“It’s Roosevelt from New York”
THEODORE ROOSEVELT WOULD recall his time at Harvard with little enthusiasm. “I thoroughly enjoyed Harvard,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “and I am sure it did me good, but only in the general effect, for there was very little in my actual studies which helped me in after life.” This less-than-enthusiastic assessment of Harvard’s academic usefulness may have resulted from the fact that Roosevelt entered Harvard with the ambition of becoming a natural scientist. His courses were dominated by natural history and languages. Of his twenty-nine classes, Roosevelt took six in natural history and nine in languages, including German, Italian, French, Latin, and Greek. His classes did reflect the abiding interest in natural history that would lead to his contributions to the cause of conservation, but they give no insight into his future political career, other than one class on Anglo-American constitutional history and one on political economy. For Harvard’s influence on the young Roosevelt, one must look beyond the classroom, not only to the university’s boxing ring and social clubs, but also to the parlors of the Boston Brahmin merchant princes.
If there was one experience in Roosevelt’s life that threatened to sever his New York roots, it was not his time in the West. Nor was it the long periods of his political career that he spent posted in Washington, DC. Instead, it was Roosevelt’s four years as a Harvard undergraduate that gravely challenged his New York connections. While many Roosevelt biographers have closely examined Harvard as it existed under its reforming president Charles Eliot, few have looked at the way in which Harvard was inextricably entwined with a small group of leading Boston families. Theodore Roosevelt’s four years at Harvard were also four years spent in Boston and its environs.
Harvard’s close identification with Boston and its small, closed, interrelated upper class begs the question why Roosevelt’s father decided to send his namesake there. The scions of New York’s top families, if they attended college at all, usually went closer to home, to Columbia, Yale, or Princeton. Neither Theodore Roosevelt Sr. nor any of his brothers attended college. Yet, soon after the family’s return from Europe, the decision was made. By the winter of 1873, when Roosevelt was still only fourteen, he began receiving tutoring from Harvard graduate Arthur Cutler with the single goal of passing the university admission exams. Certainly President Eliot’s reputation as a reformer had spread to Manhattan. In early 1874, the New York Times was already commenting on the controversial system of “electives” instituted by Eliot, which allowed students to choose courses that simply interested them, such as botany and history. Probably Roosevelt’s father agreed with the paper’s conclusion “that in a period and country where material interests are all-powerful, those studies should be most encouraged by a university . . . which tend to the general elevation and refinement of and ennobling of the whole man.” Botany and history might not seem to prepare America’s top young men for careers in law, medicine, or business, but that was the point. The United States needed more than mere specialists. The country also needed men who could think.
The elective system emphasized educating the individual student, rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all curriculum. Eliot rejected the idea that schools should be merely factories of homogeneity. For the hidebound traditionalists on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, such “liberal” thinking was hard to tolerate. Education, Eliot wrote in Harper’s, should cultivate each student’s special skills: “We Americans are so used to weighing multitudes and being ruled by majorities that we are apt to underrate the potential influence of individuals.” This seemed to reflect Roosevelt Sr.’s attitude toward raising his own children by cultivating their individuality and responding to each child’s unique needs. His eldest son’s unique talent clearly lay with the natural sciences, and under Louis Agassiz, Harvard had become the leading university in the field.
Eliot also placed an emphasis on athletics. “There is an aristocracy to which the sons of Harvard have belonged,” Eliot declared in his inaugural address, “and, let us hope, will ever aspire to belong—the aristocracy which excels in manly sports.” Himself part of that aristocracy, Eliot took a gentleman’s view of the proper place of athletics in campus life. Having rowed Harvard crew while a tutor at the college, the twenty-four-year-old Eliot wrote his fiancée that he cared little for winning. Rowing was neither his profession nor his love: “It is recreation, fun, and health.” Later, as college president, Eliot urged students to make sports “one of the incidental pleasures” of their time at Harvard. While at Harvard, Roosevelt kept with him a letter his father wrote in which he warned him, “Take care of your morals first, your health next and finally your studies.” The younger Roosevelt would always endeavor to follow this advice, and threw himself with vigor into wrestling and boxing.
