Theodore Roosevelt (3 page)

We do not know much about Alice's attitude toward this new interest of her husband's, but I think it safe to presume that it was a completely docile one. She is a slightly vague figure, an improbable partner for her dynamic spouse, but all seem to agree that she was sweet and agreeable—probably a bit dull. Anyway, he seems always to have adored her.

His fundamental interest in people was now bringing him closer to men of different backgrounds. He was also learning to appreciate the fact that social progress can only be accomplished by means that gentlemen of his sort had previously scorned. He was later to say: “I knew both the machine and the silk-stocking reformers fairly well.… The machine as such had no ideals at all, although many of the men composing it did have. On the other hand, the ideals of many of the silk-stocking reformers did not relate to the questions of real and vital interest to our people.”

After two years of law school he gave it up to run as a Republican candidate for the Assembly in Albany and was elected for the year 1882, and thereafter reelected twice, for the years 1883 and 1884. His youth, his high, shrill voice, his aggressive desire to be heard, and his fancy clothes made him at first an object of curiosity and some ridicule, and it was felt even by some of his party that he was too violent in his denunciations of Democrats, but it didn't take him long to establish himself as a man to be heard. “I rose like a rocket,” he later observed.

One of his early targets was a New York State judge, T. R. Westbrook, who corruptly aided Jay Gould in corruptly gaining control of the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, going so far as actually to hold court in the offices of the speculators engaged in depressing the stock. TR went after him like a bulldog, distressing some of his associates who were inclined to use soft gloves in any sparring with such a power as Gould. But he obtained the judicial investigation he sought, and even though Westbrook was cleared he was publicly tarnished, and his subsequent death may well have been a suicide. TR, however, was not yet a notable liberal. Opposing a proposed ameliorization of conditions of virtual slavery in state prisons, he said he had “no maudlin sympathy … for men who had deliberately placed themselves outside the pale of society.” In his final term in the Assembly he voted against a bill limiting the hours of streetcar conductors to twelve a day as a protection insulting to workers.

His trouble was that he still thought of a man, any man, as in total charge of his own destiny and therefore capable of choosing the terms of his employment and incurring total responsibility for his crimes. In the case of the legislature prohibiting the manufacture of cigars in homes, it would have been like the younger Roosevelt to have seen it as an invasion of basic rights, but when he became aware, through his own exhaustive investigations, of the sordid atmosphere that such a home industry created, he began to see that economic hardship could reduce men to near serfdom and that free will was possibly a monopoly of the well-to-do.

The crisis that changed his life now fell upon him. He and Alice had moved from a small brownstone to his widowed mother's mansion on West Fifty-seventh Street to await, in more comfortable circumstances, the birth of their first child. On February 14, 1884, Mittie Roosevelt died of typhoid and Alice of Bright's disease following the safe delivery of a daughter. “There is a curse on this house,” Elliott told his desperate brother, arriving from Albany shortly before the double end. The latter recorded in his diary: “And when my heart's dearest died, the light went out from my life forever.”

Two

TR had already invested a substantial percentage of his inherited capital in what turned out to be the ultimately losing proposition of a cattle ranch, Elk Horn, in the Badlands of the Dakota Territory, and now he resolved to conquer his sorrow in the new life this offered. Leaving his baby daughter Alice in the care of his still unmarried and willing sister Bamie, he became a rancher, rounding up his straying cattle for branding in the unfenced prairies, supervising his few employees while sharing all their tasks and taking long weeks off to hunt bison and grizzly bears in the wilderness. When he killed his first buffalo, according to his astonished guide Joe Ferris, he “broke into a wild facsimile of an Indian war dance.”

He certainly proved himself the equal of the toughest cowboy. A drunken bully at a bar with two drawn pistols who called him “Four Eyes” because of his glasses was knocked out cold before he could raise a hand, and after the theft of some horses from his ranch TR and two of his men trailed the three thieves to their camp where they caught them with their rifles on the ground or on their shoulders. Creeping up on them, they covered them with cocked rifles and marched them for a solid week through the wilderness to a sheriff. At night during his watch over the culprits TR read
Anna Karenina.
It was true, as he once said, that “reading with me is a disease.”

