TR: AN AMERICAN PATRICIAN…
OF SORTS
America has distinguished itself from other cultures throughout its history. Most notably, the first generations of Americans possessed an inherent democratic spirit, a fierce individualism. From the beginning, America had no aristocracy. Early settlers and pioneers did not arrive with pedigrees or escutcheons. In fact, America in its earliest days was largely populated by lower classes, some indentured to work, some slaves, and countless others simply desperate for land and opportunity. Many people of middle class also arrived on the continent without pretension or provision—tradesmen and farmers, entrepreneurs as we would call them today. They arrived in the New World humble but hopeful. While European courts deeded tracts of land and created a gentry class, the average early American was not defined in terms of his geographical or even mercantile empire. The average American, then as now, was just that: average.
The Roosevelt family arrived on American shores around 1640, as ordinary as many of their fellow immigrants. They were from the Netherlands and planted themselves in New Amsterdam, right where they disembarked. “Roosevelt” means “field of roses,” and was spelled in various ways before “Roosevelt” became standard in the family's third American generation. The Roosevelts were like thousands of other immigrants to the American continent: fairly comfortable, very industrious, and extremely determined. Unlike many others, they had not fled religious oppression or racial discrimination in the Netherlands. They simply wanted to experience opportunity in this beautiful, abundant, welcoming land. Klaes Maartenszen van Rosevelt, the head of the family, possessed a pioneer spirit—a spirit that would be inherited by his descendent Theodore Roosevelt, who would be born in Manhattan two centuries after the family arrived in America.
The Roosevelts involved themselves in many businesses, first farming (Klaes bought a 50-acre farm in what is now Midtown Manhattan, right where the Empire State Building stands today), and then the importation of glass. Later they expanded their activities to include banking and real-estate investment. They were a prosperous family, “patrician” in the sense of the admirable elite, those worthy by distinction, responsible leaders who rise by merit. The Roosevelts became a very wealthy family, though they never reached the heights of the famous Astor and Vanderbilt fortunes. They were also immensely generous.
The Roosevelts concerned themselves with charity work and social betterment. Klaes's son Nicholas was the first of the clan to enter politics, around 1700, elected as a city alderman. Beyond public service, the Roosevelts also recognized first of all a personal responsibility toward others, to better the conditions of people and their situations.
Many of the institutions in and around New York today bearing the Roosevelt name are assumed to have been named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt. On the contrary, many of them were established by, or named for, other members of this patrician family, before TR made his own mark. Roosevelt Hospital was founded and funded by a distant relative, James Roosevelt. The Roosevelt Building, the distinctive New York landmark designed by Mead and White, was named for Cornelius Roosevelt, Theodore's philanthropic grandfather. Although the American Museum of Natural History boasts the Roosevelt Rotunda—named for Theodore, and located behind an equestrian statue of him—his father was actually a founder of the institution.
In fact, when TR—as we will call the subject of this biography—was born on October 27, 1858, it would have seemed impossible that he could ever surpass the fame and universal respect of his father, Theodore (whom we shall call “the elder,” or his nickname Thee; he was not actually a Senior, as his son was not formally Theodore Roosevelt Junior). By that point in the family's history and fortunes, TR's father concerned himself mainly with philanthropy. He supported big projects like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is said to have had its genesis in the Roosevelts' living room. Thee also had smaller—sometimes virtually anonymous—pursuits. For instance, he not only endowed the Newsboys Lodging-House for orphaned street children, but he paid weekly visits there, principally to encourage the youngsters and teach Bible classes. Thee did not enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War, because his wife, Martha Bulloch, was a southern belle from Roswell, Georgia. (Her brothers were prominent in the Confederate Navy.) Roosevelt compensated for this lack of active military service during the war by perfervid charity work among Union soldiers, encouraging them and, after consulting with President Lincoln, establishing the Allotment Bureau. He ceaselessly traveled to military camps, explaining and facilitating subscriptions to the Allotment System, whereby soldiers could send part of their pay to families back home.
He came to be known so widely as an advocate and worker for private causes and public charities that friends would joke that anyone who saw him coming down the street would greet him with the words, “How much this time, Theodore?” Although he petitioned local and national governments to instate compassionate policies, it was the hallmark of the Roosevelt family to practice and encourage personal responsibility among citizens for uplift and reform.
Roosevelt was remembered by his son TR as “the best man I ever knew.” His marriage to “Mittie” Bulloch was the talk of Manhattan, as well as antebellum Georgia, where they married. Her family home, Bulloch Hall, which still stands in Roswell, is widely assumed to be the model for Tara in Gone with the Wind, and Mittie herself was said by friends of author Margaret Mitchell to be the inspiration for Scarlett O'Hara. After moving to New York City, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt was generally regarded as an incredible white-skinned beauty, fragile yet determined, the essence of charm, an eccentric but gracious hostess and member of Society.
The Roosevelt children worshiped their father and adored their mother. Theirs was a notably happy childhood (except for health challenges), nurtured by servants and nannies, and punctuated by two lengthy trips to Europe, one extending to a cruise on the Nile. There were four Roosevelt children: Anna, the eldest, nicknamed Bamie (a corruption of “Bambina,” little girl) or Bye; Theodore; Elliott (father of Eleanor Roosevelt, who would later marry her distant cousin Franklin from another branch of the family); and Corinne.
Roosevelt family crest. Roughly translated from the Latin: “He Who Plants, Cultivates.”
The two eldest children had severe health problems. Bamie suffered from the painful spinal affliction known as Pott's Disease and spent a decade of her childhood in cumbersome braces. Her father cared for her in countless tender ways, and became interested in the affliction to the extent that he helped found and endow what became the New York Orthopedic Hospital. Its primary purposes included research and care, but also to be a dispensary of assistance and equipment to poor children. Thee's son Theodore, nicknamed “Teedie” in his youth, suffered from a variety of ailments, principally asthma and cholera morbus. Naturally slight and weak, the boy's frequent asthmatic episodes frightened him and his parents alike; he would find it nearly impossible to breathe and all strength would leave him. TR's earliest memories were of his father walking him around the house hour after hour at night, soothing him to induce calmer respiration. Teedie's frailty extended to his eyesight, which evidently approached legal blindness.
TR later wrote about realizing his poor eyesight during his thirteenth year:
It was this summer that I got my first gun, and it puzzled me to find that my companions seemed to see things to shoot at which I could not see at all. One day they read aloud an advertisement in huge letters on a distant billboard, and I then realized that something was the matter, for not only was I unable to read the sign but I could not even see the letters. I spoke of this to my father, and soon afterwards got my first pair of spectacles, which literally opened an entirely new world to me. I had no idea how beautiful the world was until I got those spectacles. I had been a clumsy and awkward little boy, and while much of my clumsiness and awkwardness was doubtless due to general characteristics, a good deal of it was due to the fact that I could not see and yet was wholly ignorant that I was not seeing.
Teedie once endured a crisis of self-esteem, when he was helpless against two bullies who cornered him. He had suffered a bout of asthma and was sent to a rural location for recuperation. “On the stagecoach ride thither I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age, but very much more competent and also much more mischievous. I have no doubt they were good-hearted boys, but they were boys! They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.”
All these factors, plus the advice of physicians, convinced the elder Roosevelt to work his son's physical challenges out of him. TR was twelve. He remembered the speech: “You have the mind but not the body…. You must make your body.” The upstairs back piazza of the family town house at 28 East 20th Street in Manhattan was converted to a gymnasium. Teedie began to exercise, working on gymnastic equipment, lifting weights, boxing, and doing calisthenics. In the country, especially at the family's estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, Teedie rode horses and rowed boats; he hiked and ran and played sports. Although it was years before he shed all symptoms of asthma, he never stopped exercising, all the way until the time of his death. He became known as a physical fitness addict. TR would title one of his books The Strenuous Life—his prescription for physical, moral, and civic standards. He boxed in college; he became an avid hunter, relishing the harshest conditions and most trying challenges; he rode to hounds for a period, frequently shocking society friends with his bloody face and broken bones, a reckless enthusiast. Later, during his time in the White House, in place of other presidents—“kitchen cabinets” of friends and advisors, TR was to establish a Tennis Cabinet that played almost every day weather permitted.
Teedie's active, aggressive lifestyle was closely tied to his later famous philosophy of the strenuous life. But his regimen was not solely physical; it merely reflected other aspects of the boy's emergent personality. Family and friends noted in young Teedie a voracious interest in everything around him. He could recall virtually every detail of books read to him. Later, when he could read to himself, he often consumed a book a day, sometimes more.
His love of reading continued into his adult years, even the busiest days of his presidency. Once a friend gave him a dense volume, with several pages marked, for Roosevelt to read when he could make the time. TR immediately opened the book, seeming to glance at page after page, lingering only slightly at each one. Finally, he closed the book and began discussing its points. His friend was incredulous that Roosevelt could have read, much less retained, any information in that manner. “Ask me anything about that material,” TR challenged his friend. He did. Roosevelt passed the quiz.
As a boy, Teedie started a journal and made remarkable observations, particularly during travels—some comments very funny, and some quite sagacious about history (one of the subjects he particularly enjoyed). Likewise, Teedie took an interest in natural history, and before long he was measuring fish in street markets, drawing detailed studies of rodents, and stuffing specimens in every place at every opportunity. He established a boyhood “Roosevelt Natural History Museum” that prefigured his scientific essays and explorations in Africa and Brazil. Whatever spare places were left in the family's home after the construction of the gymnasium were littered with examination-tables, specimens in jars, bloody pelts, and the malodorous omnipresence of taxidermists' chemicals.
Some described the boy as precocious. Certainly people knew that there was more to Teedie than mere hyperactivity. He held his own with adults in discussions, but he maintained a tight-knit circle among his peers, including his siblings, always close, and neighborhood children like Bamie's friend Edith Carow from the other side of Union Square. He could be headstrong, but he was sensitive too, to the point of tenderness. He seemed to take an interest in everything, and he mastered whatever interested him. Many marked him for greatness.
Because of his frailty and poor eyesight, TR never attended school. He had tutors—one wonders whether they could keep up with their pupil at times—and entered Harvard after passing examinations. He intended to secure a degree in natural history. His later natural history work in the field and in print, and his discoveries and theories, would have made TR a prominent American in that discipline alone. Yet his “landscape” was wider than that covered in typical college courses. When he began his studies, he was dismayed that the prospects of a professional naturalist might shackle him to laboratories, rather than allowing him to roam the outdoors. TR dropped this major and pursued general studies. Nonetheless, he would still make great contributions to the field. Few laymen have done more to preserve and protect the natural environment than TR would do during the rest his life. Some critics today criticize TR's love of hunting. But it should be recalled that he set aside 230,000,000 acres of American land as national forests and parks, game preserves, and bird reservations during his presidency, making countless animals, as well as future generations of the American public, beneficiaries of his passion for natural history and God's creation.
Theodore grew up in a very devout Christian family. Thee's Dutch Reformed tradition merged well with Mittie's Presbyterian faith, both in the Calvinist tradition, and the family worshiped faithfully and read the Bible at home. When TR went to Harvard, he carried his spiritual habits with him, studying the Bible daily, attending chapel, and teaching weekly Sunday school classes in Cambridge. He might have been considered a prig. Indeed, his attire, sideburns, and affected Harvard accent were all in the style of a dandy; he even had a dog cart. Yet he maintained many friendships and enjoyed a convivial lifestyle. As a student, Roosevelt's intensity asserted itself. A classmate recalled an exasperated professor in one class saying, “Now look here, Roosevelt. Let me talk! I'm running this course!” TR was invited to join the Dickey and Hasty Pudding clubs, and the most exclusive Porcellian. He was staff member of the Advocate. When he graduated in 1880, he was both magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.
Withal, the greatest impact on TR during his four college years was not Harvard-related. In the course of the social whirl of dances and dinners, he met the cousin of a classmate and fell in love. The pretty and fragile Alice Hathaway Lee, related to several Boston Brahmin families, was seventeen when Roosevelt fell under her spell. Roosevelt, boisterous and headstrong (sometimes redolent of taxidermy fluids), the New Yorker of Dutch lineage, was initially a strong cup of tea for dainty Alice. But TR was, predictably, determined. “Do you see that girl over there?” Roosevelt once asked a friend about Alice; “She won't have me, but I'm going to have her!” A long and tempestuous courtship followed, marked by florid Victorian emotionalism, one of Roosevelt's hallmarks at the time. TR was rapturous when Alice finally accepted his proposal of marriage.
While at school, he continued to build his body. TR was an active boxer on campus, although ultimately unsuccessful at the sport. Still, legends grew up on campus about his sportsmanship; more than once he suffered late hits, but defended his opponents to the spectators, insisting they had not heard the bell.
Also during this time, TR went on his first extended hunting trip, an expedition to the Maine woods. He reveled not only in the chase, the kills, the new flora and fauna, but also in the brutal cold, the long treks, and the daunting challenges. He befriended the guides William Sewall and Wilmot Dow. Skeptical at first of this willowy “dude,” Sewall and Dow were soon convinced of his prowess in the field. TR proceeded to wear them out, rising earlier, staying awake longer, sacrificing comfort, dismissing freezing rain, snow, and ice, and constantly talking. He loved every minute of the experience. (A few years later, TR hired Sewall and Dow to move to the Dakota Territory to manage one of his cattle ranches.) TR became an habitué of the Maine woods, the first of many happy hunting grounds in his life.
North Dutch Church inscription, 1769. Two “Rosevelts” are listed: Senior Elder Jacobus and Deacon Isaac. The spelling of the name varied during the family's first generations in
Manhattan.
The establishment patrician found himself quite at home in rough sleeping bags and crude hunting lodges. He was still “Mr. Roosevelt” to his guides; he still woke up early and left camp to read the Bible at dawn every morning; but his blue-blood inheritance was mixing well with the red-bloodedness of the outdoor life.
Another important game-changer occurred in TR's life during his college years, when his father entered politics. Politics—the dirty, sordid politics of the Gilded Age—traditionally was a pursuit that “proper” men disdained. Yet that admirable icon of New York society, Theodore Roosevelt the elder, surprised family and friends alike by accepting a federal appointment from President Rutherford B. Hayes. The position was an important one, but it was also one infamous for graft and corruption: Collector of the Port of New York. Its very reputation is what persuaded the elder Roosevelt to accept the appointment: he resolved to champion Reform.
TR's father was doomed to failure and even disgrace, none of his own doing or culpability. The forces that would attack him would steel his son to redeem the Reformist vision.
Letterhead of the original Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1875. TR's father was listed as a vice president—the SPCC was one of the many charities and missions he supported. He was in the company of “old money,” established families represented by Elbridge Gerry and Peter Cooper. “New money” was represented by August Belmont and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Henry Bergh established the original Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a novel cause, much ridiculed at first.