Harvard was more than just the university and the town of Cambridge. In Gilded Age America, Harvard meant Boston. The city of Boston and its ruling class must have figured prominently in the Roosevelts’ decision that Theodore should attend Harvard. One reason was probably Boston’s reputation as the “Athens of America,” as North American Review founder William Tudor put it. For its small size, Boston boasted an enormous array of authors, poets, historians, artists, and scientists. Roosevelt’s father perhaps viewed Boston as he regarded Dresden in Germany, not as the political or financial capital of the country, but as the cultural capital. Just as the European Grand Tours were meant to broaden and enrich his children’s view of the world, sending his son to Boston was meant to make Theodore a refined and cultured gentleman. Again, President Eliot: “The country suffers when the rich are ignorant and unrefined. Inherited wealth is an unmitigated curse when divorced from culture.” No doubt the elder Theodore Roosevelt agreed.
Still, Harvard’s close association with Boston and its ruling families made it an unusual choice for most New York families. Yet the very things that might have put off most New Yorkers probably attracted Theodore Roosevelt Sr. As the son of Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt and a partner in the Roosevelt and Son conglomerate, Theodore Sr.’s wealth placed him on the same financial and professional footing as Boston’s merchant class. Unlike their New York counterparts, however, the Boston Brahmins had the reputation of being morally rigid, ever on guard against their accumulation of wealth leading to a decline in Christian values. Samuel Eliot, Charles Eliot’s grandfather, cautioned his son to pursue only those paths in life “that will best conduce to the establishment of your character as a gentleman, a man of honour, the moralist, and the Christian.” How similar to Roosevelt Sr.’s advice to his own son upon his departure for Harvard: “Take care of your morals first.” For a Harvard undergraduate, this meant more than just abstaining from alcohol and sex. In an increasingly materialistic world, men such as Eliot and Roosevelt also feared losing their sons to avarice and excess. More than one Boston Brahmin family had watched its young men get sucked into the immoral maw of Gotham, never to return.
As President Eliot had noted, culture and refinement should accompany wealth. Indeed, culture served as a balm and buffer to a life spent pursuing wealth. The Boston Brahmin families reflected this notion, with many of their sons, like President Eliot, dedicating themselves to a life of letters. Culture also provided an avenue for Boston’s elite to serve the community. Eliot’s cousin Samuel, a professor of history and political science, in both age and philanthropic endeavors was almost a Boston equivalent of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. Samuel Eliot was active as a director and trustee for Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Athenaeum, one of America’s largest libraries. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that by patronizing culture, the Boston Brahmins were building a city that would “lead the civilization of North America,” much as Renaissance Florence did for Italy. Although Thomas Perkins began as a slave trader and opium smuggler, by midcentury, having invested in a host of New England companies, he was a leading Boston philanthropist who helped found Massachusetts General Hospital. “All history and all experience show,” his eulogist proclaimed in 1854, “that literature, science, art, all that ennobles and refines humanity, are intimately connected with the prosperity of commerce.” Allowing the wealthy to become patrons of the arts, commerce might serve culture, but the Boston Brahmins also believed that culture served commerce. In a continuous cycle, prosperity depended upon those things—literature, science, art—that wealth could foster.
Like Theodore Roosevelt Sr., the Boston Brahmins had a keen sense of noblesse oblige. Wealth and status, they believed, conferred upon them an obligation to help those less fortunate in their communities. For both Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and the Boston families, religion underpinned these notions of charity. To follow in Jesus’s footsteps as portrayed in the Gospel of Luke, a man must serve his neighbor and tend to the poor and needy. In this sense, Boston far outpaced New York City. In Boston, charities had flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1830, the city had only 26 incorporated charities; only twenty years later, it boasted nearly 160. Brahmin money poured into the city’s philanthropic societies. Between 1828 and 1852, Amos Lawrence, a prominent textile merchant, gave away an astonishing $639,000. Thomas Perkins gave his mansion to the Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, which was then renamed the “Perkins School” in his honor (and still exists today). Charles Eliot’s cousin Samuel was a director and trustee of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded. In all their good works, the parents of Roosevelt’s friends and classmates—who included a Bacon and an Otis, a Cabot and a Choate, a Quincy and an Adams, a Saltonstall and a Weld, a Thorndike and a Peabody—would provide a continuing example of, and education in, the responsibilities of wealth and privilege.
As religion helped establish charity, so charity helped foster reform. Always at the intellectual forefront of Americans, Bostonians had long led the rest of the country in reform ideas. In antebellum America this meant finding in Boston the most rabid abolitionists. But the Civil War did not do away with the reforming spirit. With the rapid immigration, industrialization, and urbanization of the Gilded Age, Boston’s reformers had plenty to do. Far from eschewing politics as a rough game, the Brahmins took the reins of city political power. Certainly as the biggest taxpayers and property owners they had the most to lose from corrupt city management, working-class violence, or inefficient police and fire departments. But, as with abolitionism, the Boston elite also sought reform at the highest levels of American government. By Theodore Roosevelt’s time, Boston had become the capital of the good-government and civil-service reform movements. In an era when US senators and congressmen sat on corporate boards, earning thousands of dollars in “fees,” and political machines ran cities and entire states, the Boston Brahmins would have none of it. By 1881, they had helped found the National Civil Service Reform League, backed by the quintessential Boston intellectual journal The North American Review. In New York, Harper’s was Gotham’s answer to the Review, and a belated one at that. The North American Review began publishing in 1815, whereas the first issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine appeared only in 1850. Once again, Boston provided the young Theodore with examples of civic-mindedness that appealed to his father, who himself was about to be caught up in an ugly fight with New York machine politicians that helped usher in the civil-service reform movement.
Like the Boston elite, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was a reformer. He had joined with other men, such as Joseph Choate and John Jay—top New York lawyers—and J. Pierpont Morgan—head of America’s most powerful banking house—to form the Republican Reform Club, an early movement to press for good municipal government. In the summer of 1876, Roosevelt traveled to the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati to secure the nomination of reform candidates to the national ticket in lieu of the corrupt James G. Blaine of Maine. The eventual nomination of Rutherford B. Hayes marked something of a triumph for the reform forces, especially as the New York delegation initially supported the state party boss, US Senator Roscoe Conkling. After the election, President Hayes would take direct aim at Conkling’s power in New York. The new president ordered an investigation of one of the richest plums in Conkling’s basket, the New York Custom House, headed by Conkling lieutenant Chester A. Arthur, who held the official title “collector of customs.” Loyal Republicans had long been rewarded with choice appointments in the custom house, which in turn became a powerful political base for the machine. As it was a federal institution, Hayes ordered all political activity at the custom house to cease.
The president was not finished. Against the New York boss’s wishes, Hayes nominated Theodore Roosevelt Sr. to replace Chester Arthur. This was tantamount to a declaration of war by the president on the New York Republican machine. The elder Roosevelt was caught in the crossfire. Hayes’s efforts were complicated by the fact that Roosevelt’s appointment had to be approved by the Senate’s Committee on Commerce—a committee chaired by Conkling. Roosevelt’s rejection by the committee was inevitable. Conkling would score a victory against the president and strike a blow against the New York and Boston reformers.
For Theodore Roosevelt Sr., then, Harvard provided the perfect environment in which to educate his namesake. There he would rub elbows with the sons of the Boston elite and ingest their ideas on morality, culture, patronage, charity, and reform. This was far from evident in September 1876, however, as young Theodore departed for Cambridge. In New York he left behind not only his family, but also a serious love interest: Edith Kermit Carow, a childhood friend who had become something much more. Roosevelt would begin his four years at Harvard a homesick, awkward, and solitary youth, spending far too much time alone in pursuit of specimens for his natural science collection, and mooning over Edith back in New York. At first, he would not quite fit in among this different type of American elite, almost inbred in its exclusion of outsiders. This was the grim fate facing seventeen-year-old Theodore as he stepped off the night boat from New York.