He had a simple formula for the conquest of fear. “There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to mean horses to gunfighters, but by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.” And nothing soured the tremendous joy of living in the undeveloped West. He wrote: “There are few sensations I prefer to those of galloping over those rolling limitless prairies, rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called Badlands.”

Edmund Morris has summed up admirably what his western experience did for TR:

During his time there he had built a massive body, repaired his soul, and learned to live on equal terms with men poorer and rougher than himself. He had broken horses with Hashknife Simpson, joined in discordant choruses to the accompaniment of Fiddlin' Joe's violin, discussed homicidal techniques with Bat Masterson, shared greasy blankets with Modesty Carter, shown Bronco Charlie Miller how to “gentle” a horse, and told Hell-Roaring Bill Jones to shut his foul mouth.

In 1884 he returned to politics as a delegate to the Republican convention in Chicago where he initiated his lifelong friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge, a delegate from Massachusetts. Both men were strongly opposed, along with the liberal wing of their party, to the corrupt James G. Blaine, the leading contender, and unenthusiastic about the outgoing president, Chester A. Arthur, his principal rival. They backed Senator George Edmunds of Vermont, whose chances were small. Blaine was nominated, and the terrible question arose for the two new friends: would they stay with the party or desert it with the considerable number of high-minded liberals later to be known as mugwumps?

It was the great and deciding moment of TR's life. Would he cross the line to become a party man, a professional politician, or would he follow his ideals no matter what the cost to his own political future? When he became a delegate to the party's convention, had there not been an implied promise that he would support the man the convention chose? He decided anyway, and Lodge with him, that they would go along with Disraeli's famous growl: “Damn your principles! Stick to your party.” And they were right, too. TR's career would have been ended had he bolted. He had been far too denunciatory of the Democrats for them ever to have advanced him, and, of course, the Republicans would never have trusted him again.

Both Lodge and TR had to suffer the scorn of some people they had previously admired, but TR's romantic view of the world enabled him in short order to see his role in the whole affair as a basically moral one and the mugwumps as hypocrites and traitors to the cause of right. His great gain was the lifelong (at least until the terrible crisis of 1912) support, advice, and devotion of the man soon to be a senator from Massachusetts. Lodge might have struck some as an odd contrast to TR. As Morris puts it: “Next to the wiry, bouncing, voluble Roosevelt, Lodge was tall, haughty, quiet, and dry. His beard was sharp, his coat tightly buttoned, his handshake quickly withdrawn.” But both men were scholars of American history and lovers of horse riding and fox hunting; both combined an appreciation of the aristocratic standards for gentlemen with a relish for the rough-and-tumble of practical politics, and both were strong family men. TR said of Lodge: “From that time on he was my closest friend personally, politically, and in every other way, and occupied toward me a relation that no other man has occupied or will occupy.”

In one of his multitudinous letters to Lodge he suggests one basis for their deep congeniality: “What funnily varied lives do we lead, Cabot! We touch two or three little worlds, each profoundly ignorant of the others. Our literary friends have but a vague knowledge of our actual political work, and a goodly number of our sporting and social acquaintances know us only as men of good family, one of whom rides hard to hounds while the other hunts big game in the Rockies.”

As authors they read each other's books with relish. They were gentlemen historians in the path of Francis Parkman and William H. Prescott, determined that history, as a branch of literature, should be a work of the imagination as well as a compendium of facts. TR's most outstanding work is the four-volume
Winning of the West.
It may have been superseded, as most histories are, by works buttressed by later research, but it tells the basic story of the development of the continent in lively and readable chapters. The style breathes some of the spirit of the author:

From the Volga to the Pillars of Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, acknowledged the sway of the kings of Teutonic or Scandinavian blood.

