Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Faimly, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt

But six months later, Robert felt obliged to rescind.

Firstly, Advice. Don't write any more experience in the lower walks of life, or moralize upon its wickedness....Mother gets into a pigeon fit and thinks her "darling innocent" is going straight to destruction. And the old gentleman ruminates on the disappearance of the £1,000 and looks blank when it is suggested to him that he is supporting Theodore's "French teacher." The old lady takes it hard and no matter what you do perhaps you had better not write about it. You had better keep to towers and castles.

Russia -- the overwhelming splendors of St. Petersburg, the squalor of Moscow -- affected Theodore profoundly. "I scarce know terms strong enough to express my feelings...Everything is in the extremes." Conceivably it had taken Robert's admonitions to bring him to see the human element; still, the kind of sensitivity that began to emerge in his letters and in his journal was very much his own. He toured a Moscow foundling hospital where every year some six thousand infants were received. On the edge of the city early one Sunday he watched a thousand prisoners start the long march to Siberia. A dignified, elderly figure he identifies in the journal only as Dr. Haase had come to bid the prisoners farewell. Nothing or no one that Theodore encountered in his travels seems to have impressed him as this man did.

He was dressed in the old style with silk stockings and slippers, his breast decked with honor...He is one of the finest-looking old gentlemen I ever saw and his actions carry out his appearance. He went around among the prisoners asking them if they were well and content...when they were departing he distributed among those whom he thought deserving. It was more the universal feeling of kindness which prompted every movement than any particular action which I can adduce which evinced his character.

The prisoners must be fairly treated, the old man insisted, for at Judgment Day their word would count as much as that of anyone. Though a few of the sick had been put in wagons, the rest had started off on foot with the prospect of six months of continual walking before them.

To the great relief of his father, Theodore came home with no new revolutionary ideas or worldly airs. Nor, apparently, was it with the least misgiving that he entered directly into the family firm, downtown at 94 Maiden Lane. The Russian journal would be taken up and reread from time to time and one "treasure" among the few he had brought back, a small square of malachite supporting a small gilt Russian peasant pulling a gilt sledge, was to occupy a prominent position in the 20th Street parlor. Only after they were grown would the children become aware that it was anything other than a priceless work of art.

The impression is that the family business more or less ran itself. CVS had announced his retirement soon after Theodore joined the firm, and another brother, James Alfred Roosevelt, was made senior partner. James Alfred, as nobody disputed, had the best head for business. He was shrewd and tough, and he had married an Emlen from Philadelphia, a move which, in the words of one descendant, "did the family's fortune no harm." James, too, like his father, was made a director of the Chemical Bank, and the Chemical Bank, with real estate, was of greatest importance to the Roosevelts and their standing in the financial community. CVS had been a founding father of the Chemical Bank, the only bank in New York that had never failed to meet its obligations in gold, even during the Civil War.

The family's real-estate holdings were lumped under what was called the Broadway Improvement Association, of which James Alfred was also head and chief spokesman.

So it was James Alfred, ultimately, who had the final say on all questions pertaining to money, a subject about which all Roosevelts cared deeply, but which they preferred also to keep altogether private. When, in 1868, a publication called Gallaxy presented the names of New York's ten bona fide millionaires, with CVS listed among them, Weir Roosevelt responded angrily in a letter to The New York Times that no man's privacy was safe any longer. "I ask you whether it is the present opinion of the respectable newspapers that a rich man has no rights, or, in other words, whether the mere accumulation of property by a private citizen is of itself a sufficient offense against society to call for a public exposure and justify the interference of the press?"

One of Theodore's rare observations on the atmosphere at Roosevelt and Son is contained in a love letter to Mittie written hastily at his desk in 1853, shortly before they were married. So wonderful was the mere thought of her, he said, it could even brighten a day at 94 Maiden Lane, "where such a thing as sentiment would be laughed at as a humbug worthy of Mr. Barnum's collection." The bookkeeper, he cheerfully informed her, had warned him never to marry a southern girl.

