The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (7 page)

A photograph taken in 1862 shows deep eyes, leonine features, a glossy beard, and big, sloping shoulders. “He was a large, broad, bright, cheerful man,” said his nephew Emlen Roosevelt, “… deep through, with a sense of abundant strength and power.” The word “power” runs like a leitmotif through other descriptions of Theodore Senior: he was a person of inexorable drive. “A certain expression” on his face, as he strode breezily into the offices of business acquaintances, was enough to flip pocketbooks open. “How much this time, Theodore?”
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For all his compulsive philanthropy, he was neither sanctimonious nor ascetic. He took an exuberant, masculine joy in life, riding his horse through Central Park “as though born in the saddle,” exercising with the energy of a teenager, waltzing all night long at society balls. Driving his four-in-hand back home in the small hours of the morning, he rattled through the streets at such a rate that his grooms allegedly “fell out at the corners.”
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Such a combination of physical vitality and genuine love of humanity was rare indeed. His son called Theodore Senior “the best man I ever knew,” adding, “… but he was the only man of whom I was ever really afraid.”
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I
N ALL RESPECTS
except their intense love for each other, Theodore and Martha Roosevelt were striking opposites. Where he was big and disciplined and manly, “Mittie” was small, vague, and feminine to the point of caricature. He was the archetypal Northern burgher, she the Southern belle eternal, a lady about whom there always clung a hint of white columns and wisteria bowers. Born and raised in the luxury of a Georgia plantation, she remained, according to her son, “entirely unreconstructed until the day of her death.”
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Of her beauty, especially in her youth (she was twenty-three when Teedie was born), contemporary accounts are unanimous in
their praise. Her hair was fine and silky black, with a luster her French hairdresser called
noir doré
. Her skin was “more moonlight-white than cream-white,” and in her cheeks there glowed a suggestion of coral.
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Every day she took two successive baths, “one for cleaning, one for rinsing,” and she dressed habitually in white muslin, summer and winter. “No dirt,” an admirer marveled, “ever stopped near her.”
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On Mittie’s afternoons “at home” she would sit in her pale blue parlor, surrounded always by bunches of violets, while “neat little maids in lilac print gowns” escorted guests into her presence. Invariably they were enchanted. “Such loveliness of line and tinting … such sweet courtesy of manner!” gushed Mrs. Burton Harrison, a memoirist of the period. Of five or six gentlewomen whose “birth, breeding, and tact” established them as the flowers of New York society, “Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seemed to me easily the most beautiful.”
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Her exquisite looks were balanced by exquisite taste. Not surprisingly, for someone who made such a delicate pastel picture of herself, she was a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. She filled her house with the finest furniture and porcelain, and her need for “everything that was beautiful” is said to have strained even the considerable Roosevelt resources. Theodore Senior acknowledged that her palate for wine was superior to his own, and never paid for a consignment until she had personally approved it.
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Mittie was a woman of considerable wit. Her letters, written in a delicate Italian hand, show flashes of inventive humor.
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As a storyteller, especially when recounting what her enraptured children called “slave tales,” she revealed great gifts of mimicry. One evening, at a family party, she grimaced her way through a piece called “Old Bess in a Fit,” while Theodore Senior, who could not bear seeing her lovely face distorted, tried in vain to stop her. Eventually he was reduced to picking her up like a doll and carrying her out of the room on his shoulder.
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F
ROM HIS FATHER
, young Teedie inherited the sturdy Dutch character of Klaes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, one of the early
settlers of New Amsterdam, who stepped ashore sometime in 1649. From that day on for the next two centuries, every generation of Roosevelts—Teedie being the seventh—was born on Manhattan Island.
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Oom
Klaes had been a farmer, but subsequent Roosevelts ascended rapidly in the social scale, becoming manufacturers, merchants, engineers, and bankers. A Roosevelt had served in the New York State Senate and helped ratify the Constitution with Alexander Hamilton. Another had received his bride from the hands of General Lafayette. Industrious and honest, the family amassed a comfortable fortune. Teedie’s grandfather Cornelius van Schaack Roosevelt was worth half a million dollars at a time when the average daily wage was fifty to seventy-five cents.
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The only non-Dutch infusion that Teedie received through his father was that of Grandmother Roosevelt, but it was a rich admixture of Welsh, English, Irish, Scotch-Irish, and German strains traceable back to immigrant Quakers. Strangely enough, she, and not old Cornelius, taught Teedie the only Dutch he ever knew, a nursery song:

Fifty years later, when he went hunting in Africa, he sang this song to Boer settlers and found that they recognized it. “It was interesting,” he wrote, “to meet these men whose ancestors had gone to the Cape about the time that mine went to America two and a half centuries previously, and to find that the descendants of the two streams of emigrants still crooned to their children some at least of the same nursery songs.”
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From his mother, Teedie acquired several refined French traits. Although her forebears were predominantly Scots—James Bulloch of Glasgow emigrated to Charleston in 1729—they had early married into the Huguenot family of de Veaux.
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Mittie, with her rococo beauty and elegance of manner, could have been mistaken for a Frenchwoman, and she passed on to Teedie a certain Gallic volubility.

The Bullochs also contributed aristocratic qualities, not shared by the Roosevelts. Whereas
Oom
Klaes had been a man of the soil, ranking far below Governor Pieter Stuyvesant, James Bulloch was a learned planter who could entertain Governor James Edward Oglethorpe on equal terms.
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Unlike the Roosevelts, who with two or three exceptions preferred the security of commerce to the glamor of politics,
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the Bullochs stepped naturally into positions of power. Among his direct maternal ancestors Teedie could count six distinguished politicians, including Archibald Bulloch, the first President of Revolutionary Georgia.
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Few Americans, surely, have been born into such a perfectly balanced home environment as the son of Theodore and Mittie Roosevelt. There was a harmony of Southern refinement and Northern vigor, feminine humor and masculine seriousness, and—later on—the rewards of privilege and the responsibilities of charity. Through the front window of the house Teedie looked down on carriages and cobblestones, and heard coming from Broadway and Fifth Avenue the rumble and throb of a great city. Through the rear window he gazed out into another world, an enormous, block-wide garden full of trees and flowers, roamed by ornamental peacocks.
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Were it not for the weight of asthma in his lungs, he might consider himself a child of Paradise.

But then, five months after his second birthday, Southern cannons fired upon Fort Sumter, and the harmonies of 28 East Twentieth Street were jarred into discord.

W
HEN WAR WAS DECLARED
, on 12 April 1861, Teedie and his six-year-old sister Anna (“Bamie”) had been joined by a fourteen-month-old brother, Elliott (“Ellie”), and Mittie Roosevelt was already pregnant with her final child, Corinne (“Conie”), who arrived in the fall. No sooner had the last been born than Theodore Senior left home, and sadness filled the house.
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He had spent most of the summer agonizing, to the tramp of mustering regiments, over what role he should play in the war. Although he was not yet thirty, and in prime physical shape, his domestic situation was such that he could not contemplate taking
up arms. Under his roof lived three women—Grandmother Bulloch, Mittie, and her sister Annie—who owned slaves and a plantation and were passionate in their support of the Confederacy. (Mittie allegedly once hung out the Stars and Bars after a Southern victory.) Two of Mrs. Bulloch’s sons were fighting for the South. Could he fire upon, or receive the bullets of, his brothers-in-law? In anguish Theodore Senior did what many of his wealthy friends were doing. He hired a substitute soldier.
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Yet as a strong Lincoln Republican, his “troublesome conscience” would not let him rest. A certain strain developed between himself and his wife, although their mutual love never wavered. “I wish we sympathized together on this question of so vital moment to our country,” he told her gently. “I know you cannot understand my feelings and of course do not expect it.”
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Eventually he announced that he had decided to aid the war effort in a civilian capacity, and, true to his nature, soon found a charitable cause.

Already, in these early days of war, millions of government dollars were flowing through the pockets of Union soldiers and into the hands of sutlers, who infested military camps, hawking bottles of liquor hidden in loaves of bread. The sutlers charged such exorbitant prices that their customers soon had no money left to send home to their families. It was to right this wrong that Theodore Senior set off to Washington, and, conquering his natural distaste for politics, began to lobby for remedial legislation.

With two colleagues, he drafted a bill for the appointment of unpaid Allotment Commissioners, who would visit all military camps and persuade soldiers to set aside voluntary pay deductions for family support. This proposal, which eventually became standard military practice, seemed eccentric, if not downright suspect, in 1861, as a family friend recalled many years later: