Eleanor and Franklin (4 page)

Do you think it would be a good plan to send
me
to school again perhaps as I am not going to college I could make more friends there. I will do just as you think best, mon père.

I gave you my plan of study in my last letter but I would just as leif study at school as at home for Thee is way behind or rather before me & perhaps although I don't now I may in future years see it was best for me.

I feel rich too in the prospect of my allowance, next first of January, it seemes a long way off.

Are we going to Oyster bay next summer dont you think Thee & I could spunge on all of our uncles & you & have a sail boat. I
know
we could manage her & would not I think be likly to drown. My darling Father you have made me a companion & a very happy one I don't believe there is any boy that has had as happy & free of care life as I have had.

Oh. Father will you ever think
me
a “noble boy”, you are right about Tede he is one & no mistake a boy I would give a good deal to be like in many respects. If you ever see me not stand by Thee you may know I am entirely changed, no Father I am not likly to desert a fellow I love as I do my Brother even you dont know what a good noble boy he is & what a splendid man he is going to be as I do No, I love him. love him very
very
dearly & will never desert him & if I know him he will
never
desert me.

Father my own dear Father God bless you & help me to be a good boy & worthy of you, good by.

Your Son.

[P.S.] This sounds foolish on looking over it but you touched me when you said always to stand by Thee in your letter.

E.R.

When Theodore Sr. finally gave in to Elliott's pleadings and allowed him to enter St. Paul's in September, 1875, the boy's happiness was brief. “I am studying as hard as I can,” he wrote his father on October 1, “and I think all my teachers are satisfied with me.” But after a letter full of casual gossip, he added an ominous postscript:

Private

Yesterday during my Latin lesson without the slightest warning I had a bad rush of blood to my head, it hurt me so that I can't remember what happened. I believe I screamed out, anyway the Doctor brought me over to his house and I lay down for a couple of hours; it had by that time recovered and after laying down all the afternoon I was able to go on with my afternoon studies. I lost nothing but one Greek lesson by it. It had left me rather nervous and therefore homesick and unhappy. But I am well now so don't worry about me. I took some of my anti-nervous medicine, and I would like the receipt of more. You told me to write you everything or I would not bother you with this, but you want to know all about me don't you?

P.S. II Don't forget me please and write
often
.

Love from Ellie

“Poor Ellie Roosevelt,” Archibald Gracie wrote his mother, “has had to leave on account of his health. He has ‘ever been subject to rush of blood to his head' and while up here he exerted himself too much both physically and mentally. He studied hard and late. One day he fainted just after leaving the table and fell down. . . . His brother came up to take him home. . . . ”

The various doctors who were consulted did not agree on the nature of his malady. According to some reports he had a form of epilepsy, but there is no other record of epilepsy in the family and the seizures of which we have accounts were too infrequent to fit such a diagnosis. Some doctors who have read this account have noted that
Elliott's seizures occurred when he was confronted with demands that evidently were too much for him and have suggested that they may have been, without Elliott's realizing it, a form of escape.

It was the elder Roosevelt's view that bodily infirmities were to be conquered by a strenuous outdoor life and Spartan discipline. He had told the frail and asthmatic Theodore in 1870: “You have the mind but not the body. . . . You must make your body.” And that was exactly what Theodore proceeded to do. Outdoor life was now to cure Elliott; he was sent to Fort McKavett, a frontier post in the hill country of Texas, where the Roosevelts knew many of the officers, including the commander, General Clitz. This may seem to have been an inappropriate treatment for a medical ailment, but in wealthy families of that era travel was the standard prescription for illnesses, nervous disorders, and unhappy love affairs, and Elliott did seem to function more effectively away from his family and school. With an unusual ability to fit into any situation and a zest for adventure, the sixteen-year-old quickly and without complaint made the transition from the comfortable, closed, and protected life of New York society to the rough equalitarianism of the frontier.

Graham, Young Co., Texas

Jan. 12th, 1876

Dear Father:

I have gone through some regular roughing since I last wrote you at Weatherford. After we left there we came on slowly camping at night and shooting all that we wanted to eat for we have never been on short rations yet thank goodness. The weather up to last night was very warm and pleasant but suddenly one of those frightfully cold north winds sprang up and from being too warm with our coats off, the addition of blankets, ulsters and mufflers of all kinds did not keep us even tolerably warm. Ed and I left them: that is the two wagons; at about half past five and went on for three or four miles and made a camp fire and prepared everything for them, but we waited and watched and no wagons so at last we concluded that they had gone on to Graham not having seen the fork we turned up it being so dark. We were camped by a house so as we had no blankets and it was most fearfully cold we tied our horses to the gate post and left the saddles on to keep them warm and as Ed said I had a “persuasive air with me” I went up to the little log hut and knocked. The door was opened and the master appeared and I talked with him for a while and then a friend of his appearing on
the scene he offered to take Ed with him and the first fellow took me in. The hut was crowded and a single fire burning so although there were chinks on all sides and a cold wind blowing still we kept fairly warm. There were three girls two quite good looking so I made the rest of the evening pass quite pleasantly only I was a little worried about the other chaps not having turned up. At about ten o'clock the landlord or rather ranch man came in with “Gentlemen your beds are ready” where at, as I had been riding since seven o'clock and not had a mouthful to eat either I got up and making my good night to the ladies, the elder of which being the mistress sat pipe in mouth in the chimney corner; I rose followed by some six others all pretty rough looking chaps and followed mine host into an adjoining room no roof but logs and the merest frame work of walls. Three rolls of blankets on the floor, three men took one, two another and a cow boy from way out west and I took the third. I used Tar who had stuck to my heels all the evening in mortal terror of two other dogs belonging to the house, for a pillow partly for warmth and partly to drown the smell of my bed fellow. In this manner I shivered through the night up to five when “breakfast gentlemen” brought us all to our feet and without more ado we ran for the fire in the next room and were served by the old lady still pipe in mouth with bacon and bread a frugal meal but if you laugh at it think I had not a mouthful since six a.m. the day before, roughing it! eh? . . .

Your affectionate

Son.

In two visits Elliott spent over a year with the 500 men, women, and children who lived in Fort McKavett. Officers and enlisted men delighted in regaling the attractive young easterner with tales of Mexican War days and Indian fights. There were elaborately organized wild-turkey shoots in which Elliott did his “fair share of the shooting, also of the eating.” He became “chums” with the post commander, boxed, sat on the piazza listening to the post band, read every paper he could lay his hands on, and argued politics. “So Hayes is really counted in,” Elliott wrote his father, March 4, 1877. “I wish you could hear the dismal forebodings that the Democratic members of our party (I was the only Republican) have for the ‘Old Union' we have had some glorious pitched battles, ‘you bet'!” There were also whist parties until three in the morning, and although he assured his family
that he neither smoked nor drank, “for wine we drink catawba and the General knows what a good bottle of that is like I can tell you.”

The old trouble with his head seemed to be gone but all his attempts to follow an organized course of reading and study came to naught. “It strikes me it's just a sell my being down here . . . altogether I feel like a general fraud, who ought to be studying,” he confessed to his father. He was troubled, but not enough to resist the temptations of the “glorious” life at the fort.

Soon after Elliott returned to New York in 1877, his father became ill with what was later diagnosed as intestinal cancer. For weeks Elliott scarcely left his father's room. That winter, wrote Corinne, “Elliott gave unstintingly a devotion which was so tender that it was more like that of a woman and his young strength was poured out to help his father's condition.” Elliott wrote in his diary of his father's “cries for ether,” the mercy of “a chloroform sleep,” and new agonies on awakening until the final release of death on February 10, 1878, at the age of forty-six.

The family was devastated, and the children vowed to lead lives that would reflect credit on their father's name. “We have been very fortunate,” Theodore Jr. wrote Bamie after he returned to Harvard, “in having a father whom we can love and respect more than any other man in the world.”

