A little bird in the air
Is singing of Thyri the fair,
The sister of Svend, the Dane;
And the song of the garrulous bird
In the streets of the town is heard,
And repeated again and again.
Hoist up your sails of silk,
And flee away from each other.
ALICE HATHAWAY LEE was just seventeen when Theodore first saw her on 18 October 1878. “As long as I live,” he wrote afterward, “I shall never forget how sweetly she looked, and how prettily she greeted me.”1 With his photographic memory, he no doubt carried that first vision of her pristine to the grave. Alice blushing must indeed have been an unforgettable sight, and not only to eyes as worshipful as Theodore’s. Contemporary testimonials to her beauty are as unanimous as those in praise of her charm. She was “an enchanting creature” of “singular loveliness”; of “quick intelligence,” “endearing character,” and “unfailing sunny temperament”; she was “gay,” “exceptionally bright,” and “the life of the party.”2 Images of sunshine and light recur so often in descriptions of her that one can understand how quickly she bedazzled Theodore, as indeed she bedazzled everybody.
“She seems like a star of heaven … my pearl, my pure flower.”
Alice Hathaway Lee when Theodore Roosevelt first met her. (Illustration 4.1)
The imagination, stimulated by such universal praise, delights to picture Alice Lee coming through that garden gate more than a century ago: an exquisite, willowy blonde, smiling shyly, moving with the “long, firm step” of a natural athlete. She wears a dress of white brocade that glows in the late-afternoon light.3 Through Theodore’s spectacles, as it were, we see, as she draws nearer, that she is tall—five foot seven, only two inches shorter than he—yet holds herself proudly erect. Her hair, drawn up to expose a graceful neck, is honey-colored, but when the sun strikes the water-curls that cling to her temples, or the thick ropes piled high on her head, unexpected highlights of gold shimmer in it. Her eyes are similarly chromatic: at times they seem a very pale blue, at others a pearly gray. Heavy lashes, when she glances down demurely, brush cheeks whose pinkness, blending into a soft pocket of shadow in the corner of her mouth, make her irresistibly kissable. She is, in short, as ravishing a beauty as ever walked across a Boston lawn, or through the pages of any Victorian novel. Theodore, drinking her in at every pore, fell in love with her there and then. Just two more meetings were enough to convince him “that win her I would, if it were possible,” and to affirm that “I had never before cared … a snap of my finger for any girl.”4
So much for Edith Carow. Theodore, when he wrote those words, was in such rapture over Alice that he probably exaggerated his indifference to other women. But whatever spark Edith had kindled in his heart was obliterated by the firestorm of passion which now consumed him. After only one weekend at Chestnut Hill he could afford to be sarcastic about his childhood sweetheart: “… give my love to Edith—if she’s in a good humour; otherwise my respectful regards.” The suspicion grows that his last interview with that strong-willed young lady, in the summer-house at Oyster Bay, had been a stormy one. “If she seems particularly good-tempered,” Theodore went on, “tell her that I hope that when I see her at Xmas it will not be on what you might call one of her off days.”5With that he cast her from his mind, and dedicated himself to the “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”6
GIVEN HER EXTREME YOUTH, and the protective aura of wealth and privilege that had always surrounded her, Alice not surprisingly proved to be as elusive a prize as Theodore had ever hunted. His ardor was so violent—in courtship as in everything else—that he periodically frightened her away, like a nervous doe; then he would have to restrain himself, and with soft words and soothing gestures coax her near again. She found him by no means a romantic attraction. The slight stench of arsenic that emanated from his clothes; the tickly whiskers and glittering glasses; the manic bursts of energy which left him white and sick with exhaustion; his geyser-like garrulousness, choked by stammers which would inevitably explode under the pressure of more words boiling up inside him; his exuberant hopping on the dance-floor, so perilous to lace pantaloons; the bloodcurdling stories of wolves and bears; the black eyes from boxing, the nervous diarrhea, the alarming hiss of asthma in his lungs—these were not the things a girl of polite background dreamed about, except perhaps in nightmares. Yet Alice could not help being intrigued by him, and flattered by his adoration. How different he was from those boring young Boston Brahmins—and, so far as she knew, from everybody else in the human race. How sidesplitting he could be, when he told jokes in that curious falsetto of his! Her quick mind rejoiced in his intelligence, and her body, when they skated together, to the masculine hardness of his arms. Even as she sprang away from him, she took care not to spring too far; not that there was any risk of him abandoning the chase. Theodore, like his father before him, “almost always got what he wanted.”7
NO SOONER HAD the lovesick junior returned to Winthrop Street after Thanksgiving than he formally entered in his diary the vow that he would marry Alice Lee.8 To make it doubly formal, he arranged a “tintype spree,” or trip to the photographer’s, so that he might pose beside his beloved at the very onset of their courtship. Clearly it would be improper to suggest that Alice come to the studio alone, so Rose Saltonstall was roped in as a convenient third party. There is more than a hint of nervousness in Theodore’s first letter to Alice, reminding her of their rendezvous. Even at this stage he seems afraid that his doe might wander.
“Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls.”
Alice Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and Rose Saltonstall, 1878. (Illustration 4.2)
PORCELLIAN CLUB
December 6, 1878
Dear Alice, I have been anxiously expecting a letter from you and Rose for the last two or three days; but none has come. You must not forget our tintype spree; I have been dextrously avoiding forming any engagements for Saturday … Tell Rose that I never passed a pleasanter Thanksgiving than at her house.
Judging from the accounts I have received the new dress for the party at New Bedford must have been a complete success.
YOUR FELLOW-CONSPIRATOR9
Alice did not forget, and the group portrait, so momentous to Theodore, survives. Bewhiskered and slim as a reed, he sits between the two girls, carefully clutching his hat and cane. Alice, seated lower, leans toward him, almost touching his right thigh. Her skirts droop sexily over his shoe. She wears a lace-fronted dress and high feathered hat. Her gray eyes gaze dreamily into the camera: she seems unaware of the giant resolve looming next to her.10
By now Alice Lee was occupying Theodore’s thoughts through every waking hour, and would continue to do so, according to his own testimony, for the next year and a quarter. At times her girlish waywardness would drive him to despair; in one particular moment of frustration he ripped the pages containing the Thanksgiving vow bodily out of his diary.11 There is a suggestion of sexual torment in Theodore’s entry for 11 December 1878, when he asks God’s help in staying virtuous, as his father would have wished, “and to do nothing I would have been ashamed to confess to him. I am very …” Here the eager researcher turns the page, only to find a huge blot of ink. Somehow its very blackness and monstrous shape convey more of Theodore’s misery than whatever words he had scribbled beneath it.12
Such fits of depression were, however, rare in the early days of his courtship. “Teddy” continued to be welcome at Chestnut Hill, and Alice was quick to atone, with a soft word or look, for any bruise she may have inflicted upon him. At any such sign of favor he positively radiated with joy, and would exult, when alone with his diary, in his youth, his social and academic success, and the luck which had led him to Chestnut Hill. “Truly,” he wrote, as 1878 passed into 1879, “these are the golden years of my life.”13
IT MUST NOT BE SUPPOSED that Theodore’s obsession with Alice Lee caused him to neglect his studies, or that he ceased to partake of the clubby delights of Harvard. “I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity since I came back,” he boasted in a letter home, “having been elected into several different clubs.”14 Apart from the Porc and its partridge suppers, he attended regular meetings of the Institute of 1770, and its secret caucus, “the old merry brutal ribald orgiastic natural wholesome Dickey.”15 He presented papers to the Harvard Natural History Society on such subjects as “The Gills of Crustaceans” and “Coloration of Birds.” He lectured learnedly on sparrows at the Nuttall Ornithological Club (whose middle-aged members, discomfited by his knowledge, accused him of being vain and “cocksure”). He was put up for the Hasty Pudding early in the New Year, and won election as fifth man in the first nine.16 When his instructor in political economy asked him to form a Finance Club, he not only did so immediately, but wrote a joint paper, with Bob Bacon, on “Municipal Taxation,” and presented it at the club’s inaugural meeting.
