The Roosevelts: An American Saga

Chapter 1

A remarkable photograph in the Theodore Roosevelt collection at Harvard's Houghton Library shows Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession passing through New York on the way to the train that would complete the long journey home to Illinois. The shot, taken as the procession moved through the Union Square area, captures both the formal solemnity of the occasion and the life of the street. The caisson carrying the coffin has not yet come into view, but an honor guard of infantry in blocky formation follows a straggling line of riders up ahead. People dressed in black line both sides of the street four or five deep. A few of the spectators, hoping to secure a better vantage, have climbed up onto ledges beneath the recessed windows of a commercial building.

There were probably other shots of this scene taken at about the same moment. But in this one the anonymous photographer also captured an arresting accidental detail: two tiny heads poking out of the second-story window of an elegant brownstone. They are six-year-old Theodore Roosevelt and his younger brother, Elliott, four, looking down at the scene below. Their faces are framed by the shutters of the window in a way that suggests a depth of field, thus inviting the eye to enter the dark room behind them, the private world of the Roosevelts.

The brownstone belonged to the boys' grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, a great-grandson of Johannes, one of the two founding brothers of the Roosevelt clan, and at the time of Lincoln's death the most prominent member of the family. He was a short man with reddish hair and a large head. (One acquaintance had said of him, "His appearance suggested to me a Hindoo idol roughly carved in red porphyry.") His eyes magnified by thick spectacles, C.V.S., as he was known, was a man of few words whose face wore the stern and inquiring look of a bookkeeper with power. The look was one that had settled on him as a result of a life devoted to the art of the bottom line, but it was probably also congenital. The one moment of frivolity anyone recalled from his childhood occurred one Sunday in his youth when C.V.S. was going home after attending his second church service of the day. He came upon a party of pigs, which ran free in the streets of New York in those days, and on a whim he mounted a huge boar that promptly turned and bolted, carrying him back at full tilt directly into the outraged members of the congregation gathered outside the Dutch Reformed Church he had just left. Those who did not move quickly were bowled over.

Afterward, C.V.S. moved steadily through life establishing a record as a conservative man, thrifty and enterprising. As far as anyone knew, his only other unusual act was becoming the first Roosevelt of his line to marry a non-Dutch woman, a Quaker named Margaret Barnhill. When they were first engaged, he wrote her, "Economy is my doctrine at all times, at all events till I become, if it is to be so, a man of fortune." It was couched as a caveat emptor, but it became a prophecy, the underlined words indicating the emphatic nature of the wish. C.V.S. took the family investment firm, Roosevelt and Son, which had been founded by his grandfather, into new areas of enterprise, making it the largest importer of plate glass in the city. He also bought up land all over Manhattan during the Panic of 1837. Five years later he was worth $250,000, and three years after that his net worth had doubled. In 1868 when a newspaper listed the names of Manhattan's handful of millionaires, the name Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt was among them.

Although a man of the new age, C.V.S. tried to maintain the old ways where his family was concerned, bringing his five boys into his business and reminding them of their heritage. (When TR, nearly fifty, visited Africa in 1909 and recited a Dutch rhyme for a contingent of Boers he met there, it was a fragment he had retained from Sunday afternoons with his grandfather.) He was, in a sense, the last Dutch Roosevelt.

The sons of C.V.S. were such energetic youngsters that family and friends began referring to their mother as "that lovely Mrs. Roosevelt with those five horrid boys." They spoke a language all their own. As Silas, the oldest of the boys, said later on, "A Stranger must be somewhat scandalized by the sudden fits we take of irony, cordiality...sense and nonsense, which succeed each other without apparent connection or warning approach."

All of the sons of C.V.S. had acquired their father's gravity by the time they went forth into the world. All had significant achievements as lawyers and businessmen, directors of banks and railroads. One of them, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, was a writer, newspaper editor, and politician, who changed his middle name from Barnhill to escape jokes about manure when he ran for and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He fought Boss Tweed and became a pioneering conservationist. But it was Theodore, youngest of the boys (and later called the first Theodore Roosevelt to distinguish him from his more famous son), who strayed furthest from his father's expectations.

Like his brothers, Theodore stopped off to see his mother every morning on his way to work and joined his father for dinner every Saturday evening. If he was different from the others, it was because he was less adept at making money and less interested in extending the reach of the family business. As the youngest, he had more latitude to explore personal values. He traveled widely at home and abroad. Unwilling to look at the world through plate glass, he began while still young to do volunteer work in New York charities, which provided him with a clear view of the social disorganization caused by the sudden glut of immigrants and the pell-mell urbanization remaking the city. Without knowing it at the time, he had stumbled on what became his life's calling.

Perhaps influenced by the "inner light" of his mother's Quaker background, Theodore had a "troublesome conscience" of his own that not only drew him to social problems but also made him more anxious to give money away than make it. Made wealthy by the hard work of C.V.S., Theodore made the transition from business to philanthropy while still in his thirties, becoming one of a small group of men who founded the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other cultural institutions. But his primary interest was in relieving human misery. He helped begin the Newsboys' Lodging House to benefit thousands of urchins who survived by selling papers, and was deeply involved in such organizations as Miss Sattery's Night School for Little Italians.

He wanted to do good, but he was also drawn to the compelling human interest of the netherworld of human suffering he discovered, a world that, if not for his "social work," would have remained as invisible to him as it was to most in his class. "My boys at the Lodging Home were very interesting tonight," he once wrote his son Elliott after spending an evening with the newsboys. "One little fellow eight years old was particularly so, as he had neither father nor mother and felt perfectly able to care for himself. He described how a policeman had 'bringed' him to the Station House once but seemed not quite sure which particular crime it was for."

He was a handsome man, powerfully built with a big head and shaggy beard inevitably described as "leonine." (When still a boy, his son and namesake Teddy, punning on the metaphor, called the first Theodore "a handsome and good natured lion.") He was filled with such charismatic energy that one contemporary referred to him as "a force of nature." There was such an obsessive quality to his philanthropy that a family friend called it a "maniacal benevolence."

The first Theodore would never know the extent to which he had altered individual lives, but almost a quarter century after his death, when his son, then governor of New York, joined some of his colleagues at a conference, Joseph Brady, the governor of Alaska Territory, made a point of seeking him out. While others might greet him as the head of a great state, Brady said, he wanted to shake TR's hand because he was the son of the first Theodore Roosevelt. He went on to describe how as a boy he had been picked up off the streets of New York by TR's father, who placed him in a home in the West, paying for his travel there and periodically checking on his progress as he grew up. The first Theodore Roosevelt, Governor Brady said, had made him who he was.

All the five boys of C.V.S. relied on the women they married for emotional subtlety. Theodore's brother and next-door neighbor Robert (C.V.S. had bought them connected houses at 20th Street and Broadway to keep the family together) had a wife who was a full-fledged eccentric. Elizabeth, or Aunt Lizzy, as the first Theodore's children knew her, kept a menagerie of animals in her enclosed yard, including a cow that had to be carried there in a sling through her living room. There was also a monkey named Topsy that she dressed in brocaded shirts, gold studs, and trousers. Theodore's oldest child, Anna, would remember Topsy as having a "violent temperament," and indeed she once suffered an attack by the monkey while carrying a message through the passageway linking the two houses. Hearing her screams, Aunt Lizzy came running, but was less worried by the teeth marks on the girl's arm than by the emotional trauma possibly suffered by her pet. "Poor Topsy," she cooed, as the monkey stood on top of a dresser chittering angrily and tearing off all the miniature clothes except for the pants, which caught on his tail, thus driving him to even greater rage.

The woman Theodore married would, in time, become almost as peculiar as Aunt Lizzy. She was Martha Bulloch, a Southern belle from Roswell, Georgia. Called Mittie, she was a captivating beauty whose bisque skin nested in thick dark hair. ("Sweet little Dresden China Mother," her son Elliott would call her.) The Bulloch heritage exhaled the antebellum scent of Southern gentility and was exemplified by a Greek Revival plantation home, Bulloch Hall, which some claimed was one of the models for Tara in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

Mittie's forebears on her father's side included a representative to the Continental Congress as well as an assortment of duelists and desperate men. On her mother's side one particularly notable figure was Archibald Stobo, a minister who had migrated to Panama late in the seventeenth century with other Scottish religious dissidents to found the utopian community they intended to call New Caledonia. Eventually the colonists were driven out by the Spanish. Trying to get back to Scotland, they anchored outside Charleston, South Carolina, to take on supplies. Because he was an ordained minister, Stobo was asked to come ashore to perform a marriage. While he was there a violent storm arose, sinking his ship and drowning the other colonists and leaving him beached in a different part of the New World than the one he had set out for. His daughter married one James Bulloch, another Scot newly arrived in America, and they went off to Savannah to live, establishing a family that had, by Mittie's time, become prominent in Georgia's civic life.

