THE STORY OF NEW YORK in 1858 is a tale of two cities. Contrasts were everywhere. Great affluence rubbed shoulders with grinding poverty. On some streets pedestrians picked their way among piles of garbage, while on others the residents took regular street-cleaning and new cobblestones for granted. There was the city of the elite, and there was the city of the huddled masses, and the city a person lived in depended greatly upon that person’s wealth or lack thereof. Segregation based on wealth began at birth and continued even after death. Rich New Yorkers were buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. New York’s poorest were buried in a Potter’s Field on Wards Island in the East River.
There were other contradictions as well. Though it was an island bound on all sides by rivers, New York suffered chronic water shortages, even as the East River seeped into basement tenements. The New York police, organized to protect the citizens from crime, were often criminals themselves engaged in blackmail and bribe-taking. A hundred saloons, brothels, and burlesque houses easily outnumbered the city’s two dozen churches. With more hospitals than any other American city, New Yorkers still feared disease most of all, especially the periodic cholera epidemics that took thousands of lives. Another one was only eight years off, but who could blame the pathogens for taking up residence and multiplying? They were practically invited into the filthy city, a place where roaming pigs still did much of the street cleaning.
On October 27, 1858, the day that Theodore Roosevelt was born in a luxurious brownstone in the posh neighborhood near Gramercy Park, Michael and Catherine Hertel, a father and daughter, suffocated to death in their Lower East Side tenement. The cause was smoke from a fire in an adjacent brewery, set alight by a blaze in a neighboring cooperage. The Hertels were typical New Yorkers. Arriving in America from Germany, they had settled in New York’s Kleindeutschland, Little Germany, along with tens of thousands of their compatriots. The Hertels lived in a brick tenement, a five-story building of small one- and two-bedroom apartments. Many of the rooms had no outside window, making for a dark and fetid existence. It would be another half-century before the housing laws began to catch up with the squalid life in the tenements. The dozens of residents living in this building with the Hertels shared a common latrine in the back lot. They toted water up the stairs from a common spigot in the same place. To dispose of the dirty water, they most often opened a window and dumped the contents of their buckets or washbasins out into the street. And at the time when the fire broke out next door, New York still had no law mandating any kind of fire escape. During a fire, the tenements became deathtraps for the working poor of Manhattan.
No zoning laws existed to separate commercial and residential properties, and, like a spreading inkblot, the booming industrial city seeped into whatever vacant land was available. Among their neighbors in Kleindeutschland, the Hertels counted shipyards, coal yards, and factories of all types, which were also common places of employment. With New York the meatpacking capital of the United States, the laborers of the city worked as well in the neighborhood slaughterhouses, operations that added blood and manure to the ever-pungent odors of the Lower East Side. Inevitably, from time to time an animal would escape from one of the slaughterhouses, and pedestrians would flatten themselves against the walls of buildings and watch as men in blood-spattered aprons chased a maddened cow down the street. The brewery next to the Hertels’ tenement was also typical of the city, as was the adjacent coppersmith, conveniently located to make casks for the beer. By midcentury, there were more than 1,000 cooperages in the city making barrels for nearly every kind of industry, from sugar and flour to nails and coins. Barrel making was so ubiquitous in New York that two barrels were included on the city seal. The mostly immigrant workforce would often work late into the night by lantern or gaslight, making the barrels by hand. In the fire that killed the Hertels, which broke out at almost 9 p.m., wood shavings had probably been set alight by a careless worker.
In addition to the Hertels, twelve horses also perished in the fire. These were likely the enormous draft horses that New Yorkers were accustomed to seeing pulling brewery wagons. In any case, they were in the basement of the brewery when the fire broke out. Their deaths must have represented a considerable loss for the brewer. But stabling horses right inside a business was common, and at midcentury the city contained thousands of stables housing tens of thousands of horses. Horses represented the backbone of the city’s transportation and delivery system. There were private saddle horses, carriage horses, and giant drays for pulling freight and the city’s aboveground trolleys. By the 1850s, the city’s street railways carried some 35 million passengers each year. And every day, New York’s horses left on the streets tons of manure and thousands of gallons of urine, representing a formidable challenge to the city’s street-cleaning forces. When a horse died in the harness, the owner simply unhooked his carriage or wagon and moved on, leaving the removal and disposal of the carcass to the city contractor. In summers, the air was ripe with the smell of steaming manure and rotting horse. By 1858, disease remained a constant concern for New Yorkers.