“We little suspected,” wrote Professor J. Laurence Laughlin many years later, “that we were being addressed by a future President of the United States and his Secretary of State.”17
Thus, in February of 1879, Theodore Roosevelt revealed that the political animal within him was at last beginning to stir. About the same time he made his first public speech, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Crimson. It was an awkward effort, yet vividly remembered by William Roscoe Thayer:
Since entering college I had met him casually many times and had heard of his oddities and exuberance; but throughout I came to feel that I knew him. On being called to speak he seemed very shy and made, what I think he said, was his maiden speech. He still had difficulty in enunciating clearly or even in running off his words smoothly. At times he could hardly get them out at all, and then he would rush on for a few sentences, as skaters redouble their pace over thin ice. He told the story of two old gentlemen who stammered, the point of which was, that one of them, after distressing contortions and stoppages, recommended the other to go to Dr. X, adding, “He cured me.”
A trifling bit of thistledown for memory to have preserved after all these years; but still it is interesting to me to recall that this was the beginning of the public speaking of the man who later addressed more audiences than any other orator of his time and made a deeper impression by his spoken word.18
Although Theodore continued to dream of being a natural historian when he left college, he confessed that the prospect of three extra years of overseas study—a necessary academic requirement—made him “perfectly blue.”19 Politics, on the other hand, was beginning to appeal to him so strongly that he asked Professor Laughlin if he should not perhaps make that his career instead. Laughlin replied that the halls of American government were much more in need of idealistic young men than were zoological laboratories.20 Still, Theodore clung to his imagined vocation, until a softer, more influential voice persuaded him to abandon the chimera forever.
Whether it was the prospect of losing her beau to some foreign university for three years, or simply his distressing tendency to produce creepy-crawlies, Alice Lee did not relish the idea of Theodore becoming Professor or Doctor Roosevelt. Her disapproval of his collecting was probably the reason for a startling remark he made to Harry Minot at the end of his sophomore year: “As you know, I don’t approve of too much slaughter.” Much later Theodore himself admitted that courting Alice “brought about a change in my ideas as regards science.”21
Their intimacy ripened slowly during the early weeks of 1879. There were polite teas with the Saltonstalls and dances at the Lees’, winter walks and coasting parties (Alice occasionally allowing him to share her toboggan) on the crisp slopes of Chestnut Hill. “I like the two girls more and more every day,” he told Bamie, “especially pretty Alice.”22 Determined to make himself as irresistible as possible, he nurtured his reddish whiskers to the size of powder puffs, and grew increasingly resplendent in his dress, with high glossy collars, silk cravats and cameo pins, fobbed watch chains, and coats rakishly cut away to show off the uncreased, cylindrical trousers of a man of fashion.23
TOWARD THE END OF FEBRUARY, Theodore began to suffer from a surfeit of polite conversation. The drawing-rooms of Chestnut Hill suddenly became claustrophobic to him: he decided to clear his head, and his lungs, with another vacation in Maine.24 When he reached Mattawamkeag Station on 1 March, Bill Sewall was waiting in a sleigh to escort him to Island Falls, thirty-six miles away.
For hour after hour, as they hissed north over a three-foot shroud of snow, Theodore marveled at a landscape wondrously changed from the one he had explored six months before. “I have never seen a grander or more beautiful sight than the northern woods in winter,” he told his mother afterward. “The evergreens laden with snow make the most beautiful contrast of green and white, and when it freezes after a rain all the trees look as though they were made of crystal.”25
At Island Falls, he renewed his acquaintance with Sewall’s nephew and partner Wilmot Dow, whom he had met only briefly the previous September. Dow, just twenty-three, was as big a man as Sewall, and, by the latter’s admission, “a better guide … better hunter, better fisherman, and the best shot of any man in the country.” In time this impassive, smooth-faced youth would become as good a friend to Theodore as his uncle.26
For the first few days in Aroostook County, the subzero temperatures troubled Theodore’s asthma, or “guffling,” as Sewall called it. But after a pung trip to a lumber camp at Oxbow, even deeper in the wilderness, he breathed clear again, and “enjoyed every minute” of his stay.27 The Aroostook lumbermen, many of whom were unlettered, and had spent all their lives in the woods, were the roughest human beings he had yet encountered. Sewall noted how he charmed them and held their interest.
Of course he did not understand the woods, but on every other subject he was posted. The reason that he knew so much about everything, I found, was that wherever he went he got right in with the people … Theodore enjoyed them immensely. He told me after he left the camp how glad he was that he had met them. He said that he could read about such things, but here he had got first hand accounts of backwoods life from the men who had lived it and knew what they were talking about. Even then he was quick to find the real man in very simple men.28
No doubt the emerging politician got great satisfaction out of his ability to converse, on equal terms, with backwoodsmen as well as Boston Brahmins. He asked Bill Sewall, as he had Professor Laughlin, whether he should go into science or politics after he graduated. “You may laugh, but I have a presentiment that some time I may be President.”29
More intent on the here and now, Theodore the hunter exulted in chasing a caribou for thirty-six hours through the snowy forest, with neither tent nor blankets to protect him. The naturalist collected specimens, while the sometime invalid worked up “enough health to last me till next summer.”30 Last but not least, King Olaf trapped a lynx, and swore that its fur would soon warm the pretty feet of his beloved.
In mid-March, Theodore was back at Harvard, “doing double work to make up for my holiday.”31 Within a week he had breezed through his semiannuals with an average of over 85, and could turn once more to the courtship of Alice Lee. Determined to reenter her life in dramatic fashion, he chose as his stage the floor of the college gymnasium.
