The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (87 page)

It is difficult to say whether Elliott Roosevelt was victim or culprit in his own decline. His misfortunes were physical as well as psychological. Since puberty he had been afflicted with semiepileptic seizures, usually brought on by stress, and when still adolescent
discovered that alcohol was an effective depressant.
³
Long before his twenty-first birthday, Elliott was drinking heavily, although his good looks and athletic bearing tended to disguise the fact. After marrying the beautiful but (in Theodore’s view) “utterly frivolous” Anna Hall,
⁴
he had become a confirmed alcoholic. Withdrawal from drink after binges only worsened his tendency to epilepsy. A series of inexplicable sporting accidents, which may have been caused by seizures, progressively wrecked his health. The most serious of these—a fall from a trapeze during amateur theatricals in 1888—temporarily crippled his leg, and he became dependent on laudanum and morphine during the agony of recuperation. There had been a complete physical collapse in 1889, followed by such desperate drinking during the early part of 1890 as to shock even himself into awareness of his impending doom. Swearing never to touch alcohol again, he left the United States for Europe that summer, taking his wife, six-year-old daughter, and baby son with him.
⁵
From Vienna, in September 1890, came news of the inevitable relapse, followed shortly before Christmas by a
cri de coeur
from Anna.
⁶
She was pregnant again, and was afraid of spending the winter alone with her unstable husband. If Bamie—ever-willing, ever-capable Bamie—would come over and look after her, Elliott could surely be persuaded to enter a sanitarium for treatment. By the time the baby was born he should be decently dried out, and they could all return happily to New York in time for the next social season.

Although Theodore considered Anna’s optimism “thoroughly Chinese,” he did see the advisability of Bamie’s presence in Vienna.
⁷
But no sooner had he given his official permission, as head of the family, than a bombshell announcement, on legal stationery, arrived from New York. His brother’s seed, apparently, was also sprouting in the body of a servant girl named Katy Mann. She claimed to have been seduced by Elliott shortly before his departure for Europe, and threatened a public scandal if she did not receive financial compensation for her pregnancy.
⁸

Roosevelt’s reaction to this “hideous revelation” was entirely characteristic. “Of course he was insane when he did it.”
⁹
Alcoholism he believed to be a disease that could be treated and cured. But infidelity was a crime, pure and simple; it could be neither
forgiven nor understood, save as an act of madness. It was an offense against order, decency, against civilization; it was a desecration of the holy marriage-bed. By reducing himself to the level of a “flagrant man-swine,” Elliott had forfeited all claim to his wife and children. For Anna to continue to live with him now would be “little short of criminal,” he told Bamie. “She ought not to have any more children, and those she has should be brought up away from him.”
¹⁰

Were it not for Anna’s present delicate condition (she was a frail person at the best of times), Theodore would no doubt have ordered Bamie to fetch her home at once. There was nothing to do but let Bamie go over as planned and privately confront Elliott with the news. If nothing else, it might sober him up long enough to commit himself to a sanitarium for treatment. Such an act of voluntary self-incarceration, wrote Theodore, “will serve to explain and atone for what cannot otherwise ever be explained.” As souls pass through Purgatory in order to wash away sin, so, presumably, could a repentant Elliott redeem his fit of “insanity.”
¹¹
In the meantime Theodore and the lawyers would await the birth of Katy Mann’s baby; should any Roosevelt blood be identifiable in it, they would pay her whatever hush-money was necessary.
¹²

Bamie sailed for Europe in early February 1891. While she was still on the high seas, Theodore received an affectionate and unsuspecting letter from Elliott. Despite his newfound contempt for “the dear old beloved brother,” memories of their happy closeness in the past crowded in on him, and he sank into the deepest gloom. “It is horrible, awful; it is like a brooding nightmare. If it was mere death one could stand it; it is the shame that is so fearful.”
¹³
Much of the “shame,” of course, was his own: he felt acute distaste for the role he had inherited as go-between in a shabby paternity suit. If it ever got out that the Civil Service Commissioner was involved in blackmail payments, Frank Hatton would annihilate him. But he saw no other way of protecting his family from a catastrophic scandal.

At the end of February, Bamie wrote to say that Elliott, surprisingly, had already placed himself in the Marien Grund Sanctuary at Graz. He was in a highly excitable state, bursting into tears at the slightest hint of disapproval, so she would wait until he was stronger before telling him about Katy Mann. The incarceration was to last three months. Although Theodore was pessimistic about
the effects of so short a stay in so luxurious a retreat, he was relieved for Anna’s sake—“Elliott is purely secondary.”
¹⁴
With neither of his brother’s babies due until the spring,
¹⁵
he could devote his full attention to Civil Service matters.

I
T HAPPENED THAT
Roosevelt’s family troubles during the early part of 1891 coincided with a period of renewed political difficulties. At times he felt he was “battling with everybody … the little gray man in the White House looking on with cold and hesitating disapproval.”
¹⁶
The struggle was provoked by his efforts to extend the classification of the Civil Service to all offices in the Indian Bureau. Rioting by Sioux in South Dakota reservations, where maladministration and corruption were rife, had forced him to rethink his old paternal attitudes to the red man, and he now tried to persuade Administration officials that Indians should take part wherever possible in agency affairs. “I should take the civilized members of the different tribes and put them to work in instructing their fellows in farming, blacksmithing and the like, and should extend the present system of paid Indian judges and police.” But the officials were apathetic, and President Harrison flatly refused to admit that conditions on the reservations were bad.
¹⁷

February saw the usual appropriations crisis in Congress. Republican spoilsmen lobbied to such good effect that for two days the Civil Service Commission was in danger of losing its entire operating budget. Speaker Reed had to use his massive personal influence before the funds were voted on 14 February.
¹⁸

With the departure of Congress in early March, pressure on the Civil Service Commission finally eased, and Roosevelt found himself with little official work to do. His thoughts began to drift toward literature again, for the first reviews of his
History of the City of New York
¹⁹
were flowing in from both sides of the Atlantic.

T
HE
B
RITISH CRITICS
were complimentary, if not enthusiastic. It was felt that Roosevelt had done as well as could be expected, given the largeness of his subject and the limitations of his space.
New York
was “pleasantly written,” remarked the
Spectator
, but as a story it
was not inspiring. Roosevelt had been unable to prove that the city’s rapid growth had been to any good purpose. “An hour in New York suffices to inform the observing foreigner that it is among the worst-governed, worst-paved, worst-built, and worst-ordered cities in the world.” Still, one had to admire Roosevelt’s condemnation of municipal corruption and his freedom from “any trace of Chauvinism.”
²⁰

It was left to an American periodical, the
Nation
, to point out that on the contrary Roosevelt was very chauvinistic indeed. The anonymous reviewer sounded a complaint that would be heard with increasing frequency during the next ten years: “Mr. Roosevelt preaches too much. He lays down the singular proposition that a feeling of broad, radical, intense Americanism is necessary if good work is to be done in any direction … The sooner we get over talking about ‘American’ systems of philosophy, and ethics, and art, and devote ourselves to what is true, and right, and beautiful, the sooner we shall shake off our provincialism.”
²¹

The most that can be said of
New York
today is that it is a piece of honorable hackwork, tightly written, unflawed by any trace of originality. One or two passages are of semiautobiographical interest (Roosevelt can never resist injecting himself and his personal opinions into a historical narrative), and his command of urban details is at least as impressive as that of Western material in his earlier histories. The section dealing with the unprecedented tidal wave of immigration that battered New York after the War of 1812 is an early example of Roosevelt’s fascination with “ethnic turnover,” as he called it. “The public-school system and the all-pervading energy of American life proved too severe solvents to be resisted even by the German tenacity … The children of the first generation were half, and the grandchildren in most cases wholly, Americanized—to their own inestimable advantage.” There is also a characteristic passage that describes policemen attacking the Draft Rioters “with the most wholesome intent to do them physical harm.” Thirty rioters were slain “—an admirable object-lesson to the remainder.”
²²

R
OOSEVELT WAS WORKING
in his office on the afternoon of Tuesday, 24 March
—
regretting that there was just enough paper on
his desk to keep him from
The Winning of the West
²³
—when a Mr. John C. Rose of Baltimore was shown in. Rose was counsel to the Maryland Civil Service Reform League, and as such considered himself a watchdog over the law in his hometown. He had serious irregularities to report.

A Republican primary was scheduled in Baltimore for the following Monday, Rose explained. Its purpose was to elect delegates to the Maryland State Convention, which would in turn establish procedures for the election of delegates to the National Convention in 1892.
²⁴
At the moment things were not going well for the friends of Benjamin Harrison. It looked as if the city might choose an anti-Administration slate; in that case the President could forget about Maryland’s votes when he ran for renomination. As a result, the local postmaster and U.S. marshal—both Harrison appointees—were using their offices as emergency campaign chests. Senior federal employees were going around “assessing” subordinates for contributions ranging from $5 to $10 each.
²⁵
This was in open defiance of Section One of the Civil Service Code, prohibiting the solicitation of money for political purposes on government property. The money would certainly be used to bribe election judges on Monday, and there was no saying what other means the pro-Administration forces might use to influence the course of the voting. Rose begged Roosevelt to come down and investigate the situation at once: several witnesses were prepared to testify to the truth of his allegations.
²⁶