Edith Carow in 1885, a year before her marriage to the widower Theodore Roosevelt.
IN THE DESOLATE MONTHS AFTER Alice Lee’s death, Theodore Roosevelt could never have conceived that within two years he would be secretly engaged to his childhood friend Edith Carow. Retreating to the “vast silent spaces” and “lonely rivers” of the Badlands following the tumultuous Republican Convention in the summer of 1884, he remained certain that his allotment of domestic bliss was “lived out.” The ecstatic love he had shared with Alice came only once in a lifetime. His own capacity for passionate feeling was exhausted, he believed, and he resolved never to dishonor the wife he had loved more than “any man ever loved a woman.” With an inexorable romantic idealism, he resigned himself to a bleak and isolate existence.
Leaving his four-month-old daughter with Bamie, who had sold the family’s New York town house and moved into her own home at 689 Madison Avenue, Theodore sought refuge from sorrows both personal and public. Privately, memories of his wife haunted every corner of the city. In the political arena, his support of the failed reform candidate against the triumphant machine nominee, James Blaine, had diminished his prospects and informed his decision not to run for a fourth term in the New York State Assembly.
He had fallen in love with the rugged landscape surrounding the Dakota Territory’s Little Missouri River during a hunting trip the previous September. He had hoped to return with “the head of a great buffalo bull” to hang in the home he and Alice were building in Oyster Bay, but while there, he had decided to invest in two open-range cattle ranches, the Elkhorn and the Chimney Butte. His purchase of 1,400 head of cattle for $85,000 reduced by more than half the sum his father bequeathed to him. He went into partnership with two local cowboys, Bill Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris, and convinced William Sewall and William Dow, two wilderness guides he had hunted with in Maine, to join the enterprise. As his vision of family happiness died with Alice, he seriously considered a career as a full-time rancher, residing and writing in the West, with only occasional visits back east.
When he first returned to the Badlands in the summer of 1884, the austere landscape seemed to mirror his melancholy. “The plains stretch out in death-like and measureless expanse,” he wrote. “Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.” In the “noontide hours” of a scorching summer day, he remarked, “there are few sounds to break the stillness.” With every living thing immobile in the stifling heat, he heard only the “soft, melancholy cooing of the mourning-dove, whose voice always seems far away and expresses more than any other sound in nature the sadness of gentle, hopeless, never-ending grief.”
Just as he had frantically thrown himself into his labors in the assembly to alleviate the immediate anguish of Alice’s death, so he now immersed himself in the daily work of the ranch. He was often on his horse sixteen hours a day, riding after stray horses, hunting game, joining his men in the “hardest work,” that of “the spring and fall round-ups, when the calves are branded or the beeves gathered for market.” During roundups that covered over two hundred miles in four to five weeks, the cook began “preparing breakfast long before the first glimmer of dawn.” Shortly after three o’clock the men were roused from sleep and the day’s toil delegated. “These long, swift rides in the glorious spring mornings are not soon to be forgotten,” Theodore marveled. “As we climb the steep sides of the first range of buttes, wisps of wavering mist still cling in the hollows of the valley; when we come out on top of the first great plateau, the sun flames up over its edge, and in the level, red beams the galloping horsemen throw long, fantastic shadows.”
Relentless physical activity served him well. “Black care,” he wrote, “rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” Once, constant activity had assuaged the pain of his father’s death; now, he hoped that by occupying every minute of his waking day, he could simply outride his depression. A two-week hunting trip in September, he reported to Bamie, had provided “enough excitement and fatigue to prevent over much thought”; he had “at last been able to sleep well at night.”
In Medora, he had a spacious ranch house built to share with his friends, Sewall and Dow, and eventually their wives. “The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms,” he wrote, “so that one can be alone if one wishes to.” The central room featured a massive stone hearth with trophy heads gazing down from the walls and buffalo robes covering the couches. His own chamber held a rubber tub for bathing and rough shelves for his favorite books—“Parkman and Irving and Hawthorne and Cooper and Lowell”—along with a growing assortment of volumes sent from New York by his devoted sister.
As the months passed and Roosevelt started to recover himself, he approached Century magazine with the idea of presenting a series of sketches highlighting hunting experiences on the Great Plains. In fits and starts at first, he began to compose during breaks in his work. Before long, he was writing steadily before “the flickering firelight” of the enormous fireplace. Organizing his manuscript around the different game he hunted—black-tailed deer, antelope, bull elk, buffalo, and grizzly bear—he fused a naturalist’s interest in the unique characteristics of each animal with a hunter’s thrill of the chase.
Daily labor on the ranch had given Roosevelt an acute awareness of the natural cycles and unique pleasures each season held. On summer evenings, he relaxed in his rocking chair on the wide porch of the ranch house, reading in the shade of the cottonwood and enjoying the “cool breeze” from the nearby river. As the crisp autumn temperatures began to transform the landscape, he particularly savored the long days in the saddle, whether hunting or rounding up cattle. “Where everything before had been gray or dull green there are now patches of russet red and bright yellow,” he noted. “The clumps of ash, wild-plum trees, and rosebushes in the heads and bottoms of the sloping valleys become spots of color that glow among the stretches of brown and withered grass.”
Even when the winter days “dwindled to their shortest” and the yapping wailing songs of coyotes echoed through the “never-ending” nights, Roosevelt took comfort in the camaraderie of housemates gathered round the fireplace to read, relax, or play chess. Soon enough, spring brought earlier daybreak to the Badlands and his morning rides took on “a charm all their own,” the bleached landscape becoming “a vivid green, as the new grass sprouts and the trees and bushes thrust forth the young leaves.” On those clear mornings, he thrilled to the sounds of “bird songs unknown in the East”—the lilting melodies of the Missouri skylark, the “rich, full notes” of the white-shouldered lark-bunting, the tuneful sweetness of the lark-finch. The green thickets and groves encircling his ranch house teemed with the songs of hermit thrushes and meadowlarks. This quickening of life in the Badlands awakened a corresponding energy in Theodore Roosevelt.
As his fits of depression subsided and publication of his book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, drew near, Roosevelt’s thoughts turned east, toward the home and the people he had left behind. Memories of joyful days spent with his childhood friend Edith Carow increasingly intruded on his consciousness. The desire to renew their old and deep friendship, however, was coupled with a surge of guilt and anxiety when he contemplated anything that might compromise Alice’s memory. This thought lay on his conscience like a crime, and he instructed his sisters, who were still close to Edith, that she never be present during his visits. He traveled to New York in July 1885, when his book was published to excellent reviews. This work “will take a leading position in the literature of the American sportsman,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Roosevelt writes most happily, tells naturally what he sees and does.”
Roosevelt remained in New York that summer, living for the first time in his recently finished country home at Oyster Bay, the planning and design for which had filled many happy hours with Alice. Completed and furnished under Bamie’s devoted supervision, the rambling twenty-two-room Queen Anne house stood atop a hill, surrounded by forests and grassy clearings, commanding a clear view of the Long Island Sound. Returning to Cove Neck must have recalled vivid memories of childhood summers at nearby Tranquillity, where “no day was long enough” to contain the myriad pursuits of Roosevelt’s lively family and friends.
Replicating those crowded childhood days, Bamie orchestrated a steady stream of houseguests to Oyster Bay, including Corinne’s childhood friend Fanny Smith. Fanny found Theodore’s new house, which he rechristened “Sagamore Hill,” as enchanting as she had once found Tranquillity. The Roosevelt homestead again became a social hub, but Theodore now assumed the central position his father had once occupied. “Especially memorable,” Fanny recalled, “were the battles, ancient and modern, which were waged relentlessly on the white linen tablecloth with the aid of such table-silver as was available.” Stunned by Theodore’s “familiarity with historical details of long past centuries,” Fanny admiringly noted that he made her “feel that Hannibal lived just around the corner.” Roosevelt’s Aunt Annie and her husband had recently completed a country house accessible to his by a dirt path through the woods, and nearby lived his cousin Dr. West Roosevelt, who had accompanied him to Maine when he first met Bill Sewall. Despite this renewed consolidation of the Roosevelt clan, Theodore managed to avoid one old friend. Although Edith had spent a week with Aunt Annie at “Gracewood” earlier that summer, she was noticeably absent from the group that gathered at Theodore’s new home.
These summer weeks were the most extended time Theodore had spent with his daughter, Alice, who was now nearly eighteen months old. Under Bamie’s loving guardianship, Alice had emerged as a lively, blond, blue-eyed toddler. Indeed, the warmth and affection that bound Bamie and her niece could not have been stronger if they were mother and child. “She was the only one I really cared about when I was a child,” Alice later remembered. Though crippled by curvature of the spine and seriously overweight, Bamie seemed to Alice marvelously larger than life, “a great big handsome man of a woman . . . but oh so attractive!” Even as a young child Alice observed that Bamie “had an extraordinary gift with people.” Her numerous friends adored her and felt completely at ease in her presence. Had “she been a man,” Alice believed, “she would have been the one to be President.”
Roosevelt returned to the Badlands in late August, but two months later he was back in New York. He arrived at Bamie’s Madison Avenue town house, where he routinely stayed while visiting the city, to find Edith Carow about to depart. Whether Theodore’s failure to signal his impending return or her delay in taking leave of Bamie brought about the reunion, long-hidden feelings surfaced before day’s end. Less than three weeks later, the two were secretly engaged. “You know all about me darling,” Edith told Theodore. “I never could have loved anyone else. I love you with all the passion of a girl who has never loved before.”
THE RESURRECTION OF HER RELATIONSHIP with Theodore offered Edith the prospect of happiness and security that had eluded her since childhood. Her father, Charles Carow, became an alcoholic after his family’s once-thriving shipping business fell into bankruptcy. The seventh of eight children born to wealthy merchant prince Isaac Quentin Carow, Charles had lacked no privilege growing up in his family’s St. Mark’s Place mansion. He dwelled in a world of private tutors, dancing lessons, and access to New York’s most exclusive clubs. At twenty-five, he had just begun work at Kermit & Carow, the family firm, when his father suddenly passed away.
Charismatic and eligible, Charles Carow seemed a perfect match for Gertrude Tyler. At nineteen, she had lately returned from two years in a fashionable Parisian girls’ school. Gertrude’s father, Daniel Tyler IV, had graduated from West Point and served in the Army before amassing a fortune in iron manufacturing. Following his marriage to Emily Lee, they moved to the sumptuous mansion in Norwich, Connecticut, where Gertrude was raised.
Intent that she become a poised and well-bred young lady, Gertrude’s father had insisted she attend boarding school in Paris. On the Continent, in contrast to America, he assured her, she would “find great attention paid to deportment and manners.” She would be schooled in “matters of carriage, such as walking, entering a room, sitting down and rising”; comportment that would signify a proper upbringing. “Do not my dear Gertrude undervalue or despise these matters,” he admonished. “They are important and it will be my pride to know and feel that both your mind and manners are formed on good and true standards. Now is the time for you to finish an education, mental and physical which will make you an ornament to society.” While Gertrude was often homesick and could not bear to spend the Christmas season abroad, she pledged to work hard at music lessons, study of French, and riding lessons. “Do not doubt,” she promised her mother, “that I shall do everything in my power to improve the advantages that you and Father have given me.”
Encountering Gertrude in New York soon after her return, Charles pursued her avidly. On March 7, 1859, he formally declared his intentions to her father: “My dear Sir, I have to ask of you the greatest favor that one man can ask of another. I have won Gertrude’s heart. Will you give me her hand?” The wedding took place two months later in the Christ Episcopal Church in Norwich, Connecticut, followed by a brilliant reception in the Tyler mansion.
The couple’s first child, a boy, died at six months. Then, the year the war began, the Carows welcomed their first daughter, Edith. Gertrude’s father rejoined the Army as a general, while Charles remained in New York endeavoring to steer the family shipping business through an abrupt decline precipitated by the Civil War. He had inherited the family enterprise on the brink of a crisis that made “the risk of sailing under the American flag . . . so great as to divert a large share of the carrying trade into foreign bottoms.” Buffeted by drastic financial reverses, Charles began drinking heavily and gambling. Soon he was no longer able to afford his own home and the family was forced to move in with his widowed sister, Ann Eliza Kermit. As the war came to an end, the Carow’s second daughter, Emily, was born in Ann’s large town house at 12 Livingston Place near Union Square.
When Charles was not drinking, he was an affectionate husband and an effusive, doting father. “My dear little girl,” he wrote Edith when he and Gertrude left to visit the Tylers in Norwich, “Papa hopes his dolly has been very good since he has been gone. . . . Papa & Mamma always say, before they go to sleep, ‘God bless little Edie,’ and again before they get up in the morning.” From the time she was young, Charles had sought to communicate to his “precious little monkey” his fascination with the theatre and love of literature. Edith proved an apt pupil. “Almost the first thing I remember,” she later told Theodore, “is being told about Sinbad the Sailor when I was a tiny girl and used to climb up on my father’s knee every evening and beg him to ‘spin me a yarn.’ ” As her father read aloud from the Arabian Nights, “a new world” opened up, “full of glowing Eastern light and colour.” Her early exposure to such frightful and wonderful stories spurred “a passion for fairy tales” later concisely distilled into her own verse: “Oh fairy tales, my fairy tales / Fantastic, weird and wild / I love you with a changeless love / A mother gives her child.”
When father and daughter were apart, Charles urged her to write him her thoughts and feelings without the monitor of self-consciousness, without worry over corrections. “I got your letter about 3 o’clock yesterday,” he wrote. “It was so nice & long. No matter about the spelling when you write to me. Say what you want to say and don’t lose time thinking how to spell the words. If I want I can beat you with a big stick when you come back—so just write whatever comes into your head.” When they were together, he took Edith on long walks, pointing out various wildflowers and teaching her to know them by color, shape, and habitat. This shared pursuit fostered an interest in the natural world that remained with her the rest of her life.
When Charles Carow was drinking, however, recrimination and tension permeated the household. Gertrude began to suffer bouts of melancholy coupled with a mysterious series of nervous disorders. Still, the Carows managed to maintain a public facade of elegance and ease, spending their winters in New York with Mrs. Kermit and their summers at General Tyler’s country estate in New Jersey. Gertrude’s finishing school lessons in proper carriage and deportment helped her conceal private anxiety behind a veneer of propriety. And she imparted these lessons to her uncommonly poised little girl, Edith.
Edith was a toddler when she first met Theodore Roosevelt. The Kermit house on Livingston Place stood directly behind the 14th Street mansion of Theodore’s grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaak Roosevelt. Edith and Corinne Roosevelt were almost exactly the same age and they soon became, in Corinne’s words, “pledged friends.” Edith’s earliest memories revolved around the Roosevelts’ 20th Street household, where she frequently played with Corinne and developed a particular affection for Teedie, three years her senior. Far less did she enjoy their visits to her own house, where she anxiously struggled to hide her “old and broken toys.”
When she was five, Edith was invited to join the Roosevelt children in the home school taught by Mittie’s sister, Annie Gracie. Years later, Edith fondly recalled “the school room, the children around the table, and dear Mrs. Gracie training clumsy little fingers to write and teaching the earliest lessons in the primer.” She and Teedie cherished an illustrated children’s magazine called Our Young Folks, a compilation of stories, poems, and illustrations by celebrated writers and artists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Winslow Homer, Henry Longfellow, and Charles Dickens. Later, “at the cost of being deemed effeminate,” Roosevelt confessed an early fascination with “girls’ stories,” such as Little Men and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl. His ability to focus and withdraw into a book was equaled only in his friend, Edith Carow. “I think imagination is one of the greatest blessings of life,” Edith later wrote, “and while one can lose oneself in a book one can never be thoroughly unhappy.”
Thoughts of Edith provoked an intense yearning in Teedie during his family’s yearlong trip to Europe. “It was verry [sic] hard parting from our friend,” he confided in his diary. Six months into the Grand Tour, when the family was in France, he dramatically revealed to his diary that a glance at Edith’s picture provoked “homesickness and longings for the past which will come again never, alack never.” Edith eagerly awaited his return, promising to keep all Teedie’s letters so they could read them over back in New York and relive his adventure together.
Edith’s parents considered sending Edith to school when Mrs. Gracie’s lessons ceased during the Roosevelts’ time abroad. In the end, they decided to postpone her entry until the following fall, fearful she was already damaging her eyes by constant reading. “Whenever they see a book in my hands,” she told Corinne, “they give me no peace till I lay it down.”
Edith was nine years old when a bankruptcy warrant was issued against her father’s estate. The New York Times followed the proceedings for weeks, reporting creditor meetings and the auction sale of several ships, including the Edith, named after his daughter. Charles quickly realized he had no choice but to seek more frugal living arrangements. That summer, his family moved with Aunt Kermit to a more modest house on West 44th Street.
The Carows’ reduced means did not prevent them from enrolling Edith in Miss Comstock’s renowned private school for girls at West 40th Street. Nor did Gertrude scrimp on the stylish clothes her daughter required to join her classmates for regular forays to the symphony or theatre. Miss Comstock, headmistress of the fashionable school, was a formidable figure to the young girls. Edith’s schoolmate Fanny Smith described the “terrifying charm” of that “impressive-looking woman with flashing dark eyes and clear-cut features.” The curriculum included history, languages, arithmetic, zoology, botany, poetry, drama, and literature. Edith proved to be a diligent and exceptional student. “When I come home, I study my lessons, and when I think I know them I read,” she told Corinne, who was still being schooled by private tutors. “I like my composition class very much,” she confided, and “I am trying hard for the Arithmetic and Department prizes and hope to get them.”
At Miss Comstock’s, Edith developed a lifelong devotion to drama and poetry. “I have gone back to Shakespeare, as I always do,” she would write to her son Kermit seven decades later. “Usually the Historical plays, or Hamlet or Macbeth. Lear is too tragic. This time I read As You Like It. There can be nothing more delightful! I believe if it were lost I could write it out.” She could memorize and recite numerous poems, including John Milton’s Lycidas in its entirety, and was able to quote extensively from Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Romantic poets.
Edith also cultivated a defensive air of detachment during her school-days, declining to participate in the costumed tableaux and girlish gossip that so fascinated her classmates. Her beloved books often took precedence over friends, leading schoolmates to reproach her for “indifference.” Years later, Edith explained that her aloofness was simply “a trick of manner” to obscure her own perceived defects. While it may have deprived her of camaraderie, her tactic succeeded in establishing the distance and mystery that prevented humiliation. “Girls,” one of her fellow classmates observed, “I believe you could live in the same house with Edith for fifty years and never really know her.”
Edith’s friendship with the Roosevelt family remained her lodestar, helping her navigate a troubled girlhood as her father became more and more unstable and her mother descended into hypochondria and depression. When the Roosevelts returned from their first trip abroad, Edith joined Corinne, Theodore, and Elliott in a weekly dancing class taught by the demanding Mr. Dodsworth. The dance lessons were “the happiness of many New York children of those years,” Edith remembered. A half century later Edith could still recall her pride as she and Corinne, “the only two who had satisfied our difficult and critical teacher,” were called onto the floor to dance the minuet all alone. Fanny Smith never forgot the pleasure of belonging to that “little group of girls and boys wearing special badges and pledged either definitely or otherwise only to dance with one another.”
During the summers at Tranquillity, Edith was a regular houseguest. In particular, she excelled in the word games the young people loved to play, “ ‘Consequences,’ ‘Truth,’ and nearly always ‘Crambo,’ when each one would draw from a hat a folded question and from another hat a word, and then in the few minutes allotted would answer the question in verse which should include the word we had drawn.” In the afternoons, “the happy six” would row across the bay: Theodore with Edith, Elliott with Corinne, their cousin West Roosevelt with Fanny, whom he “much worshipped.” They would carry their books to the woods and read aloud to one another. At picnic lunches near Cooper’s Bluff, they recited their favorite poems. “In the early days,” Fanny recalled, “we all delighted in Longfellow and Mrs. Browning and Owen Meredith.” Later, they turned to Swinburne, Kipling, Shelley, and Shakespeare.