THE OCCASION WAS THE spring meeting of the Harvard Athletic Association on 22 March 1879. T. Roosevelt, Jr., weighing in at 135 pounds, was entered for the semifinal bout of the lightweight boxing championship, against W. W. Coolidge, at 133¼ pounds. The winner would presumably take on the defending champion, C. S. Hanks, entered at 133½ pounds.32 Theodore, who was known to possess a wicked right hand, had given Coolidge “a tremendous thrashing” the year before,33 no doubt hoped to repeat the performance now for the benefit of Alice Lee. She sat in the gallery with a party of other Boston girls, prettily wrapped in furs, for the gymnasium was freezing.34
The first bout went well for Theodore. According to the Harvard Advocate, he “displayed more coolness and skill than his opponent,” and had no trouble in dispatching Coolidge. There was a ripple of delicate applause from the gallery, and he retired to sponge off for the final bout. When he came out, Hanks (who had duly won the other semifinal) was waiting for him. Again to quote the Advocate, “a spirited contest followed, in which Mr. Hanks succeeded in getting the best of his opponent by his quickness and power of endurance.”
These terse words might have been the only record of the afternoon’s fighting, except that some students in the audience were so impressed by Theodore’s performance that they talked about it the rest of their lives. One of them was the future novelist Owen Wister, destined, like William Roscoe Thayer, to become a biographer of the skinny figure in the ring. His description of the bout has made it perhaps the most celebrated episode in Theodore’s Harvard career:
We freshmen on the floor and those girls in the gallery witnessed more than a spirited contest; owing to an innocent mistake of Mr. Hanks, we saw that prophetic flash of the Roosevelt that was to come.
Time was called on a round, Roosevelt dropped his guard, and Hanks landed a heavy blow on his nose, which spurted blood. Loud hoots and hisses from gallery and floor were set up, whereat Roosevelt’s arm was instantly flung out to command silence, while his alert and slender figure stood quiet.
“It’s all right,” he assured us eagerly, his arm still in the air to hold the silence; then, pointing to the time-keeper, “he didn’t hear him,” he explained, in the same conversational but arresting tone. With bleeding nose he walked up to Hanks and shook hands with him.35
According to another spectator, Hanks said good-naturedly, “Hadn’t we better stop?” Theodore shook his head like a terrier, bared his teeth, and began punching again. The rest of the bout was “distinctly gory.” It was plain that the smaller man was outclassed. Hanks had a much longer reach; his eyesight, moreover, was normal, whereas Theodore was obliged to box without spectacles. “It was no fight at all,” another student remembered. “… You should have seen that little fellow staggering about, banging the air. Hanks couldn’t put him out and Roosevelt wouldn’t give up. It wasn’t a fight, but, oh, he showed himself a fighter!”36
One wonders if Alice Lee, shuddering into her furs, admired the bloody Theodore as much as his classmates, however. At any rate, he succeeded in drawing himself to her attention again. As soon as his cuts and bruises healed she accepted an invitation to “a little lunch party” in his rooms. Five other girls and college boys were present, under the benign chaperonage of Mrs. Saltonstall. The lynx rug was presented with great ceremony. Alice announced that she would make Teddy a pair of slippers.37 Their relationship was moving into an intimate, more serious phase, and Mrs. Saltonstall surely reported this fact back to Chestnut Hill. But the Lees did not seem to fear losing a daughter who, at the tender age of seventeen, had yet to make her debut.
With spring sweetening the air, and Alice growing increasingly receptive to his advances, Theodore decided to pay court to her on horseback, in the style of a true gallant. Lightfoot was accordingly shipped to Cambridge. All at once Chestnut Hill seemed so much closer that Theodore took to galloping over the river almost daily, looking (in his own words) “very swell, with hunting crop and beaver.”38 He took long walks with Alice, taught Alice the five-step waltz, played whist with Alice, told Alice ghost stories, wrote endlessly in his diaries about Alice, Alice, Alice. The very shape of the word, as it uncurled from his pen, seemed to give him pleasure. All through April and May, he overflowed with happiness as intense as his grief of the previous year. “What a royally good time I am having … I can’t conceive of a fellow possibly enjoying himself more.”39
BY RISING EARLY and working before breakfast, Theodore was able to pack six to eight hours of study into the first half of the day, leaving his afternoons and evenings free for romance. Although he defined this as “a life of most luxurious ease,” poor Lightfoot cannot have agreed. The animal was not only thundering constantly along the hard road to Chestnut Hill, but had to help Theodore work off his exuberance afterward with marathon gallops through the countryside. When, on 13 May, Theodore was invited to dinner at the Lees’, he whipped Lightfoot up to such a pace that he nearly killed both horse and himself. “I rode like Jehu, both coming and going, and as it was pitch dark when I returned (about 10:15) we fell, while galloping downhill—a misadventure which I thoroughly deserve for being a fool.” For weeks it seemed that the crippled horse might not recover, and Theodore was obliged to visit his beloved on foot—a twelve-mile tramp every time.40
By early June, however, he was once again in the saddle. Pausing only to register a preoccupied 87 percent in his annual examinations,41 Theodore braced himself for the final phase of his courtship of Alice Lee. It was now or never. Only two weeks remained until Harvard shut its doors for the summer. Then, for almost three months, he would be hundreds of miles away from her—while other suitors, perhaps, strolled the lawns of Chestnut Hill. Alice had already given disturbing hints that she liked to flirt. If he did not secure her by Class Day, she might be wooed away.
It comes as a surprise to flick through Theodore’s diary for these momentous final weeks of his junior year and find no hint of crisis in its bland pages. Since ripping out his written vow to marry Alice, he had begun what was to become a lifelong habit, that of simply not recording what was ominous, unresolved, or disgraceful. Triumph was worth the ink; tragedy was not. Until Alice was his, he would continue merely to list the trivial details of their relationship, so that if he failed, posterity would not know it, and even he, in time, might forget his aching desire for her.
His letters home are just as guarded, although one cannot help but admire how subtly, since the New Year, Theodore has made the Roosevelts aware of Alice Lee, and prepared them, subconsciously as it were, for his possible engagement. Casually he suggests the entire family might like to come up to Harvard for Class Day, 20 June. “I want you particularly to know some of my girlfriends now.”42 How convenient to have both them and the Lees at hand, should he wish to make an announcement—at the conclusion of his junior year, at the blossoming climax of spring!
Although it is not certain that Theodore asked Alice to marry him on Class Day, he afterward confirmed that he proposed to her sometime in June, and his unerring sense of place and time would seem to make the evening of the twentieth inevitable.43 He had been tense as a wire the night before, at the D.K.E. Strawberry festivities: “I got into a row with a mucker and knocked him down, cutting my knuckles pretty badly against his teeth.”44 But now his mood was tranquil. Never had he spent such a pleasant day; never had Alice looked “sweeter or prettier.” He had ushered at Saunders Hall in the morning, lunched at the Porc, ushered again at the Flower Rush, then escorted Alice to two tea-parties in succession. No doubt much of the student body had admired the tall, honey-haired girl strolling around with “that fellow with whiskers and glasses.”45 Now, in the twilight, they sat together watching the sway of tinted lamps in the Yard, and listening to the songs of the Glee Club.