As a businessman Theodore appears to have been miscast. He had no apparent aversion to trade, or any philosophical conflict with moneymaking as such. (For a time he even thought seriously of leaving the family firm in order to make more in some other line, though what that might be he had no idea.) Rather he appears to have found little or no satisfaction in the work. His letters rarely touch on it. The one picture we get of him having any fun on the job, evincing any of his usual enthusiasm, is an account of a winter day in Washington when he scaled the snow-covered roof of the new Treasury Building to measure for skylights. He felt like a mountaineer, sometimes sliding thirty or forty feet down the roof. All he needed was his alpenstock, he said. Otherwise, the impression is of years at a desk going through the motions, performing dutifully as the proper Victorian breadwinner, a prudent, attractive figure, quite in the Roosevelt mold, but uninspired, unaggressive, and, probably, not very good at what he did.

The power rested in the older brother's hands. Theodore was free to do Europe at will, while James Alfred stayed on and ran things, and Theodore seems to have gone off to Europe -- or to the country or to his eager philanthropy -- at every chance.

As time went on, his crusades among the needy, his hospital and museum projects, became his true vocation. It was thus that he became one of the prominent men of the city, as truly a good citizen as New York had ever known. "Whatever he had to do, he did all out," remembered Charles Loring Brace, the pioneer social worker. To some, he seemed strangely driven. John Hay, another friend, spoke of his "maniacal benevolence," and in letters to his wife Theodore himself infers occasionally that "with so much to do" he has no choice. "I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live."

Together with Brace and a friend named Howard Potter, he had helped establish the Children's Aid Society, to do something for the city's homeless children -- "street rats" as the police chose to call them -- whose numbers by 1869 probably exceeded twenty thousand. Largely through Theodore's initiative a permanent Newsboys' Lodging House had been established on West 18th Street, where nightly several hundred stray boys, most of them newsboys, were given a clean bed in a warm room for five cents, a fraction of what was charged by the lowest kind of commercial flophouse. It was Brace's contention -- the theme by which he appealed for funds and enlisted the efforts of men like Theodore -- that decent society had no greater threat than the existence of a "class of vagabond, ignorant, ungoverned children." The time would come, Brace warned, when these children would have the vote, "the same rights as ourselves" -- a very different justification for Christian mercy from that espoused by Theodore's old gentleman in Moscow, but one that carried Brace and his projects far.

The mission of the Children's Aid Society was to bring "moral disinfectants" to the festering "crime nests" of New York. A kind-hearted agent or "visitor" was first dispatched to the "infected quarter," someone who could naturally befriend the homeless waifs, this being work that Theodore, for one, did extremely well. Then an informal religious meeting, or mission class, was established; then a reading room, then an industrial school or workshop. Presently came the Lodging House. But the long-range objective was to return as many of the children as possible to their own families, if such existed, or, more often, to ship them off to farms in the Middle West or beyond, to get them out of the city entirely. By 1869 some 4,500 children had been thus dispatched to Ohio, Illinois, and points beyond. In time more than 100,000 would be sent.

When Brace first asked Theodore if he might spend every other Sunday evening at the Lodging House, talking with the boys, Theodore declined, saying his "troublesome conscience" would not permit it. He would be there every Sunday.

He "threw himself" into the work, Brace remembered: "He knew them by name, he knew their histories...they would gather round him, and he would question each one as to what he was doing, and give him advice and sympathy and direction. You felt the moment Mr. Roosevelt was in the room that he was a help to those poor fellows."

As generous with his money as his time, he gave regularly to this and other causes, and raised still more among his well-to-do friends, some of whom eventually learned to take out their checkbooks the moment he came into their offices. One man, on hearing that Theodore was going abroad, estimated it would save him at least a thousand dollars.

Importantly, Theodore's influence was felt just at that stage in the city's growth when it could have the greatest effect, a point he never lost sight of. He believed in New York, he said, not so much for what it was as for what it might become, the example it could set. No city offered more opportunity for those wishing to do something for the good of mankind; his joy, he said, was being connected with new work, worthy institutions in their infancy, the influence of which would be felt throughout the country. The year following the war he helped start the New York Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital, for the treatment of children deformed by spinal disease. With Joseph Choate, Pierpont Morgan, Howard Potter, and others he had founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. It was in the front parlor at 28 East 20th Street that the original charter for the Museum of Natural History was approved the evening of April 8, 1869.

No one seems ever to have spoken ill of him. A man who knew him in business for more than twenty years said he never heard him utter an angry word, never saw him out of sorts. When Albert S. Bickmore, the brilliant young naturalist, first came to the city with his idea for a natural history museum, it was to Theodore that he went, because he had been told that Theodore Roosevelt was "just the man" to make such a project a success. Thirty years later Bickmore could still quote Theodore's response: "Professor, New York wants a museum of natural history and it shall have one, and if you will stay here and cooperate with us, you shall be its first head."

Most memorable was what Brace called his "rich power of enjoyment of everything human." Pious as he was, as solemn sounding as his religious speculations might become, he adored parties and would dance all night. Like the new President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, he had a passion for fine horses and to see him astride one of his own in Central Park was, as one friend remarked, to see the model of Christian manhood.

He would make the most of any situation, of every moment, often replenishing his energies with occupations or chance conversations that others would have found irksome or boring. "I amused myself by drawing the little there was in him out," he would say of someone he met on a train.

Best were the pleasures of a morning walk or his books or a good cigar or what he called the quiet luxury of home life. He loved flowers, yellow roses especially, and the Palisades along the Hudson River. Separated from home and the beloved "home faces," he could slip rapidly into abject homesickness and sound, on paper at least, most uncharacteristically plaintive. He felt bereft of real friends, he wrote to Mittie one such summer evening. "The city is deserted by all my acquaintances and I scarce meet anyone now in the Park that I know."

I wonder in so large a city, living here all my life, how it comes that I have so few intimate friends; it seems strange, especially when I know that you consider me so very sociable. But I have no more time to moralize. Those who I love love me and I would not give up their affection for the lukewarm article called by that name by thousands.

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was as though he was in league with them. As Ellie once told him, he was one of those rare grown men who seem never to forget that they were once children themselves -- "just my ideal," Ellie said, "made to govern and doing it so lightly and affectionately." Sweetest of all was his undivided attention, the "sunshine of his affection."

Day began with the three youngest poised at the foot of the long stairway waiting for his descent and their morning prayers together, this ritual being held on the library sofa, two of them seated to one side of him, the third wedged into what they regarded as the prime position between him and the arm of the sofa. Evenings, in the library, they would wait for the sound of his key at the door, then rush to greet him and troop after him up the stairs to his room to watch him dress for dinner. (He always dressed for dinner and with what seemed to them the most amazing speed.)

He taught them to ride and to climb trees. Conie remembered "the careful way in which he would show us dead limbs and warn us about watching out for them, and then, having taught us and having warned us, he gave us full liberty to try our wings..." As they grew older he tried to include them in his own outside activities, taking along one or more, for example, on his Sunday-night visits to the Newsboys' Lodging House. Those evenings when he brought some friend of special interest to the house -- John Hay, Matthew Arnold, Albert Bickmore -- he saw that the children sat and listened to what was being said.

His own preachments were fundamental and heartfelt, and it would be hard to overemphasize the extent to which they charged the atmosphere. Cultivate a hopeful disposition, he told them. Accept the love of others and you will be loved.

"I always believe in showing affection by doing what will please the one we love, not by talking." (To show their love for him, they could improve their handwriting or learn to swim or memorize a passage from the Bible.)

"I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language."

He hated idleness. Every hour must be accounted for and one must also enjoy everything one did. Get action, he said. Seize the moment. "Man was never intended to become an oyster."

Deceit or cowardice was not to be tolerated. Courage he rewarded openly and sometimes with dramatic effect. At a rented country house in New Jersey one summer, he surprised the three youngest children with a new pony. When he asked who would jump on, Conie, then four, was the only one not to hang back, and so he declared the pony was hers, to the humiliation of her older brothers. "I think I did it," she would write long afterward, "to see the light in Father's eyes."

That a great, bearded figure of a man was also one so readily touched by the sufferings of others, so tender-hearted with children, so sensitive to the pulls of conscience, seemed strangely incongruous to some who knew him. But to those closest to him this androgynous quality was the essence of his personality. Howard Potter, the friend who probably knew him best, saw him as a "singular compound of feminine and masculine qualities, lovable as a woman, and as strong as a man."

To Teedie, the little namesake, he was at once the most magnificent creature on earth and quite frightening, but then Teedie was full of fears of all kinds, as he would acknowledge in time. Anna Bulloch Gracie, the elder Theodore's pious and adoring sister-in-law, called him Greatheart. It had come to her on a Sunday morning as she watched him go off to church with his children -- the warrior Puritan, Greatheart, from The Pilgrim's Progress, stout Greatheart, guide and protector of wayfaring innocents, fearless leader in life's purposeful journey. "Come now, and follow me, and no hurt shall happen to you from the lions...."

"There never was anyone so wonderful as my father," Bamie remembered. And the fact that he swept in and out of the house, in and out of their lives, the fact that he was not always around as their mother was, made him seem all the more special and "wonderful."

Of the four children it was Bamie who most closely resembled him; Bamie, who, to use her own words, never let herself be young, and who, as would be said, probably had the best mind in the family.

Bamie was the mainstay, then and for as long as she lived. For a girl born into New York society she was also severely handicapped. She was not in the least pretty, for one thing. Her dark-blue eyes were deep-set, the lids heavy, which made her look tired and years older than she was. In repose she could look painfully sad.

More seriously, she was also somewhat physically deformed. The standard family explanation for this has been that as an infant she had been dropped by a careless nurse. However, no mention of such an incident is to be found in family records dating from the time it supposedly occurred, or afterward. The one specific early reference to the problem is in a letter written by Grandmamma Bulloch, an observant member of the household in that earlier day. Writing of the infant Bamie, she said, "I am quite uneasy about her back. There is something wrong there. She cannot stand more than a second on her feet, then her countenance expresses pain, and she crumbles down."

The problem, in fact, was Pott's disease, the form of tuberculosis which softens and destroys the bones and which, when localized in the spine, causes hunchback. Known to have been a child crippler since the time of the Pharaohs, it was first identified in the eighteenth century by a British physician, Percivall Pott. Still, by the late nineteenth century, it remained a mystery and was thought to be incurable.

In Bamie's case the effect was severe curvature of the spine and intense suffering. At age three, at the time of Teedie's birth, she was fitted with her "terrible instrument," a heavy steel-and-leather apparatus that left her immobile and rubbed a hideous sore on her back. The doctor came regularly each morning to wash and dress the sore and to strap her in again, and through the rest of the day she had to be picked up and carried from room to room or out to her sofa on the piazza. She could lie face down only. In the evening it was her father who removed the apparatus and at bedtime Grandmamma Bulloch would rub her legs until she fell asleep.

Her father's devotion became the most important thing in her life. A summer when she had to be left behind at 20th Street while her mother, grandmother, the new baby, and Dora Watkins went off to the country was a summer of untold happiness because he was there with her so much of the time, because at the end of his business day he would come directly to her on the piazza, bringing her ice cream or fresh peaches or some small gift, because he would sit with her while she had her supper, then carry her to bed "with his very strong arms."

She was also released from the "terrible instrument" that same summer, the summer of 1859, when she was four. He had found another doctor for her, Charles Fayette Taylor, an orthopedic surgeon who in some professional quarters was thought to be a quack. Pott's disease was Taylor's specialty. He treated it with what he called the "movement cure," a form of physical therapy based on Swedish techniques that he had learned in Europe. Bamie was among his first patients and he not only transformed her daily regimen, giving her virtually a new life, but interjected into the family circle his conviction that physical well-being and mental outlook are directly correlated.

She was fitted with a radically different kind of back brace, a custom-made "spinal assistant" that was light in weight and designed so that she could be up and moving about, which, Taylor stressed, was the whole point. He wanted her moving about, both for her back and for what it would do to her spirits. Improvement was slow but unmistakable, and it was seeing this, seeing what Taylor had done for his own child, that led Theodore to establish the Orthopedic Dispensary and Hospital with Taylor at its head.

A full cure was never to come, however. Through most of childhood she was required to lie down part of every day and, by Roosevelt standards, her physical activity was limited. The rest of her life she wore a piece of ram's wool on her back beneath her clothes in order to sit comfortably in a chair. She was not, by the time she attained her full growth, exactly a hunchback, but she did have an odd hunched stance. The small figure she presented to the world, or that she confronted in the hall mirror, was plainly "curious," thick through the shoulders.

"Poor little thing," her father wrote when she was seven. "I never think of Bamie without pain. It seems such a dreary life that is in store for her."

He wanted her with him whenever possible. At some point during the war, on one of his periodic trips to Washington -- the exact date is not known -- he took her along and she sat on Abraham Lincoln's lap. She would remember nothing of the event, only that she had been with her father.

In a family notable for its intense attachments, theirs was perhaps the most intense of all. She was emphatically "Papa's pet." He kept her photograph in a leather case and carried it with him wherever he traveled. His letters to "My own Darling Bamie" were overflowing with tenderness, with concern for her every move, with advice, warnings, and not a little baring of his own soul. "Try to cultivate a quiet sober style," he would write, "and bottle up your spirits a little until I have possession of you. Then you may let them out again as much as you please."

The one and only time he ever physically punished Teedie -- possibly the only time he ever physically punished any of his children -- was when, at age four, Teedie bit Bamie on the arm.

Bright, conscientious, she picked things up quickly (French, the piano) and her energy was very nearly the match of Theodore's. "Dear busy Bamie," Grandmamma Bulloch called her. But it was her odd, almost quaint maturity that set her off. She was "competent beyond her years," even when very small. She had no interest in games or toys. She wished only to be "useful," to look after her own needs, to look after the younger three, to whom she never seemed like anything but another grownup. Teedie, by way of introduction to his diary of the European tour, was to explain, "When I put 'We 3' I mean Ellie, Conie, and I. When I put 'big people' I mean Papa, Mama, and Bamie." That she was plain and deformed seems never to have figured in their picture of her. Not once in all that Mittie wrote about her children is there even a trace of pity or worry over Bamie. Bamie was strength. Bamie was good sense, the one to lean on, to turn to for help. She was, as Teedie would tell her fondly, "a kind of little feminine Atlas with a small world on her shoulders."

Of the youngest three, Ellie was the best-looking and the most convivial, and in many ways the most endearing. As a baby he had been "decidedly pretty." At two he could speak more clearly than his older brother and in no time became larger, better coordinated, the natural athlete of the two. Little brother was big brother. He was also distinguished by a sweet, even temper and what seemed an inordinate fund of kindness for someone so young. Once, at about the age of seven, he had gone off for a walk wearing a new overcoat and returned without it. He had given it away, he explained, to a ragged child who had none and looked cold.

Unlike Bamie, whose hair was dark brown, he, Teedie, and Conie were all fair-haired and Conie was known for her "ardent" blue eyes.

Teedie, in Bamie's expression, was the "great little home-boy" of the family. He was extremely frail and undersized for ten, a nervous, timid, often solitary child with bad color and what his mother described as a "quiet patrician air...his large blue eyes not looking at anything present." His joy was in stories of high adventure, in birds and animals, almost anything to do with nature. "My mouth opened wide with astonish[ment] when I heard how many flowers were sent in to you," he had written to his mother the spring before, in April 1868, when she was in Savannah. "I could revel in the buggie ones. I jumped with delight when I found you heard the mockingbird, get some of its feathers if you can." He kept pet mice in a bureau drawer, and, in partnership with a cousin, West Roosevelt, had founded his own "Roosevelt Museum of Natural History" in the back hall on the fourth floor, a collection already comprising some several hundred specimens.

Teedie was an asthmatic. His attacks had started at about the age of three and more even than Bamie's affliction they had had a profound effect on the life of the family -- summer plans, sudden cancellations of dinner engagements, changes in plans of all kinds being determined time and again by the status of his health. During the first few days at any summer house or hotel, his mother would keep her bags packed, knowing from experience that some unknown something might trigger an attack and off she would have to go with him, back to the city or to try still another, different locale.

Conie, too, had "the asthma," but very infrequently and never so seriously. Teedie, moreover, was beset by chronic stomach trouble, by headaches, by colds, fevers, and a recurring nightmare that a werewolf was coming at him from the bottom of his bed. Earlier in the year, in January 1869, he had fallen into such a low state that Mittie had taken him off to Philadelphia for a stay with her half sister, Susan, whose husband, Hilborne West, was a physician. Teedie, as Mittie said, kept everyone "on the stretch." Rarely could he sleep without being propped up in bed or in a big chair, so difficult was it for him to breathe. For a time, his father had thought possibly the trouble had something to do with the furnace at East 20th Street.

The attacks were a dreadful experience for everyone. They happened nearly always at night and there was little anybody could do. Theodore would gather the child up in his arms and walk the floor with him for hours. Some nights, in desperation, he would bundle him up against the cold, servants would be roused to fetch the carriage to the door, and father and child would drive off in the dark in the hope that the sudden change of air might bring relief -- which sometimes it did.

Like other parents of their social position, the Roosevelts did not wish to see their children "coarsened" by public schools. But mainly it was from worry over their health that all four were kept from school of any kind, public or private. They were tutored within the home walls and from within the home ranks by their own Aunt Anna, who, until her marriage to James K. Gracie in 1866, was, like Grandmamma Bulloch, a vital part of the household. At one point Teedie and Ellie were sent down the street to private classes only a stone's throw from the house, these conducted by Theodore's own boyhood tutor, but even so cautious a departure had proved unsatisfactory. The boys were withdrawn after only a month or two and not made to go again.

Since school played no part in their lives, they were cut off from their contemporaries. The only accessible -- the only permissible -- playmates were those within the family circle, namely cousins and the approved offspring of a few old family friends of comparable station and antecedents. Bamie seems to have had no childhood friends, while the youngest three had but one who had figured significantly thus far -- little Edith Carow, who was Conie's age and the daughter of Charles Carow, a lifelong friend of Theodore's.

But then neither did any of them suffer from a lack of affection or stimulation. If anything, there was a surplus of both. Aunt Anna, who had no children, was as devoted as though they were her own. Grandmamma in her lace cap was famous for her "melts," overwhelming outbursts of maternal, southern affection; and nurse Dora Watkins was considered so overly indulgent to the children as to be a possible hindrance to their health and/or moral character. Years after her death, the mere mention of Grandmamma's name was enough to make the youngest three burst into tears.

The charming, erudite Dr. Hilborne West, the Philadelphia uncle, spent part of each summer with them, read and acted Shakespeare with all four children under the trees, and allegedly no one had more to do with their "early stirring of intellectual desires." "The very fact that he was not achieving a thousand worthwhile things, as was my father," wrote Conie years afterward, "the very fact that he was not busied with the practical care and thought for us, as were my mother and aunt, brought about between us that delightful relationship when the older person leads rather than drives the younger into paths of literature and learning."

It was, plainly, a family of paradoxes: privileged and cushioned beyond most people's imagining, yet little like the stereotype of the vapid, insular rich; uneducated in any usual, formal fashion but also uninhibited by education -- ardent readers, insatiable askers of questions; chronically troubled, cursed it would often seem, by one illness or mysterious disorder after another, yet refusing to subject others to their troubles or to give in to despair.

Of the tawdriness and drudgery of the workaday world they knew almost nothing. They had never experienced drought of hunger or steerage or any of a dozen other ordeals common to so many Americans of the day. They were never without money or servants. They scarcely knew what it was to clean out a stall or put their hands in dishwater. When a cook got drunk one evening at the Union Square house and CVS went to see what the fuss was about, it marked the first time he had set foot in his own kitchen.

They knew themselves to be aristocrats, though it is unlikely they used that word: "people of good family" was preferred. They had little patience with bad manners, no use for social climbers, little knack for the kind of easy familiarity that businessmen and politicians traded on and that Europeans thought so very American. "Be careful always in chance acquaintances" was another of father Theodore's admonitions to the children.

"Family" and "stocks" or "antecedents" were favorite topics. Their own position relative to that of the common herd was an accepted fact of life. Theodore was no more averse to using an expression like "our class" than was anyone else of comparable background. But if conscious of their position, they were also conscious of their duty. They had standards, standards which they never questioned. They were Roosevelts, but, being Roosevelts, that in itself could never be thought of as enough. Duty and the family name demanded more.

And then, in addition, there was Mittie, in some regards the most fascinating of them all, "darling little Mittie," a Roosevelt by marriage only.

Copyright © 1981 by David McCullough