The Roosevelts celebrated Edith’s birthdays as if she were a member of the family. “I cannot believe that my sweet little fair, golden-haired friend, whom I have loved since she was three years old is really fifteen today,” Aunt Gracie wrote. Edith was included in small family dinners and visits to the theatre. On New Year’s Day, 1877, she stood by Corinne’s side to receive guests. At dancing parties, continuing the partnership begun under Mr. Dodsworth’s tutelage, she regularly paired off with Theodore. At one of Aunt Gracie’s sociables, Corinne and a friend deliberately wandered into the “dimly and suggestively lit” morning room “for the express purpose of interrupting Thee and Edith, who had gone there for a cosy chat.” The party was “far too merry,” Corinne chided, “for a sentimental tete-a-tete.”
Theodore’s departure for Harvard produced the first unraveling in the close-knit circle of family and friends. Refusing to let their cherished scholarly and social coterie vanish with him, Corinne and Edith formed a literary society in which Corinne served as president and Edith as secretary. The group, which included Fanny Smith, Maud Elliott, and Grace Potter, expected members to contribute original poems and short stories to be read aloud and criticized at weekly meetings. As secretary, Edith was charged with copying and organizing the submissions into a “Weekly Bulletin.”
Edith personally produced dozens of poems, short stories, and essays, which she carefully preserved in her papers. The Roosevelt family biographer Betty Boyd Caroli observes that in her writings for this intimate circle, “Edith revealed about as much about herself as she ever permitted anyone to see.”
Her poem entitled “My Dream Castles,” written during Theodore’s freshman year at Harvard, suggests the lonely distance she maintained despite her inclusion in the Roosevelt household. While she might join in their games and celebrations, loving friendship and charity could not entirely ease an outsider’s sense of loss, of alienation:
To my castles none may enter
But the few
Holding to my inmost feelings
Love’s own clue.
They may wander there at will
Ever welcome finding still,
Warm and true.
Only one, one tiny room
Locked they find,
One thin curtain that they ne’er
Gaze behind.
There my lost ambitions sleep,
To their tear-wept slumber deep
Long consigned.
This my lonely sanctum is;
There I go
When my heart all worn by grief
Sinketh low.
Where my baseless hopes do lie
There to find my peace, go I.
Sad and slow . . .
Romantic longing and a self-dramatizing nostalgia resonate in her words, an elegy for the warm companionship of the dream family she feared would be left behind with their childhoods. In another poem, “Memories,” she once again reveals the profound anxiety of a melancholy girl confronting adulthood at the end of her day:
I sit alone in the twilight
In the twilight gloomy grey
And think with a sad regretting
For the days that have passed away.
Both Corinne and Fanny recognized a superior quality in Edith’s writings. “She reads more and writes better than any girl I know,” Corinne noted in her diary. For Corinne, whose literary ambitions would drive her to become an accomplished poet, this was not easy to admit. Indeed, she often found Edith’s criticism of her work overwhelming and her personality inscrutable. Still, she could not help loving best of all her “clever” friend, “tall and fair, with lovely complexion and golden hair.” She confided in her journal: “I have a feeling for Edith which I have for no one else, a tender kind of feeling. I am always careful of her and then I know quite well that I love her much more than she does me in fact.”
In the spring of Theodore’s freshman year, Theodore Senior brought a small party of young people to visit him at Harvard, including Bamie, Corinne, and Elliott, along with Edith Carow and Maud Elliott. “What fun we did have,” Corinne remembered, describing lively lunches and dinners with her brother and his friends, Johnny Lamson and Harry Jackson. They played hide-and-seek, attended the theatre, and enjoyed long carriage rides through the surrounding countryside. Edith and Theodore again found themselves partners, riding in one carriage, while Corinne and Maud were paired with Lamson and Jackson.
“The family all went home, leaving me disconsolate,” Theodore recorded in his diary. “The last three days have been great fun.” Arriving in New York, Edith immediately wrote to Theodore, echoing his sentiment. She had “enjoyed to the utmost” every moment of “three perfectly happy days.” Theodore admitted to Corinne that he had never seen “Edith looking prettier; everyone, and especially Harry Chapin and Minot Weld admired her little Ladyship intensely, and she behaved as sweetly as she looked.”
Edith’s cherished relationship with Theodore remained constant in the following months, as did her friendship with Corinne. When Theodore Senior lay dying, Corinne confided her grief and frustration to her oldest friend. “Oh Edith, it is the most frightful thing to see the person you love best in the world in terrible pain, and not be able to do a thing to alleviate it.” The following summer, Edith joined Theodore and Corinne at Oyster Bay as the Roosevelt children tried to distract themselves from the sorrow of the patriarch’s death.
In his diary, Theodore described days spent sailing with Edith or rowing with her to the harbor where the steamboats from the city landed. He wrote of “spending a lovely morning with her” driving to Cold Spring Harbor to pick water lilies.
The next day, August 22, 1878, he took Mittie, Elliott, Corinne, and Edith on a long sail, followed by tea at his cousin West’s house. The mysterious severance in their relationship occurred that same evening. In his diary, Theodore merely notes: “Afterwards Edith & I went up to the summer house.” What transpired there would become the subject of much speculation by Roosevelt’s family and friends. Some postulated that Edith had refused Theodore’s offer of marriage, although her intense devotion makes such a scenario unlikely. Furthermore, an initial refusal would hardly have deterred Theodore, who would shortly prove his tenacity in his courtship of Alice. Corinne suggested a different reason, indicating that her dying father had expressed concern about Theodore’s intimacy with Edith, given Charles Carow’s fiscal and temperamental instability. If Theodore discussed the issue with Edith that night, he might well have triggered the volatility that he would obscurely explain to Bamie as a clash of tempers “that were far from being of the best.” This, too, is mere conjecture. Neither Edith nor Theodore ever talked about what happened.
We know only that eight weeks later, Theodore met Alice Hathaway Lee, fell in love “at first sight,” and launched the spirited campaign “to win her” that concluded successfully in the winter of 1880. Before the engagement was announced in mid-February, Theodore wrote to Edith. Years later, Corinne spoke of the “shock” Edith experienced when she heard the news. The summer months that year must have been lacerating for Edith; another woman would be Theodore’s constant companion, displacing her on morning drives to Cold Spring, afternoon sailing and rowing excursions, and private evening tête-à-têtes in the summerhouse.
Edith was long accustomed to mastering her private sorrows. She schooled herself to participate in the engagement and wedding festivities of the man she adored. Arriving at the Brunswick Hotel in Boston two nights before the marriage, she crowded into an upstairs chamber with Fanny and Grace, while the Roosevelt family occupied two suites downstairs. “We had great fun,” Fanny recorded in her diary. They explored the town and shared meals at a large table, where “wild spirits” prevailed. The next morning, Edith, Grace, and Fanny drove to the church together. At the reception following the ceremony, Edith reportedly “danced the soles off her shoes.”