In 1850, the first Theodore, then nineteen, traveled to the South and met the Bullochs through an introduction provided by an in-law of his elder brother Silas. Mittie, then fifteen, thought him stuffy; and for his part, Theodore was bothered by the fact that the first face he saw at Bulloch Hall was that of "Toy," the slave about Mittie's age who had slept at the foot of her bed since she was a little girl. After this cool introduction, he saw Mittie again three years later when she was touring the North. In a more hospitable environment, Theodore wooed and won her. When they were married at Bulloch Hall in 1855, Mittie's mother sold four slaves to pay for the wedding.

Returning to New York with her husband, Mittie brought with her a feel for the mythic and grandiose, an imaginative dimension that was not otherwise part of the Roosevelt mentality. It was expressed in the stories she told her children, tales filled with sentimentality and Southern gothic, as well as the derring-do of high adventure.

Her moods oscillated between deep melancholy and febrile gaiety, yet her Roosevelt in-laws quickly learned that it did Mittie an injustice to regard her merely as a vaporish daughter of the South. On one well-remembered occasion the horses pulling her carriage were spooked and bolted, unseating the driver. As the vehicle careened wildly through the streets of New York, bystanders stepped up to try to stop the team but were thrown back. Finally, after a terrifying ride, the horses reached the Roosevelt home, dashed into their stable and ran into a wall in a crash that killed one of the team. By the time servants caught up, Mittie was out of the carriage dusting herself off. "Will you hand me my card case, James?" she coolly asked one of them, as if she had just arrived by plan.

She and Theodore had four children in quick succession, each with nicknames serving almost as clan designations. Anna, who was not only "Bye" but "Bamie" (from bambina), was born in 1855 with the physical deformity of a curved spine but what everyone agreed was a "large soul" that would eventually make her one of the most respected women of the age. Three years later came the future President, Theodore, who was called "Teedie" and sometimes "Thee." Elliott, whom everyone agreed was the sweetest one in the family and who would move through his life with his brother in an odd and tragic pas de deux that defined them both, was "Ellie." In 1861, a year after his birth, came Corinne, or "Conie," the baby of the family, who was both the most sensitive of the Roosevelt children and also the most sentimental.

Friends remarked on how the first Theodore had to baby Mittie almost as much as his children. His uxoriousness, which might otherwise have been just an amusing eccentricity, took on a tragic aspect with the coming of the Civil War. He was caught in the tension between Mittie and his own abolitionist-minded parents. (Mittie's eldest child, Bamie, later said of her mother: "I shudder to think of what she must have suffered...[because] the Roosevelts think they are just but they are hard.") The pleasurable Sunday dinners at the home of C.V.S. became ordeals of silence. On many evenings when Mittie was expected to help entertain her husband's friends and associates, she instead stayed upstairs and ate with the children in the nursery to avoid having to defend once again her Southern sympathies.

Mittie did not simply pine, however. She had brought her mother and sister to live with her in New York, where circumstances forced on them the identity of conspirators. When Theodore was gone, the Bulloch women rolled bandages and packed supplies under a surreptitiously unfurled Confederate flag while whispering about the real and imagined victories of The Cause.

Hoping to head off the conflict inside his family, Theodore had joined other prominent New Yorkers in petitioning Congress against the war at its onset. He did not enlist because of what he referred to as his "peculiar circumstances": Mittie had brothers fighting for the Confederacy and it was a remote but terrifying possibility that Theodore might kill or be killed by one of them if he went into battle. Instead, he hired a substitute to serve in the army in his place. Others of his class did the same thing, but this act, although necessary, was deeply at odds with Theodore's sense of principle. As his daughter Bamie said later, "He always afterward felt that he had done a very great wrong in not having put every other feeling aside and joined the fighting forces."

