Trained for either camp or court,
Skilful in each manly sport,
Young and beautiful and tall;
Art of warfare, craft of chases,
Swimming, skating, snow-shoe races
Excellent alike in all.
ON THE NIGHT OF 26 October 1876, the normally quiet streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, were disturbed by the roars of a student demonstration. Freshman supporters of the Republican candidate for President stamped on the cobblestones and echoed a shout that could be heard in electoral districts across the nation: “Hurrah for Hayes and Honest Ways!!” Torchlight flickered redly on their optimistic faces and waving banners. After eight years of governmental scandals under the Grant Administration, it seemed at last that Civil Service Reform, so dear to the hearts of young progressives, was on the way. The United States, just one century old, stood thrillingly poised, like themselves, at the threshold of maturity. There was a crackle of excitement in the fall air, a promise of power and future glory. The demonstrators were in great good humor, and not altogether in earnest: one lopsided banner called for FREE TRADE, FREE PRESS, AND FREE BEER.1
“Iron self-discipline had become a habit with him.”
Theodore Roosevelt the Harvard freshman, 1877. (Illustration 3.1)
All at once, from a second-story window, came the jeering voice of a Democratic senior: “Hush up, you blooming freshmen!” Albert Bushnell Hart, who was in the crowd, noted the effect of this insult upon his classmates, and upon one of them in particular:
Every student there was profoundly indignant. I noticed one little man, small but firmly knit. He had slammed his torch to the street. His fists quivered like steel springs and swished through the air as if plunging a hole through a mattress: I had never seen a man so angry before. “It’s Roosevelt from New York,” some one said. I made an effort to know Roosevelt better from that moment.2
According to other accounts, a potato came whizzing in the little man’s direction, and his language in reply was unprintable.3 A trifling incident, perhaps, but the Hayes demonstration was the first sign of any political interest in young Theodore. It happened to occur on the eve of his eighteenth birthday. He had been at Harvard for only one month.
CAMBRIDGE IN 1876 was essentially the same peaceful village it had been for more than two hundred years. The occasional shriek of a horsecar’s wheels around a sharp corner, the slap of cement on bricks, the hiss of hydraulic dredges down by the marsh, warned that a noisier age was on its way, but as yet these sounds only accentuated the general sleepy calm, so soothing to academic nerves. In the center of the village stood the ivy-hung buildings of Harvard Yard, widely spaced with lawns and gravel walks, securely surrounded with iron railings, an oasis within an oasis. Through these railings could be glimpsed the intellectual elite of New England, men whose very nomenclature suggested the social exclusiveness, and inbred quality, of America’s oldest cultural institution.4
The eight hundred students of Harvard College echoed, in their dress, mannerisms, and behavior, the general parochial atmosphere. Although President Eliot’s revolutionary new administrative policies had freed them from the hidebound conformity of former years, they still tended to wear the same soft round hats and peajackets, quote the same verses of Omar Khayyhám, smoke the same meerschaum pipes, walk with the Harvard “swing” (actually an indolent saunter), and speak with the Harvard “drawl,” with its characteristic hint of suppressed yawns. Their pose of fashionable languor was dropped only on evenings “across the river,” when they would drink huge quantities of iced shandygaff in Bowdoin Square, and make loud nuisances of themselves at variety shows in the Globe Theater.5 They cultivated a laissez-faire attitude to the outside world and its problems, elegantly summarized by George Pellew, class poet of Theodore’s senior year, in his “Ode to Indifference”:
We deem it narrow-minded to excel.
We call the man fanatic who applies
His life to one grand purpose till he dies.
Enthusiasm sees one side, one fact,
We try to see all sides, but do not act.
… We long to sit with newspapers unfurled,
Indifferent spectators of the world.6
These lines do not appear to have offended the future apostle of the Life Strenuous, when he heard them recited at the Hasty Pudding Club. He had other things on his mind at the time. Even so, it is surprising that he did not react to them as furiously as he did to the jeer, and the whizzing potato, of the Hayes demonstration. No philosophy, certainly, could be more foreign to his ardent nature than that of Indifference; as President he would wax apoplectic over much milder material.
The truth is that “Roosevelt from New York” was much more comfortable with the languid fops of Harvard than his apologists would admit. He not only relished the company of rich young men, but moved at once into the ranks of the richest and most arrogantly fashionable. Within a week of his arrival in Cambridge, he forsook the bread-slinging camaraderie of meals at Commons and joined a dining-club composed almost exclusively of Boston Brahmins.7 Showing the self-protective instinct of a born snob, he carefully researched the “antecedents” of potential friends. “On this very account,” he wrote Corinne, “I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”8
Although his class numbered some 250—each of whom could, on graduation day, consider himself privileged above fifty thousand American youths—Theodore considered only a minute fraction to be the “gentleman-sort,”9 and took little notice of the rest. But his personality was too warm, and his manners too good, for him to ignore them completely. “Roosevelt was perfectly willing to talk to others,” recalled a member of the lower orders, “when the occasion arose.”10
As a result of this attitude, his popularity at Harvard was confined to the minority who could call him “Teddy.” Partly because he gave so little of himself to the majority, and partly because the variety of his interests kept him constantly on the move, vignettes of him during those early days at Cambridge are sketchy and dissimilar. Yet all are vivid. He trots around Holmes Field in a bright red football jersey, “the man with the morning in his face.” Flushing with indignation, he leaps to his feet during roll call, and protests harshly the mispronunciation of his name; he drops from a horsecar in the Square, “thin-chested, spectacled, nervous and frail”; he hunches over a book in a roomful of noisy students, frowning with absorption, oblivious to horseplay around his chair, and to the fact that his boots are being charred by the fire; he stands in the door of Memorial Hall, talking vehemently, stammering, baring his teeth; he actually runs from one recitation to another, although it is not considered Harvard form to move at more than walking speed; again and again he leaps to his feet at lectures, challenging statements and demanding clarifications, until a professor shouts angrily, “See here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.”11
Perhaps the most revealing anecdote is that of Richard Welling, who was, at this time, the strongest student in the records of Harvard Gymnasium. His first impression of Theodore was “a youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development,” drearily swinging between vertical poles. Later that winter, when the youth invited him to go skating in bitter weather, Welling changed his mind. Theodore escorted him to Fresh Pond, which was
too big and too unprotected from the furious winds to be good skating ground, rough ice, dull skates, wretched skaters scuffling about, mostly arms waving like windmills in a gale—and when any sane man would have voted to go home, as the afternoon’s sport was clearly a flop, Roosevelt was exclaiming, “Isn’t this bully!”—and the harder it blew, and the more we skated, the more often I had to hear, “Isn’t this bully!” There was no trace of shelter where we could rub our ears, restore our fingers to some resemblance of feeling, or prevent our toes from becoming perhaps seriously frostbitten. Never in college was my own grit so put to the test, and yet I would not be the first to suggest “home.”
Nearly three hours passed before Roosevelt finally said: “It’s too dark to skate any more,” (as though, if there had been a moon, we could have gone on to midnight) … I recall my numbed fingers grasping the key to my room and unable to make a turn in the lock. That afternoon of so-called sport made me realize Roosevelt’s amazing vitality.12
Theodore Senior, admitting to an “almost sinful” interest in his son’s progress, worried sometimes about the physical phenomenon he had helped create. “His energy seems so superabundant that I fear it may get the better of him in one way or another.”13
Clearly, the young man was going to have to do something about his temper. Arguments at his eating club provoked him to furious volleys of food-throwing, and on one occasion he slammed a whole pumpkin down on the head of an adversary. He reacted to personal abuse with instant fisticuffs, even punching friends who tried to restrain him.14
At first the social butterflies of Harvard did not know what to make of this hornet in their midst. His name was too foreign, his manner too “bumptious” to win instant acceptance. However, it did not take the Minots and Saltonstalls and Chapins long to discover that he was the brother of Bamie Roosevelt, the charming Knickerbocker who had summered in Bar Harbor, Maine, the last few years, and that his bumptiousness was a side-effect of his uncontrolled enthusiasms. They found it hard to dislike someone so supremely unconscious of his own peculiarity. “Teddy” happened to be a fascinating, if spluttery, talker: he could analyze lightweight boxing techniques, discuss the aerodynamics of birds and the protective coloration of animals, quote at will from theNibelungenlied and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and explain what it was like trying to remain submerged in the Dead Sea. He was “queer,” he was “crazy,” he was “a bundle of eccentricities,” but he was wholly interesting.15
It was the custom in those days for members of Harvard’s more exclusive clubs to wander through the streets after election meetings, and serenade each new addition to their rolls. At least a dozen times, during the years 1876–80, the name that floated up through the night air was that of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.16
FEARING THE DAMPNESS OF ground-floor dormitories, to which freshmen were traditionally assigned, Theodore took a room on the second floor of Mrs. Richardson’s boardinghouse at 16 Winthrop Street, about halfway between the Yard and the Charles River. Furnished and decorated by Bamie, it was already “just as cosy and comfortable as it could look” when he moved in on 27 September 1876. Four big windows, facing north and east, supplied all the light an amateur taxidermist could wish for. The walls were tastefully papered, the carpet deep and warm. Cushions and a heavy fur rug awaited him on the chaise longue. There were his birds under domes of glass, and his bowie knives crossed over the mantel. A massively carved table stood in the center of the room, under the gas jet, along with the hard, bare chair which New Englanders considered appropriate for study. Theodore gazed about him in delight. “When I get my pictures and books,” he assured Bamie, “I do not think there will be a room in College more handsome.”17
As he settled in, and felt for the first time the joy of adulthood, he overflowed with gratitude to the parents who had brought him thus far. “It seems perfectly wonderful,” he wrote Mittie, “looking back over my eighteen years of existence, to see how I have literally never spent an unhappy day, unless by my own fault. When I think of this and also of my intimacy with you all (for I hardly know a boy who is on as intimate and affectionate terms with his family as I am) I feel I have an immense amount to be thankful for.”18 Another letter dating from the early months of his freshman year is full of documentary detail:
Perhaps you would like me to describe completely one day of college life; so I shall take last Monday. At half past seven my scout, having made the fire and blacked the boots, calls me, and I get round to breakfast at eight. Only a few of the boys are at breakfast, most having spent the night in Boston. Our quarters now are nice and sunny, and the room is prettily papered and ornamented. For breakfast we have tea or coffee, hot biscuits, toast, chops or beef steak, and buckwheat cakes. After breakfast I study till ten, when the mail arrives and is eagerly inspected. From eleven to twelve there is a Latin recitation with a meek-eyed Professor, who calls me Rusee-felt (hardly any one can get my name correctly, except as Rosy). Then I go over to the gymnasium, where I have a set-to with the gloves with “General” Lister, the boxing master—for I am training to box among the lightweights in the approaching match for the championship of Harvard. Then comes lunch, at which all the boys are assembled in an obstreperously joyful condition; a state of mind which brings on a free fight, to the detriment of Harry Jackson, who, with a dutch cheese and some coffee cups is put under the table; which proceeding calls forth dire threats of expulsion from Mrs. Morgan. Afterwards studying and recitation took up the time till halfpast four; as I was then going home, suddenly I heard “Hi, Ted! Catch!” and a baseball whizzed by me. Our two “babies,” Bob Bacon and Arthur Hooper, were playing ball behind one of the buildings. So I stayed and watched them, until the ball went through a window and a proctor started out to inquire—when we abruptly separated. That evening I took dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Tudor, and had a very pleasant home-like time … When I returned I studied for an hour, and then, it being halfpast ten, put on my slippers, which are as comfortable as they are pretty, drew the rocking chair up to the fire, and spent the next half hour toasting my feet and reading Lamb.19
From time to time, as Theodore sat writing, he could glance over his shoulder and see the firelight reflected in the eyes of salamanders. He had established an impromptu vivarium in the corner of the room, where animals awaiting execution had an opportunity to review their past lives. At first this collection was small enough to reassure his landlady, but its population gradually expanded to include snakes, lobsters, and a giant tortoise. The latter managed to escape from its pen while Theodore was out, and wandered through the house in search of freedom: Mrs. Richardson, stumbling upon it, was frightened into hysterics. Rooseveltian eloquence presumably saved the day, for Theodore continued to reside at 16 Winthrop Street throughout his college career.20
In addition to boxing, wrestling, body-building, and his daily hours of recitation, the young freshman attended weekly dancing-classes, hunted in the woods around Cambridge, taught in Sunday school, stuffed and dissected his specimens, organized a whist club, took part in poetry-reading sessions, followed the Harvard football team to Yale (“The fellows … seem to be a much more scrubby set than ours”), and, in time-honored undergraduate fashion, caroused with his friends, making the night hideous with his harsh, unmusical singing.21 He developed a sudden, and ardent, interest in the girls of Boston, and, thanks to his excellent local connections, was soon seeing many of them. Hardly a week went by, in those early months of 1877, without its round of matinees, theater parties, and balls. Theodore reported them all enthusiastically to his family, along with assurances that he was not neglecting his studies, and at least one guilty protestation that he remained faithful to Edith Carow.22
Although he had not lacked for female company hitherto in his life, it had been confined mostly to the Roosevelt family circle. Even his intimacy with Edith had the quality of a brother-sister relationship. Sickly and reclusive as a child, preoccupied with travel and self-improvement in his teens, he had had little opportunity to knock on strange doors. Now, doors were opening of their own accord, disclosing scores of fresh faces and alluring young figures. Understandably Theodore was dazzled. Almost every girl he met is described in his letters as “sweet,” “bright,” or “pretty.”
What the girls thought of him, with his crooked spectacles, grinning teeth, and alarmingly frank conversation, was another matter. The evidence is that they tolerated him (to one debutante, he was “studious, ambitious, eccentric—not the sort to appeal at first”) until they found they had grown fond of him.23
It might be mentioned here that neither during his student years, nor indeed at any time in his life, did Theodore show the slightest tolerance for women (or for that matter men) who were anything but “rigidly virtuous.” His judgments of people lower down the moral or social scale could be particularly prudish. “Have just received a letter telling me that [cousin] Cornelius has distinguished himself by marrying a French actress!” he wrote in his diary one day. “He is a disgrace to the family—the vulgar brute.”24 Sex, to him, was part of the mystical union of marriage, and, however pleasurable as an act of love, its function was to procreate. Outside marriage, as far as he was concerned, it simply did not exist.25
Of the inclinations that naturally beset a young man when he returns, hot from the intimacies of a sleigh-ride, to his private room, it is perhaps unnecessary to speak. There are erasures and pages torn out of Theodore’s diaries, yet also the ecstatic declaration, when he finally fell in love, “Thank Heaven, I am … perfectly pure.”26
At the same time that he became a ladies’ man, he developed into something of a fashion plate, or, as he preferred to describe himself, “very swell.” Invited away for the weekend, he was suddenly ashamed of his hat, and sent home for a beaver. Selecting a new wardrobe, he agonized for days over his afternoon coat, “being undecided whether to have it a frock or a cutaway.” He complained that his washerwoman did not act squarely “on the subject of white cravats.”27 He sported one necktie so brilliant it cast a glow upon his cheeks, and combed his whiskers until they swayed in the breeze. Sniggers could be heard in the Yard, as he marched dazzlingly by. But Theodore, in the manner of all dandies, pretended not to notice he was being noticed.28
WHEN HE ASSURED his parents that he was not neglecting his studies, he was telling the truth. Indeed, he got through prodigious quantities of work. Iron self-discipline had become a habit with him, and he plotted every day with the methodism of a Wesleyan minister. The amount of time he spent at his desk was comparatively small—rarely more than a quarter of the day—but his concentration was so intense, and his reading so rapid, that he could afford more time off than most. Even these “free” periods were packed with mental, physical, or social activity. “He was forever at it,” said one classmate. Another marveled: “Never have I seen or read of a man with such an amazing array of interests.”29 Tumbling into bed at midnight or in the small hours, Theodore could luxuriate in healthy tiredness, satisfied that he had wasted not one minute of his waking hours.
