
“My library has been the greatest possible pleasure to me,” he wrote to his parents during his freshman year, “as whenever I have any spare time I can immediately take up a book. Aunt Annie’s present, the ‘History of the Civil War,’ is extremely interesting.” From early childhood, he had regarded books as “the greatest of companions.” And once encountered, they were never forgotten. Much later, greeting a Chinese delegation when he was president, he suddenly remembered a book about China read many years before. “As I talked the pages of the book came before my eyes,” he said, “and it seemed as though I were able to read the things therein contained.” Taft was continually amazed at how Roosevelt found time to read, snatching moments while waiting for lunch or his next appointment. “He always carried a book with him to the Executive Office,” Taft noted, “and although there were but few intervals during the business hours, he made the most of them in his reading.” Charles Washburn, a classmate at Harvard, considered Roosevelt’s ability to concentrate a signal ingredient to his success. “If he were reading,” observed Washburn with astonishment, “the house might fall about his head, he could not be diverted.”
The habits of mind Roosevelt developed early in his academic career would serve him well throughout his life. As soon as he received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never leaving anything to the last minute. Preparing so far ahead “freed his mind” from worry and facilitated fresh, lucid thought. During the last months of his presidency, aware that he was committed to speak at Oxford University following his yearlong expedition to Africa, he finished a complete draft of his lengthy address. “I never knew a man who worked as far in advance of what was to be done,” marveled Taft. “Perhaps I value this virtue more highly because I lack it myself.”
While posting honor grades each semester, Roosevelt cultivated a boggling array of social activities. He persevered in the promise to “make my body,” exercising rigorously day after day. He spent hours in the gym vaulting and lifting weights. He competed for the lightweight cup in boxing and wrestling, rowed on the Charles River, played strenuous games of lawn tennis, and ran three or four miles a day. Like his father, he pursued his chosen pastimes with the same zeal he devoted to his work. He organized a whist club and a finance club at which William Graham Sumner appeared; he wrote for The Advocate, joined the rifle club and the arts club, taught Sunday school, and took a weekly dancing class. With his explosive energy “he danced just as you’d expect him to dance if you knew him,” a contemporary recalled—“he hopped.” And despite this overcharged agenda, he maintained his passionate interest in birds, watching and shooting them in the field during the days, stuffing and labeling them in his room at night.
“His college life broadened every interest,” Corinne observed, “and did for him what had hitherto not been done, which was to give him confidence in his relationship with young men of his own age.” If he lacked Will Taft’s immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality. “Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity,” he told his mother after his election into several social clubs, including the Hasty Pudding Club, the D.K.E. Society, and the prestigious Porcellian Club.
Theodore’s burgeoning self-assurance and involvement in the Harvard community came at a critical time. He would need all the resilience and support he could muster to cope with a shattering blow during his sophomore year when his forty-six-year-old father came down with a fatal illness. An intense love had continued to bind father and son while Teedie was in college. “As I saw the last of the train bearing you away the other day,” Roosevelt had written his son after seeing him off for his freshman year, “I realized what a luxury it was to have a boy in whom I would place perfect trust and confidence who was leaving me to take his first independent position in the world.” Teedie’s reply reflected his own profound respect and devotion: “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.” With unabashed affection, Teedie addressed his frequent letters to his “darling father” or his “dearest father,” and Thee returned the tenderness in kind.
Two months before Roosevelt Senior was taken ill, he had been nominated by President Rutherford Hayes to replace incumbent Chester A. Arthur as Collector of Customs for the Port of New York. His nomination was seen as a triumph for civil service reformers over New York senator Roscoe Conkling, who had run the port as his special fiefdom for years. The distinguished position required the approval of the U.S. Senate, however, where a fierce battle raged for weeks between the reform element of the Republican Party, represented by Hayes and Roosevelt, and the machine politicians, represented by Conkling and Arthur. In the end, the machine politicians won. The Senate rejected Roosevelt’s nomination, insisting instead on the reappointment of Arthur. “The machine politicians have shown their color,” a disappointed Thee wrote Teedie. “I fear for your future. We cannot stand so corrupt a government for any great length of time.”
Six days after his rejection by the Senate, Theodore Senior collapsed. Doctors diagnosed an advanced stage of bowel cancer. Over Christmas vacation, when Teedie was home, his father seemed “very much better,” sparking the false hope that he was beginning to recover. As Teedie was leaving to return to Harvard, he had a conversation with him that he would long remember: “Today he told me I had never caused him a moments pain. I should be less than human if I ever had, for he is the best, wisest and most loving of men, the type of all that is noble, brave, wise & good.”
The final days of the forty-six-year-old Thee’s two-month bout with cancer produced excruciating pain. His groans reverberated through the house and his dark hair turned gray. Elliott stayed by his father’s side, ready to bring a handkerchief drenched in ether to his face. But when he screamed, neither the ether nor the sedatives could still the pain, and the fear in his father’s eyes was terrible for the sixteen-year-old boy to behold.
On Saturday, February 9, 1878, the family, who had shielded Teedie from the worsening situation, sent an urgent message for him to come home. He raced to catch the overnight train, but reached New York on Sunday morning to find his father had died late Saturday night. His grief was “doubly bitter,” he wrote. “I was away in Boston when the man I loved dearest on earth died.” Remembering how his father’s devoted strength had comforted him throughout the worst of his childhood attacks, he was filled with unbearable remorse: “I never was able to do anything for him during his last illness.”
“The death of Mr. Roosevelt was a public loss,” stated the New York Times. “Flags flew at half-mast all over the city,” reported Jacob Riis. “Rich and poor followed him to the grave, and the children whose friend he had been wept over him.” Newsboys from the lodging house, orphans for whom he had found homes, and Italian girls he had taught in Sunday school all grieved for their kind benefactor. “There was truly no end to a life that had been devoted to such philanthropy,” Reverend William Adams declared at his funeral, “for the work he had laid out would remain and grow in power long after his death.”
“He has just been buried,” Theodore wrote in his diary. “I felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away; and the two moments of sharp, bitter agony, when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me or greet me with his loving smile, and then when I heard the sound of the first clod dropping on the coffin. . . .” Ten days later, back at Harvard, his loss still struck him “like a hideous dream.” Semi-annual examinations offered some distraction to get through the days, but the restless nights were filled with misery. “It has been a most fortunate thing for me that I have had so much to do,” he wrote in his diary. “If I had very much time to think I believe I should almost go crazy.” He was grateful for the small margin of relief his insular college world offered, realizing that his mother and siblings had nothing to assuage their grief.
Returning home to Oyster Bay that summer was difficult, for “every nook and corner about the place, every piece of furniture about the house is in some manner connected with him.” Only frenzied activity managed to keep his sorrow at bay. In late June, however, Theodore confided to his diary a surprising recognition of his own character: “Am leading the most intensely happy & healthy, out of doors life & spending my time riding on horseback, making long tramps through woods and fields after specimens, or else on the bay rowing or sailing—generally in a half naked condition and with my gun along. I could not be happier, except at those bitter moments when I realize what I have lost. Father was himself so invariably cheerful that I feel it would be wrong for me to be gloomy, and besides, fortunately or unfortunately, I am of a very buoyant temper being a bit of an optimist.” Nevertheless, the young man remained painfully aware of the magnitude of his loss. His father had been “the only human being to whom I told everything,” he wrote. “Never failing to get loving advice and sweet sympathy in return; no one but my wife, if ever I marry, will ever be able to take his place.”
Perhaps this fundamental loneliness contributed to Theodore’s ardent pursuit of seventeen-year-old Alice Hathaway Lee during his junior year at Harvard. He later claimed that when they first met at the home of his college friend, Richard Saltonstall, “it was a real case of love at first sight—and my first love too.” Like the first flush of his father’s infatuation with Mittie, it seemed as if Theodore’s passion for Alice far exceeded his genuine knowledge of her. While his diary is rife with descriptions of her bewitching beauty, scant space is devoted to shared sympathies or interests that might lead to lasting companionship. Within four weeks of their introduction, he vowed “to win her.” Seven months later, when he was only twenty, he proposed and initially, she rejected him. He was undeterred.
The campaign he launched to gain Alice’s love necessitated a full-blown battle plan. Theodore later told a friend he “made everything subordinate to winning her.” Weekend after weekend, he rode his horse six miles to her country home in Chestnut Hill. He took her sledding and skating, read to her, accompanied her on long walks in the woods, and escorted her to dances. He worked to ingratiate himself with her parents and mesmerized her young brother with exciting tales of adventure. Meanwhile, he made every attempt to integrate her into his sphere, introducing her to his friends at the Porcellian and inviting her to join his family for a round of parties in New York. Still, she hesitated to make a commitment at such a young age. Only in the privacy of his diary did young Theodore acknowledge “the tortures” he was suffering. His wooing of Alice had the aspect of an epic quest in which he was the hero, a crusade in which he would succeed or die. “I have hardly had one good night to rest and night after night I have not even gone to bed. I have been pretty nearly crazy over my wayward, wilfull darling.”
Finally, in late January of his senior year, she agreed to become his wife, and they set a wedding date for the following autumn. “I am so happy that I dare not trust in my own happiness,” he wrote. “I do not believe any man ever loved a woman more than I love her.” Captivated by his first love, he believed there was “nothing on earth left to wish for.”
Despite the absorption in his engagement, Theodore continued to wrestle and box. He joined a hunting expedition in Maine and had a “royally good time” with his club mates. He completed a thesis on “Equalizing Men and Women Before the Law” that shared the same progressive attitude toward women as Will Taft’s senior essay. “As regards the laws relating to marriage there should be the most absolute equality preserved between the two sexes,” Theodore wrote. “I do not think the woman should assume the man’s name . . . I would have the word ‘obey’ used not more by the wife than by the husband.” Unlike young Taft, however, he was not ready to recommend women’s suffrage.
Nor did he neglect his regular class work, applying himself sufficiently to graduate magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, twenty-first in a class that opened with 230 students. Still dividing his classmates according to their family’s standing, he boasted that “only one gentleman stands ahead of me.” As he approached graduation, he reflected on his college years with self-satisfaction. “I have certainly lived like a prince,” he wrote in his diary. “I have had just as much money as I could spend; belonged to the Porcellian Club; have had some capital hunting trips; my life has been varied; I have kept a good horse and cart; I have had half a dozen good and true friends in college, and several very pleasant families outside; a lovely home . . . and to crown all infinitely above everything else put together—I have won the sweetest of girls for my wife. No man ever had so pleasant a college course.”
The prospect of marriage altered his long-cherished plan to become a naturalist, a career that would require years of study abroad and was unlikely to provide a substantial income. Instead, he decided to enter Columbia Law School, vowing to “do my best, and work hard for my own little wife.”
From that point on, as Carleton Putnam writes, “Natural history was to remain a genuine avocation, but it never loomed again as a feasible career.”
By the age of twenty-one, Theodore had known, in his own words, “great sorrow and great joy,” and while he believed “the joy has far overbalanced the sorrow,” his early suffering had deepened his self-knowledge, intensified his powers of concentration, and heightened his sensibilities.
BOTH WILL AND TEEDIE HAD the good fortune of growing up as favored children in close-knit, illustrious families where affection and respect abounded. Both inherited from their fathers legacies of honorable and distinguished careers, as well as a commitment to public service and a dedication to the Republican Party. Where Will developed an accommodating disposition to please a living father who cajoled him to do more and do better, Teedie forever idolized a dead father who had paid for a substitute for himself during the Civil War to placate his wife, yet had fostered military and historical tales of heroism in his beloved son.
Will had the stronger physical endowment but the weaker self-control; Teedie the weaker body but the greater strength of will. The enormously powerful Will abused his physical gift; the smaller Teedie, a heroic compensator, toughened and transformed his body. Will tended to stay indoors; Teedie tested himself outdoors, against nature. Taft was easygoing and even-tempered; Roosevelt perpetually in motion, as if to keep self-inquiry at bay.
Will, by temperament warmer and more sociable than Teedie, found common ground with one and all; others instinctively responded to his smiling countenance and kindly demeanor. Teedie was less approachable at first blush, limiting his associations to those who shared his class and station in life.
Where Teedie was an intellectual adventurer with a passion for reading and a wide-ranging curiosity engendered by a broad set of experiences, Will worked methodically, within the defined frameworks outlined by his instructors. The one was self-assured, guided by his own ferocious determination; the other more subject to the entreaties of others, steering his course out of the desire to please. Will was more modest and straightforward; Teedie more boastful and complex. Common to both was a sober good sense and a willingness to work hard that led to high distinction in college and the promise of success as they looked forward to law school.
If there are splendid traits in abundance in the characters of both young men, the one major distinction at this stage is that Teedie had shown he could come through agonizing misfortune. Will had not yet been tested by adversity.