Theodore tried to serve the Union by bringing his philanthropic concerns to the war. Designing a program that would encourage soldiers to send their pay home and thus ease the privations of their families, he spent months in Washington, frequently meeting with Lincoln himself. (Although much shorter, he was, in fact, more than once mistaken for the President in walking down the street with White House secretary John Hay.) Theodore became such a favorite of the peculiar Mrs. Lincoln that she sometimes wrote him a note (spelling his name "Rosevalt") asking him to escort her when she went to town to buy bonnets.

"I know you will not regret having me do what is right," Theodore wrote Mittie in one rather plaintive letter, "and I don't believe you will love me any the less for it." But back home there was tense ambiguity. The war that had divided the nation was dividing the consciousness of his family. The consequences were especially apparent in little Teedie, who seemed to have caught faint echoes of his father's dilemma. Once during the war the women in the household dressed him in a miniature Zouave outfit for a photographer and while posing the precocious four-year-old asked, "Are me a soldier laddie, too?" His mother's sister, Aunt Anna, told him that he was indeed a little soldier and he promptly saluted her. But he wasn't sure which army he served in. He collaborated in the hushed melodrama of provisioning the Confederates that took place during his father's absences. Yet when he and his brother and sisters went to Central Park to play "Blockade Runner," a game he made up, Teedie insisted always on being the government captain who intercepted the rebels. Later, when he watched the funeral cortege of his hero Lincoln, it was probably not the Great Emancipator that he mourned, but the Commander in Chief of the Armies of the Republic.

As the war ended, it was clear that the wounds the Roosevelts suffered, while perhaps invisible, were deep. Mittie's mother died just as Sherman's men were nearing Bulloch Hall. Mittie herself was still gay and charming, but her behavior was often odd. Increasingly obsessive about cleanliness, she now bathed twice a day and insisted that each bath have two washes and rinses. It was almost as if a part of her was washed away by all this water, for she now drifted off into periods of remoteness. It was now that her children began to use diminutives to refer to her in their letters: "Darling Little Mother" or "Motherkins."

For his part, the first Theodore was left with a guilt for not having fought that would become part of the psychological heritage he passed on to his eldest son, in whom it would become the irritant that eventually produced a pearl.

No mere paper saint, the first Theodore Roosevelt was a man of power as well as compassion. Moving easily in the upper echelons of Knickerbocker society as part of his birthright, he used his charities to join the emerging elite that would define the culture of New York and eventually the entire country in the postwar period. He was a man who gave generously, but also took for granted fine things and good living. When he moved the family from the place at 4th Street and Broadway where Teedie and the others were born to a new house he had built on West 57th Street, it was at immense cost. Yet, there was more than enough money for such indulgences. The first Theodore would spend a fortune on homes and horses, cutting a dandy figure on the bridal paths of Central Park, and yet also have enough left of the inheritance he received from C.V.S. when the old man died in 1871 that he himself would be able to will each of his own children the equivalent of more than $1 million in contemporary dollars upon his own death.

As his children got older, much of that intensity contemporaries noted in Theodore's personality focused on them. He held a daily Bible reading at which they scrambled to get the prized seat on the sofa beside him, the "cubbyhole," as they called it. One of the enduring images of the Roosevelt family was of Theodore's four children lined up on their stomachs on the raised deck of the summer house he rented each year on Long Island as he came by and slipped peach slices into their mouths so adroitly that no juice dripped on their chins. Each one of them looked forward to their birthdays because their father "gave" himself completely for an entire afternoon, doing whatever the child wished.

The Roosevelt children grew up as a little tribe that got all it needed from within. But instead of making them insular and obtuse, this intensity made them appealing for members of the outer world, who envied their charmed circle. In time people who knew them individually would regard each of the first Theodore's children as the most extraordinary person they had ever met. Together they possessed something almost undefinable that seemed from the onset to set them aside from others — a divine fire.

The leader was Bamie. Large-headed and heavy-lidded, misshaped in body and with what one acquaintance regarded as a curiously dark complexion, she had none of Mittie's fragile beauty, but had a power that transcended her defects. She believed that the spinal deformity that her father tried to remedy with torturous back braces and manipulation resulted from having been dropped by some servant in her bath as a baby, but it was probably caused by tuberculosis of the spine. Less because of her disability than because of her courageous response to it, she became her father's favorite. Because of her, he helped found the New York Orthopedic Hospital. One of the few times Teedie could remember being punished by his father was at the age of four when he bit Bamie on the arm and then hid under the kitchen table in an attempt to escape Theodore's wrath. She had a special status with her parents. The other children sometimes called themselves "We Three."

Bamie inserted herself into the vacuum created by Mittie's emotional withdrawal and became the strong feminine figure in the Roosevelt family. Her brother Teedie would later compare Bamie to "a little feminine Atlas" taking the world's problems on her deformed shoulders. She herself was more matter-of-fact, saying simply that she was the family's "odd job man." (In time she would help raise two of the family's semi-orphans — Teddy's first child, Alice, and Elliott's daughter Eleanor.)

But if she inherited her father's "capacity for compassion," she also had an incisive mind that was developed when she went abroad in 1870 to board at a school outside of Paris run by a famous educator named Madame Souvestre who would give her a thought just before each day's rest period and return after two hours to examine her on the different ways she had translated this thought into French. As the other side of her nature, Bamie developed what one family member called a "caustic disapproval" that made people careful with her.

Corinne was less "granitic" than her sister, more volatile and with the youngest child's desire to please. The author of a large body of sentimental poetry that she began as a youngster, Conie was particularly alive to nuance and soon became the most purely social of the children. Later on the family would joke gently about how at dinner parties whoever was sitting next to her got the "elbow in the soup" treatment as she appeared to hang on their every word. One such moment occurred late in her life at Buckingham Palace where she had been invited for dinner. Queen Mary was telling about a recent camping expedition in India and had gotten to the point in her story where she was describing a strange noise she'd heard outside the royal tent. "What was it, ma'am?" Conie blurted out. Annoyed at having her denouement anticipated, the Queen stood up and said huffily, "It could have been a wolf," and then swept out of the room.

Bamie and Conie would eventually rank among the most accomplished women of their time. Yet from childhood, they would accept a position in the shadows of their brothers, Theodore and Elliott, fretting over them, urging them on, basking in the reflected glory of their accomplishments, and suffering with them in their defeats. It was clear to them and to everyone else that the Roosevelt boys would write the next chapter in the family story.

Mittie said that Teedie looked like a "terrapin" when he was born. Ellie, on the other hand, she pronounced "decidedly pretty" as a baby. While Theodore was off on his travels during the Civil War, Mittie wrote to say that Teedie had become "miserably jealous" to find her in bed with his little brother stroking his ears. Teedie had insisted on getting in bed with them. When the baby allowed him to stroke his ears too, four-year-old Teedie said haughtily, "Oh, do look, Mama, how he do obey me." The question of power would always lurk just below the surface of their relationship.

If Teedie was the most imaginative, Ellie was the most lovable of all the children, learning early on that there was power in his charm, a quality he would rely on too heavily later in life. He inherited his mother's high spirits and his father's compassion for the less fortunate. One of the stories the family always told about Ellie — an epiphany of his character when it was still innocent — was how at the age of seven he had gone off in an overcoat on a cold morning and returned later on bare-shouldered, having given the coat to a shivering urchin he saw during his walk.

Elliot was lithe and active, exploring his world with a confidence that sometimes made him seem older than his older brother. He felt protective of Teedie and when he was six wrote their father in alarm that he had just watched his brother have "a small attack of __ (I don't know how to spell it)." The word was "asthma," and throughout his boyhood it threatened to close up Teedie's lungs and suffocate him. The attacks came on without warning and terrorized the family, although the boy himself settled into them with resignation. Each recovery left him frail and battered. Each new attack brought new intimations of his mortality. Never voiced, the thought was always there in the minds of his parents: Teedie might die.

What the worried family — and the sufferer himself — did not see were the subtle compensations. Young Theodore's acceptance of his plight allowed him to show his brave endurance; his recoveries allowed him to show his resourcefulness. His illness became the play within their play with Teedie taking on the role of director as well as star. It was he who made his mother stay up all night beside his bed telling him stories with chivalry and adventure. It was he who caused his father to order up the carriage in the middle of the night and command the driver to speed through the darkened streets of New York in an effort to force air into his failing lungs.