His regimen was flexible, but balanced. Any overindulgence in sport or flirtation would be immediately compensated for by extra study. When an attack of measles laid him low in February 1877, he made up for lost time by canceling his Easter vacation in New York, secluding himself on a friend’s farm, and finishing in five days “the first book of Horace, the sixth book of Homer, and the Apology of Socrates.”30
It must not be assumed that Theodore struck any of the Harvard faculty as intellectually remarkable during this stage of his academic career. On the contrary, he was regarded as “an average B man … not in any way distinguished.”31 He paled in comparison with the scintillating, sixteen-year-old Bob Bacon, and at least half a dozen of his classmates surpassed him in composing themes. “Roosevelt’s writing was to the point,” said one instructor, “but did not have their air of cultivation.”32 Like many voluble men, he was a slow writer, painfully hammering out sentences which achieved force and clarity at the expense of polite style.
Neither this nor the pessimism of professors prevented him from scoring an average of 75 at the end of his freshman year, with honor grades in five out of seven subjects.33 If it could not be counted a “distinguished” performance, for a boy who had largely educated himself, then it would do for the time being.
BEFORE LEAVING HARVARD for the summer of 1877, Theodore played host to several guests from New York, including Edith Carow. The latter, perhaps aware that she had local rivals, flirted with him and his classmates so successfully that he exclaimed afterward, “I don’t think I ever saw Edith looking prettier; everyone … admired her little Ladyship intensely, and she behaved as sweetly as she looked.” He begged Corinne to pass on the word that “I enjoyed her visit very much indeed.”34
But within a day or two he was praising other girls again. When college broke up on 21 June, he hurried, not to the parlors of New York City, but to the lonely forests of the Adirondacks, “so as to get the birds in as good plumage as possible.”35 Possibly Edith, hearing this, heaved a quiet sigh. She could compete with the belles of Boston, but what were her charms compared with those of the orange-throated warbler, red-bellied nuthatch, and hairy woodpecker?
IN MID-JULY, THEODORE joined his family at Tranquillity, and soon afterward published his first printed work, The Summer Birds of the Adirondacks. This scientific catalog was the fruit of three expeditions dating back to August 1874, on the last of which he had been briefly joined by Harry Minot, his best friend from Harvard. Minot contributed a few observations and was listed as co-author, but the title-page typography left no doubt as to who took full credit. Ninety-seven species—some unknown even to longtime residents of the area—were described in precise thumbnail sketches, remarkable for their emphasis on song as well as plumage. Theodore’s acute ear had been ravished, in the Adirondacks, by a wealth of melody such as he had never heard before. His notebooks, upon which Birds was based, are so full of auditory observations that visual ones are sometimes forgotten. Spectacles or no spectacles, sound always meant more to him than color. One rhapsodic passage shows how sensuously he reacted to it:
Perhaps the sweetest bird music I have ever listened to was uttered by a hermit thrush. It was while hunting deer on a small lake, in the heart of the wilderness; the night was dark, for the moon had not yet risen, but there were clouds, and as we moved over the surface of the water with the perfect silence so strange and almost oppressive to the novice in this sport, I could distinguish dimly the outlines of the gloomy and impenetrable pine forests by which we were surrounded. We had been out for two or three hours but had seen nothing; once we heard a tree fall with a dull, heavy crash, and two or three times the harsh hooting of an owl had been answered by the unholy laughter of a loon from the bosom of the lake, but otherwise nothing had occurred to break the death-like stillness of the night; not even a breath of air stirred among the tops of the tall pine trees. Wearied by our unsuccess we at last turned homeward when suddenly the quiet was broken by the song of a hermit thrush; louder and clearer it sang from the depths of the grim and rugged woods, until the sweet, sad music seemed to fill the very air and to conquer for the moment the gloom of the night; then it died away and ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Perhaps the song would have seemed less sweet in the daytime, but uttered as it was, with such surroundings, sounding so strange and so beautiful amid these grand but desolate wilds, I shall never forget it.
This Keatsian passage, composed when Theodore was only eighteen, foreshadows the best of his mature writing in its simplicity and atmospheric effects. Yet he kept it and other such effusions strictly private: in his published works he seemed determined to be scholarly. Summer Birds was followed in due course by a similar study, Notes on Some of the Birds of Oyster Bay. Thirty-five years later, when the ex-President was writing his memoirs, he would look back fondly on these “obscure ornithological publications,” which formally launched him on his career as a professional natural historian.36
That career was the subject of a solemn discussion between father and son during the late summer of 1877. Theodore’s courses in his freshman year had all been prescribed; now, as his sophomore year loomed, he could choose some of his own—and begin to follow his future course in life. Summer Birds, which was favorably reviewed, must have convinced Theodore Senior that his son was already one of the most knowledgeable young naturalists in the United States.37 The boy’s collection of birds and skins, now numbering well into the hundreds, was probably unequaled in variety and quality by any American of his age. He was regarded as “a very promising taxidermist, appeared in a national directory of biologists, and very likely had no peer, as a teenage ornithologist, in his knowledge of bird coloration, courtship, flight, and song.38 His future as a scientist would therefore seem to be assured. Yet Theodore Senior gave him surprisingly little encouragement.
My father … told me that if I wished to be a scientific man I could do so. He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up such a career and do non-remunerative work of value if I intended to do the very best work that was in me; but that I must not dream of taking it up as a dilettante. He also gave me a piece of advice that I have always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I must even things up by not spending it. As he expressed it, I had to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the numerator, then I must reduce the denominator. In other words, if I went into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the enjoyment that could accompany a money-making career, and must find my pleasures elsewhere.
After this conversation I fully intended to make science my life-work.39
Returning to Harvard as a sophomore in the fall of 1877, Theodore elected two courses in natural history: elementary botany, and comparative anatomy and physiology of vertebrates. (His instructor in this course, which he found “extremely interesting,” was William James.) He also chose two courses of German and one of French, and was prescribed courses in rhetoric, constitutional history, and themes. In this demanding schedule he was to surpass the record of his freshman year with an excellent average of 89. He scored 96 and 92 in German, 94 in rhetoric, 89 in botany, and 79 in anatomy. His average would have been even higher, but for a hairs-breadth 51 in “that villainous French.” Even so, with six honor grades out of eight, he once again confounded his academic critics, and there was no more talk of scholastic mediocrity. “He distinctly belonged,” said Thomas Perry, instructor in themes, “to the best twenty-five in a very brilliant class.”40
With respect to the other two hundred and twenty, Theodore gradually relaxed his rather snobbish standards. “My respect for the quality of my classmates has much increased lately,” he wrote Corinne, “as they no longer seem to think it necessary to confine their conversation exclusively to athletic subjects. I was especially struck by this the other night, when after a couple of hours spent in boxing and wrestling with Arthur Hooper and Ralph Ellis, it was proposed to finish the evening by reading aloud from Tennyson, and we became so interested in In Memoriam that it was past one o’clock when we separated.”41 His best friend continued to be Harry Minot, but as time went on he showed an increasing fondness for Richard Saltonstall, a large, shy boy from the highest ranks of Boston society. With Bob Bacon, too, he maintained an easy friendship, and was invited with him to join the prestigious Institute of 1770.42
About the time he turned nineteen in October 1877, Theodore was informed that his father had been appointed Collector of Customs to the Port of New York by President Hayes. He dutifully expressed “the greatest interest” in subsequent movements toward confirmation by the Senate, but the interest was personal rather than political.43 Since his appearance at the Hayes demonstration a year before, he had shown no further concern for politics; his letters of the period, so full of bubbling curiosity about other aspects of life, are bare of any reference to national affairs. Now, however, events conspired to force politics brutally upon his attention.
Theodore Senior, who had himself just turned forty-six, was as politically naive as his son. He assumed at first that the Collectorship was a reward for distinguished services to New York City, but disillusionment came rapidly. President Hayes, it turned out, had chosen him merely as a symbol of the Administration’s commitment to Civil Service Reform. By elevating this decent and incorruptible man up to public office, Hayes hoped to embarrass Senator Roscoe Conkling, boss of the corrupt New York State Republican machine, who was demanding the reappointment of Chester A. Arthur as Collector. The fact that Arthur was himself decent and incorruptible only increased the savagery of the resultant battle for Senate confirmation. Roosevelt lay helpless as a pawn between the clashing forces of Old Guard “Spoils-men” and Reform Republicans.
Since Boss Conkling happened to sit on the Senate committee that must consider the appointment, it was subjected to endless delaying tactics. Yet Hayes would not withdraw his nomination, and Roosevelt, as a patriotic citizen, had no choice but to remain at the President’s disposal.44 He loathed Conkling with all his soul, and felt contaminated by any contact with the machine. Theodore Senior belonged to a class and a generation that considered politics to be a dirty business, best left, like street cleaning, to malodorous professionals. Humiliated by the scrutiny of his inferiors, exhausted by week after week of worry, he began to deteriorate physically under the strain. He was racked by mysterious intestinal cramps, which worsened as the struggle dragged on into December. By then the “Collectorship row” was making nationwide headlines, and while the nomination seemed doomed, suspense continued to torture the nominee.
His son, following daily developments in Cambridge, grew increasingly worried. “Am very uneasy about Father,” he wrote on 16 December, after the nomination had been finally rejected in the Senate by a vote of 25 to 31. “Does the Doctor think it is anything serious?”45 Two days later Theodore Senior collapsed with what was diagnosed as acute peritonitis. For a while he lay desperately ill, but as Christmas approached he began to recover. The Roosevelts celebrated with exhausted relief, vowing to have no more to do with politics.46
BACK AT HARVARD early in the New Year, Theodore recorded in a private diary his father’s parting assurance “that after all I was the dearest of his children to him.”47 As always, the deep voice and all-seeing eyes inspired a determination to be worthy of “the best and most loving of men.” He was cramming hard for his semiannual examinations when, late on the afternoon of Saturday, 9 February, an urgent summons arrived from New York.48 Theodore ran to catch the overnight train, knowing that his father must have suffered a relapse, yet unaware that screams of agony were echoing through the Roosevelt town house. Theodore Senior’s “peritonitis” was in reality a malignant fibrous tumor of the bowel, and since its brief period of remission over Christmas it had grown so rapidly that it was now strangling his intestines. The pain that he suffered had, in a matter of weeks, turned his dark hair gray; even now, as his elder son rushed to his bedside, it was all the other children could do to hold him down. “He was so mad with pain,” Elliott recorded, “that beyond groans and horrible writhes and twists he could do nothing. Oh my God my Father what agonies you suffered.”49
Theodore arrived on Sunday morning to find the flags of New York City flying at half-mast. “Greatheart” had died shortly before midnight.50
Alone in his room later that day, the new head of the Roosevelt family drew a thick slash down the margin of his diary for 9 February 1878 and wrote: “My dear Father. Born Sept. 23, 1831.” Here his pen wavered and stopped.