Next to a cholera epidemic, fire represented the city’s greatest threat. Only a generation had passed since the Great Fire of 1835 had destroyed seven hundred buildings. And only three weeks before the fire that killed the Hertels blazed through their tenement building, the great Crystal Palace, the massive exhibition hall built in 1853, had burned to the ground—remarkably, without a single loss of life. When the fire broke out in the cooperage, several things occurred that illustrated some modest improvements that had been made in New York firefighting. The alarm was telegraphed to the Fifth District bell tower, which rang to alert the volunteer firemen. A horse-drawn pump arrived, possibly one of the steam-powered pumps introduced only that year. The firemen enjoyed a large supply of water thanks to the Croton Aqueduct, which had been completed in 1842. Still, the lack of a permanent, professional firefighting force meant a delayed response that night. This allowed the fire to spread from the cooperage to the brewery, the smoke then permeating the Hertels’ tenement. Saving a few minutes might have saved their lives.
In New York at midcentury, the Hertels’ miserable existence in their decrepit tenement coexisted with the affluence of others, such as the Roosevelt family. Growing up in postbellum New York, Theodore Roosevelt would be keenly aware of the growing disparity between great wealth and great poverty. He would note this years later when writing his history of New York City, contrasting the growth of “colossal fortunes” with the poverty of the tenement-house population. Roosevelt decried the conformity of the upper classes in Gilded Age New York. In the summers, the elite took the Grand Tour through Europe; in winter, they returned to their identical brownstone-front houses. Inside, the houses were all decorated with the same dark furniture, heavy drapes, gilded mirrors and picture frames, and ormolu objets d’art. Roosevelt might have been describing his own family and their home, as it was into such a brownstone-fronted, gilded house that he was born.
Martha Bulloch Roosevelt gave birth to her first son in a lavish home situated a short distance from Gramercy Park. A true southern belle whose family still owned slaves in Georgia at the time of Roosevelt’s birth, “Mittie” was something of an alien living in New York. And when she arrived in the city after her wedding to Theodore Roosevelt Sr., New York must have appeared alien to her. For Mittie, one consolation was surely that she married into one of the most prominent New York families of the era. Since the first Roosevelt had come to New Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, every generation of the family had been born in Manhattan. By the mid-nineteenth century, the name “Roosevelt” conjured images of wealth and success in business. Manhattan boasted a Roosevelt Street, and, by 1871, a Roosevelt Hospital. The head of the New York City branch of the Roosevelt clan was Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, Mittie’s father-in-law, one of New York’s wealthiest men, who presided over a business and real-estate empire from his grand Union Square mansion.
The earliest photo of Theodore Roosevelt dates from 1865; in it, he and his brother Elliott can be spied watching Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession from a window in their grandfather’s house. The photograph gives a hint of the family’s economic and social standing. C. V. S. Roosevelt had built his massive, four-story mansion after making money in banking, mining, Manhattan real estate, and imported glass. Years later, Theodore Roosevelt would describe his grandfather’s house as one of New York’s grand homes on Union Square, with a large central hall that rose all the way up to the roof. This cavernous central hallway, not to mention his grandfather’s wealth and position, must have made a great impression upon the young Theodore, perhaps confirming the importance of C. V. S. as head of the family.
Although Union Square Park was open to the public, Gramercy Park, near Theodore’s home, was not. The idea of a private park was not entirely new to New York. St. John’s Park in Lower Manhattan had been deeded to the owners of the houses that surrounded it in 1827. The following year it was enclosed by a locked cast-iron fence, and, as Gramercy would be some years later, St. John’s was designed with gravel paths and trees and shrubs. St. John’s Park, though, only lasted until 1866, when Cornelius Vanderbilt bought it for $1 million. Still, the idea of a private park was certainly more English than American, and Gramercy Park would not have been out of place in London. Perhaps this was part of the appeal of the new development to the Roosevelt family and others. The 1850s were a time when the elite of New York—the “aristocracy” of old money—sought to separate themselves from the plebian class, not only in terms of where they lived, but also, increasingly, of where they socialized.
The Union Club was New York’s oldest social club. It had been formed in 1836 as an exclusive men’s club for the wealthy, the “old-stock” elite of the city. Just as the wealthy built their houses above 14th Street, so now, too, in 1855, they moved their club to a specially designed Florentine building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 21st Street, barely two blocks from the Roosevelt home. Gramercy Park was a quaint and discreet enclave, but Fifth Avenue became the ostentatious address of choice for the very wealthiest New Yorkers. Beginning in the late 1840s, ornate mansions and townhouses began appearing on lower Fifth north of Washington Square and running up to the new Madison Square, which the city had built between 23rd and 25th Streets in 1847. William Astor and John Jacob Astor IV built neighboring mansions between 33rd and 34th Streets at the end of the 1850s, ensuring the cachet of the Avenue. Many of the new houses were built not with marble, limestone, or brick, but with Triassic sandstone, which, owing to the presence of iron ore, turned from pink to brown as it weathered. The term “brownstone” would now be used as an adjective indicating wealth and prestige.
To serve the new neighborhoods, all manner of institutions—not just the Union Club—moved north of 14th Street. Columbia College moved to a new campus at 49th and Madison in 1856, aiming to shape the minds of New York’s elite, while new places of worship were built to save their souls. Grace Church on Broadway at 10th Street replaced Trinity in Lower Manhattan as the church of choice for upper-class New Yorkers, with pews selling for as much as $1,600 apiece, and other churches opened along Fifth Avenue. The Church of the Ascension opened its doors in 1851 just down the street from Grace on 10th, followed by First Presbyterian Church in 1846, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian in 1852, and eventually, St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 50th Street in 1879. In 1845, James Renwick Jr., the architect who had designed Grace Church, was asked to draw up plans for Calvary Church on 21st Street, closer to the Roosevelts. To the original Early English Gothic building that had been moved from Fourth Avenue in 1842, Renwick added a Gothic Revival sanctuary with twin spires and a five-sided apse. The two styles clashed terribly. New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong called the new church, just steps away from his own home, “a miracle of ugliness.” The twin spires, although presaging Renwick’s future masterpiece, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, did not last at Calvary. They had not been built straight from the ground, but added directly atop the church’s towers, and the unstable spires were removed in 1860. It was unlikely that Theodore Roosevelt would have remembered the spires, although growing up he could probably still glimpse, from the top floor of his own home, the remaining towers rising above the other houses.
With his father a partner in the family firm Roosevelt and Son, Theodore enjoyed a comfortable existence from the moment he was born. While the Roosevelts never ascended to the level of wealth enjoyed by such New York families as the Astors and the Vanderbilts, they were still considered one of the city’s top families. Moreover, by having an interest in New York banking, commerce, and real estate, the Roosevelt family became directly linked to other families of the city with great fortunes to their names. Sometimes, such fortunes seemed tenuous, as the nation’s economy, centered in New York, experienced periodic booms and busts. In fact, Theodore Roosevelt was a “bust baby,” born into the mid-nineteenth century’s worst economic slump.
IN SEPTEMBER 1857, about a year before Roosevelt’s birth, a heavy storm hit the North Carolina coast. In Wilmington, heavy rain washed away bridges, and drifts of sand blocked railway traffic. Offshore, the storm battered a number of vessels, ripping away sails and rigging and overtaxing pumps. As of September 17, no deaths had been reported, although the steamship Central America was missing. Newspapers speculated that the ship had simply run out of coal or had some of her machinery damaged, which must have forced the ship to make way slowly under sail. The papers were wrong.
The next day brought news of the disaster. The Central America had sunk, losing more than five hundred of her passengers and crew. Although it was a terrible tragedy, New Yorkers immediately focused on the treasure of gold the ship had been carrying. “Loss of the Central America steamer,” George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary, “the first of our treasure-ships that has perished. She foundered with several hundred passengers and a million and a half in California gold, sorely needed in Wall Street just now. The pressure there is cruel.” The Central America’s anticipated arrival in New York, with its $1.6 million in gold, was supposed to have relieved the pressure caused by bank depositors withdrawing massive amounts of gold, as a panic had hit the financial sector at the end of August. Plummeting farm prices had caused Midwestern businessmen to withdraw their funds from New York banks, which then immediately called in their mature debts. The New York branch of the giant Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed, and credit dried up overnight. The American economy came to a standstill.
The great slump of 1857–1859 radiated outward from New York, affecting every major American city and reaching across the Atlantic to London and Paris. If New York prided itself as the “Empire State,” surely Manhattan was the “Empire City,” the capital of American finance, banking, commerce, shipping, and manufacturing. The recession that was in progress at the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s birth helped to transform the nation on the eve of the Civil War. Unemployment soared and half of Wall Street’s brokers went bankrupt. Homelessness surged, and the recession forced New Yorkers into increasingly crowded and rundown tenements. Banks collapsed, wages fell, and retailers cut prices to unload their goods at almost any price. With grain shipments from the American West stalled because of the credit crunch, food prices stayed high and the normally busy shipping industry sat idle. Manhattan bristled like a porcupine with its usually bustling docks and piers at the end of every street, but now agricultural exports and manufactured imports dried up, and the once mighty shipbuilding industry, particularly for freight-hauling clipper ships, died out. Out-of-work stevedores crowded the waterfront saloons, waiting to unload ships that never arrived.
The business of Roosevelt and Son reflected the business of New York. In addition to importing glass, the firm owned extensive real estate in Manhattan and upstate New York. It also owned two piers in Lower Manhattan, and through C. V. S., Roosevelt and Son held stock in banking, mining, and insurance interests. Other records show the Roosevelts shipping coal and bidding on $100,000 blocks of US Treasury notes. The recession did not leave the Roosevelts untouched. And yet, it afforded new opportunities as well for the rich. Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, gobbled up local railroad companies to form the New York Central Railroad, a company in which the Roosevelt firm was to own stock.
Vast amounts of Manhattan’s wealth passed through the hands of men named Roosevelt. Yet Theodore Roosevelt Sr. seemed little motivated by wealth. Unusual for New York at the time, the senior Roosevelt instead dedicated himself more to charitable and cultural pursuits than to empire building. He helped found the Children’s Aid Society, Newsboys’ Lodging House, New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History. He also helped found the Republican Reform Club, and by the 1870s had a reputation as a reform Republican. Such endeavors would have a profound impact on his son.
Although Theodore Roosevelt Sr. differed from other elite New Yorkers in his dedication to charity, art, education, and reform, he shared such values with the elite of another American city. Indeed, he might have been mistaken for a Boston Brahmin rather than a New York Knickerbocker. His son’s life would early on reflect the importance of the New York–Boston axis of the late nineteenth century. From marriage to friendship to political alliances, Roosevelt would always have one foot firmly planted on the shores of Massachusetts Bay—a much more important Roosevelt touchstone than the American West.
THE CIVIL WAR was the single greatest defining event for Americans of the nineteenth century. American presidents such as General Ulysses S. Grant and Major William McKinley were defined by their service in the war. But so, too, were average Americans. Although Theodore Roosevelt was only two years old at the outbreak of the war in 1861, the legacy of the war helped define his world.
In 1863, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. paid a substitute in order to avoid the risk of being drafted under the new Conscription Act—a routine practice followed by tens of thousands of men during the war, with no stigma attached. At the same time, he and two other wealthy New Yorkers conceived of a plan allowing soldiers to send money home to their families, who often were left nearly destitute in the absence of the main breadwinner. Without such a plan, New York families often had to wait for a regimental chaplain to travel to the city from the battlefield, whereupon the chaplain would distribute the soldiers’ pay. With congressional and presidential backing, the Allotment Commission came into existence. President Abraham Lincoln named Roosevelt one of New York State’s three allotment commissioners. Thus began a long period of the elder Roosevelt being away from home, returning only for holidays, birthdays, and family vacations. The Roosevelts were enjoying such a vacation during the hot July of 1863, spending it in New Jersey, when the most important event of the Civil War affecting New York City occurred, the New York Draft Riots.
Theodore Roosevelt was only four and a half years old when the riots broke out—and was on the other side of the Hudson River—but the riots had a profound impact on every New Yorker of the time, even a boy only overhearing his parents’ conversations. Moreover, given that much of the violence occurred in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, the young Roosevelt likely saw some of the damage the riots left behind when they returned home. Roosevelt’s own account of the draft riots in his history of New York hints at their effect on his view of the city and its citizens. He placed most of the blame for the riots on “the low foreign element,” especially the Irish. Many New York Republicans blamed Democrats for the Civil War in general, and Roosevelt saw the state and city Democrats as allies to the rioters. Neither the political bosses nor the Catholic authorities had acted as good shepherds to their flock, Roosevelt believed. Placing the blame for the draft riots squarely on Democrats and Irish Catholics was the norm among Roosevelt’s class. The riots cast a dark shadow over the late nineteenth-century politics of the city and the relations among its ethnic and religious groups. In short, the draft riots instilled in the young Roosevelt some very distinctly New York prejudices.
One lasting effect was to underscore Roosevelt’s ethnic identity. Growing up hearing Dutch spoken around his grandfather’s dinner table made young “Teedie” acutely aware of his European origins—mainly Dutch, but also Welsh, English, Irish, and German. His mother’s side was largely Scottish, and the Bullochs were true southern “cavaliers” who looked across the Atlantic for their romantic heritage. Such ethnic self-identification only underscored Roosevelt’s elite background. But “Dutch” signified class more than any real connection with Holland. With increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe taking place by the end of the nineteenth century, Roosevelt understood that his family was “native,” old-stock American. So, too, were the family friends of the Roosevelts in New York—the John Hays, the Joseph Choates, and the Elihu Roots. At an early age, Roosevelt understood where his family’s ethnicity, religion, and class placed him among the teeming throng of the city.
IN APRIL 1868, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and Mittie Roosevelt boarded a ship for the American South. Exactly three years had passed since the end of the Civil War. Docking in Savannah, they were met by Mittie’s Georgia relatives, including a slew of Stewarts, Elliotts, and Bullochs. The Roosevelts then took a slow carriage ride northeast to Bulloch Hall, the family estate in Roswell, Georgia. In following this road from Savannah to Atlanta, they were traveling in reverse the path taken by Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman in his notorious “March to the Sea” after the fall of Atlanta. Signs of the war and the utter destruction it had caused met the Roosevelts wherever they looked. Railroad tracks still lay by the roadside, rails torn from the ground and twisted over fires by Union troops—Sherman’s “neckties.” Blackened stone and brick chimneys peeked from behind the tops of trees, forlorn survivors of Sherman’s fiery scourge.
The elder Roosevelts had taken seven-year-old Corinne with them, but left behind in New York twelve-year-old Anna, known as “Bamie”; nine-year-old Theodore, then called “Teedie”; and eight-year-old Elliott. Taking the very youngest of the children to war-ravaged territory seems an odd decision, but perhaps Corinne was least prepared to part from her parents. Ill health may also have contributed to the older children remaining in New York. Although Elliott was still regarded as the strongest of the children, having yet to suffer the seizures that would afflict him as a teenager, Bamie’s and Teedie’s health were matters of constant concern for the family. Pott’s disease—actually a form of tuberculosis—had weakened the bones of Bamie’s spine to such an extent as to leave her something of a hunchback for the rest of her life, while Teedie’s bouts with asthma, stomachaches, and headaches often held the entire family hostage to his maladies. Still, the family managed to travel extensively despite such afflictions. During the Civil War, the elder Theodore Roosevelt had taken Bamie, always his favorite, to Washington, where she sat upon Abraham Lincoln’s lap.
Anna, Theodore, and Elliott were left in the care of Mittie’s sister, who dutifully made the children sit and write out laborious letters to their absent parents and sister. The young Theodore’s letters illustrate his boyhood fascination with wars and battles, and a bit of insensitivity to his southern mother’s feelings concerning the war. Aside from asking for battlefield trophies, Theodore also asked for the climbing vine known as a “supplejack,” which, he said, “will figure greatly in my museum.”
Young Theodore’s natural history museum in the Roosevelt home included plants, birds, and mice. In this he was not copying his father, but taking the lead. Theodore Roosevelt Sr. would help found the American Museum of Natural History the following year, but for the present, no such institution existed in New York, a situation lamented by the New York Times. Banvard’s Museum had opened on Broadway in 1867 with the promise of displaying scientific collections and natural wonders. So far, however, the only animals on display were trained birds, mice, and a cat, which were made to draw toy wagons, fire a cannon, and walk on tightropes. “This part of the entertainment must bring rare delight,” the paper wryly noted, “to those who think these tiny prisoners ought to be made to earn their sustenance and endure their confinement too, as the culprits in our penitentiaries do—by hard labor.” New York was behind Boston and most European cities in its lack of an institution dedicated to natural history. “Even at the present time,” the Times concluded, “an enterprising man with capital could, in a single year, obtain material for a popular museum that would be a credit to New York, and a constant source of wonder, instruction, entertainment and study to young and old, wise and simple, citizens and stranger.” The charter for the American Museum of Natural History would be signed in the Roosevelt parlor exactly one year later.
Teedie was not the only Roosevelt to keep animals at home. From their third-floor piazza at the back of the house the children could spy Aunt Lizzie Roosevelt’s menagerie of guinea pigs, birds, and a monkey next door. Roosevelt later recalled that his interest in natural history was sparked by seeing a dead seal that had been fished out of New York Harbor. That seal told volumes about the state of nature in New York City, even at the middle of the nineteenth century. Modern observers of New York’s caverns of steel and concrete can barely imagine the wealth of species that once occupied Manhattan. When Henry Hudson stumbled across “Manhatta,” home of the Lenape Algonquins for hundreds of generations, the island was a cornucopia of native plant, animal, and bird species. Wolves, black bears, mountain lions, beavers, mink, and river otters prowled the land while whales, porpoises, seals, and sea turtles swam the waters. The air was filled with millions of birds, the water with millions of fish. No wonder a small child might still encounter some of this profusion of nature even in the middle of America’s largest city.
The Roosevelts supplemented their interest in nature with summers in New Jersey and, later, at their summer home at Oyster Bay, Long Island. The children rode horses, played in streams, and heard stories of bears and wild dogs in the woods. Teedie’s asthma seemed to bother him less the more time he spent outdoors, but ill health always accounted for at least some of his introspection.
Such illness became a key element of the family’s first Grand Tour to Europe. The Roosevelt family took two such tours, the first in 1869–1870 as Theodore turned eleven, the second in 1872–1873 when he turned fourteen. The first trip was troubled by Theodore’s near-constant bouts of headaches, asthma, and homesickness. Later, in his memoirs, Roosevelt himself would note that this trip was colored by his immature “chauvinism and contempt” toward Europe, while the second trip reflected growing maturity, a sense of “discernment and appreciation,” and a love of Germany that was cultivated during a long stay with a German family in Dresden. Roosevelt’s direct boyhood contact with Europe was certainly important in the development of his ideas, both about America and the world. Much of the pride and prejudice Roosevelt would display resulted directly from his New York upbringing.
Despite the difference in Roosevelt’s age at the time of the two trips, the same love-hate relationship to Europe is reflected in his journal entries for both trips. Roosevelt’s self-described chauvinism was decidedly pro-American. He appreciated the art, history, and landscapes of England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, but he continually decried the poverty, decrepitude, and dishonesty of Europe, as well as of some very European things, such as the Pope and Roman Catholicism. Such attitudes, coming from any upper-class, native-stock young man from Manhattan, were not surprising.
For all of his appreciation of European art and scenery, Roosevelt had only disdain for the continent’s poverty and filth. This was ironic, as New York’s lower wards were notorious for their abject poverty and mountains of garbage. During his childhood in New York, aside from trips with his father to the Newsboys’ Lodging House, located at the corner of Fulton and Nassau Streets, Roosevelt had been largely shielded from such sights. Taking place before Roosevelt had similar contact with New York’s “other half” in the 1880s, the European trips probably afforded him his first close observations of real poverty. In the journal for his second trip, he noted the filthy streets of Bonn and the “queer inhabitants” of Italy, where “everybody combines to cheat you.” His father was always there, acting like the perfect ugly American. In a particularly revolting scene, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., one of the great philanthropists of New York, taunts and abuses Italian beggars. While his children watched, the father bought small cakes and tossed them into the beggars’ open mouths or at the feet of the poor women and children—“like chickens,” as young Theodore observed. “For a ‘Coup de Grace’ we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings,” Roosevelt recounted. “We made the crowds that we gave the cakes to give three cheers for U.S.A. before we gave them cakes.”
In the summer of 1873, Theodore and Elliott lived with the Minckwitz family of Dresden, where they were immersed in German language and culture. This is when Roosevelt began a love affair with all things German that would last until the Great War. The choice of Germany, and Dresden in particular, was no accident. In the nineteenth century, German was the language of literature, history, and science. In New York, the German people were considered sober, cultured, and industrious. With unification having taken place only two years before, the German Empire was an important European power. Finally, while Berlin was the political capital of the new country, Dresden was the German capital of art, music, science, and education. A beautiful city often compared to Florence, Dresden boasted some of Europe’s best galleries, museums, and libraries. In Dresden, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had found a city that would provide his children with all the intellectual stimulation they could possibly need.
But, just as Roosevelt’s trips through Italy confirmed previously formed prejudices about Catholics and Italians, his long stay in Dresden reinforced his ideas about Germans. By the time of his German sojourn, New York’s Kleindeutschland comprised about four hundred blocks of the city, concentrated in the Tenth, Eleventh, Thirteenth, and Seventeenth Wards in Lower Manhattan. Germans made up over 64 percent of the population of these four wards, which contained approximately half of the city’s Germans. Moreover, Roosevelt’s own home was only a few blocks from the northern border of Kleindeutschland, making Germans a familiar sight for the young Dutch-descended Knickerbocker. By the 1870s, Germans were becoming ubiquitous in city life, business, and politics. Between 1860 and 1890, the German American population of the city rose from 15 percent of the total population to 28 percent. New York would soon become the third largest German-speaking city in the world after Berlin and Vienna.
As a boy growing up in mid-nineteenth-century New York, the young Theodore did not have to travel to Europe to develop profound ideas about that continent, its people, and its religions. The city had shaped Roosevelt’s worldview even before he departed for Europe. Young Theodore returned from Europe more cosmopolitan and worldly, and more in tune with the immense demographic changes about to occur in his city. And just as Theodore took a ship west across the Atlantic back to New York City, millions of Europeans were getting ready to do the same.
UPON RETURNING FROM Europe, fourteen-year-old Theodore began preparing for entrance into college. In Dresden, the Roosevelt boys had encountered one of the most accomplished European cities of the time in terms of art, science, and education. The same could not yet be said of New York. If Dresden appeared as a sort of European Athens, the only comparison in the United States was Boston. And Boston meant Harvard.