Her brave attempt to affect gaiety was not the only trial Edith would face. The death of Mrs. Kermit, with whom Edith had lived since she was a small child, was soon followed by the final days of her gentle grandfather, General Tyler. Initially, she continued to see a great deal of Corinne, Fanny, and Aunt Gracie, who held a weekly sewing class for the girls once their formal schooling ended. Soon, however, she found herself quite forsaken as both Corinne and Fanny became engaged. Edith and Fanny served together as bridesmaids at Corinne’s wedding. “All yesterday I thought of nothing but you from morning to night,” she explained to her oldest friend. “I do not mean I was sad or grieving for that would be impossible when I know how happy you are going to be, but I kept realizing that you were leaving your old life behind, and if we live to be ninety years old we can never be two girls together again.”
In 1883, yet another death seemed to complete the disintegration of Edith’s support system. Charles Carow, his body weakened by decades of drinking, collapsed and died that spring. He left his wife and daughters without sufficient means to maintain their accustomed life. Recognizing that they could live abroad more cheaply than in New York, Gertrude made plans for an extended sojourn in Europe with Edith and Emily. While rumor circulated that Edith might marry “for money,” such gossip proved groundless. Even as more and more of her friends were engaged or married, Edith maintained her solitude. As the circle of her friends diminished, she sought consolation in her treasured books, keeping a careful record of the hundreds of volumes she completed. During this desolate period, Edith purportedly held on to the belief that “someday, somehow, she would marry Theodore Roosevelt.” She certainly never anticipated the grim coincidence that left Theodore’s wife and mother dead on the same day. Though Edith joined the family at the funeral service and frequently saw Corinne, Bamie, and Aunt Gracie in the months that followed, there is no evidence that she and Theodore connected until their chance encounter at Bamie’s house in October 1885.
THEODORE WAS REMARKABLY ALTERED FROM the young man Edith had last seen. Months laboring under the Badlands sun had hardened his body and bronzed his skin, but he had the same bright eyes, the same splendid smile. Edith herself had become a handsome young woman, still “the most cultivated, best read girl” he knew. In the days that followed, he became a regular visitor, enlivening the parlor of her 36th Street town house. Perhaps their old friendship and mutual losses quickened the relationship. On November 17, 1885, they pledged themselves to marry. The engagement opened a world of joy for Edith, an emergence from five years of bleak nightmare. If the love Theodore developed for Edith lacked the extreme sentimental idealism of his love for Alice, their complex, ever-strengthening bond would sustain a mature and lifelong growth and happiness.
The early months of his reunion with Edith, however, were clouded by Theodore’s Victorian belief that second marriages “argued weakness in a man’s character.” He insisted upon a sufficient interval before informing anyone, even their families, about their intention to marry. Acutely aware of the importance of appearances, Edith decided to accompany her mother and sister to Europe that spring as planned, allowing time to elapse before any public announcement of the engagement. In the meantime, they felt there was nothing wrong with two old friends keeping company during the winter social season. Once again, Edith joined the Roosevelts at the Essex County Hunt Ball, theatre parties at Aunt Annie’s, and dinners at Bamie’s. Respecting their secret even in his private diary, Theodore never wrote out Edith’s full name, though the capital E appears day after day, reflecting the extensive time they spent together.
In the spring of 1886, Edith sailed to Europe and Theodore returned to the Badlands. In New York, he had begun work on a biography of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, which he hoped to complete at his ranch in Medora. Though separated by nearly 5,000 miles, the couple sustained their relationship month after month through the exchange of long letters. In early June, just five weeks after Edith’s arrival in London, she had already received seventeen letters from Theodore and written almost as many in return. “How fond one is of old letters and how one prizes them,” Edith had written in her composition book at Miss Comstock’s. “I never wish to destroy even a note.” Though she cherished each word, the intensely private Edith would one day burn nearly their entire correspondence from this period. Only one full letter remains—the same letter in which she declared to Theodore that she loved him “with all the passion of a girl who has never loved before.”
Written from London on June 8, 1886, this letter made the strength of Edith’s feelings for Theodore abundantly clear, even as she appealed to him to be patient while she tried to put her “heart on paper.” Never having troubled much about her appearance, Edith admitted she was suddenly anxious “about being pretty” in order to please him. “I perfectly love your description of the life out west for I almost feel as if I could see you and know just what you are doing, and I do not think you sentimental in the least to love nature; please love me too and believe I think of you all the time and want so much to see you.”
Edith’s diffident and beseeching tone disappears the moment she turns to literature, whether expressing her fascination with Coleridge’s Kubla Khan or noting the “digging” required to excavate meaning from Browning’s poems. Her critique of the lead singer’s performance in a production of Carmen, which she had heard the previous night, displays a confident, acerbic wit: “He is middle aged, ugly and uninteresting with not enough voice to redeem his bad acting. His one idea of making love is to seize the prima donna’s arm and shake her violently. I am so glad it is not your way.”
As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted the larger world. Like Edith, Theodore filled pages of his letters with talk of authors and their creations. He had carried Anna Karenina with him during this trip west and told Corinne that he“read it through with very great interest.” Although he considered Tolstoy “a great writer,” he found his work deeply unsettling. “Do you notice how he never comments on the actions of his personages? He relates what they thought or did without any remark whatever as to whether it was good or bad, as Thucydides wrote history—a fact which tends to give his work an unmoral rather than an immoral tone, together with the sadness so characteristic of Russian writers.”
Roosevelt read this novel of multiple marriages, broken marriages, and an assortment of adulteries at a time when the nature of marriage and remarriage, its moral and ethical reverberations, was of signal importance to the newly betrothed widower. From its very first sentence—“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina confronted Theodore in an intensely personal fashion and his comments upon it illuminate his own nature more brightly than Tolstoy’s novel.
“I hardly know whether to call it a very bad book or not. There are two entirely distinct stories in it,” he observed. The history of Levin and Kitty “is not only very powerfully and naturally told, but is also perfectly healthy. Annas most certainly is not, though of great and sad interest; she is portrayed as being a prey to the most violent passion, and subject to melancholia, and her reasoning power is so unbalanced that she could not possibly be described otherwise than as in a certain sense insane. Her character is curiously contradictory; bad as she was however she was not to me nearly as repulsive as her brother, Stiva.” Roosevelt’s revulsion at Tolstoy’s infantile, pathetic, endearing bon vivant—his categorical interpretation of healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships—reveals a deep-seated disgust with physical and moral slackness that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
While he continued to enjoy the simple, invigorating routine of his life at the ranch, with long days free to read and write, ride and hunt, his engagement to Edith provided a welcome sense of clarity about his future. He began to muse on the satisfactions and exhilaration of political life that he had abandoned in New York. He contemplated an offer from Mayor William Grace to assume the presidency of the Board of Health, but it ultimately fell through. Still, he admitted to Henry Cabot Lodge in August, “I would like a chance at something I thought I could really do.”