Words, whispered perhaps, passed between Alice and Theodore. At ten o’clock, when the singing ended, they walked over to Memorial Hall and danced till nearly midnight. Then it was time for Alice to go home. Theodore decided, as her carriage-wheels clattered away, that the night was too young for him to go to bed. Accordingly he went to the Porc, and spent a couple of contemplative hours over the billiard-table. He had much to ponder. Alice had rejected him—but in such a way he could not be wholly despondent. She would, he knew, remember him fondly at least through summer, and he had a tacit invitation to resume his suit in the fall.
IF LIGHTFOOT, LIMPING DOWN the gangplank of the Boston–New York freighter, looked forward to a lazy summer on Long Island, he was soon disillusioned. No sooner had Theodore arrived back in Oyster Bay than the horse was put into harness, and trained to trot and go.46 Mittie Roosevelt, used to her son’s sudden enthusiasms, assumed he was merely having fun; it did not occur to her that deadly serious motives lay behind this interest in elegant locomotion. Even his purchase, in August, of a “dog-cart,” or tilbury—whose seat was just large enough for two slim people—failed to arouse her suspicions. After all, his twenty-first birthday was approaching, and it was time he learned to drive.
Theodore spent much of the summer trying to imitate his father’s prowess with reins and whip—not altogether successfully, for graceful, balanced movements never came easily to him. But he was not discouraged. “I am leading the most delightful life a fellow well could,” he wrote, exulting in his “magnificent health and spirits.”47 As usual he passed every spare minute in the open air, rowing, swimming, sailing, shooting (mostly at inanimate targets, out of deference to Alice), and constantly challenging Elliott to physical contests. “As athletes we are about equal; he rows best; I run best; he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling or boxing; I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, &c, &c.”48
Theodore’s diaries do not dwell on the nineteen-year-old Elliott’s more obvious superiorities, such as good looks, charm, and sexual attractiveness. That fatally flawed Apollo was still, in the summer of 1879, unaware of the demon that would one day destroy him. An adolescent tendency toward epilepsy had been cured—seemingly—by the Rooseveltian remedy for all ills, travel. After a trip to Europe and two long stays in Texas he had returned, vigorous and healthy, to take his place as a young banker in New York society.49 Instantly friends of both sexes flocked to him, as others had done, years before, to Theodore Senior. “Nell” had all of Bamie’s poise and none of her severity. He was untouched by Theodore’s aggressive egotism. Like Corinne he tended to gush, but his warmth was more genuine. Kindly, open, decent, generous, he indeed was his father’s son—were it not for a helpless inability to concentrate on anything but pleasure.
As far as girls were concerned, these faults merely added to his appeal. Even Fanny Smith, a lifelong worshiper of his brother, had to admit that “Elliott as a young man was a much more fascinating person than Theodore Roosevelt.”50
ON 16 AUGUST THEODORE’S EXCELLENT results arrived from Harvard. He was pleased to note that “in zoology and political economy I lead everybody.”51 This double achievement, in two such diametrically opposed subjects, was enough to reawaken his career dilemma of the previous winter. He had rejected Professor Laughlin’s advice to make government, not science, his career. But now, perhaps because Alice had included the effluvia of the laboratory among her reasons for rejecting him, he began to wonder if Laughlin had not been right. Actually he had already, as he later confirmed, “abandoned all thought of becoming a scientist.”52 From now on politics, not zoology, would preoccupy those parts of his mind not given over to Alice Lee.
For thirty-six precious hours, in late August, Theodore was able to worship his beloved in body as well as spirit. En route to yet another vacation in Maine, he stopped off in Boston and spent a couple of nights at Chestnut Hill. Alice accompanied him to a beach party, walked with him through the woods, showed off her graceful prowess on the tennis court, and was his partner at a barn dance. She was “so bewitchingly pretty” he could continue north “only by heroic self-denial.”53 Had Island Falls not been beyond the reach of any telegram, Theodore would have undoubtedly canceled his booking with Bill Sewall, and remained at Chestnut Hill to eat lotus fruit with the Lees.54
HARSHER PLEASURES AWAITED HIM in Aroostook County, where the first chill of fall was already in the air. Since his first trip to Island Falls in 1878, Theodore had been longing to climb Mount Katahdin, whose silhouette massively dominated the western windows of Sewall’s cabin.55 Forty miles away and 5,268 feet high, Katahdin was the highest mountain in Maine, and was surrounded by some of the most intractable forest in the Northeast. Now the young underclassman felt sufficiently tough and “forest-wise” to answer the challenge on the horizon. Arthur Cutler and his cousin Emlen Roosevelt, who were also vacationing at Island Falls, agreed to join him. After only two days of preparation they helped Sewall and Dow to load up a wagon, and set off southwest into a dank, dripping wilderness.56
If nothing else, the events of the next eight days made Cutler withdraw his old doubts about Theodore’s stamina. Although conditions were wet and slippery, the young man effortlessly toted a forty-five-pound pack up the ever-steepening mountain. Losing a shoe in a stream, he padded on in moccasins, which protected his feet “about as effectually as kid gloves.” Yet despite the pain of tramping over miles of rain-slicked stones, he triumphantly reached the top with Sewall and Dow. Cutler and Emlen remained far below, in a state of collapse.57 That night, as the rain beat their tents and bedding into a sodden mess, Theodore noted in his diary: “I can endure fatigue and hardship pretty nearly as well as these lumbermen.”58 His fellow New Yorkers could not. As soon as the party got back to Island Falls on 2 September they left exhausted for home.
Having thus, as it were, flexed his muscles, Theodore set off with Bill Sewall on a second expedition, to the Munsungen Lakes, compared to which “our trip to Katahdin was absolute luxury.” It included a fifty-mile, six-day voyage up the Aroostook River in a pirogue, or heavy dugout canoe. Fully half the time they had to drag or push the boat through torrential rapids, pausing occasionally to hack their way through beaver dams and log drifts. They spent ten hours a day up to their hips in icy water, stumbling constantly on sharp, slimy stones. “But, oh how we slept at night! And how we enjoyed the salt pork, hardtack and tea which constituted our food!”59
By way of relaxing after this bruising expedition, Theodore persuaded Sewall and Dow to take a third jaunt, during which they drove or marched over a hundred miles in three days. Rain fell unceasingly, but Theodore continued to delight in his “superb health” and ability to walk, wrestle, and shoot on near-equal terms with backwoodsmen. When Sewall and Dow finally put him on the Boston train on 24 September, he declared he felt “strong as a bull.”60 The two big men, watching his skinny arm wave them goodbye, may have had their doubts about that—Sewall for years afterward continued to think of him as “frail”—but they could not fail to be awed by his vitality.61 He had taken them on in their own environment, and proved himself as good as they.