One can see who had been raised on Gibbon and Macaulay! But TR's finest book, in the opinion of many, is his autobiography, which re-creates this strong man in strong prose so vivid that it has a value transcending its historical accuracy.

In 1886 TR ran for mayor of New York City and trailed the two leading contenders, Abram Hewitt, who was elected, and Henry George, who alarmed the voters as a socialist. Had TR won, would that have ended his political career as it has that of every other New York mayor to this date (2001)? The great event, anyway, of the year was what followed shortly after his defeat: his marriage in London to Edith Carow.

A friend of his sister Corinne, she had known him since childhood and had always been supposed by the family to have been in love with him, even before the advent of Alice. She was certainly very different from Alice: firm of will, high-minded, intellectual, a lover of art and poetry, gracious but disciplined, a great lady but one who always regarded herself in the light of a loving support to a greater man. An adoring wife who allowed her spouse to absent himself in even the most difficult of domestic times for his long hunting trips (in 1910 one of ten months), she nonetheless did not hesitate to pull him up short when his exuberance took him over what she wisely deemed his limit. And she could be devastating, even a bit cruel, according to her stepdaughter, in her family reproaches. If his father was the only man of whom TR was ever afraid, Edith was perhaps the only woman. It is hard to see how he could have picked a better mate for his highly individual needs, or a better first lady for his ultimate home in the White House.

Despite his intense love for Edith, and his need of her—one mustn't forget his iron rules of chastity—he suffered deeply from his sense of guilt in betraying the memory of Alice. He wrote to his sister Bamie: “I utterly disbelieve in and disapprove of second marriages. I have always considered that they argued weakness in a man's character. You could not reproach me half as bitterly for my inconstancy and unfaithfulness as I reproach myself. Were I sure there was a heaven my prayer would be that I might never go there, lest I should meet those on earth who are dead.”

Happily these feelings were overcome, and in the first dozen years of his second marriage he became, as he had always wanted to be, the explosively proud father of four sons and another daughter. Edith took over the care of young Alice from Bamie, so the family consisted of six. All four of his sons saw active service in World War I—the youngest fatally—and three in World War II, two dying in uniform.

The man who had held up the Republican standard in the New York mayoralty election and campaigned actively for President Benjamin Harrison in 1888 was owed something, and TR found himself appointed to the Civil Service Commission, where he served with a Democrat and a fellow Republican during the whole of the term of the not very helpful Harrison, whom he described as the “little gray man in the White House.” He was reappointed by Grover Cleveland and served two more years before resigning to become one of New York City's four police commissioners.

TR made himself something of a pest to an administration largely intent on using civil service as a recompense for political support, but he did succeed in disgracing the Philadelphia store tycoon John Wanamaker, Harrison's postmaster general, before a congressional committee for failing to discipline twenty-five Baltimore postal employees for dunning their underlings to contribute to the Republican presidential campaign, and he did arrange, in his six years in office, to transfer twenty-six thousand jobs from the category of political plums to that of posts awarded on the basis of competitive examinations. Years later, as president, when he for once indulged his desire to encourage the arts by sneaking in a tiny job for the indigent poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, he chucklingly warned a correspondent: “Tell it not in civil service reform Gath, nor whisper it in the streets of merit-system Askelon.”

But the great value to TR in these years was in getting to know official Washington and how it worked. He and Edith also developed a brilliant circle of friends there who enlivened their evenings with intellectual discussions and exchanges of wit: the Lodges, of course, and the John Hays and Henry Adamses. Adams found TR interesting but egocentric; he was amused but at times alarmed. He ascribed to him “that singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter—the quality that medieval theology assigned to God—he was pure act.” Hay, who was to become McKinley's secretary of state and hence TR's in 1901, enjoyed the latter's highest esteem, both as a statesman and the author of the great biography of Lincoln, but in later years TR somewhat altered this opinion, writing in 1909 to Lodge: