CHAPTER 9

Parents as Best Friends—Martha and Theodore Roosevelt Sr.

Flags throughout the city were at half-staff. Over two thousand people packed the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church for the funeral service. Hundreds had kept a vigil at the home of the stricken man. Few pulpits that Sunday did not extol the virtues of the deceased. Every newspaper in New York and many elsewhere detailed his life not only in obituaries but also in their editorials and even on their front pages. Perhaps the New York World put it best, celebrating one “who was eyes to the blind, feet to the lame, good to all.” The deceased was not a head of state or even his municipality. He never held or sought to hold public office. Yet, although he had always avoided publicity, he was esteemed when he died at the age of only forty-six, just before midnight on February 9, 1878, as the first citizen of New York. His name was Theodore Roosevelt. Only many years later would he be remembered as Theodore Roosevelt Sr.

His son, the younger Theodore, a sophomore at Harvard, had received an urgent summons to come home on the next train, but he arrived too late. His father had characteristically cautioned him, upon his departure for college, to “take care of your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.” The son had written home early in his freshman year, “Not another boy in college has a family who loves him as you all do me, and I am sure there is no one who has a Father who is also his best and most intimate friend, as you are mine.”

Three days after his father’s death, young Theodore Roosevelt reflected in his diary, “He was everything to me, the one I loved dearest on earth.” When he had finally recovered from “the first sharpness of grief,” he wrote his mother on March 24, 1878, “Darling little Motherling, I have just been looking over a letter of my dear Father’s. I do not think I could do anything wrong while I have his letters.” And reflecting still later, “My father … was the best man I ever knew. He combined strength and courage with gentleness, tenderness, and great unselfishness.”

What had made the elder Theodore Roosevelt such a beloved figure to so many? The progression of seven previous generations of Roosevelts in America had achieved distinction and wealth, but no previous Roosevelt had ever exhibited anything remotely approaching Theodore’s relentless commitment to helping others.

That Claes (or Klaes) Martenszen van Rosenvelt had chosen in 1649 to make the arduous journey to the New World is evidence of his ambition. There were abundant opportunities at home, but overseas trade was essential to a world power. With eminent practicality, the Dutch settled only one colony in North America, crowned by the finest natural harbor they could find. They called it New Netherlands, and the city that would develop around its harbor, New Amsterdam. In less than forty years it would be New York, but politics was not the first priority to those already established in commerce.

Claes was both a farmer and a merchant. His sons, their family name now anglicized to Roosevelt, developed two notable branches as they expanded, essentially city and country Roosevelts. The most prominent of what became the Hyde Park lineup along the Hudson River was the first Isaac Roosevelt, a sugar planter and American patriot who helped secure the adoption of the Constitution. The most prominent of the Manhattan line was the formidable Cornelius Van Schaak Roosevelt, who turned what had been essentially a hardware business in other directions—importing glass, selling real estate, and eventually establishing a private bank. Known as “C. V. S.,” he became the family’s first millionaire and was the father of the elder Theodore Roosevelt, called “Thee” by the family.

Thee was the youngest of the five sons of C. V. S. He was born on September 22, 1831, into a lively household ensconced in a sizeable red brick mansion on bustling Fourteenth Street. Allen Churchill notes that even as a child Theodore exhibited a balanced, cheerful personality. Perhaps because he was the youngest of their boys, both parents doted on him. His mother was not of Dutch origin—Margaret Barnhill Roosevelt’s Quaker forebears had come over with William Penn. Thee enjoyed the influence of more than one tradition.

He loved animals of all kinds, especially horses. As he grew, he delighted in riding his favorite mount or driving his four-in-hand carriage through the still-rural environs of upper Manhattan. Edmund Morris refers to Thee’s “leonine features and big sloping shoulders.” David McCullough describes Thee, who would later grow a neat beard and mustache, as “a fine figure” of a man, “physically imposing, athletic, with china blue eyes, chestnut hair … and a good, square Dutch jaw.”

Education in the practical Roosevelt household was still largely conducted by tutors. Only one son went to college, his Columbia degree a specific preparation for the law. Yet when Theodore was nineteen, his parents decided it would be beneficial to send him on a grand tour of Europe. He made the customary rounds of castles and cathedrals, but his letters dwelt more on observations that reveal an emerging social conscience. He was struck by the extremes of public squalor and private splendor. Still, upon returning home he joined the family business, now Roosevelt and Sons. His income was enhanced by a hefty inheritance after his father died. But try as he might, it would never be his true calling. It simply didn’t challenge him as it did his brothers. He had loftier pursuits.

And, more immediately, the pursuit of the most captivating girl in the world, “Mittie” Bulloch. He had met her in Roswell, Georgia, in 1850 on his first trip south, to join a wedding party. The bride’s fifteen-year-old sister, diminutive Martha Bulloch, called “Missie” throughout the region but “Mittie” by her friends, is described by Doris Faber as altogether exquisite and bewitching. Reportedly, “she had the sort of silky black hair that takes a russet tinge under the glow of candles…. Her skin was the purest white, with a coral rather than a rose tint in her cheeks.” Mittie embodied the less languid variety of Southern belle. During the same day she might read poetry under the wisteria but then later tear about the expansive acreage of her father’s estate on her spirited mount as recklessly as Theodore Roosevelt in upper Manhattan. The Bullochs were a colorful clan with Scottish roots. A Bulloch had served as governor of Georgia, and unlike the Roosevelts they had fought in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Mittie’s father, Major James Stephens Bulloch, had rather a rakish reputation, although he died of a stroke while teaching Sunday school.

Beyond attractiveness and affluence, Mittie and Thee seemed initially to have little in common. Mittie was slight, creative, emotional, and very Southern; Thee was large, serious, motivated, self-contained, and very Northern. And yet they fell almost immediately and mutually in love. Their youthful affection, so quickly kindled, never waned, an example of lifelong constancy that would never cease to inspire their children. Although they would not marry for nearly three years, they were secretly engaged before Theodore’s departure for home.

Their letters reveal great tenderness. In a typical exchange, Mittie wrote, “I feel dear Thee—as though you were part of my existence, and that I can only live in your being.” When he received this letter, Thee, “feeling the blood rush to my temple,” responded, “Oh, Mittie, how deeply, how devotedly I love you!” The delay in their nuptials was likely influenced by concerns about Mittie’s age and the suddenness of her sentiments. Since her mother, also named Martha, was already favorably disposed to Roosevelt, she finally gave her consent. The wedding at Bulloch Hall in Roswell on December 22, 1853, was followed by a week of festivities. After a brief honeymoon, the couple arrived at their new home in New York City—a substantial four-story brownstone on Twentieth Street.

The transition from Southern plantation to Northern townhouse could not be measured merely in miles. However smitten, Mittie understood that New York represented as much a new world as a new state. At eighteen, she had never been obliged to run anything, let alone such a house in a great city she found “bewildering.” And here was a seeming regiment of retainers waiting to do her bidding, whatever that might be. Certainly, she brought light and laughter to such a somber setting, and her devotion to Thee was never in doubt, but it took a period of adjustment to feel fully in charge.

Within a year she was pregnant. Her first child was a girl they named Anna after Mittie’s favorite sister, and nicknamed “Bamie,” after the Italian “bambina.” She was a joy to both her parents but also a challenge, and a precursor of problems to come. Anna was born with curvature of the spine. She was patiently nursed and exercised by her parents, only strengthening the bond between them. The seemingly fragile Martha Bulloch Roosevelt had surprising stamina. Thee resolved to do something for others similarly afflicted, and he helped to found and fund the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, turning ever more to the concerns that would consume him.

In 1856 Mittie’s widowed mother sold their Georgia plantation and with her daughter Anna moved to the Roosevelt domicile in New York. Mittie was bolstered by their arrival, enabling her to become a more confident mistress of this bustling household. Her mother was by her side when she endured the very difficult delivery of her second child, on October 27, 1858, her first son. They called the eight-pound boy Theodore, for his father, and he was promptly dubbed “Teedie” to differentiate them (he would always hate “Teddy”). Mittie thought him the homeliest baby she had ever laid eyes on—and loved him all the more. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was the first American president to be born in a great city.

The Roosevelts had two more children—Elliott, called “Ellie,” in 1860, and Corinne, called “Conie,” in 1861. None of the four was entirely healthy. Bamie might have been crippled for life, but for young Teedie it would be a question of life itself. Almost from birth, he had difficulty breathing. His asthma became so severe that he could sleep only when propped up in bed or wrapped in blankets in a chair. Both parents attended to him around the clock. And he seemed to be developing additional ailments.

“My really great father,” young Theodore recalled, “saved my life…. I remember … him carrying me in my battles for breath, up and down a room all night…. I could breathe, I could sleep when he had me in his arms…. He got me breath, he got me lungs, strength, life.” Even on blustery winter nights, Thee would have the carriage brought around and bundle his son in rugs, holding him tight, while they raced through the silent streets to catch the air. At home, his mother comforted him. As Doris Faber writes, “Night after night she sat up with him, cradling his dear funny old man’s face in her lap while she soothed his asthmatic gasping with comic stories” from her Southern childhood. It is little wonder that he would see both his parents in mythic terms.

Still, they must both at times have wondered, however deep their devotion, what perverse fate had brought so beautiful a mother as Mittie such homely children, and so vigorous a father as Thee such debilitating sickness in his offspring. Perhaps this helped encourage Thee’s inclinations to philanthropy, although he was already on his way to a lifelong commitment, his true vocation. Thee restlessly roamed the city. Seeing shivering newsboys on street corners, he founded a Newsboys Lodging House. He spent every Sunday evening there, serving them dinner, encouraging the homeless boys with no trace of condescension. As his children grew, he would take each of them along, in turn, to join him. Young Theodore Roosevelt may have grown up in affluence, but he had an acquaintance with the reality of most people’s lives that was denied to his Hyde Park cousins.

Thee set aside Monday nights for visiting families in New York’s rapidly expanding slums. He often picked up stray kittens on his rounds. Naturally, he helped to found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, as he had the Young Men’s Christian Association. Seeing so many homeless children on the city’s streets, he initiated the Children’s Aid Society. He served on every charitable board he could induce the city and state of New York to set up, never taking a salary and avoiding publicity. He nurtured institutions that aided the blind and deaf as well as schools for immigrant children. He helped to found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Virtually every charity, every hospital, every cultural institution bore his imprint. He was obtrusive only when soliciting help from others. Beyond contributing his own time and money, he ceaselessly sought the support of his many wealthy friends. Others, watching him approach with his great strides, the glint in his eyes, would simply ask, “How much this time, Theodore?”

At a time of rampant political corruption throughout New York, Thee’s politics were largely an amalgam of well-intentioned reforms. Originally a Democrat, Thee would become, to his wife’s consternation, a Lincoln Republican. His hope, as McCullough points out, was for what New York might become—an authentic melting-pot symbol for the nation, as the nation should be for the world. In his view, “No other city offered such opportunities for those wishing to do something for the good of mankind.”

Martha Roosevelt lavished unconditional love on all four of her children in a fashion so public it would have offended many another society matron’s sense of propriety. More given to affection than advice, Martha called her family’s hugging sessions “melts.” But she, too, could be serious, just as Thee could be fun loving. Put simply, they were better together. Each day started with family prayers. Afterwards, Thee would send Teedie out to buy fresh strawberries from a nearby market for breakfast. The sights, sounds, and smells of the great city were never foreign to him. As Teedie grew, in the words of Churchill, “into a wan wistful child, with a wide mouth, large teeth, unruly hair, and spindly legs,” physicians believed that if he exerted himself as little as possible he might somehow outgrow the asthma. His father suspected otherwise. Might not a stronger, more active body provide the best antidote to any ailment? Teedie loved the natural world, just as his father did—from birds to botany.

Not even the War between the States could sever the ties between Mittie and Thee. In 1861 Thee made an agonizing decision, one he regretted for the rest of his life. There could be no doubt of his Union loyalties. Yet he simply could not bring himself to fight against his wife’s kin, and so he hired a substitute. Instead, he pursued other means of selfless service, helping to form an Allotment Commission to convince Union soldiers to send a portion of their paychecks home to their families, and supporting the Sanitary Commission, predecessor of the Red Cross, and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Mittie’s brothers’ service in the Confederacy was so conspicuous that they were excluded from the general amnesty after the war, and they moved to England.

Despite Teedie’s many activities and interests, by the time he was ten his parents continued to be alarmed by his pallor and the lack of development in his frail physique. He had started to keep a diary of his observations, yet his eyes remained as weak as his legs. He read any book he could find, and books were abundant in his home. His tutors were more than impressed. If only Teedie were strong enough, Thee vowed, the boy must go to college. He early settled on Harvard.

Concerned not only with Teedie’s lack of development but also the generally poor health of her other children, Mittie suggested a bracing tour of Europe. Thee worked out an itinerary. The children were not particularly excited about it, preferring the more leisurely summers they had enjoyed, most recently in Oyster Bay, Long Island, their enduring summer home, an “enchanting” place of “special delights,” as Conie Roosevelt recalled it. Nevertheless, in 1869 the full Roosevelt family embarked on their grand tour. Tirelessly visiting museums, Teedie protested, “If only Raphael had painted landscapes instead of church things.” A highlight was the festive celebration of his eleventh birthday in Cologne, which his parents attended in full dinner dress. Having seen them dance with such effortless ease only heightened Teedie’s resolve to join “the fellowship of the doers.” He yearned to become stronger, concurring with his father’s conviction that the doctors had been totally wrong in recommending rest as the cure for Teedie’s ailments.

After they returned home, Thee took his son aside and gave him the advice that would shape his life. “You have the mind,” Thee said, “but not the body. Without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery, but I know you will do it.” Thee transformed the second-floor piazza of their home into a fully furnished gym. Intended for all his children, it became Teedie’s haunt. Hour after hour, he lifted dumbbells, worked with horizontal bars, and punched a large bag. The gym was not drudgery to Teedie, it was salvation. He gloried in any modestly measurable improvement in his body. By the time Teedie returned from a second family trip to Europe, this one extending to the Middle East and Africa, he was all but physically transformed.

Thee returned home several months before the rest of his family. Some projects couldn’t wait. When they finally arrived back in October 1873, he had a staggering surprise waiting for them. He had secretly supervised the construction of an immense new home, literally a mansion, on West Fifty-Seventh Street, near the green expanse of Central Park. Thee told Mittie, “We have now probably one abiding resting place for the rest of our days.”

With the aid of an excellent tutor, Teedie was accepted at Harvard in the class of 1880. In October of his freshman year he wrote his father, “I have kept the first letter you wrote me and shall do my best to deserve your trust.” By the fall of his sophomore year, Teedie knew that his father had fallen sick with an undetermined ailment. He tried to cheer him up by writing home on December 8, 1877, “I am anticipating the most glorious fun during the holidays.”

Thee seemed better upon Teedie’s arrival. Perhaps it had served as a tonic. Teedie proudly wrote in his diary his father’s pronouncement that “after all I was the dearest of his children to him.” Now, even more, he must prove worthy of “the best and most loving of men.” After Teedie returned to Cambridge, his family finally learned the truth about Thee’s illness. There had been only a brief period of remission. What had been initially diagnosed as “peritonitis” was in fact inoperable cancer of the bowel. When that urgent telegram went to young Theodore to return home as quickly as possible, the news had already spread throughout the community. Mittie took the terrible loss bravely, as least publicly, feeling that her task, as in the past, was somehow to try to cheer everyone up. What a heritage they had to live up to! She would never regain the buoyancy of her youth, but as Thee had stressed, “One must live for the living.”

Young Theodore stayed at Harvard, graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1880, abandoned natural science for politics, and married a lovely young lady named Alice Lee, who reminded him of his mother. “You must not feel melancholy, sweet Motherling,” he wrote her, “I shall only love you all the more.” She had no doubt of that, nor of her son’s bright future. Four years later, with Theodore already in the New York State Assembly, his wife gave birth to a girl they also named Alice. In less than forty-eight hours, at the age of only twenty-two, Alice Lee Roosevelt was dead. Her Bright’s disease had not been diagnosed. On the same day, February 14, 1884, in the same house, now viewed as “cursed” by Theodore’s brother Elliott, their mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, died of typhoid fever at the age of forty-eight. It was six years since her husband had passed away. Neither lived to the age of fifty. The joint funeral of wife and mother was so poignant that even the minister was too moved to muster many words of solace.

Theodore Roosevelt Jr. went on to marry a second supportive wife, Edith Kermit Carow, with whom he would have five more children and rebuild his life, while retaining every cherished memory of a childhood marred only by sickness. Edith would outlive him by nearly thirty years.

In the autobiography Roosevelt wrote six years before his own death, he recalled his mother as “a sweet, gracious, beautiful Southern woman, a delightful companion, and beloved by everybody.” Perhaps Theodore Roosevelt’s confidence came more from his father and his ebullience more from his mother, but he viewed both as little short of perfection. Together they had breathed the very gift of life into their first son.

As it turned out, Roosevelt’s tumultuous tenure as president began upon McKinley’s death in 1901, on his father’s birthday, September 14. His sisters happened to be visiting. “It is a good omen,” he told them. “I feel as if my father’s hand were on my shoulder and as if there were a special blessing on the life I should lead here.”