ON THE MORNING AFTER his return to Cambridge, Theodore emerged from breakfast at the Porc and found his new dog-cart outside the door, lamps and lacquerwork gleaming. Lightfoot waited patiently between its curving poles, long since resigned to the indignity of haulage. The staff of Pike’s Stable had done a good job: Theodore could see that both horse and cart were in fine condition. His whip stood ready in its sprocket. Neatly folded under the seat lay a rug just large enough to wrap two pairs of touching legs. Climbing up carefully (for the dog-cart had a notoriously erratic center of gravity) he shook the reins and was soon rolling down Mount Auburn Street in the direction of Chestnut Hill.62
To his delight, the rig went beautifully, Lightfoot breaking only at the occasional roar of a locomotive. Theodore was conscious of the stares of passersby, and presumed that he was cutting a fine figure: “I really think that I have as swell a turnout as any man.”63If by any man he meant his fellow students, he understated the case; for this was the first dog-cart ever seen at Harvard, and remained the only one throughout his senior year. With such stylish equipage, he could hardly escape the amused notice of his classmates. Hitherto, he had managed to keep his visits to Chestnut Hill fairly secret, but now rumors began to fly.64 The amorous Don Quixote, spurring Rocinante across the plain of La Mancha, was no more comic a courtier than Theodore, as he wobbled on tall wheels over the Charles River Bridge. In the words of his classmate Richard Welling:
Some of us were surprised, senior year, when we saw our serious friend Teddy driving a dog-cart, and, between you and me, not a very stylish turnout. Among the fashionables there was in those days an exquisite agony about a dog-cart which stamped it as the summit of elegance. The driver should hold the reins in a rather choice manner as though presenting a bouquet to a prima donna, and the long thorn-wood whip with its white pipe-clayed lash should be handled in a graceful way, like fly casting, to flick the horse’s shoulder. The cart should be delightfully balanced so that, although the horse trotted, the driver’s seat would not joggle. The driver was thus serenely perched on his somewhat elevated seat, and holding his whip athwart the lines, acknowledge the salutes of friends by gently raising his whip hand to his hat brim, his poise never for an instant disturbed. In short, in a horse show where the judges were passing upon fine points of equipment and technique, I fear Roosevelt would have been given the gate.65
History does not record what Alice Lee thought of this apparition as it creaked to a halt outside the Saltonstalls’ house. Presumably she was not as dazzled as Theodore had hoped, for he studiously avoids mentioning her in his diary entry for the day, 26 September 1879: “… they were all so heartily glad to see me that I felt as if I had come home.” On the next page Theodore writes: “Dr. and Mrs. Saltonstall are just too sweet for anything, and the girls are as lovely as ever.”
Something is obviously wrong. For the rest of September, all of October, and most of November, he shows a strange reluctance to refer to Alice, even obliquely. Her name appears but once, in a list of his guests at an opera party on 16 October. Two pages are ripped out just prior to that date. There is also a reduction in the flow of Theodore’s perpetual cheerfulness. Yet the evidence is that he continued to drive over to Chestnut Hill, and his relationship with the rest of that sociable community remained as warm as ever. Only Alice, apparently, was cool.
If he was not happy during these first months of his senior year, Theodore was too busy to be depressed. “I have my hands altogether too full of society work,” he mildly complained, “being Librarian of the Porcellian, Secretary of the Pudding, Treasurer of the O.K., Vice President of the Natural History Soc., and President of the A.D.Q.; Editor of the Advocate.” His diary makes frequent reference to theater parties and suppers—“I find I don’t get to bed too early.”66 Although he had purposely arranged a light study schedule (only five courses, as opposed to nine in his junior year), he worked at it six to eight hours a day.67 He was determined to keep up his three-year average of 82, and in mid-October proudly informed the Roosevelts: “I stand 19th in the class, which began with 230 fellows. Only one gentleman,” Theodore added, with a fine regard for social distinction, “stands ahead of me.”68 He was still, for all the influence of Bill Sewall, an unabashed snob. His idea of a good time, during this period of estrangement from Alice, was to pile six fashionable young men into a four-in-hand, “and drive up to Frank Codman’s farm where we will spend the day, shooting glass balls &c.”69
Alice was not at Theodore’s side when he turned twenty-one on 27 October 1879. But his adoring family was, and he saw no reason to be despondent. He would get his girl—he knew it. If still not altogether certain about his career, he at least knew roughly what he would like to do, and his achievements to date, whether social, physical, or intellectual, had not dishonored the memory of his father. For once, he could look back at the past without regret, and at the future without bewilderment. Simply and touchingly, he wrote in his diary: “I have had so much happiness in my life so far that I feel, no matter what sorrows come, the joys will have overbalanced them.”70
SORROWS CAME sooner than he expected. Early in November, Alice’s resistance to his advances, hitherto always softened with a hint of future compliance, began to show signs of permanent hardening. Theodore was immediately plunged into a state of sleepless, aching frustration. “Oh the changeableness of the female mind!” he burst out in a letter home, a remark which must have caused the Roosevelts some puzzlement, since he did not go on to explain it.71 The prospect of failure clearly terrified him. “I did not think I could win her,” he afterward confessed, “and I went nearly crazy at the mere thought of losing her.”72
As usual he kept despair at bay by burying himself in books (for his birthday he had requested “complete editions of the works of Prescott, Motley, and Carlyle”) and studying harder than ever.73 Somehow he managed to conceal his agony from his classmates. Frederick Almy, class secretary, heard Theodore read a paper at the November meeting of the O.K. Society and was impressed by his vigorous, confident manner. “Roosevelt spoke on the machine in politics, illustrating by the recent election in New York. An interesting discussion followed … I have a very high opinion of Roosevelt.”74
As Thanksgiving, the anniversary of his vow, approached, he made a desperate, last-minute effort to press his suit. Alice would “come out” a week after the festival, and become fair game for all the eligible young men in Boston. He reasoned that his best hope lay in bringing their respective families together, enmeshing Alice in such warm webs of mutual affection (for he was sure everybody would get on famously) that she would be powerless to break away. With considerable skill he managed to arrange four such meetings in twenty days. On 2 November Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Alice, and Rose visited New York and were entertained by the Roosevelts; on 17 November Bamie and Corinne visited Chestnut Hill, and the Saltonstalls gave a dinner in their honor. On 18 November the Lees repeated the compliment. Finally, on 22 November, Theodore held an elaborate, thirty-four-plate luncheon in the Porcellian, at which elders of all three families were represented. The rest of the company comprised the most attractive of his Boston girlfriends and the most fashionable of his college chums. Perhaps because of Alice’s youth, or because Theodore did not wish to arouse premature suspicions, he relegated her to the secondary position on his left; the place of honor went to a Miss Betty Hooper.75
This three-week diplomatic offensive paid off handsomely in terms of family goodwill. The Lees were in reported “raptures” over their New York trip, and his sisters had been effusively welcomed at Chestnut Hill. As for his luncheon, “everything went off to perfection; the dinner was capital, the wine was good, and the fellows all gentlemen.”76 For a few days Theodore basked in the glow of his achievements, then drove out to Chestnut Hill for Thanksgiving hoping that Alice would now look more favorably upon him.
