THE FIRST WORDS OF ELEANOR ROOSEVELT’S MEMOIRS are: “My mother was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.” That declaration represented an unending reproach and longing that defined the terms of her unfinished relationship with her mother, Anna Livingston Ludlow Hall, who died at twenty-nine, when Eleanor was only eight.
Anna Hall considered manners more important than feelings, and beauty most important of all. From the beginning, she made Eleanor feel homely and unloved, always outside the closed circle that embraced her two younger brothers. Anna mocked her daughter’s appearance and chided her manner, calling her “Granny” because she was so serious, even at the age of two. Before company Eleanor was embarrassed to hear her mother explain that she was “a shy and solemn child.” And, ER wrote, “I never smiled.” From her earliest days her mother seemed to consider her doomed to social failure. And for her mother, social success was everything.
Anna was proud of her family lineage. Her maternal grandmother was Elizabeth Livingston Ludlow, a granddaughter of Chancellor Robert R. Livingston. ER remembered the matriarch vividly. Domineering and imperious, she walked with a long cane, which she banged and pointed insistently, and she always got her way. She and her relatives, the Clarksons and DePeysters, had ruled the Hudson River Valley since the seventeenth century.
New York’s first Robert Livingston had sailed from Scotland in 1673, allied himself with French and Indian traders, married a Schuyler, befriended a provincial governor, and was sufficiently diplomatic to be ceded a land grant in 1686 that established him as the first lord of the manor of Livingston, 163,000 acres spanning Dutchess and Columbia counties. His grandson Philip Livingston was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. His great-grandson Robert Livingston, as chancellor of New York, presided over the inauguration of President George Washington in 1789.
Philanthropic and public-spirited, the Livingstons were also leaders of that small circle that became Knickerbocker Society. In fact, the first known effort to list America’s nascent social aristocracy was made by Sara Van Brugh Livingston, who married John Jay, later to become the United States Supreme Court’s first chief justice. Her dinner and supper lists, compiled beginning in 1787, were largely limited to her cousins—Alsops, Cadwaladers, DePeysters, Van Rensselaers, Van Hornes, and always other Livingstons—who continued to marry one another generation after generation, but her lists did also include over a dozen physicians and clerics. Subsequent enumerations, made by more narrowminded folk, tended to eliminate such self-created gentry.
Shortly after the Civil War, when the new wealth of the industrial revolution provided too many aspirants to the upper reaches of society and confused the standards for entry, a Southern fop named Ward McAllister decided to codify America’s aristocracy once and for all. He made distinctions between “Nobs” (old families), “Swells” (acceptable new families), and “Parvenus” (unacceptable new families). In 1872, he organized the first of Ward McAllister’s “Patriarch” balls. Twenty-five illustrious Knickerbockers were chosen to sponsor this annual charity ball, and each Patriarch was asked to invite four ladies and five gentlemen of similar Patriarchal status. The Knickerbocker Society thereby numbered 250. But Ward McAllister’s chief sponsor, his “Mystic Rose,” was Mrs. William Astor—Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor—whose ballroom comfortably contained four hundred people. So it was that “The 400,” as they were forevermore known, came to be assembled by Ward “Make-a-lister.” The names of Mr. and Mrs. Valentine G. Hall, as well as their eldest daughter, Miss Anna Hall, are found on one of the first “400” lists ever published. Later, however, Anna Hall Roosevelt and several of her cousins and friends decided that the Patriarchs, and even Mrs. Astor, had become too democratic, and held a series of Monday and Tuesday dinner dances at Sherry’s, then society’s most fashionable restaurant and supper club, as well as a variety of alternative cotillions and assemblies, whose even more restricted guest lists better fitted their idea of society.
ER scorned the unregenerate elitism of her mother’s family. But she failed to recognize that her father shared virtually all of their social inclinations. As ER reflected on her heritage during the last years of her life, she wrote:
My father, Elliott Roosevelt, charming, good-looking, loved by all who came in contact with him, had a background and upbringing which were alien to my mother’s pattern…. I doubt that the background of their respective lives could have been more different. His family was not so much concerned with Society (spelled with a big S) as with people, and these people included the newsboys from the streets of New York and the cripples whom Dr. Schaefer, one of the most noted early orthopedic surgeons, was trying to cure.
ER romanticized her father, remembering herself as “perfectly happy” whenever she was with him. She saw him as the very opposite of her mother. The fact is that when Anna Rebecca Hall married Elliott Roosevelt, he was both an eligible and ardent member of her society.