In late August and early September, Roosevelt accompanied his ranching partner Bill Merrifield on a hunting trip in Idaho. When he returned, he was appalled to find that news of the engagement had leaked into the social columns of the New York Times and that Bamie, assuming the report must be unfounded gossip, had demanded a retraction. Theodore faced the difficult and necessary prospect of revealing the truth to his sister after months of deceit.
“Darling Bamie,” he wrote on September 20, 1886, “On returning from the mountains I was savagely irritated by seeing in the papers the statement that I was engaged to Edith Carow; from what source it could have originated I can not possibly conceive. But the statement itself is true. I am engaged to Edith and before Christmas I shall cross the ocean and marry her. You are the first person to whom I have breathed one word on the subject.” He proceeded to reiterate his condemnation of second marriages. “You could not reproach me one half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness, as I reproach myself,” he maintained. “Were I sure there were a heaven my one prayer would be I might never go there, lest I should meet those I loved on earth who are dead. No matter what your judgement about myself I shall most assuredly enter no plea against it. But I do very earnestly ask you not to visit my sins upon poor little Edith. It is certainly not her fault; the entire blame rests on my shoulders.” He was particularly anxious that his family never question their long history of affection toward Edith, that none should mistake her in any fashion for a schemer or interloper.
“As regards yourself, my dearest sister,” he continued, “I can only say you will be giving me the greatest happiness in your power if you will continue to pass your summers with me. We ourselves will have to live in the country almost the entire year; I thoroughly understand the change I will have to make in my life. As I have already told you, if you wish to you shall keep Baby Lee, I, of course paying the expense. . . . I will explain everything in full when I see you. Forever your loving brother.” This arrangement for the child of his previous marriage would prove more problematic than he anticipated.
His plans to return home were delayed by troubles at the Elkhorn ranch. A calamitous drop in the price of cattle had persuaded Sewall and Dow that the ranch was no longer a viable operation. “It looked to me as if we were throwing away his money,” Sewall reported, deeply distressed by the prospect of failing his friend Roosevelt. The two men and their wives reluctantly returned to Maine, later reflecting that despite “all of the hardships and work it was a very happy life [they] had lived all together,” indeed, “the happiest time” they had ever known.
Roosevelt, too, never forgot his years in the Badlands. Though he would ultimately lose a sizable portion of his fortune when a blizzard decimated his cattle herd, he considered his experience with “fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier” to be “the most educational asset” of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president. “It is a mighty good thing to know men, not from looking at them, but from having been one of them,” Roosevelt explained. “When you have worked with them, when you have lived with them, you do not have to wonder how they feel, because you feel it yourself.” Just as his daily work in the assembly had taught him to live down “the defective moral quality of being a stranger” among colleagues with whom he initially had little in common, so his years in the Badlands taught him “to speak the same language” as men who spent their days herding cattle, roping steer, and hunting game in the open country. Men who routinely faced danger and hardship recognized no superiority in social class or family background. His ranching days enabled him “to interpret the spirit of the West,” fostering a genuine national perspective foreign to most eastern politicians.
With his wedding planned for December 1886, however, Theodore returned to the city and his preparations for a renewed life with his oldest friend. Immediately upon his arrival in New York, he “was visited by a succession of the influential Republicans of the city to entreat [him] to take the nomination for Mayor.” He understood that it was “of course a perfectly hopeless contest,” since Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 50,000 votes. Nevertheless, he agreed to make the sacrificial three-week run, knowing that it would elevate his stature within the party.
The race pitted twenty-eight-year-old Roosevelt against both the Democratic candidate, Abraham Hewitt, a socially conscious industrialist, and the independent labor candidate Henry George, a radical, whose hugely popular book Progress and Poverty had become a bible for reformers. In powerful prose that struck a chord throughout the country and made the book one of the top ten best sellers in American history, George argued that the “enormous increase in productive power” during the previous decades had not diminished poverty nor lifted “the burdens of those compelled to toil.” On the contrary, the progress that accompanied the Industrial Revolution had produced ever harsher lives for the masses of the people. He contended, in opposition to the social Darwinists, that “the want and injustice of the present social state are not necessary.” The gap between the rich and the poor was not a consequence of unchanging natural laws or the survival of the fittest, but of environments made by man and changeable by man. Under the right laws, George insisted, “a social state is possible in which poverty would be unknown.”
Roosevelt responded that “the mass of the American people are most emphatically not in the deplorable condition of which you speak, and the ‘statesmen and patriots of to-day’ are no more responsible for some people being poorer than others than they are for some people being shorter, or more nearsighted, or physically weaker than others. If you had any conception of the true American spirit you would know we do not have ‘classes’ at all on this side of the water. . . . Some of the evils of which you complain are real and can be to a certain degree remedied; others, though real, can only be gotten over through the capacity for steady individual self-help which is the glory of every true American, and can no more be done away with by legislation than you could do away with the bruises which you received when you tumbled down, by passing an act to repeal the laws of gravitation.”
“The best I can hope for is to make a decent run,” Roosevelt conceded in a letter to Fanny Smith Dana. “The simple fact,” he explained, alluding to a famous painting, “is that I had to play Curtius and leap into the gulf that was yawning before the Republican party.” As the days progressed, however, with George firing up audiences across the city, Roosevelt worried that the gulf into which he had leapt was even deeper than he had first thought. He feared that many of his “should-be supporters” in the Republican Party would desert him in the end, voting for Hewitt to prevent the election of a radical mayor. Nonetheless, he committed to the campaign with his customary zeal. From sunup to sundown, tirelessly canvassing the city, he roused audiences with his fighting spirit, heartily shook endless hands, and freely granted interviews to reporters. He brought overflow crowds to their feet, pledging, “I am a strong party man myself [but should] I find a public servant who is dishonest, I will chop his head off even if he is the highest Republican in this municipality.”
Friends and family were thrilled to see Roosevelt again step into the public arena. “It is such happiness to see him at his very best once more,” Bamie wrote to Edith in London. “Ever since he has been out of politics in any active form; it has been a real heart sorrow to me, for while he always made more of his life than any other man I knew, still with his strong nature it was a permanent source of poignant regret that even at this early age he should lose these years without the possibility of doing his best and most telling work . . . this is the first time since the [assembly] days that he has enough work to keep him exerting all his powers. Theodore is the only person who had the power except Father who possessed it in a different way; of making me almost worship him.”
Despite the excitement generated by Roosevelt’s return to public life, the Democratic candidate, Abraham Hewitt, won the election. Moreover, since thousands of Republicans voted for Hewitt in fear of the radical George, Roosevelt came in a distant third. Nonetheless, the press praised Roosevelt for a spirited campaign. “Fighting is fun for him, win or lose,” the New York Sun editorialized.
Three days after the election, Theodore set sail for England, accompanied by his faithful sister Bamie. Three weeks later, on December 2, 1886, he married Edith Carow in a simple ceremony at St. George’s Chapel in London. Theodore and Edith swiftly departed for a three-month honeymoon that would take them across England, France, and Italy. Typically, even as they explored Florence, Venice, and Paris, Theodore managed to complete a half-dozen articles on ranching life for the Century magazine. “I read them all over to Edith,” he reported to Corinne, “and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.”
During these halcyon days, Edith realized hopes and longings harbored since she was a girl. More than a decade after her honeymoon, she claimed to “remember them all one by one, and hour by hour.” Her marriage to Theodore commenced what appears to have been a rich sensual life. Many years later, her biographer Sylvia Morris reports, Edith amazed a granddaughter by openly mentioning “that wonderful silky private part of a woman.” When the Roosevelts returned home in March 1887, Edith was already three months pregnant.
The young couple returned from this idyllic interlude to face complications in uniting their daily lives. When Edith learned that Theodore was planning to leave three-year-old Alice in Bamie’s care, she surprised him with powerful opposition, insisting they incorporate the little girl into their new household. Edith’s reaction created a painful dilemma for Theodore, who well knew the devotion his childless older sister had shown her “blue-eyed darling.” “I hardly know what to say about Baby Lee,” he uncomfortably informed Bamie. “Edith feels more strongly about her than I could have imagined possible.” For Bamie, the loss was devastating. “It almost broke my heart to give her up,” she confessed. Although she maintained her composure, conceding that it was best for Alice to be with her father, she avoided further emotional attachments for some time thereafter.
The situation must have been terribly confusing for Alice, whose happiest memories revolved around Bamie’s warm and loving home, where “the lovely smell of baking bread coming from the kitchen” heralded “the pleasure of English-style afternoon tea with piping-hot Earl Grey’s tea and lots of paper-thin bread and butter.” Alice never forgot the wrenching and bewildering day Theodore returned with his new wife: “I in my best dress and sash, with a huge bunch of pink roses in my arms, coming down the stairs at my aunt’s house in New York to meet my father and my new mother.”
The small child was expected simultaneously to transfer her affections to a new mother and pray each night for her “mother who is in heaven,” though her father kept steadfastly mute about the beautiful woman who had been his first love. “In fact,” Alice lamented, “he never ever mentioned my mother to me, which was absolutely wrong. He never even said her name . . . I think my father tried to forget he had ever been married to my mother. To blot the whole episode out of his mind. He didn’t just never mention her to me, he never mentioned her name, toanyone. . . . He obviously felt tremendously guilty about remarrying. . . . The whole thing was really handled very badly. It was awfully bad psychologically.”
Edith, too, had to adjust her conception of domestic bliss to the new realities of married life. As mistress of Sagamore Hill, she had envisioned a quiet life in the country with her husband and children, filled with books, writing, and a few like-minded friends. Unlike her husband, she was not a naturally gregarious person. “Where she was reserved,” Theodore’s cousin Nicholas Roosevelt recalled, “he overflowed with exuberance and enthusiasm.” Their divergent natures would require both Theodore and Edith to balance private family life and public pursuits, necessitating compromise and cooperation.
Initially, Theodore focused intently upon his new wife. She happily recalled “rowing over to a great marsh, filled with lagoons and curious winding channels,” reading aloud from Browning and Matthew Arnold. The household seemed complete when she gave birth to a son, Theodore Junior, on September 12, 1887. “She was extremely plucky all through,” Theodore reported to Bamie. “I am very glad our house has an heir at last!”
For a time, the placid existence suited Theodore. After completing his book on Senator Benton, he had embarked on a short biography of founding father Gouverneur Morris and was beginning research on what would be his major work, The Winning of the West. “I have a small son now,” he wrote to a friend, “and am settling down more and more to country life for all but a couple of months of the year. My literary work occupies a good deal of my time; and I have on the whole done fairly well at it; I should like to write some book that would really take rank as in the very first class, but I suppose this is a mere dream.”
It was not long, however, before his abundant energy and expansive nature required an outlet that tranquil family life could not provide. Even his conception of domestic satisfaction included a continuous stream of houseguests arguing over books or politics at dinner, hiking together in the woods, enjoying canoe races and competitive games of tennis or polo. He assumed that his entire family, which had always been a kind of self-contained universe, would spend weeks together in his rambling home.
For a time, Edith tried to isolate her new household and create a more secluded family life. “Theodore,” she would quietly say, “I think this winter we’ve seen a great deal of Douglas and Corinne and I don’t think we’ll ask them down for a little while—yet. We may ask them later.” At first he would agree: “Very well, very well, Edie, we’ll have them later.” But soon he “put his foot down” and insisted upon opening their home to the company, stimulation, and activity he needed. Clearly, two very different temperaments had to be reconciled. Edith later acknowledged to Theodore Junior that it had been a great “temptation” to withdraw from society, but “Father would not allow it.” Slowly, she began to open her house to her husband’s family and friends, while wisely turning the drawing room into her sanctuary, “the place where she kept her own books and treasures.” In this elegant room, furnished with bookcases, chairs, and sofas that had been in her family, she found the privacy she craved. Children and guests were told to knock and await permission to enter.
The accommodations Edith made in her manner of life at Sagamore Hill were insignificant beside the transformations occasioned by her husband’s impulsive move to Washington, D.C., to become a member of the Civil Service Commission. The 1888 presidential campaign between Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland had revived his interest in politics. A loyal Republican, he had agreed to stump for Harrison, traveling through the Midwest for twelve days, speaking before large crowds, discovering once again the pride and pleasure an enthusiastic audience could bestow. His reintroduction to national politics was “immense fun,” he told Henry Cabot Lodge, who would join him in Washington as a new congressman from Massachusetts.
When Republicans captured both the presidency and the U.S. Congress, Roosevelt hoped he might be appointed assistant secretary of state. Despite intense lobbying by his friends, however, the new secretary, James Blaine, was hesitant to have a man of “Mr. T.R.’s temperament” in such an important post. “I do somehow fear that my sleep at Augusta or Bar Harbor would not be quite so easy and refreshing,” Blaine admitted, “if so brilliant and aggressive a man had hold of the helm.”
After absorbing this disappointing news, Roosevelt finally received word that President Harrison would offer him the less exalted post of civil service commissioner, where he would be charged with enforcing the 1883 Pendleton Act, mandating that one quarter of all federal jobs be filled by competitive examination rather than party affiliation. Roosevelt’s family and friends cautioned against accepting the post, believing it beneath his talents, but Roosevelt leapt at the chance to return to political life.
For Edith, pregnant with their second child after a miscarriage the previous summer, the move to Washington signaled an unwelcome disruption of domestic order. Politics held scant interest for her compared with an abiding love of literature, a passion she could share with her husband while he was at work writing. Moreover, as the manager of the family’s finances, she worried that his meager annual salary of $3,500 would not cover both the rental in Washington and the maintenance of Sagamore Hill. To economize, Roosevelt decided to stay with Henry Cabot Lodge until Edith could join him after the baby’s birth in October.
Whereas Edith dreaded the long separation from her husband, Roosevelt was thrilled to be actively involved in the ferment of the capital. Within minutes of his arrival at the commission offices in the City Hall building, it was clear that he would bring impetus and authority to his new role. Matthew Halloran, who served as a certification clerk for thirty-five years, recalled his first indelible glimpse of Roosevelt. The morning quiet was instantly shattered by his ringing introduction: “I am the new Civil Service Commissioner,” he proclaimed, his energetic, penetrating voice and brusque demeanor setting his new staff scrambling. “Have you a telephone? Call up the Ebbit House. I have an engagement with Archbishop Ireland. Say that I will be there at ten o’clock.” His appearance had immediate effect. “I jumped up with alacrity,” Halloran recalled. “Behind large-rimmed eye-glasses flashed piercing blue-gray eyes, Theodore Roosevelt impressed me as a fine specimen of vigorous manhood. The dazzling smile with its strong white teeth, which was later to become famous all over the world, is still a most vivid recollection. It seemed to mirror the wholesomeness and geniality of the man and it put me wholly at ease. . . . Our friendship and my admiration for him began at that moment.”
Indeed, it seemed that a favorable impression of the new commissioner was widespread. In an editorial praising Roosevelt’s appointment, the Decatur (Illinois) Republican observed, “He is equally at home in the drawing rooms of New York or Paris, in the halls of legislation or amid the exciting scenes of a national convention, and when he plays the cowboy on the ranch in Montana he is as far from a tenderfoot as when he takes up the pen to paint in glowing language the glories of a sunset in the Rockies or describes in a magazine article the interest of a fight with the hungry coyotes of the plains.” The legend of this intrepid young man and his multifarious talents was beginning to grow.
Theodore spent most of the summer in Washington, with only occasional weekend visits to Sagamore Hill. “It has been a hopeless kind of summer to look back on,” Edith wrote in mid-August, “and all I can think of are the times you have been here; our lovely rows and that long drive and our drives to and from the station. . . . My darling you are all the world to me. I am not myself when you are away. Do not forget me or love me less.”
On October 10, 1889, Edith gave birth to a second son. She named him Kermit, carrying forward the name of her Aunt Kermit and her father’s old mercantile house, Kermit & Carow. Two months later, she finally joined her husband in their newly rented town house at 1820 Jefferson Place. “Edie has occasional fits of gloom,” Theodore reported to Bamie on January 4, 1890, “but the house is now getting to look very homelike and comfortable, such a contrast to when I was alone in it! I can hardly realize it is the same place; and I am thoroughly enjoying the change.”
SO IT WAS THAT THE spring of 1890 saw both the Roosevelts and the Tafts settled in the same Washington neighborhood. Both men had accepted positions in the capital that were far from their ideal vocations, though Roosevelt stepped into his job as commissioner with characteristic verve, while Will approached the role of solicitor general with trepidation. Their two wives also responded very differently to the prospect of life in Washington. Nellie had been an active proponent of the move, undeterred by the idea of uprooting her growing family in order to expand her experience and influence alongside her husband. Edith shuddered at the tumult and social demands of the city, a disruption imposed on the family circle she had waited so long to establish. In many ways, the two women complemented and balanced their respective partners. Nellie spurred Will Taft to greater confidence and action, her expectations and support driving him to greater engagement in the important work of the time. Edith, meanwhile, worked to restrain the impetuous will that drove her husband to ceaseless activity.
Despite—or perhaps because of—their dissimilar natures, Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft would forge a historic friendship. Nellie and Edith, despite their proximity and clear parallels in their interests and upbringings, never made a deep connection. In fact, their commonalities were far more superficial than their disparities. Both had grown up in the shadow of wealthier, more eminent families and had eventually married into them. The social ambitions that dictated private schools, proper wardrobes, and advantageous marriages for both girls were internalized in very different ways. Nellie, exposed to the scintillating world of national politics and society as a girl, was determined to marry a future president (or create one of the man she married). She had watched her father sacrifice personal ambitions and satisfaction for material comfort and longed to find personal fulfillment, a more vivid and expansive existence. Edith, on the other hand, who had seen the dissipation of her family’s empire in the hands of an alcoholic father, craved security and domestic coherence above all else.
Both women were scholars after their fashion. Each had avidly pursued her education, read widely for pleasure, and developed her closest friendships in a circle with similar literary inclinations. For Nellie, literature was a way to engage the larger world, to explore the social issues of the day; reading and writing were intensely personal pursuits for Edith, a way to isolate herself and create a private world to share with those she let in. When Edith married, she believed that she and Theodore could withdraw and build a life centered on books and family, sustained by reading and writing. Nellie, whose relationship with Will evolved in the heated discussions of her salon, agreed to a marriage she believed would expand the boundaries of her existence and her opportunities for involvement and impact.
Nellie always chafed at the conventions that circumscribed her role in the world. The same iconoclastic impulse that drove her to sneak cigarettes or dance in German beer halls made her ache to pursue higher education, as her brothers had, or to find purpose as a pioneer in early childhood schooling despite the opposition of her family. Seeing nothing but ennui in the “favorable” matches that were the crowning achievement for women of her time and station, she sought something different in her union with Will Taft. Solicitous and respectful, he accepted and needed her as a partner in public as well as in domestic pursuits. In London on her honeymoon, she was thrilled to hear Gladstone speak in Parliament. In Cincinnati, she savored newspapers and enjoyed discussions of current events. She was elated that they would now find themselves in Washington, at the epicenter of American political life.
Edith desperately longed for the staid home life that Nellie was fighting to escape. She sought always to make the Roosevelt home a refuge for herself and her family. “A very long way after her husband and children,” one friend observed, “came a small group of chosen friends.” Like Nellie, she was accomplished and competent, pursuing her intellectual passions while astutely managing her household. She did not, however, share her new neighbor’s interest in the social and political agendas that dominated the consciousness of Washington, D.C. While Edith and Nellie lacked a basic affinity and understanding, the unique support each woman gave her husband was indispensable, allowing William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt to find common cause and succeed in ways neither could have alone.