Unfortunately she did not, although she continued, rather heartlessly, to flirt and tease. He returned to Harvard in a melancholy mood. Four days later Alice “came out” in the traditional shower of rosebuds, and Boston’s eligible youth began to circle ominously around her. Theodore was a guest at the party, and in the days following could no longer conceal his violent frustration. “See that girl?” he exclaimed at a Hasty Pudding function, pointing across the room at Alice: “I am going to marry her. She won’t have me, but I am going to have her!”77
As winter settled in, and the long evenings dragged out, Theodore felt the loneliness of unrequited love weigh heavily upon him. Unable to find solace in reading books, he began to write one, entitled The Naval War of 1812.78 His insomnia worsened to the point that for night after night he did not even go to bed. He wandered endlessly through the frozen woods around Cambridge, declaiming Swinburne.79 After one such excursion he refused to return to his rooms. Seriously alarmed, a classmate telegraphed Theodore’s family for assistance. Fortunately James West Roosevelt was staying nearby, and rushed to the aid of his stricken cousin. Somehow, the distraught lover was soothed.80
He did not see Alice at all during the two weeks prior to his Christmas vacation. Returning to New York on 22 December he threw himself determinedly into the usual family festivities. On Christmas Eve he called on at least ten “very pretty girls,” as if to erase from his mind the picture of his beloved. Edith Carow was among them. “She is the most cultivated, best-read girl I know.”81
All at once, on the day after Christmas, the word “Alice” joyously reappears in his diary. That young coquette had decided to visit New York for a week, accompanied by a retinue of “Chestnut Hillers.” Graciously accepting Theodore’s invitation to stay, she permitted him to squire her around town, and his delight knew no bounds. They had “an uproariously jolly time,” he told his diary, adding in a more reflective moment that her presence at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street seemed “so natural.”82
New Year’s Day, 1880, dawned calm and sunny, matching Theodore’s mood. He drove his guests out to Jerome Park for lunch and an afternoon of dancing.83 Alice bobbed and swayed enchantingly in his arms, and he sensed that his long agony would soon be over.
Sun., Jan. 25 At last everything is settled; but it seems impossible to realize it. I am so happy that I dare not trust in my own happiness. I drove over to the Lees determined to make an end of things at last; it was nearly eight months since I had first proposed to her, and I had been nearly crazy during the past year; and after much pleading my own sweet, pretty darling consented to be my wife. Oh, how bewitchingly pretty she looked! If loving her with my whole heart and soul can make her happy, she shall be happy; a year ago last Thanksgiving I made a vow that win her I would if it were possible; and now that I have done so, the aim of my whole life shall be to make her happy, and to shield her and guard her from every trial; and, oh, how I shall cherish my sweet queen! How she, so pure and sweet and beautiful can think of marrying me I can not understand, but I praise and thank God it is so.84
The engagement was kept secret pending family approval. For several days Theodore could not believe his luck. “I still feel as if it would turn out, as it so often has before, and that Alice will repent.” But she did not. Now that her defenses were down, he could kiss and cuddle her as often as he wished.85 In a daze of delight, he rushed to New York to break the news to his family. Mittie Roosevelt was stunned, but, thanks to her prior exposure to Alice, wholly satisfied. The girl had beauty, grace, and humor—qualities for which she herself had been famed in her time. As for Theodore, Mittie had long since recognized that he, not Elliott, was his father’s son: decisive and masterful, a man who knew exactly what he wanted. Right now it was “a diamond ring for my darling.”86 While he shopped for it, Mittie wrote Alice a delicate, violet-scented note, formally welcoming her into the family. The reply came by return of post, and reassured her that Alice, no longer the coquette, was as deeply in love as Theodore.
Chestnut Hill, Feb. 3rd 1880
My Dear Mrs. Roosevelt I feel almost powerless to express my thanks and appreciation of your sweet note received this afternoon, full of such kind assurances of love and welcome, it is more than kind, and feeling so unworthy of such a noble man’s love, makes me feel that I do not deserve it all. But I do love Theodore deeply and it will be my aim both to endear myself to those so dear to him and retain his love.
How happy I am I can’t begin to tell you, it seems almost like a dream. It is such pleasure to have known all his loved ones, and not to feel that I am going amongst perfect strangers … I just long for tomorrow to see Theodore and hear all about his visit home. I was so afraid you might be disappointed when you heard what he went on for, and I assure you my heart is full of gratitude for all your kindness. With a great deal of love, believe me, Ever yours devotedly,
ALICE HATHAWAY LEE87
There remained the problem of reconciling the Lees to the premature loss of their daughter. Although that amiable couple had no objection to Alice’s early engagement, Theodore foresaw “a battle royal” in winning their consent to her early marriage. With his usual regard for the calendar, he hoped to announce the former on Valentine’s Day, and celebrate the latter on his birthday, 27 October. Even that eight-month interval would likely be too short for Mrs. Lee.88 Alice wanted to press for a fall wedding, but he wisely left the date open when negotiating with her father. Pleased at this show of responsibility, George Cabot Lee made the engagement official on 14 February 1880, and Theodore was free to dispatch a series of triumphant announcement notes to his friends. “I have been in love with her for nearly two years now; and have made everything subordinate to winning her.…”89
Now that Alice was his, Theodore’s natural exuberance, so long bottled up, burst out like champagne. His letters and diaries for the months following are awash with adoration. “My sweet, pretty, pure queen, my laughing little love … how bewitchingly pretty she is! I can not help petting her and caressing her all the time; and she is such a perfect little sunshine. I do not believe any man ever loved a woman more than I love her.”90 Although the February weather was snowy, he drove constantly to Chestnut Hill, “the horse plunging to his belly in great drifts,” impatient to be in the arms of “the purest, truest, and sweetest of all women.” When his family arrived in Boston later that month for a round of festive luncheons and dinner parties, Theodore worked himself up to such a pitch of excitement that he went for forty-four hours without sleep.91
For all his joy, there came now and again, cold as ice in his stomach, a reminder that he had very nearly failed. “The little witch led me a dance before she surrendered, I can tell you,” he confided to his cousin John, “and the last six months have been perfect agony … Even now, it makes me shudder to think of some of the nights I have passed.”92 He remained insecure about Alice long after the Lees agreed, in early March, to a fall wedding.93 “Roosevelt seemed constantly afraid,” recalled Alice’s cousin, “that someone would run off with her, and threaten duels and everything else. On one occasion he actually sent abroad for a set of French duelling pistols.”94 Planning an Easter visit to New York with Alice, he was naively anxious to impress his local friends at a dinner in her honor: “I want to include everybody, so as to rub up their memories about the existence of a man named Theodore Roosevelt, who is going to bring a pretty Boston wife back to New York next winter.”95
As the weather softened, and Alice remained faithful, Theodore learned to relax. By 1 April he was able to note smugly that “in spite of being engaged,” she was “certainly the belle of the Harvard Assembly.” In order to spend every available minute with her, he resigned many of his official positions, including the vice-presidency of the Natural History Society, neglected his editorship of the Advocate, and began to cut recitations freely. His study hours dwindled from thirty-six to fifteen a week. “My marks were so good the first three years that I can afford to be idle now.” Already he was bored with scholastic honors. The fact that he had scored 94 and 98 in two semiannuals, written in the same week he successfully proposed to Alice Lee, did not seem remarkable to him.96
NOW THAT THEODORE’S romance was common knowledge on the Yard, he not unnaturally became something of a figure of fun. Professor A. S. (“Ass”) Hill, his instructor in forensics, was so amused by the “precocious sentimentality” of a Rooseveltian essay that he read it aloud to the class, keeping the name of the author secret. Afterward he waspishly asked Theodore to criticize it, and sat back to enjoy the young man’s blushes.97
Theodore’s dog-cart and dandified appearance (he now sported a silk hat, regarded as the non plus ultra of college fashion)98 did not escape the satire of Owen Wister, who wrote the songs for the D.K.E. theatricals. During one burlesque production of Der Freischütz, the chorus launched into a serenade about
The cove who drove
His doggy Tilbury cart …
Awful tart,
And awful smart,
With waxed mustache and hair in curls:
Brand-new hat,
Likewise cravat,
To call upon the dear little girls!99
Wister, gleefully pounding the piano, was unaware that the incensed “cove” himself happened to be in the audience. Next morning, rumors circulated that Teddy Roosevelt was “very angry,” and had muttered something about “bad taste.” Wister innocentlyclaimed that since Roosevelt’s mustache was not waxed, his lyrics were not libelous.100 He might have added that Theodore had no mustache at all, only whiskers.
But the latter was too much in love to stay angry for long, and looked puzzled when Wister apologized.101 They soon became fast friends. Theodore was attracted by the sophomore’s wit and intelligence, while Wister was one of the first to define the peculiar glow of the mature Rooseveltian personality. During the past few years, this glow had only flickered at sporadic intervals. Now it began to beam forth steadily, throwing Theodore into ever-greater prominence against the muted backdrop of Harvard. “He was his own limelight, and could not help it,” Wister wrote many years later. “A creature charged with such a voltage as his, became the central presence at once, whether he stepped on a platform or entered a room.”102
THE VOLTAGE, OF COURSE, was stimulated by Alice. Its radiance suffuses almost all the diary entries in that spring of 1880.103 On the fresh April mornings, they played tennis together, she gracefully mobile in her long white dress, he awkward and jerky, clutching his racket halfway up the spine. Later, while Alice sewed, he read to her from Prescott’s Conquest of Peru. They took endless drives in the dog-cart, with Alice prettily perched beside him in his high seat, as Lightfoot (losing weight rapidly) bowled them along miles of blossom-strewn roads. In the evenings, they sat at whist and listened to the younger Lees practicing the piano. Before bedtime, Theodore generally managed to sneak Alice off for an hour alone in the moonlight. “How I love her! She seems like a star of heaven, she is so far above other girls; my pearl, my pure flower. When I hold her in my arms there is nothing on earth left to wish for; and how infinitely blessed is my lot … Oh, my darling, my own bestloved little Queen!”104
THEODORE’S ENGAGEMENT seems to have removed the last vestiges of doubt concerning his future. “I shall study law next year, and must there do my best, and work hard for my little wife.”105 He had already made it clear that he considered law a stepping-stone to politics, and confirmed that larger ambition in a conversation with William Roscoe Thayer. The occasion was a meeting of Alpha Delta Phi in Holworthy, shortly before Commencement.
Roosevelt and I sat in the window-seat overlooking the College Yard, and chatted together in the interval when business was slack. We discussed what we intended to do after graduation. “I am going to try to help the cause of better government in New York City; I don’t know exactly how,” said Theodore.
I recall, still, looking at him with an eager, inquisitive look and saying to myself, “I wonder whether he is the real thing, or only the bundle of eccentricities he appears.”106
Theodore was, however, in dead earnest. For his senior thesis he chose the most controversial political subject of the day: it was entitled “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights.”107 The very first sentence struck the keynote of his career as a politician. “In advocating any measure we must consider not only its justice but its practicability.” Some of his less realistic classmates were shocked by this frank admission that a principle could be both just and impracticable. Yet Theodore made no bones about his real feelings later in the document:
A cripple or a consumptive in the eye of the law is equal to the strongest athlete or the deepest thinker, and the same justice should be shown to a woman whether she is or is not the equal of man.… As regards the laws relating to marriage, there should be the most absolute equality preserved between the two sexes. I do not think the woman should assume the man’s name … I would have the word ‘obey’ used not more by the wife than the husband.108
By these remarks Theodore laid himself open to charges of effeminacy, and at least one instructor suggested he was too much influenced by “feeling” to be entirely masculine.109 For the rest of his life he would remain acutely aware of the needs and sensibilities of women. Few things disgusted him more than “male sexual viciousness,” or the Victorian conceit that a wife is the servant of her husband’s lusts. Although a woman’s place was in the home, he believed that the home was superior to the state, and that its mistress was therefore the superior of the public servant. The question of suffrage, as his dissertation made plain, was not so much controversial as unimportant. If women wished to vote, then they should be allowed to do so. Yet he could not resist adding, “Men can fight in defense of their rights, while women cannot. This certainly makes a powerful argument against putting the ballot into hands unable to defend it.”110
ON 30 JUNE 1880, Theodore Roosevelt graduated from Harvard College as a B.A. magna cum laude, twenty-first in a class of 177.111 His family was present in force, and so was a large contingent from Chestnut Hill. President Eliot placed an embellished diploma in his hand, and murmured the special congratulations due a Phi Beta Kappa. Marching back to his seat in the bright sunlight, with his gown swirling triumphantly and a battery of adoring eyes upon him, Theodore could be excused a moment of self-satisfaction. His academic record was excellent; he was already, at twenty-one, a prominent member of society in Cambridge, Boston, and New York; he had been runner-up in the Harvard lightweight boxing championship; he was rich, pleasant-looking, and, within a limited but growing circle, popular; he was the author of two scholarly pamphlets, a notable thesis, and two chapters of what promised to be a definitive naval history. To crown it all, he was engaged to a beautiful young woman. “Only four months before we get married,” he told himself. “My cup of happiness is almost too full.”112
Yet there was wormwood in his cup, unknown to anybody but the graduate and Dr. Dudley A. Sargeant, college physician. On 26 March, after announcing his engagement, Theodore had undergone a complete physical examination, and had been told to his satisfaction that he had gained twelve pounds since coming to Harvard. But the doctor had other, less satisfactory news. Theodore’s heart, strained by years of asthmatic heavings and over-exercise, was in trouble. Far from climbing mountains in Maine, he must in future refrain even from running upstairs. He must live quietly, and choose a sedentary occupation, otherwise, Sargeant warned, he would not live long.113
“Doctor,” came the reply, “I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. If I’ve got to live the sort of life you have described, I don’t care how short it is.”