Anna was seventeen when her father, Valentine Hall, died in 1880. A dour, hypochondriachal country squire who boasted Irish roots and a phenomenal fortune, he was a religious zealot whose primary interests were satisfied by his own live-in theologian. Unlike many of his Knickerbocker colleagues, he never worked to increase the family fortune, considering his father’s commercial success sufficient. After all, he was a partner (and the husband of his partner’s daughter) in the firm of Tonnele and Hall, which had “unlimited credit” throughout the world and large real-estate holdings in one of the most booming and valuable neighborhoods in New York City, Sixth Avenue from 14th to 18th street.
Valentine Hall’s wife and six children lived in dread of his rages, in thrall to his power, in service to his whims. Oak Terrace, the spacious family home overlooking the Hudson River, five miles north of the village of Tivoli, was a joyless place despite its virgin woods, its tennis courts, its exuberant plantings, its well-trained horses, and its extensive library. It was remembered as a solemn place, devoted to prayer and consternation. There were so many sins, and so many sinners to worry about. In this space laughter was scorned and frivolity despised. The Hall town house at 11 West 37th Street in Manhattan was also dreary, though it did occasionally host some of society’s more glamorous entertainments. When the family was at home alone, however, its dark narrow rooms were filled with silence and each meal was a somber event.
However pious, Valentine Hall was not a recluse. He was an active member of society, and conscious of its requirements. Though he would not permit his wife to handle money or to shop in public, he ordered a lavish array of clothes and accessories sent to the house so that she and their daughters would have the opportunity to make appropriate selections. Mrs. Hall and the older girls were always stylishly attired in the best and most expensive fashions. Appearances for women eclipsed education, and the girls were tutored—in religion, music, and a hint of usable literature and language. They were above all taught to dance, and to walk correctly. The two oldest sisters, Anna and Elizabeth (known as Tissie), were known for their regal bearing, achieved by grueling hours of back-straightening hikes up and down the River Road with sticks across their shoulders, held by the crooks of their elbows.
When Valentine Hall died suddenly at the age of forty-six, an iron and forbidding hand was removed. Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, who was a decade younger than her husband and had always been treated as one of the children, did not know the first thing about accounts, household management, or how to raise a family. Seventeen-year-old Anna, who seemed to share her father’s religious principles, as well as his sense of propriety and discipline, tried for a time to maintain a semblance of order. But her siblings were wild and unruly, very young and very needy. Her young brothers, Valentine and Edward, twelve and nine, were uncontrollable; Edith (known as Pussie) was seven, and little Maude was only three. Anna’s efforts at control were exhausting and futile. It was not at all the sort of life a belle was meant to lead.
After a year of that ordeal, she was pleased to meet the dashing, well-traveled, if somewhat eccentric Elliott Roosevelt. “I am just pining for excitement,” Anna wrote Elliott. They announced their engagement in June 1883 at Algonac, the Delano home, at a party given by Laura Delano, Sara Delano Roosevelt’s younger sister and one of Anna Hall’s best friends.
THERE HAD ALWAYS BEEN SOME COMPETITION BETWEEN THE Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family, from which Elliott Roosevelt descended, and the Hyde Park/Poughkeepsie branch, to which Sara Delano Roosevelt belonged by marriage. But all Roosevelts shared a common ancestor. Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt (Nicholas son of Martin of the Rose Field) and his wife, Jannetje Samuels Thomas, landed in New Amsterdam during the 1640s. For generations the Roosevelts prospered, lived comfortably, gave to charity, married one another or their closest neighbors, and continued to broaden their financial base, if not their geographical horizon. For over a century, in fact, the Roosevelts all seemed to live, work, court, and build new homes within the confines of the neighborhood between South Street and the family business center on Maiden Lane in downtown New York.
Merchants and patriots, the Roosevelts served the revolutionary cause with distinction. As time passed, they built increasingly large homes, moved uptown, diversified their interests (from sugar-refining to hardware to plate glass to real estate and banking), and served as city aldermen and in the State Assembly and Senate.
Isaac Roosevelt, born in 1726, was known as the first American Roosevelt because he was the first to conduct his business in English and, later, because he supported George Washington, as Isaac the Patriot. He helped to found the New York Chamber of Commerce, became president of the Bank of New York, the second bank chartered in America, and built the first large-scale sugar-refinery in Manhattan, importing his raw sugar from the West Indies.
By 1800, there were over fifty Roosevelt families. Some endowed hospitals, others simply amassed ever-larger fortunes. All worked hard and lived well. James, only son of Isaac, purchased a four-hundred-acre farm in what was then the country: the property ranged from Fifth Avenue to the East River, from 110th Street to 125th Street. Wanting to become a gentleman farmer, he built stables and bred horses, cut much of the timberlands and cleared the land. But the soil was too rocky for profitable farming, and in 1819 he sold the land for $25,000 and moved north, to Poughkeepsie, becoming the first Roosevelt to leave New York City’s merchant arena for the life of a country squire. One of James’s many sons (he had three wives) was named Isaac, after his grandfather; he graduated from Princeton and Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. But Isaac abandoned medicine to tend and extend the family estate. Eventually he married Mary Rebecca Aspinwall, the eighteen-year-old niece of his second stepmother, Harriet Howland Roosevelt. A year later, in 1828, their son, James, was born. This James Roosevelt became Sara Delano’s husband—and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s father.
While Isaac the Patriot’s Dutchess County descendants were cultivating their gardens, their New York City merchant cousins were buying land on Long Island and becoming known as the Hempstead and Oyster Bay Roosevelts. The Oyster Bay Roosevelts traced their lineage not to Isaac but to Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt and Margaret Barnhill, a Philadelphia Quaker.
Cornelius Van Schaack (CVS) Roosevelt achieved a virtual monopoly of the plate-glass importing business and bought real estate all over New York City. In addition, CVS became a director of the new Chemical Bank, and was eventually named one of the five richest men in New York. During the 1830s, CVS moved his family north to 14th Street (to what is now Union Square), and built a suitable summer residence in Oyster Bay, on Long Island Sound. His five sons (a sixth died in childhood) all had distinguished careers, in law, banking, diplomacy, and politics. Theodore Roosevelt, CVS’s youngest son and father of the future president, was born in 1831. Like his brothers, Theodore was a businessman, reformer, and politician. He managed the family’s plateglass business until the firm moved entirely into finance.
Known as Greatheart, Eleanor Roosevelt’s grandfather Theodore was the first humanitarian in the family. Disturbed by the increasing number of poor and homeless, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., was a pioneer in the creation of New York’s charities. He helped found the Children’s Aid Society and organized a Newsboys’ Lodging House. He supported efforts to train and find work for blind people. He became vice-president of the State Charities Aid Association and joined the board of United Charities. Inspired by his eldest daughter’s need for medical care and physical therapy, he founded the Orthopedic Hospital. He also helped to found the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, sponsored Miss Slattery’s Night School for Little Italians, and helped to create the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History. He gave generously of his time as well as his money. Theodore Roosevelt spent every Sunday evening with the newsboys of New York City, every Monday evening visiting families in distress, and frequently visited the Orthopedic Hospital. Over time, he encouraged his children—Anna (Bamie), Theodore, Jr., Elliott, and Corinne (nicknamed Pussie—like Anna Hall’s sister Edith—and later known as Conie)—to do the same.
He was also one of the most dashing men in New York society. He loved to dance and to party. Above all, he loved to careen through Central Park driving a four-in-hand at reckless speeds.
In 1853, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.—though an abolitionist like his brothers—became the first Roosevelt to marry into a slave-owning Southern family. Martha (“Mittie”) Bulloch grew up—with fourteen brothers, sisters, stepbrothers and stepsisters, and half-brothers and half-sisters—in Cobb County, Georgia, on former Cherokee lands made famous when gold was found there in 1830. The Cherokee Indians, who had already converted to Christianity and lived peacefully alongside their European neighbors, were forcibly removed and embarked on “the trail of tears”—a long westward march during which thousands died. Nine years later the town of Roswell was created by Mittie’s parents and several other prominent Savannah families, on a hilltop along the Chattahoochee River. Bulloch Hall was not magnificent by local standards—but it was congenial, with four Doric columns supporting a splendid veranda that overlooked Virginia cedars and magnolias, giant oaks and mimosa. Behind this grand façade, family passions and intrigues were played out with increasing, if relative, poverty.
When Mittie married Theodore Roosevelt, her widowed mother (Martha Stewart Elliott Bulloch) and her sister Anna (Annie) moved with her from Georgia to the dark New York town house on East 20th Street to which her marriage brought her. She was eighteen—beautiful, passionate, and deeply in love—but she missed her pastoral Georgia home. When she had children, she filled their heads with images and tales of her Southern childhood—wild and romantic stories of love and loss, tales of high adventure on the turbulent seas, and blood-curdling stories of nighttime horror in the cruel and smoky swamps. Duels were fought; ships were wrecked; slaves were torn apart by wild cougars.
The violence and brutality of slavery had always been a part of Mittie’s life. At Bulloch Hall there were nineteen slaves, including a butler and a coachman, a head housekeeper and a cook, as well as a personal nurse and a “little black shadow” for each child. The child consigned to Mittie slept on a straw mat on the floor of her bedroom, was at her side at all times, available to run errands—and presumably to play. But play among children under slavery was a dangerous thing. Mittie’s brother Daniel Stewart Elliott was sent away to Europe for a year after he killed his “little black shadow” in a temper.*
The Civil War was a time of divided passions in Theodore Roosevelt’s family. His wife was a Southern patriot, as were his wife’s mother and sister, who had joined Mittie in New York City only reluctantly, and for reasons of economic need (Mrs. Bulloch had to sell four slaves to pay for her daughter’s lavish wedding). Though their politics differed, Theodore welcomed his wife’s relatives, who were warm, devoted, cheerful, and actually much needed in the Roosevelt household, especially after the birth of their first child, Anna (known as Bamie, and later as Bye) on 18 January 1855. The intensive care the fragile baby required became the primary responsibility of Theodore and his mother-in-law, since nineteen-year-old Mittie spent months in bed depressed after her daughter’s birth.
Although Grandmother Bulloch longed to return to Georgia, she was “unwilling to leave” her increasingly dependent daughter, and granddaughter Bamie, whose early efforts to walk revealed that she had Pott’s disease, a form of bone tuberculosis that resulted in curvature of the spine and was at that time treated with a heavy steel brace. On 27 October 1858, another baby, Theodore, Jr., was born; then on 28 February 1860, Elliott was born; and Corinne arrived in September 1861, while the Civil War raged. With four needy toddlers and Mittie’s heart torn apart, the Civil War was devastating for the Roosevelts of East 20th Street.
Grandmother Bulloch cried for three days when Port Royal fell in November 1861. She announced that she would rather die than live under a triumphant Yankee government. In October 1864, at the age of sixty-five, Martha Bulloch died after she learned that two of her sons had been killed before Richmond fell, and before she could learn that her beloved Roswell had been spared during Sherman’s sweep through Georgia.
It was rumored that Mittie hung a Confederate flag out the window every time the South won a victory, and everybody knew that she and her family sent packages of contraband supplies (woolens, cosmetics, food) through the Yankee blockade via the Bahamas to relatives and friends in Georgia. Two of Mittie’s brothers, James and Irvine Bulloch, were great Southern heroes. Captain James Bulloch was sent on a secret mission to England, where he designed and helped build the famous Alabama raider on which Irvine served with distinction until it was torpedoed.
While the Bulloch brothers fought for the Confederacy, Theodore Roosevelt—like Anna Hall’s father, Valentine—hired a substitute to take his place in the Union army, for $300, which at the time satisfied the draft law. But there was no way of buying exemption from the effects of the war on his family. The right of the rich to hire the poor to do their fighting and dying during the Civil War led to the New York City draft riots of 1863; it also influenced Theodore’s son’s life. Subsequently shamed by his father’s failure to fight, TR became fanatical about the need for heroic military adventure.
By the end of the war, the Roosevelt household was in shambles. Mittie spent weeks in bed with unknown maladies marked by palpitations and heart pain. Young Theodore was haunted by nightmares and monsters, headaches and stomach upsets, and on occasion, an acute case of asthma, which completely incapacitated him. America’s most robust president was, for many years, a maladjusted and miserable little boy. Undersized and underweight, he relied on his younger brother, Elliott, for physical protection. But Elliott too suffered from an undiagnosed disorder and fainting spells, which some of his relatives subsequently called epilepsy. Like Theodore, Corinne also had chronic but less severe asthma.
Of the children, only Bamie, Theodore, Sr.’s favorite, was free of self-induced or psychosomatic ailments. Young as she was, Bamie emerged in this period as the responsible mother-surrogate she would remain throughout her life, to the great good fortune of her siblings and her mother—who with the years had become more and more eccentric. Always forgetful and late, Mittie was now fanatic about cleanliness, and would only wear white. Not only dirt but color disturbed her. She took several baths a day, each requiring two full tubs of water—one to wash and one to rinse. Years later, Bamie recalled that her mother never went to town in the summer without “veils and dust coat, and …brown paper cuffs so that not a single speck of dust or smudge could touch her.”
However odd Mittie was, she did become more functional after the death of her mother. When the Civil War ended, she redecorated and refurnished East 20th Street, became a leading society hostess, and assumed responsibility for her children’s education, hiring new tutors for them, and taking them on a series of tours to Europe to free the spirits and enlarge the mind. In 1870 she sent Bamie off to Les Ruches, Europe’s most prestigious school for aristocratic girls, located in a great park near Fontainebleau. Les Ruches’s headmistress, the learned and powerful Marie Souvestre, was to figure prominently in the lives and education of several young Roosevelt women, including Eleanor.
The family’s first grand tour, of 1869–70, functioned not only as a remarkable journey in behalf of language and culture but as a family reunion with the Bullochs, who had been denied amnesty and remained in exile in Liverpool after the Civil War.
This tour of the continent also revealed some startling attitudes about people and society that no survey of Theodore Roosevelt, Sr.’s charitable activities could possibly have suggested. In his Diaries of Boyhood and Youth, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., noted on 14 December 1869, for example, that they climbed hills and visited castles. During a scenic lunch, “beggars came round.” Father “hired one to keep off the rest,” and then the family had “fun” when they tossed cakes to a crowd of beggar “boys, girls, and women.”
We tossed the cakes to them and I fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr. Stevens kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a “Coup de Grace” we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings. We drove on very soon in the moonlight. It was beautiful…. We made the crowds that we gave cakes to give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cake….
A week later, on 4 January 1870, the Roosevelts went from Vesuvius to the baths of Nero, to the temples of Diana, Mercury, and Venus—where “Father tossed pennies” to the beggar children, and when a boy transgressed a rule made by Papa, “he whipped him till he cried and then gave him a sou.”
After the family returned to the United States, Mittie for the first time took personal charge of her older son’s effort to improve his physical capacities. Young Theodore was humiliated by his undersized and scrawny body, and was determined to best his younger brother. For months Mittie accompanied her sons to a gymnasium, where they lifted weights, heaved themselves over and under and around parallel bars, and pummeled punching bags and each other. Eventually she had a gymnasium fully outfitted on the back porch of 20 East 20th Street, where she continued to direct the proceedings.
Elliott enjoyed these bodybuilding exercises, but Theodore regarded them as sacrosanct. They enabled him to act out his wildly competitive feelings toward his taller, better-looking, more popular younger brother: “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.” Theodore’s commitment to competition with Elliott marked their relationship far into the future.
For years the leader of the two, Elliott Roosevelt was also the most congenial child in the family. As a boy, Elliott had been considered “decidedly pretty.” At two, he spoke more clearly than Theodore, and was a better athlete. “Little brother was big brother”—gracious, kind, and always generous. Eleanor Roosevelt often told the story of her father’s first demonstration of generosity, which occurred when he was seven years old. One frosty evening near Christmas, Elliott went for a walk and returned without his new and much-treasured overcoat. When asked where it was, he explained that he had given it away “to a small and ragged urchin who looked cold.”
By all accounts, Elliott was the most favored of the Roosevelt children. Called Nell, after the understanding, compassionate, and longsuffering little girl in Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, Elliott was unmarred by his brother’s “aggressive egotism.” Neither overbearing nor strident, he seemed always capable and charming.
But in adolescence new traits began to appear in Elliott’s character—a troubling quest for pleasure, a casual sense of purpose, an inclination toward poetic introspection. Once the family geography began to change, it changed very rapidly. In 1872, thirteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was presented with a “double barrelled breech loading shotgun” by his father. That present revealed that young Theodore was severely myopic. Nobody had ever noticed that his range of vision had throughout his childhood been somewhat less than thirty feet. It was not until he complained that his brother and friends were always shooting things he had not noticed that spectacles were ordered. They changed his life. “I had no idea how beautiful the world was.” With his spectacles and his gun, Theodore embarked on a life of killing—especially birds. During the winter of 1872, the family sailed in a luxurious dahabeah up the Nile. Young Theodore went off each morning to return with dead birds—ten, twelve, eighteen at a time, larks, doves, ringed plovers, large cranes, hawks, pelicans, geese—which the young naturalist proceeded to stuff. His parents were so pleased by his preoccupation with such “splendid sport,” and delighted to see that his asthma had vanished, that they endured the reek of formaldehyde and other noxious chemicals. While Theodore went off to shoot, Elliott went off by himself in a small boat, which had been his present that Christmas. Alone with his notebook, he wrote verse and stories and contemplated the silence.
CHANGES IN THE BALANCE OF POWER BETWEEN ELLIOTT AND Theodore became even more apparent on the family’s return to New York in 1873, when the Roosevelts moved from East 20th Street into their new home at 6 West 57th Street, located in what was then the northernmost neighborhood of the city. Theodore, Sr., found it “glorious to be able to go into the country at once from our door.” Theodore also decided to join his brothers in the family compound at Oyster Bay in the summer of 1874. During this otherwise idyllic period, Elliott began to develop disturbing symptoms of a serious but never diagnosed condition. He fainted and had seizures. That summer, when Elliott was fourteen and Theodore, Jr., sixteen, Elliott was no longer the leader, the stronger. He confided a range of fears to his father, fears that had begun to emerge when he encountered difficulty studying German in Dresden the year before. He could not keep his mind upon his studies, and he feared he would never succeed in his father’s business. “What will I become when I am a man?” Weren’t there already “a very large number of partners in the store?” “I think Teedie would be the boy to put in the store if you wanted to be sure of it.” Elliott wanted to be “as good as you,” he wrote his father, “if it is in me. But it is hard.”
Believing that travel would cure all trouble, Theodore, Sr., took Elliott for a holiday in England for the autumn season. While visiting the Bullochs, Elliott had the most severe attack to date. Theodore wrote Mittie:
It came from overexcitement but of so natural a kind that I foresee it will be very difficult to guard him from it. A pillow fight was perhaps the principal cause…. It produced congestion of the brain with all its attendant horrors of delirium, etc. The doctor says that there is no cause for anxiety as it is only necessary to avoid all excitements for 2 or 3 years and he will entirely outgrow it. He is perfectly well again now, but of course weak and confined to his bed…. Ellie’s sweetness entirely won the heart of the doctor as it has that of all the servants here….
The worst time was at night, when Elliott feared being alone. Theodore wrote his wife, “He is nervous although he stoutly denies it. He sleeps in my bed.” Theodore suggested that when they returned it would be best for the two boys to share “the large bed in the back 3d story room…. I should be afraid to leave [Elliott] alone.” In a subsequent letter to his older son, Theodore told him that his letters gave Ellie joy. “His first inquiry is if there is anything from Teedie…. You will have to assume more of the responsibilities of elder brother when we return. Ellie is anticipating all sorts of pleasure with you that he will not be able to realize, and it will require much tact on your part not to let him feel his deprivations too much….”
Elliott also wrote Teedie to explain his condition. “It is so funny, my illness.” The doctor had called it “hysteria.” And so, Elliott wrote, “it comes from the nerves and therefore is not at all serious, but my body is getting so thin…, and my arms as well as my legs look like I have the strength of a baby. I jump involuntarily at the smallest sound and have a perpetual headache and [am] nearly always in low spirits….”
Whatever was wrong with Elliott, whether he had a brain tumor or epilepsy, whether he was having a sexual coming-out crisis as he entered adolescence, or whether he was the one who acted out the emotional turbulence of his family, we will never know. But travel far away from his family and the rugged outdoor life did seem temporarily to heal him.
In 1875, however, Elliott decided he wanted to join his cousin and best friend, Archibald Gracie, at Saint Paul’s School in New Hampshire. He applied himself and, according to Cousin Archie, “studied hard and late.” But in October, he had a dreadful attack during Latin class. Without “the slightest warning,” he wrote his father, “I had a bad rush of blood to my head.” The pain was intolerable, and “I can’t remember what happened. I believe I screamed out.” In December, Archibald Gracie wrote to his mother that Elliott’s “brother came up to take him home.”
Elliott did not remain at home. At fifteen he was sent off to Texas with family friends, in order to rough it on the frontier. But the experience made him feel like a fraud. He wrote his father that it seemed “just a sell my being down here…. it’s a very pleasant one but a sell nevertheless, for I feel well enough to study and instead here I am spending all your money …as if I was ill.”
Elliott’s writings during this period reveal a remarkable gender confusion. He referred to himself as a woman on the range, and wrote stories about himself in which he was disguised as a woman. However androgynous, Elliott was sent to Texas to do precisely what his brother most longed to do—hunt buffalo and other big game. He spent all day in the saddle, and was delighted by the “rough and tumble chaps” who befriended, and tempted, him. He wrote his father that he had not yet “taken a drink or a smoke” though he wanted at least to smoke. On the Texas frontier Elliott enjoyed himself “just as much as anyone ever enjoyed anything.” However much this exacerbated young Theodore’s obsession to best his brother, TR was always proud of this aspect of his brother’s youth. He dedicated Hunting Trips of a Ranchman to that “keenest of sportsmen and truest of friends, my Brother, Elliott Roosevelt.” TR explained that his brother “was in at the death of the great Southern herds in 1877, and had a good deal of experience in buffalohunting, and once or twice was charged by old bulls but never had any difficulty in either evading the charge or else killing the brute as it came on.”
WHILE ELLIOTT GALLOPED ABOUT THE WILDERNESS, THEOdore achieved his first social successes at Harvard, taking on the airs and costume of a well-dressed dandy. Although he evidently never learned to eat with any propriety, causing his good friend Cecil Spring Rice to remark subsequently that Teddy had “a variety of curious habits” (one of which was “to eat chicken like a wild animal”), he was, nevertheless, elected to the best clubs, including the exclusive Porcellian, and took great care to associate with the right people. On 15 October 1876, he wrote his family that he chose his friends entirely from the “gentleman sort.” This was slow going, however, since he knew nothing of anyone’s “antecedents.” “On this very account, I have avoided being very intimate with the New York fellows.”
The family took young Theodore’s Harvard doings seriously and tried to protect him from familial tensions, including and especially his father’s final illness. For three months, Elliott and his sisters cared for and nursed their father during his slow and tormented death from intestinal cancer. According to Corinne, “Elliott gave unstintedly a devotion which was so tender that it was more like that of a woman, and his young strength was poured out to help his father.” Theodore, on the other hand, was shielded so successfully from this trauma that when he learned of his father’s death he was devastated by the shock of it, and never forgave Elliott for not warning him of its imminence.
Afterward, Elliott agonized over his failure to contact his father’s firstborn son during the fourteen-hour deathbed ordeal. While his uncles watched the dead, he was haunted by his neglect. “I lay down on the sofa in Father’s dressing room but not to sleep, if only I didn’t have to meet Theodore tomorrow and tell him all, and I promised if there was danger to have him there, may God forgive me.”
Theodore “Greatheart” Roosevelt died at the age of forty-six on 9 February 1878. But he had been failing for some time, and had entertained thoughts of death years before, when he wrote his wife: “I feel so glad to think I have done something in life for I fear I am becoming old and lazy now. Tell Teedie and Ellie they must be prepared to take my place.”
He might well have named Bamie and Corinne, who were at least as capable. But without the vote, acknowledged influence, or authority, Theodore’s daughters were able to do little besides support their brothers’ careers. Though Bamie and Corinne both worked politically behind the scenes and contributed significantly to American public life, they were denied access to work of their own. It galled Bamie in particular, but all the Roosevelt women expressed discontent.
One evening in March 1881, as they sat in Mittie’s room, they talked about their own lives and ambitions. Bamie said she would have preferred to live in “more stirring times,” when strong women had real power. Corinne wrote to her fiancé, Douglas Robinson, about that evening: “What a splendid queen she would have made…. With you and Teddy as prime ministers and Elliott as master of ceremonies, [Bamie] might have ruled the world!”
Eleanor Roosevelt and TR’s daughter Alice were particularly inspired by Bamie. Both agreed that she would have been president had she been a man.
Denied a position of public power, Bamie nevertheless had a great influence on the political life of the country while her brother Theodore was president.
Elliott, however, was becoming increasingly mercurial and distracted—haunted and pulled by a need to escape into frivolity and excessive drinking.
* Mittie’s life in Georgia, at least circumstantially, was not unlike that of Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara, and Bulloch Hall was not unlike Tara. In fact, in 1923, Mitchell, a young reporter for the Atlanta Journal, toured Bulloch Hall before writing Gone With the Wind, which was to become one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite books, so well did it capture, she believed, the atmosphere of her Southern family.