WHEN THEODORE RESUMED writing on 12 February, the words flowed tumultuously, as if to wash away his grief.
He has just been buried. I shall never forget these terrible three days; the hideous suspense of the ride on; the dull, inert sorrow, during which 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 that 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 holding the one I loved dearest on earth. He looked so calm and sweet. I feel that if it were not for the certainty, that as he himself has so often said, “he is not dead but gone before,” I should almost perish.
None of the Roosevelts, least of all Theodore himself, could have foreseen how shattered he would be by the premature loss of his father. “He was everything to me.” For a while, it seemed as if the youth could not survive without him. Like a fledgling shoved too soon from the bough, he tumbled nakedly through the air; some of his diary entries are not so much expressions of sorrow as squawks of fright.
They give the impression of a sensitivity so extreme it verges on mental imbalance. For month after month Theodore pours a flood of anguish into his diary, although his letters remain determinedly cheerful. Only in private can he allow his despair to overflow, yet the effect is therapeutic. By the end of April he is able to note: “I am now getting over the first sharpness of grief.” With perhaps unconscious symbolism, he shaves off his whiskers, and in consequence is “endlessly chaffed by the boys.” On the first day of May, with the smell of spring in the air, he is surprised to find that his thoughts of Theodore Senior have suddenly become “pleasant” ones.51
His grief, however, was by no means over. It continued to flow well into the summer, and spasmodically through the fall. Purged of terror, it became sweetened with nostalgia. Memories of his father surfaced in the form of dreams and hallucinations of almost photographic vividness. “All through the sermon,” he wrote one Sunday, “I was thinking of Father. I could see him sitting in the corner of the pew as distinctly as if he were alive, in the same dear old attitude, with his funny little ‘warlike curl’, and his beloved face. Oh, I feel so sad when I think of the word ‘never.’ ”52
Never—it was the word he had repeated over and over again in his childhood diaries, when longing for the unrecoverable past. Inevitably, his earliest and most poignant memory floated up: “I remember so well how, years ago, when I was a weak, asthmatic child, he used to walk up and down with me in his arms for hours together, night after night, and oh, how my heart pains me when I think that I never was able to do anything for him in his last illness!”53
This, of course, was not his fault—early news of Theodore Senior’s relapse had actually been withheld from him so as not to affect his studies—but it did not stop him reproaching himself, often in tones of bitter self-contempt. “I often feel badly that such a wonderful man as Father should have had a son of so little worth as I am.… How little use I am, or ever shall be in the world … I realize more and more every day that I am as much inferior to Father morally and mentally as physically.”54
After the terror and the nostalgia, it was desire that eventually healed him. Longing for the man who had been his best friend in life was translated into an even more desperate longing to be worthy of him in death. “How I wish I could ever do something to keep up his name!”55 In this ambition he would succeed so well that the name of Theodore Roosevelt would one day become the most famous in the world; ironically its very luster would obliterate the memory of its original bearer. But the large, kindly spirit of Theodore Senior hovered always over the shoulder of his son.
“Years afterward,” Corinne recalled, “when the college boy of 1878 was entering upon his duties as President of the United States, he told me frequently that he never took any serious step or made any vital decision for his country without thinking first what position his father would have taken on the question.”56
ON 23 FEBRUARY 1878, his first night back at Harvard after the funeral, Theodore noted casually: “I am left about $8000 a year: comfortable though not rich.” No doubt, as he penned these words, his mind harked back to the conversation he had had with Theodore Senior the previous summer, when he had been promised enough money to subsidize his career as a natural historian. Now here it was. It had arrived shockingly soon, but his duty was clear. Grief or no grief, he must balance the numerator of independence with the denominator of work. With remarkable self-discipline, given the hysteria of his private emotions, he at once resumed his studies, and within a week had scored 90 percent in two semiannual examinations. Invitations poured in from sympathetic friends in Boston, but he would accept none until May, and kept “grinding like a Trojan” for the rest of his sophomore year. At the same time he continued faithfully to exercise and teach in Sunday school, obedient to a precept of his father’s, which he had never forgotten: “Take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.”57
The excellence of his results in the annual examinations was achieved at much physical cost to himself. He was “unwell and feverish” during the latter part of May, and blamed his poor showing in French on “being forced to sit up all night with the asthma.”58The ordeal was over at last on 5 June. Theodore caught the afternoon express to New York, and next morning began what he hoped would be a summer of “nude happiness … among the wilds of Oyster Bay.”59
NUDE THE SUMMER certainly was—at least in the restricted Victorian sense of the term. Theodore was soon “mahogany from the waist up, thanks to hours of bare-chested rowing.” But happiness was long kept at bay by unavoidable associations between Tranquillity and Theodore Senior. In every idle moment the skinny student might see the big, bearded man laughing, praying, snoozing in the shade, jumping into his trap at the station and driving off at a rattling pace, his white linen duster bagging behind him like a balloon. “Oh Father, how bitterly I miss you and long for you!”60
Just as he had distracted himself in college with work, Theodore now whipped himself into a frenzy of physical activity. Throughout July he rowed and portaged such exhausting distances, over such dreary wastes of water and mud-flats, that just to read his diary is to tire. On one occasion he rowed clear across Long Island Sound to Rye Beach, a total of over twenty-five miles in a single day. Rowing, as opposed to the more leisurely sport of sailing, was deeply satisfying to him. As Corinne remarked, “Theodore craved the actual effort of the arms and back, the actual sense of meeting the wave close to.” Yet he loved riding even more, and spurred his horse Lightfoot to prodigious feats of endurance, including one twenty-mile gallop. In between rows and rides, Theodore would burn off his excess energy by running at speed through the woods, boxing and wrestling with Elliott, hiking, hunting, and swimming. His diary constantly exults in physical achievement, and never betrays fear that he might be overtaxing his strength. When forced to record an attack of cholera morbus in early August, he precedes it with the phrase, “Funnily enough …”61
Evidence that his heart, if not his body, was repairing itself came on 9 August. “It being Edith Carow’s 17th birthday, I sent her a bonbonièrre.” The young lady made her annual appearance at Oyster Bay a week later, and Theodore paid her his annual attentions, rowing her to Lloyds Neck, lunching out at Yellowbanks, and picking water lilies with her in Coldspring Harbor. Without reading more into the diary than is actually there, it is possible to discern the mounting excitement he felt in her proximity. On 22 August he let off steam by thundering off on a wild ride “that I am afraid … may have injured my horse.” Later the same day Edith joined him for a sailing trip, and in the evening they went to a family party together. “Afterwards,” his diary entry concludes, “Edith and I went up to the summer house.”62
With this enigmatic remark, a curtain of blank paper descends, and Edith is not mentioned again for months. Whatever happened in the summerhouse, it seems to have kindled some sort of rage in Theodore. Only two days later he was bothered, while riding, by a neighbor’s dog; drawing his revolver, he shot it dead, “rolling it over very neatly as it ran alongside the horse.”63 On a cruise up Long Island Sound with some male cousins, he blazed away with the same gun at anything he saw in the water, “from bottles or buoys to sharks and porpoises.”64
With the first chill of fall in the air, Theodore’s thoughts turned again to Harvard, and to his future. The uncertainty he had felt ever since committing himself to a scientific career was beginning to worry him, so much so he turned to an uncle for reassurance. But the old gentleman, while sympathetic, was unhelpful, and Theodore’s bewilderment increased. “I have absolutely no idea what I should do when I leave college,” he wrote in despair. “Oh Father, my Father, no words can tell how I shall miss your counsel and advice!”65
AS IF TO SEEK REFUGE from his doubts, he decided to spend the last few weeks of his vacation in the wilds of Aroostook County, in northern Maine. Arthur Cutler had hunted in the area—one of the last stands of virgin forest in the Northeast—and had suggested that Theodore might like to do the same. There was a backwoodsman there, said Cutler, named Bill Sewall; he kept open house for hunters, and was emphatically “a man to know.” Huge, bearded, and full of lust for life, Sewall loved to shout poetry as he fought his canoe through white water, or slammed his ax into shuddering pine trees. No doubt Cutler sensed that this magnificent specimen of manhood might satisfy Theodore’s cravings for a father figure. And since Sewall was humbly born, he might rub off some of the boy’s veneer of snobbism before it toughened into impenetrable bark.
Island Falls, where Sewall had his headquarters, was so remote from New York City that Theodore took two full days to get there, completing the last thirty-six miles in a buckboard. Two cousins, Emlen and West Roosevelt, and a Doctor W. Thompson accompanied him. The strain of the journey, coming on top of his frenetic summer, caused him to suffer a bad attack of asthma, and when he arrived at Sewall’s homestead, late on the evening of 7 September, he was wheezing. Sewall’s first impression of him was “a thin, pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart.”
Doctor Thompson took the backwoodsman aside. “He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.” Sewall agreed that Theodore looked “mighty pindlin’,” but soon found out that his appearance was deceptive.66
We traveled twenty-five miles afoot one day on that first visit of his, which I maintain was a good fair walk for any common man. We hitched well, somehow or other, from the start. He was different from anybody that I had ever met; especially, he was fair-minded.… Besides, he was always good-natured and full of fun. I do not think I ever remember him being “out of sorts.” He did not feel well sometimes, but he never would admit it.
I could see not a single thing that wasn’t fine in Theodore, no qualities that I didn’t like. Some folks said that he was headstrong and aggressive, but I never found him so except when necessary; and I’ve always thought being headstrong and aggressive, on occasion, was a pretty good thing. He wasn’t a bit cocky as far as I could see, though others thought so. I will say that he was not remarkably cautious about expressing his opinion.67
Theodore, for his part, found Sewall to be a figure straight out of The Saga of King Olaf. The backwoodsman agreed. “I don’t know but what my ancestors were vikings.”68
Tramping through the woods together, they were an oddly matched yet complementary pair: Sewall slow and purposeful, advancing with bearlike tread; Theodore wiry and nervous, cocking his gun at any hint of movement in the trees, stopping every now and again to pick up bugs. Since both men loved epic poetry, and could recite it by the yard, the squirrels of Aroostook County were entertained to many ringing declamations, including Sewall’s favorite lines:
Who are the nobles of the earth,
The true aristocrats,
Who need not bow their heads to kings
Nor doff to lords their hats?
Who are they but the men of toil
Who cleave the forest down
And plant amid the wilderness
The forest and the town?69
The words may have been familiar to Theodore, yet falling from the lips of a man whose father had been a carpenter and whose mother a seamstress, they took on new, defiantly democratic overtones, which were not lost on the scion of the Roosevelts.70
ON 27 SEPTEMBER 1878, Theodore was welcomed back to Cambridge by his classmates, and to his surprise “was offered the Porcellian.” Membership in this club was the highest social honor Harvard could bestow, and he was acutely embarrassed to refuse it. His scruples had nothing to do with the possible disapproval of a Bill Sewall. It was just that he had already been offered the A.D., and had accepted that instead.71 Greatly regretting his hastiness, for he wished very much to be “a Porc man,” he turned to the more important business of choosing a schedule for his junior year.
It proved to be an ambitious one, covering nine subjects and at least twenty hours a week of classroom and laboratory work. His electives were once again German and two natural history courses (zoology and geology), plus Italian and philosophy. Those prescribed were themes, forensics, logic, and metaphysics. In this formidable curriculum he was to score the best marks of his academic career, averaging 87 and standing thirteenth in a class of 166.72 In two of his electives—philosophy and natural history—he stood first.73
No sooner had Theodore settled down to his familiar routine of recitations, study, exercise, and “sprees” than the Porcellian once more opened its doors to him. Early in October there happened to be a drunken quarrel in the Yard, during which a Porc man told an A.D. man that Teddy Roosevelt, given the chance, would have chosen his club first. When the taunt became public, the A.D. announced that as its new member had not yet signed in, he was free to reconsider his acceptance. “Of course by this arrangement Ihave to hurt somebody’s feelings,” Theodore wrote agitatedly in his diary. “… I have rarely felt as badly as I have during the last 24 hours; it is terribly hard to know what the honorable thing is to do.” He decided that honor lay in the direction of the more prestigious club, and accepted the Porc’s offer on 6 October. “I am delighted to be in,” he told Bamie. “… There is a billiard table, magnificent library, punch-room &c, and my best friends are in it.”74
Perhaps the best of these “best friends,” now that Harry Minot had dropped out of Harvard to study law, was Dick Saltonstall, whose family mansion on Chestnut Hill became a second home to Theodore in the fall and winter of 1878. The first invitation to this bastion of Boston society came on Friday, 18 October. The two young men drove out of Cambridge in Saltonstall’s buggy, crossed the river, and headed west into a brilliant fall landscape.75
Chestnut Hill lay six miles away. As the buggy creaked toward it, through increasingly luxuriant woods, Theodore could sense the waves of peace and security which flow around the enclaves of the very rich. A private lane curved up the hillside to where Leverett Saltonstall’s house lay, huge and rambling, backed by chestnut trees, and fronting on an immense sweep of lawn. The lawn was shared by another, equally imposing mansion, the home of George Cabot Lee; a mere twenty yards of grass, and a token garden gate, separated the one property from the other.76 Dick had doubtless already explained to Theodore that the Lees and Saltonstalls were more than mere neighbors. Mr. Lee was his uncle by marriage, and seventeen-year-old Alice Lee was the inseparable companion of his sister, Rose Saltonstall.77 Theodore met both girls that evening. In his diary he described them with his usual vague adjectives, “sweet,” “pretty,” and “pleasant”—the last being reserved for Rose, who was decidedly the more homely of the two.
He greatly enjoyed himself that weekend, walking through the woods with Alice and Rose, attending church with both families on Sunday morning, and “chestnutting” alone with Alice in the afternoon.78 As always, his soul responded to people of his own class, conversation on his own level, manners whose every nuance was familiar to him. Only a month ago Bill Sewall had convinced him that “the nobles of the earth” were “men of toil”—and probably would convince him again, as he intended to return to Island Falls one day. But in the meantime, the Lees and Saltonstalls were aristocracy enough for Theodore Roosevelt.
ON 27 OCTOBER, AS HIS second decade came to an end, the young man’s thoughts turned to the past, and his grief for his father surged up afresh. To distract himself he took a ramble through the woods with his gun. His diary entry for that night proves, withunconscious humor, that his heart had at last healed: “Oh Father, sometimes I feel as though I would give half my life to see you but for a moment! Oh, what loving memories I have of you! 2 grey squirrel.”
ON 2 NOVEMBER 1878, Theodore was initiated into the Porcellian.79 It seems the honor rather went to his head. “Was ‘higher’ with wine than ever before—or will be again,” he wrote. “Still, I could wind up my watch.” Then, in a revealing afterword: “Wine makes me awfully fighty.”80 A throbbing hangover confirmed his lifelong resolve never to get drunk again, and the evidence is he never did. He continued to enjoy “sprees” at the Porc, including the traditional suppers of partridge and burgundy, and champagne breakfasts on Sundays; but he remained severely teetotal on most of these occasions, and abstemious on the others. As for smoking, he had promised his father to abstain from that manly practice until he was twenty-one, with the result that when the time came he had lost all interest in it. The third vice that appeals to most undergraduates was beneath his contemplation: he remained “perfectly pure” throughout his bachelor years.81
His second visit to Chestnut Hill occurred on 11 November, when he drove over to take tea with the Saltonstalls and their ubiquitous visitor from next door, who was “as sweet and pretty as ever.” So, of course, was practically every girl that Theodore met. But Alice Lee seems to have merited his praise rather more than any other. When he saw her again, he was a houseguest for Thanksgiving, and already so much a part of the Chestnut Hill circle that she allowed him to call her “Alice.”82 As her own first “Teddy” lingered softly in his ears, he vowed, with all the strength of his passionate nature, that he would marry her.83