Having spat the wormwood out, Theodore refused to acknowledge that he had ever tasted it. His diary for that night does not even mention the interview, although it is confirmed by Harvard records. Not even Alice Lee, to whom he had promised to tell “everything,”114 was permitted to know what ailed her future husband. Right through Commencement, Theodore continued to protest his health, happiness, and good fortune. On the following day he could write, with such conviction that every word was heavily underscored, “My career at college has been happier and more successful than that of any man I have ever known.”115
ALICE JOINED THEODORE at Oyster Bay for the first ten days of July. As he proudly escorted her through the landscapes of his boyhood, he vowed “she shall always be mistress over all that I have.”116 Perhaps this was when the idea of building her a great house overlooking the bay first entered his head. One hill in particular—King Olaf would have called it a holm, with its sandy bottom, wooded slopes, and grass-covered crown—he loved above all others. As a teenage ornithologist, he had spent countless hours crouched in its coverts, notating the songs of birds in his own peculiar phonetics—cheech-ir’r’r’, fl’p-fl’p-trkeee, prrrrll-ch’k ch’k … As a Longfellow addict, he had no doubt spent as much time sitting in that hot grass, and seen sails of silk creep over the horizon. Soon he would build a manor on that hill, and live, as Olaf had done, surrounded by his own fields and looking down upon his own ships—well, a rowboat at least. The house would be called Leeholm, after his Queen; and there they would live out their days.117
Theodore could indulge such fantasies, in this final summer of boyish irresponsibility, without worrying about such trivia as proprietary rights, mortgages, and deeds of sale. Time enough for them when he took up the duties of a husband and taxpayer. In the meantime, he wished to have fun, and fun meant violent exercise. He would spend three months of such frenetic activity that his heart would simply have to correct itself—or give out in the attempt.
Although Theodore did not state this alarming ambition in so many words, his list of activities for the period makes it quite plain that he intended to keep his promise to Dr. Sargeant. I’m going to do all the things you tell me not to do. For the first few weeks at Oyster Bay he swam, rowed, hiked, and played tennis. On 20 July he accompanied Alice, Rose, and Dick Saltonstall to Bar Harbor, Maine, and promptly began to scale mountains, play tennis, bowl, and go for long hikes through the “perfectly magnificent scenery.”118
Within three days his body began to give off signals of distress, and he fell victim to an attack of cholera morbus. “Very embarrassing for a lover, isn’t it?” he complained to Corinne. “So unromantic, you know; suggestive of too much unripe fruit.”119 But he was up again next morning, and added dancing to his exercise schedule. Alice’s nineteenth birthday, on 29 July, worked him into such a paroxysm of adoration that he collapsed afterward, and the cholera morbus struck again. This time Theodore was unable to get up for two days, but Alice nursed him so tenderly he decided he rather liked being sick.120
ONE MORE ADVENTURE remained to him as a bachelor: a marathon hunting trip in the West, which he had long been planning with Elliott. “I think it will build me up,” he told Mittie, in tacit admission his health was not what it might be.121 The two young men left New York for Chicago on the night train of 16 August.
Within twenty-four hours, Theodore was gazing through the windows at a horizon wider, and a sky loftier, than any he had ever seen. Lakes as big as seas passed by on his right, farms as big as European countries unrolled to his left. The sheer immensity ofAmerica stirred something in him. For the rest of his life, “big” was to be one of his favorite words. Chicago, which they reached early on the nineteenth, was anticlimactic. “It certainly is a marvellous city,” Theodore wrote Bamie, “of enormous size and rich, but I should say not yet crystallized. There are a great many very fine houses; but I should rather doubt the quality of the society.”122
Anyway it was prairies, not parlors, that he and Elliott had come to see. For the next six weeks they hunted in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota with an assortment of guides, not finding very much game, but reveling in the informality of frontier life. “We are dressed about as badly as mortals could be,” Theodore boasted, “with our cropped heads, unshaven faces, dirty gray shirts, still dirtier yellow trowsers and cowhide boots.”123 He assured Bamie that his slovenliness was temporary. “We expect to return in three weeks or so. Will you send to 6 W. 57th St. my long travelling bag, with my afternoon suit, 2 changes of underflannels, 6 shirts, 6 pr. silk socks, handkerchiefs, neckties and pin, 2 pairs of low shoes, brushes, razors, and my beaver and my top hat? Also a pair of pajammers …” Less than halfway through the trip, the young dandy’s thoughts were clearly racing eastward.124
Theodore was still too much a New Yorker, and too preoccupied with thoughts of marriage, to enjoy fully this first exposure to the West. His initial excitement dwindled as the weeks dragged by and illness continued to plague him. Although he protested “superb health” in letters home, his diaries record “continual attacks of colic” that made it difficult for him to walk, and asthma so severe he had to sleep sitting up. Other misfortunes combined to aggravate his homesickness and longing for Alice Lee. Both his guns broke, he was bitten by a snake, thrown headfirst out of a wagon, soaked in torrential rainstorms, and half-frozen in a northwesterly gale.125 Elliott, who had already spent a year in the West, seemed much more at home. Yet beneath the jolly exterior Theodore saw signs of a discontent much deeper than his own. Using as light a touch as possible, he warned the family about it.
As soon as we got here [Chicago] he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milkpunch because he was thirsty; a mint julep because it was hot; a brandy smash “to keep the cold out of his stomach”; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweetbread, mutton, venison, corn, maccaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening shandigaff. I confined myself to roast beef and potatoes; when I took a second help he marvelled at my appetite—and at bed time wondered why in thunder he felt “stuffy” and I didn’t.126
On 24 September the brothers compared their respective game bags. Theodore had shot 203 “items,” Elliott, 201.127 Allowing for seniority, they could call it quits. By now the wind coming off the Great Lakes was bitingly cold, and it was time to go home.
Early on 29 September they arrived in New York. Theodore stopped only long enough to pick up his suitcase of finery before speeding on to Boston. Alice was waiting for him, lovelier than he had ever seen her. She had “a certain added charm that I do not know how to describe; I cannot take my eyes off her; she is so pure and holy that it seems almost a profanation to touch her, no matter how gently and tenderly; and yet when we are alone I cannot bear her to be a minute out of my arms.”128
THE LAST FEW WEEKS before the wedding were a predictable blur of activity.129 From Chestnut Hill, Theodore hurried back to New York, and lavished $2,500 on jewelry for his beloved (“I have been spending money like water for these last two years, but shall economize after I am married”). He managed a couple of quick weekends at Oyster Bay, and promised Mittie that he would remain a good son. The enigmatic Edith Carow entertained him at dinner; another old flame, Fanny Smith, was present, and found him “as funny and delicious as ever and wild with happiness and excitement.” Then he was again off to Boston, and spent his final weekend as a bachelor on an estate near Salem, “having larks” and chopping down trees in a vain effort to stay calm.
On 26 October, the eve of his wedding, he checked into the Brunswick Hotel, along with a large party of New York friends, and “in wild spirits” tipped Fanny’s chair back, until she feared she would do a reverse somersault. Later he went up alone to his room. At midnight he would be twenty-two, and twelve hours later he would be married. Tomorrow there would be another person in his bed. “My happiness is so great it makes me almost afraid.”130
“I wonder if I won’t find everything in life too big for my abilities.”
Theodore Roosevelt at the time of his assault on the Matterhorn, 1881. (Illustration 4.3)