The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (14 page)

The Minkwitz family proved to be both hospitable and conscientious. No sooner had Theodore Senior left town than they plunged the boys into a rigorous teaching schedule. “The plan of the day is this,” wrote Teedie at the end of the first month. “Halfpast six, up and breakfast which is through at halfpast seven, when we study till nine; repeat till half past twelve, have lunch, and study till three, when we take coffee and have till tea (at seven) free. After tea we study till ten, when we go to bed. It is harder than I have ever studied before in my life, but I like it for I really feel that I am making considerable progress.”
³⁷

Fräulein Anna, the Minkwitzes’ eldest daughter, was placed in charge of Teedie and Elliott, teaching them German grammar and arithmetic with “unwearied patience.” The rest of the family made a point of speaking German at all times, whether their young guests could understand them or not. Teedie, it soon transpired, understood better than they realized. He caught several personal observations about the elder Roosevelts, and gleefully retailed them by mail.
³⁸
Although he developed a fair measure of spoken fluency, he never was as easy with German prose as he was with French. However, he grew to love and enjoy German poetry almost as much
as he did English. It was during this summer that he discovered the
Nibelungenlied
, whose
Sturm und Drang
evoked vague folk-memories of his own Germanic ancestors.
³⁹

At first, Teedie did not make a very agreeable impression upon his hosts. They looked askance at his long, wavy hair, his ink-spattered hands, and ill-fitting clothes, from whose greasy recesses he was at any moment likely to produce a dead bat.
⁴⁰
“My scientific pursuits cause the family a good deal of consternation,” he reported sadly. “My arsenic was confiscated and my mice thrown (with the tongs) out of the window.”
⁴¹
Undeterred, he continued to flay, pickle, and stuff a variety of local fauna. Whenever he could get out in the country he “collected specimens industriously and enlivened the household with hedgehogs and other small beasts and reptiles which persisted in escaping from partially closed bureau drawers.”
⁴²
The skins of these unfortunate animals were allowed to festoon the exterior of the house, with fine disregard for aesthetic effect. One night, during a thunderstorm so violent the Minkwitzes hid between their mattresses, Teedie was heard to murmur in his sleep: “Oh, it is raining and my hedgehog will be all spoiled.”
⁴³

During their free evenings and weekends, the young Roosevelts happily explored the parks and shops of Dresden, and attended frequent performances of Shakespeare at the German Theater. By coincidence, their cousins John and Maud Elliott were also living in the city,
⁴⁴
and the five little Americans soon became a gang, meeting every Sunday afternoon. Lest Theodore Senior frown upon this socializing in English, they affected a cultural veneer, calling themselves the Dresden Literary American Club. Corinne spelled out their various creative roles: “I … keep up the poetry part, Elliott and Johnny the tragical, and Teedie the funny.” Evidently the last was beginning to fancy himself as a wit: his contributions to the club’s copybooks, which have been preserved, strive mightily to imitate Dickens and Lewis Carroll, but the best that can be said of them is that they are long.
⁴⁵

His letters of the same period, written with the promptness and regularity that would always characterize him as a correspondent, are full of adolescent drollery, and since they are more spontaneous than his formal efforts, can still be read with pleasure. One of them,
addressed to his mother, describes himself suffering from a familiar boyhood ailment:

Mittie may have been amused by that, but references in the same letter to recurring asthma and violent headaches were not so funny. She informed her husband that she would visit Dresden in August, and “if I find Teedie still with asthmatic feelings, I think I shall take him with me to Salzburg.”
⁴⁷
Theodore Senior was reluctant to interrupt the boy’s studies, but he had just received a “humorous” letter himself, and it made poignant reading.

When Mittie arrived in Dresden she found he was sitting up to sleep again, just as he had as a child; his wheeze was perpetual and his color was not good.
⁴⁹
She promptly bundled him off to a resort in the Swiss mountains, where his breathing cleared, only to be replaced by an ugly cough. It took three weeks in the pine-scented air of the Alps before he was well enough to return to his studies.