Eighty-nine years later, Theodore Sr.'s granddaughter, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, contrasting her own style and outlook with that of her cousin Eleanor, said that Eleanor “was a do-gooder. She got that from my grandfather. It took with Eleanor, but not with me. I never did those things. They bored me.”

Legacies of approximately $125,000 came to each of the children at the death of their father, which gave them an annual income of about $8,000. Of the $125,000, half was given outright, half a trust for life. Each of the children would receive another $62,500 at the death of their mother. And thus their annual income would be about $14,000 if they held onto their capital.

For Elliott, the most sensitive of the children, the death of his father was not only a terrible sorrow but a disaster. Without his father's stern, demanding, but loving guidance he was lost. Although intelligent and eager to learn, he was discouraged by the realization that he was hopelessly outdistanced by his contemporaries. Restless, spoiled by admiration and success out West, he was not prepared to start at the bottom of some business and patiently work his way up. And then there
was the strong pull of the exciting world of society and sport, where he was a leader by the sheer force of his personality. His inheritance made it possible for him to live in this world.

Theodore, whom Elliott visited frequently at Harvard, admired his younger brother's social skills and his great popularity with the girls. Although his every instinct was combative and competitive, Theodore was so fond of his brother, he wrote an aunt, that he could “never hold in his heart a jealous feeling toward Elliott” and “gloried” in his accomplishments. This did not stop him from keeping a sharp eye on who was the better man. “Nellie stayed up from town,” he wrote in his diary in 1879, “and so I spent the day with him: we rowed around Lloyd's—15 miles, and virtually racing the whole way. As athletes we are about equal; he rows best; I run best, he can beat me sailing or swimming; I can beat him wrestling and boxing. I am best with the rifle, he with the shotgun, etc., etc. . . . ” Elliott, although he wrote in 1880 that every day he was “more happy in the dear old brother's good company,” must have been somewhat overwhelmed by a brother who, a friend noted, “always thought he could do things a little better than anyone else,” and, if he couldn't, set out to overcome the infirmity with awesome resolution. The time was past when Elliott had to shield his older brother from bullies.

The year Theodore graduated from Harvard, Elliott decided to undertake an expedition to India to hunt tiger and elephant, and to the Himalayas for the elusive ibex and markhor. He was pulled by the lure of adventure but was also pushed by the realization that Theodore, who had been his father's favorite son, was returning to New York and would become the head of the family. Another consideration contributed to his decision to abandon New York: he had begun to drink heavily, so much so, one family report has it, that a girl whom he wished to marry refused him unless he changed his ways—which he apparently was unable to do.

Elliott and Theodore spent two months hunting out West before Elliott left for the Orient. It was a happy trip, and they enjoyed “the return to the old delight of dog and gun,” Elliott wrote his mother, but it was also the occasion for an uneasy report by Theodore on what he called Elliott's “epicurean” appetites. Only half in jest he reported after a week's hunting in Iowa:

As soon as we got here he took some ale to get the dust out of his throat; then a milk punch because he was thirsty; a mint julep
because it was hot; a brandy mash ‘to keep the cold out of his stomach'; and then sherry and bitters to give him an appetite. He took a very simple dinner—soup, fish, salmi de grouse, sweet-bread, mutton, venison, corn, macaroni, various vegetables and some puddings and pies, together with beer, later claret and in the evening, shandigaff.

When Elliott set out on his big expedition to India, aware that his glorious adventure was also a flight, he assured Bamie that the duties of paterfamilias would be attended to,

and by a far better man. Thee is well able and no mistake—shrewd and clever, by no means behind the age. What I have often smiled at in the old Boy are I am now sure some of his best points—a practical carrying out in action of what I, for example, am convinced of in theory but fail to put into practice.

Even as Elliott was journeying through India his brother won election as assemblyman from the “brownstone district” of New York and completed his first literary venture,
The Naval War o
f 1812
.