TO A NEW YORKER, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1876 appeared little more than a village. Three miles from Boston, Harvard Square was almost somnolent, the absolute quiet of the area disturbed only by the infrequent bells of the horse-drawn carriages. “Once in a while,” a contemporary observer wrote, “its dust is stirred by some mortuary procession of cattle on their way to the abattoirs.” The university and its buildings on their surrounding twenty-two acres dominated the town, just as the massive tower on the new Memorial Hall dominated the skyline. Residents and students were quick to point out to visitors the old wooden Wadsworth House, former home to university presidents, and to note, “George Washington slept here.” When in 1866 British writer Sir Charles Dilke visited Cambridge, he commented on the town’s hushed atmosphere. “Even the English Cambridge has a breathing street or two, and a weekly market-day,” Dilke observed, “while Cambridge in New England is one great academic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our universities can not rival.” On Sundays, the streets were even more empty than usual, as most of the Harvard men went into Boston to spend the Sabbath with their families. Roosevelt would usually spend these days teaching a Sunday school class, writing to his family, and collecting specimens of birds and toads.
At Harvard he fell in with some of the Boston crowd, joining a dining club for meals rather than partaking of the “uneatable” food in the student commons. In addition to throwing himself into his studies—all required classes the freshman year, including Greek and Latin—he began boxing and wrestling. Although Roosevelt was frequently knocked down, he undertook these sports as a way to continue to “make” his body, as his father had once instructed his weak son. Outside the boxing ring, Roosevelt became close friends with Henry Davis Minot—“Harry” or “Hal”—who shared his passion for nature and had even published a small book at age seventeen on The Land and Game Birds of New England. Although busy, Roosevelt felt strongly the pull of friends and family in New York. He wrote letters home all the time and made sure to return for Thanksgiving and Christmas. During the first winter break at the end of 1876, he began a tradition of hosting some of his Boston chums in Manhattan. For Roosevelt, still something of an outsider in Boston, this must have proved a particularly enjoyable experience. Now Roosevelt could play guide in America’s greatest city, showing Bostonians the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge and taking them sleighing in Central Park. He could introduce them to his father, one of the city’s great citizens, and to his lovely southern belle mother. He could even show off his love interest in New York, introducing his classmates to Edith Carow. These New York holiday gatherings would grow ever larger and longer, and would eventually include his future Boston Brahmin bride.
Not only did Roosevelt frequently visit New York; New York frequently visited him. Shortly before his final exams in the spring of 1877, a large party of New Yorkers spent several days with him in Cambridge. Much to his delight, his entire family, minus his mother, made the trip. Cousin Maud Elliott, with whom he had spent much time in Dresden, also came along. While always very proud to show off his father and siblings to his Harvard friends, Roosevelt was probably most pleased with the visit of the only one who was not a family member. The very fact that Edith Carow made the trip showed that the two were very much an item. Surely, their families and friends back in New York expected them someday to marry. The party’s return to New York three days later left Roosevelt depressed. Memories of “pretty Edith,” however, seemed to buoy him. “I do’n’t [sic] think I ever saw Edith looking prettier,” Roosevelt wrote his younger sister, Corinne, after the visit. He made a point of concluding the letter, “When you write to Edith tell her I enjoyed her visit very much indeed.” Clearly Edith had no cause for worry that a Boston belle would snatch Theodore away from her—just yet.
In fact, Roosevelt’s first year at Harvard seemed to be an almost entirely male affair, without mention of a single other woman’s name either in his letters or in his diary. Roosevelt had spent the year getting to know his Boston classmates and their families. Eventually, he would be invited into their homes as almost another son. Through them Roosevelt would meet a tantalizing array of young ladies from the very best New England families. By the summer of 1877, however, that was still in the future as Theodore and his friend Hal Minot departed for a birding trip to the Adirondacks.
Long before he went west, Roosevelt fed his love of nature as a young New York gentleman should, either out on Long Island or upstate in the Adirondacks. When he and Hal arrived at St. Regis Lake, they stayed in the fashionable Paul Smith’s Hotel. This was hardly roughing it. Although the hotel intentionally maintained a primitive facility—including no indoor bathrooms—it was still a favorite of the members of the nineteenth-century elite coming from New York or New England to have a “real” wilderness experience. Future presidents Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge would also stay at the hotel before it burned to the ground in 1930. The hotel provided outdoor guides for its guests, and it would eventually boast a casino, a bowling alley, and a direct wire to the New York Stock Exchange. This was wilderness for the wealthy, and it foreshadowed the elegant resorts that would soon pop up all over the American West.
The young men stayed in the mountains for about three weeks, including a week camping out. On July 5, Roosevelt shot his first deer, “a buck.” He and Hal emerged from the woods a few days later with only a bit of bread and tea left.
Roosevelt returned to Oyster Bay to spend the rest of the summer there before returning to Harvard in late September. That fall, things seemed to come more easily to Roosevelt, who turned nineteen on October 27. He had a set of friends with whom he socialized, and he spent an increasing amount of time staying in the homes of the Welds and Saltonstalls. He threw himself into boxing and wrestling. Roosevelt also began taking two elective courses in natural history, one in botany and one in zoology with William James. He was having a grand time. In the past year, the young man had made a comfortable world for himself in Cambridge and Boston. Events in New York were about to bring that safe and secure world to an end.
Although Roosevelt claimed never to have seen the reclusive Charles Eliot during his time at Harvard, he was probably aware that the college president was scheduled to talk at the opening of the American Museum of Natural History just before Christmas. After all, Roosevelt’s father was one of the prime movers behind the museum’s founding. The museum’s charter had been approved in 1869 in the parlor of the brownstone where the younger Theodore was born. President Grant had laid the cornerstone in June 1874. Now, on December 22, 1877, President Hayes officially opened the museum, while the august audience listened to speeches by the museum president, Robert Stuart, and the Harvard president, Eliot. The dignitaries on the platform with the speakers included Joseph Choate, Congressman Abram Hewitt, and the presidents of Columbia and Yale. Eliot wowed the audience with a speech that began by asking, “In whose honor is this brilliant audience assembled? Whose palace is this? What divinity is worshiped here?” As eighty-six-year-old Peter Cooper—the great inventor and builder of America’s first steam engine—put his hand to his ear to catch Eliot’s words, Harvard’s president answered, “The power is the beneficent power of Natural Science.” No doubt Theodore Roosevelt Sr. would have enjoyed the speech and made a point of congratulating Eliot. But the elder Theodore Roosevelt was not there; he lay dying from a painful tumor of the bowel.
Roosevelt Sr.’s illness came hard on the heels of his failed nomination for the custom-house position. On December 3, Conkling had prevented Roosevelt’s confirmation from coming to a vote in the Senate, and the issue died. Young Theodore was home for Thanksgiving at the time, and he returned to Cambridge the next day. A few days later, he wrote his father, “I am afraid that Conkling has won the day,” his earliest reference to the Republican machine of New York. He added that he had read “quite a sensible editorial on it in the Times of yesterday.” Perhaps this was the son trying to impress his father. Yet the Times editorial was a striking critique of President Hayes’s mismanagement of the collectorship issue. While praising the elder Roosevelt and generally sympathetic with Hayes’s efforts at reform, the paper took issue with the president’s handling of the matter. By provoking a conflict with Senator Conkling and his Republican followers, the president had simply made the battle one of factions within his own party, rather than a movement for real reform. In order to win, Hayes would need support from Democrats who would eagerly seize the chance to divide and conquer. “He could have appeared before the Senate,” the paper said, “not as dividing the Republican Party by Democratic aid, not as setting up one clique in the Republican Party against another, but as presenting the fruits of a candid and rational attempt at a reform of the system of civil service.”
That sentence encapsulated ideas that would guide Roosevelt throughout much of his political career. He could see through the articles in the Times and the New York Tribune that civil service reform was becoming a prominent topic within the Republican Party, and that his father stood alongside some of the great men of New York in his advocacy of it. Though he would one day be an independent reformer within the Republican Party, until 1912 Roosevelt never sought to divide the party against itself—especially if doing so would mean a Democratic win. In the 1880s and 1890s, Roosevelt would always seek to work for—and within—a united Republican Party, casting aspersions on those Republican Mugwumps who would side with Democrats against their own party.
What Roosevelt did not know, as he penned his letters from Cambridge in that last month of 1877, was that for several weeks his father had suffered severe intestinal pains. As Christmas approached, Roosevelt expressed only mild concern. Not knowing of the cancer that was at that moment killing their forty-six-year-old father, he told his sister Anna he thought their father was merely overworked and suffering from exhaustion. Only on December 21 did the family consider Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s health enough of a concern to summon his son back from Harvard. The older Roosevelt’s health improved over the holidays, though, allowing Theodore to step out and see friends in New York. On New Year’s Day, he made about twenty calls, taking particular note of the young ladies he visited, including Edith Carow.
With his father seemingly better, Roosevelt returned to Cambridge a couple of days later. Unlike the previous year, now his diary entries chronicled his attendance of dance classes, parties, and evenings at the theater. Roosevelt took note of the ladies with whom he spent time, as well as the high scores he received on midyear exams. As February began, he was having a swell time. Then, on February 9, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. died.
The son plunged into a deep depression that would not lift for months. Until then, Roosevelt’s diary entries had been short and perfunctory: “Party in the evening. Went with the Hoopers.” Now he poured his grief into the diary, penning long, emotional entries. From the time he started observing ants, mice, and birds as a small child, Roosevelt had always had the gift of vivid description. His diary entries regarding his deceased father reflect this. They are at once rich and bitter, full of adjectives and similes describing his most intimate feelings. “He has just been buried,” Roosevelt began a long entry on February 12. “I should never forget these terrible three days; the hideous suspense of the ride on; the dull, inert sorrow during which I felt as if I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away; and the two moments of sharp, bitter agony, when I kissed the dear, dead face and realized he would never again on this earth speak to me or greet me with his loving smile, and then when I heard the sound of the first clod dropping on the coffin holding the one I loved dearest on earth.” Roosevelt’s account of his grief is so descriptive and detailed—“dull, inert sorrow”—it almost reads like literature. “He looked so calm and sweet,” Roosevelt continued, in an entry that filled several pages of the diary. “I feel that if it were not the certainty, that as he himself has so often said, ‘he is not dead, but gone before,’ I should almost perish. With the help of my God I will try to lead such a life as he would have wished.”
Upon the elder Theodore Roosevelt’s death, church bells pealed throughout New York City, and the Union League Club lowered its flag to half-mast. Special meetings of the plate-glass importers and the trustees of the American Museum of Natural History passed resolutions in honor of Roosevelt: businessman, patron, and philanthropist. As visitors paid their respects to the family at No. 6 West 57th Street—where the family had moved after their second European tour—all praised the late Roosevelt effusively. This may have led his son to quote in his diary a passage from Job: “Truly ‘he was eyes to the blind, feet to the lame, and a father to the poor.’” Published eulogies referred to Roosevelt as “the upright merchant, the honorable gentleman, and the faithful friend,” and noted his enormous charitable contributions. Indeed, the loss of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. made some in the city wonder why New York possessed so few men like him. Why, for instance, did Boston boast so many more patrons of the arts, sciences, and charities than New York? About a week after Roosevelt’s death, the Times posed this question to its readers in an editorial. “It is well known,” the paper observed, “that the number of gentlemen of prominence on whom any important enterprise of charity, philanthropy, art, or science, in this City, can depend is extremely small. Not more than twenty men head most of the really useful public efforts in New York.” Referring to Roosevelt’s recent death, the Times continued, “It is for this reason that the fall of one makes such a gap in the ranks and is so widely felt.”
In what might have been a sentence written for the younger Theodore Roosevelt, the Times placed the blame upon the scions of New York’s elite. The sons of the wealthy were not inculcated with a sense of responsibility and obligation. In England, in contrast, a young man of rank and fortune must endeavor to preserve the honor of the family name and discharge the duties of his rank. Boston had followed this English pattern. “A similar class in this country have surrounded Harvard College with the fruits of their wealth and intelligent generosity,” the editorial observed, “and crowded Boston with institutions of mercy.”
As the grieving young Theodore Roosevelt scoured the papers for praise of his late father, he likely read the Times editorial and interpreted it as damning the sons of New York’s wealthy for their lack of civic responsibility. No doubt the elder Roosevelt would have agreed, as he had attempted to invest in his children that very sense of obligation. He had taken his children with him to the Newsboys’ Lodging House and the Orthopedic Hospital to impress upon them the responsibility of their favored position. In the days that followed his father’s death, Theodore Roosevelt now noted that those who had received such largesse from the elder Roosevelt paid their respects to the family. “He was wise and good in public as in private life,” Roosevelt wrote in his diary. “He was a great personal worker among the poor.” His father’s enormous legacy was pressed upon Roosevelt time and time again in the weeks and months that followed.
In calling for the members of New York’s elite to devote themselves to civic duty, the Times editorial did not stop at the arts and sciences, or even the charities. By the 1870s, “civic responsibility” increasingly meant taking an interest in government. “The practical exclusion in this City of the rich from politics,” the paper noted, “no doubt tends to separate them from the public enterprises. Such men as Mr. Roosevelt and his dozen or more compeers, ought to, and in most other communities would, have been our political administrators and leaders.” Here was the Times, in the wake of the Tweed Ring scandal that stole millions from city coffers, and even Theodore Roosevelt Sr.’s own failed bid for the collectorship, taking the idea of noblesse oblige a step further to include politics and government. When his son commented on the elder Roosevelt’s good work in public life, he possibly meant more than just as a patron of charities and museums: the senior Roosevelt had been involved in Republican matters, too, not only in the Reform Club, but also as commissioner of the State Board of Charities. His father’s work with the party seemed to cause Roosevelt to agonize over his preferred vocation as a natural scientist. “Looking back at his life,” Roosevelt wrote a month after his father died, “it seems as if mine must be such a weak useless one in comparison. I should like to be a scientist: oh, how I shall miss his sweet, sympathetic advice!” His father’s premature death had not only unsettled Roosevelt’s life, but also made him worry for the future.
Theodore Roosevelt Sr. had been the dominant person in Roosevelt’s life until his death during his son’s sophomore year at Harvard. Even after leaving home, Roosevelt followed his father’s advice and his example, and longed for time in his presence. Now his father’s death and legacy underscored the influence he had always had on Roosevelt’s life, as the young man ached with grief and looked to the future. The collectorship episode had given Roosevelt a crash course in New York politics and in the reform and machine factions within the Republican Party. His father’s death had highlighted the great man’s stature in the city, as all New Yorkers praised his many civic and charitable contributions. Roosevelt read in the New York papers how Boston led other American cities in practicing noblesse oblige, a fact Roosevelt was in an ideal position to witness firsthand. And he was now, for the first time, forced to contemplate his future as the head of the family and as his father’s namesake. Even after his death, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. loomed large in his son’s life.
ROOSEVELT RETURNED TO Cambridge at the end of February to see to his midyear exams. His loss had given him another way to measure his friends, and he was touched by the thoughtfulness of Hal Minot, Harry Shaw, and his professors. He began spending more time with Dick Saltonstall out at his home in Chestnut Hill, and there he met Saltonstall’s cousin, the central figure of the next six years of his life: Alice Hathaway Lee. Despite his awkward start at Harvard, Roosevelt eventually was welcomed almost as another son into the homes of the top Boston Brahmin families. He cemented friendships that would prove key to his political career and presidency. And he would marry, if only briefly, into one of the most prominent Boston banking families, the Lees.
So began a relationship with Boston and its ruling class that would provide friendships and political alliances to Roosevelt for the rest of his life. Although he might have comfortably stayed in Boston, New York drew him back home, as it would so many times in his life. Arguably, his wife was not the most important thing he brought back with him. By absorbing the Boston Brahmin sense of noblesse oblige, the idea that privilege conferred duty and civic service, Roosevelt brought to New York the moral and intellectual underpinnings of his life and career in the city. Such notions not only helped shape Roosevelt. They helped transform New York.