Ellie assaulted the outer world, becoming for Teedie the exemplar of physical daring. He was the "captain of games," his small dark face alive to what was happening and what it took to succeed. Teedie watched him carefully as he was forced to retreat to the world within, temporarily finding himself in thought rather than action.

Reading became his prowess. He also developed a maguslike ability as a storyteller, using this talent to draw his brothers and sisters and any other children who happened to be around from their robust outdoor play into his secondary realm inside the house.

He was curious about how things worked. He captured insects, rodents, and other specimens and took them apart on makeshift dissecting tables, almost as if by opening them up for examination he might better understand what was wrong with his own machinery. He drew, catalogued, and described what he saw. At the age of eight, when his mother threw out the corpses of two mice he had stored in the icebox for future autopsy, he accused her, in a tiny indignant voice, of "defeating the ends of science."

While Ellie was outside with handmade swords and spears, Teedie often played with his sister Conie and her dolls. One of Conie's friends who often joined them was their neighbor Edith Carow, a composed and bookish girl who went to Miss Comstock's School. Edith Carow's own family had gone into a slow decline when her father's business losses sent him into genteel alcoholism and her mother into hypochondria. Yet she had a spirited intelligence that kept her on even footing with the Roosevelt children. The only friend who penetrated their tight circle, she became something like a member of the family. At the age of three, in fact, she had stood for a moment with Ellie and Teedie at the window as Lincoln's funeral procession passed by below, but then the melancholy of the occasion (and the grotesquerie of veterans with all sorts of amputations and deformities) made her cry, and Teedie locked her in a closet so that he and Ellie could concentrate on the mournful spectacle.

When young, the children were tutored by Mittie's sister Anna. In 1869, Theodore decided to give their education another dimension by taking the family to Europe for a year's Grand Tour. They docked in Liverpool and were met by Mittie's brother James, a former Confederate officer still living in proud exile. Ten-year-old Teedie wrote home to Edith: "Conie and I want you very much to play with. The day after we landed we saw our cousins....I do not think you would like them so much because they kiss so much."

Theodore had hoped that a new environment would help Teedie's health. But the asthma flared up suddenly when the family least expected it, causing hurried trips to spas and ascents high into the mountains in search of easier air. The doctors of the Continent were as authoritative as their American counterparts and equally ineffective. In addition to asthma, Teedie continued to suffer from grim bouts of dysentery, a malady referred to within the family by the coded term, "cholera morbus."

Mittie worried to see Teedie sitting alone reading while the other children played. But the journal he kept of his trip showed how rich an experience play was for him when he felt well enough to join in. While they were in Rome, for instance, his imagination transformed a game with sticks that he and Ellie and a boy named Charles played into an intense experience out of one of the epics he read so avidly: "Ellie was on me with his sword and had me on my knees but I hurled him on Charles. I saw, however, that I would be beaten in another battle and I rushed down a steep hill but when we fought again I defeated them and rushed up to another position and again encountered and beat them."

Also clear from the journal was the tendency to dramatize himself and the desire to be at the center of any spectacle. On another afternoon in Rome, the Roosevelts happened to be in the path of the Pope when he appeared in his sedan chair. Teedie hissed to Conie that he didn't "believe in" the Pope, yet when the procession passed by and the Pontiff reached out his hand, Teedie impulsively grabbed and kissed it.

He recorded odd moments in his journal, events that someone else might have regarded as contradictions in his parents, but which to a child's eye were part of an unquestioned continuity. When they were passing through Italy, for instance, his father, who might have been a philanthropist but was no pacifist, violently attacked a monk whom he believed had roughly elbowed Teedie out of the way on the street. Later on in this trip, the first Theodore bought cakes for hungry Italian peasants and then he and his family "fed them like chickens," in Teedie's words, forcing them to give "three cheers for the USA" before they were allowed to gobble up the bits of food.

The chauvinism was infectious. Nine-year-old Elliott, who, along with Teedie and Conie, stayed with a German family to enhan