He compensated for time lost to ill health by asking Fräulein Anna to speed up his lessons. “Of course I could not be left behind,” Elliott reported, “so we are working harder than ever in our lives.” Teedie was already showing the determination, and inspirational qualities, of a born leader. The Minkwitzes, who had gotten over
their misgivings about him, openly admired his ability to concentrate on his books and his specimens to the exclusion of physical suffering. “I wonder what will become of my Teedie,” pondered Mittie, as she prepared to depart again for England. “You need not be anxious about him,” replied Fräulein Anna. “He will surely one day be a great professor, or who knows, he may become even President of the United States.”
⁵⁰

Mittie was scornfully amused and unbelieving, but Fräulein Anna prided herself, in her old age, on being the first to predict Teedie’s future glory.

R
ECROSSING THE
A
TLANTIC
in late October, Teedie turned fifteen. He was now, if not yet a man, then at least a youth of more than ordinary experience of the world. He had traveled exhaustively in Britain, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, visiting their great cities time and again and actually living in some for long periods. He had plumbed the Catacombs and climbed the Great Pyramid, slept in a monastery and toured a harem. He had hunted jackals on horseback, kissed the Pope’s hand, stared into a volcano, traced an ancient civilization to its source, and followed the wanderings of Jesus. He had been exposed to much of the world’s greatest art and architecture, become conversant in two foreign languages, and felt as much at home in Arab bazaars as at a German
kaffeeklatsch
, or on the shaven lawns of an English estate.

As is frequently the case with globetrotting children, the very variety of Teedie’s knowledge put him at something of a disadvantage when it came to the requirements of formal education. His ambition was to enter Harvard in the fall of 1876, which meant he would have to be ready, by the summer of 1875, to take a series of stiff entrance examinations. Strong as he might be in science, history, geography, and modern languages, he was weak in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. For the next one and a half years he would have to apply himself to these uncongenial subjects. Also he would have to complete the building of his body. He was still too frail to think of going to boarding school;
⁵¹
to go to Harvard he must be able to compete, physically and mentally, with the finest young men in America. Theodore Senior
was confident, on the record of Teedie’s past accomplishments, that this challenge would be met and overcome. He had already retained an eminent tutor, Arthur Hamilton Cutler, to take charge of the boy’s education.
⁵²

Nothing is known of the Roosevelts’ reunion on the docks of Lower Manhattan, save that it took place on 5 November 1873. We may assume that it was joyous, and that Teedie’s mood, as their carriage clattered up Broadway, was expectant.

I
NSTEAD OF TURNING EAST
toward the familiar row of brown-stones on Twentieth Street, the horses continued north to the distant green of Central Park. Theodore Senior had spent the last five months supervising the construction of a mansion at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street, on the outer fringes of New York City. Now in the prime of life—he was forty-two, a millionaire twice over, a founder of the Metropolitan and Natural History museums, a patron of the New York Orthopedic Hospital and many charities—he wished to establish himself in appropriately grand surroundings. “It seems like another landmark reached on my life’s journey,” he wrote Mittie after his first night in the new house. “We have now probably one abiding-place for the rest of our days.”
⁵³

The mansion was designed by Russell Sturgis, New York’s most fashionable architect. Although its blocky facade conformed with the town-house style of the period, its interior furnishings were unusually rich, with heavy Persian rugs in every hall, sumptuous furniture, and much ornamental woodwork, including a hand-carved staircase. Knowing his wife’s intolerance of anything artificial, Theodore Senior had even gone to the length of ripping out a “beautifully finished” plaster ceiling and replacing it with real oak beams. There was a large museum in the garret for Teedie, and a fully equipped gymnasium on the top floor for all the children.
⁵⁴

Teedie lost no time in plunging into his new studies. He took an instant liking to Mr. Cutler, who in turn registered approval of “the alert, vigorous character of young Roosevelt’s mind.” At first Elliott and West Roosevelt, a cousin, joined in the lessons, but Teedie, working from six to eight hours a day, soon left them behind, and
they dropped out the following summer. From then on he studied entirely alone. “The young man never seemed to know what idleness was,” wrote Cutler, long after his pupil had become President. “Every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic, or some abstruse book on Natural History in his hand.” Although Teedie showed predictable excellence in science, history, German, and French, “he did not neglect mathematics or the dry ancient languages.”
⁵⁵
None of these, however, ever came easily to him. Throughout life he was to mourn his inability to read Virgil and Homer in the original.

He continued to study with such passion that Theodore Senior worried about the effect on his health.
⁵⁶
Yet Teedie could not be restrained. Harvard, with its age-old aura of masculinity, intellectualism, and social success, floated ever nearer. He seemed to sense that, if the grail eluded his reach, he might not have the strength to grasp it again.